Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. And let’s start off by wishing the following Valley folks hearty congratulations on their January Birthdays – Shirley Hulbert, Eva Johnson, Jim…
Posts published in “Essays”
This is to nominate Lillian Hellman, the playwright, for inclusion on VeryImportantPotheads.com . The site is run by the highly competent Ellen Komp, whose biographical notes blend scholarship and gossip. I took a class from…
I wonder how Mark Twain would feel if he knew his novel Huckleberry Finn has been rewritten in such a way that the meaning of his book is entirely changed, and that such an execrable mutation of his work is about to be afflicted on the next generation of American schoolchildren.
Six dead and Gabrielle Giffords, a 40-year old congresswoman hanging to life by a thread. In the wake of the lethal fusillade in Tucson Republicans came close to confessing to complicity by reason of incitement.…
With their re-make of True Grit the Coens have shot and stuffed the original animal: so often, in the sights of big game hunters, the Western species refuses to go extinct.
The Grateful Dead? Those guys and their fanatic, tie-died, permanently stoned followers? The band that made interminable music which a noted poet and writer I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle called “unspeakable, self-indulgent dreck”?…
Catch/Release by David Ollier Weber, lately of Comptche presently of Placerville. A novel set here in the Emerald Triangle's most exciting outback venues, mostly along the Mina Road running between Covelo and Alderpoint, Catch/Release begins,…
Physically, psychically, and in every other way my thesaurus can describe, Oak Street in downtown Eugene is a very long way from the nearest killing field. This has been true since the folks who arrived…
(Caution: There may be some blasphemy in the following message, although it is certainly unintended.) This past cold Christmas morning I took a traditional dogwalk through San Francisco’s fabled Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was pretty much…