Pursuant to wresting control of my brain from the negative forces, I have been avoiding news of the larger world for the last few weeks with good results, though I have heard some news about the angry Bernie supporters at the convention. I also got an e-letter from Bernie (I think it went to fourteen million of his closest friends) inviting me to join him in the ongoing political revolution he says his campaign was just the start of; and I picked up a leaflet from the local arm of Bernie Ongoingness in Mendocino.
Posts published in “Essays”
An island city made of steel, glass and concrete, Manhattan is also a city of nearly infinite signs and spectacular symbols, many of them subversive. Indeed, Manhattan is a paradise for the study of semiotics.…
Attentive/obsessive AVA readers might recognize the name Craig Louis Stehr - he has long been one of the paper's most frequent and loyal correspondents. His missives usually tell of his travels around the nation, with…
The night hung on deep summer Ukiah like damp, dark wool— thick, heavy, and vaguely redolent of an indefinable funk. Insectile whirrs, chirps and chillers carried for miles in the still, superheated air and gave,…
I was out on a midsummer skulk in classic thief's habit, head-to-toe black and making no more impression on the night than the shadow of a knife. Throughout the lanes and byways of the little…
On Friday after the accident, while I was in the Modesto hospital, our insurance agent told us they had found a place for me to go for physical therapy. It's a nice place, they said, just down the road a few miles, so I would be leaving the Modesto Hospital (where they operated on my crushed ankle) the next morning, Saturday morning. They picked me up in an ambulance, loaded me up and took me down the road to this rehab place.
In the spring of ’68 I’d been hired as an editor at Ramparts magazine. The office was on Broadway off Sansome Street in San Francisco. One day in early summer Tom Hayden called and asked…
I recently wrote a piece about my friend Ann Menebroker, the fine poet who died recently at the age of eighty. In response, I received a number of communiqués from people who wanted to read more snippets from Annie’s letters, so I present them here with one of Annie’s poems.
By the time readers peruse this issue of the AVA, yours truly should be embarked on a 75-mile section of the John Muir Trail (JMT). Getting to a JMT trailhead is easy if you're starting…