Along with the souls of a few forlorn and unlucky violin works of the eighteenth century, Henry Eccles’s G Minor Sonata published in 1720 has spent much of its afterlife in the Purgatory of the…
Posts published in “Essays”
E.M. Forster, best known for his novels Room With A View, Passage To India and Howard’s End, published a great short story in 1909 entitled The Machine Stops, an extremely prescient imagining of a future we may soon inhabit. Forty years before the advent of television, Forster foresaw computers and the worldwide internet, the demolition of the global environment, and the total collapse of technological society.
When I was a child, I wrote “I hate Daddy” on the flowered yellow wallpaper above my bed in my room in Baltimore. When my friends asked why and how I'd gotten away with this,…
For the past couple of months this column has been following a young man from the Mendocino Coast named William and his encounters with Mendocino County’s mental health system. William suffers from schizoaffective disorder and…
Del Berg, of Tuolumne County, is the last known member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, one of the nearly 3,000 Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the opening years of World War II.
Even though Mom used to warn against women who laughed too loudly, my cousin Monica and I cultivated our “cackles” and had fun doing it. It could be pretty noisy with the two of us…
More than one friend, when told I was reading the “definitive” new biography of Charles Manson, said “Why would anybody want to read that?” It's a reasonable question. The Manson murders, almost 45 years ago,…