John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Press, 1939, 619 pp.) turns 75 this year, and for many decades it has been regulated to juvenilia,…
Posts published in “Essays”
Since medieval Germans attached pedals to their organs way back in the 14th Century, the instrument has been as much a gymnastic apparatus as a…
Marcia and I are on the two-movies-a-month plan from Netflix, and many of the movies we watch are foreign films and documentaries.
Since I am, at the very least, a semi-regular Contributor to the AVA, and haven’t contributed anything for awhile, I figured it was time to…
Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, an event that electrified young men and women world over, will return to campus for…
We were surrounded by southerners at Fort Gordon. I disliked them. I resented their diabolical ability to exploit my chauvinistic northern prejudices about them and shuck me repeatedly.
The Oscars are past and one of my long suffering readers (longer time friend) finished in a dead heat with me in our annual Academy…
Wrap up all your troubles and woes and give them to Zozobra to be carried away. Zozobra is a 40-foot tall marionette that has been…
This past weekend at New York’s Lincoln Center the iconoclastic organ virtuoso Cameron Carpenter unswaddled his restive imagination’s latest brainchild, a year-and-a-half in gestation. Midwife…
About a year ago I began writing a novel entitled Ida’s Place—Book One: Return, the first of what I intend to be at least a…
Adventist Health System West runs hospitals. Like Frank R. Howard in Willits. And Ukiah Valley Medical Center. “We reflect God’s love to our community” its…