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Posts published in “Essays”

The Grapes of Wrath Turns 75

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, to high school students, to young people inept at work…

Bach Was Never This Buff, Never This Bad

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 tool for musical expression. The most famous report of J.S.…

Off The Map

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.

Blocked!

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 protect said Contributor Status, and submit an article. The term…

O Five Charlie

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.

Pop Quiz

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 Award contest; we each prognosticated correctly on twenty of the…

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