When my friends ask librarians to recommend a novel by a local author that’s set in Sonoma County they suggest Greg Sarris’s Watermelon Nights and Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon. They rarely if ever point readers in…
Posts published in “Essays”
I highly recommend that you read the well-written, very easy-to-understand Grand Jury Report titled, “Who Runs Mendocino County?” It’s a point-on discussion regarding the governing dynamic between and among the Board of Supervisors and the…
I’ve been feeling lately as if I should be (or should have been) evolving. Not in the literal sense, although some kind of spontaneous flash mutation like growing gills or supernumerary phalanges or toxin-secreting glands…
A February night in 1924, in a Manhattan concert hall owned by the Aeolian piano company… the wailing, warped, and flatted clarinet glissando that opens George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue announced the 20th century’s self-recognition…
From 1968 to 1973 I was Executive Assistant to Cesar Chavez charged with computerizing the United Farm Workers Union. Starting in Delano, we soon moved the Union headquarters to Keene, California, located in the hills…
Twenty years ago, in our rural subdivision south of Laytonville, a man bought three parcels from the same Los Angeles heiress who also sold us our land. Dave, as I’ll call our neighbor, didn’t live…
In 1988, gas was 90¢ a gallon, Ronald Reagan was president, a prototype of the B-2 stealth bomber was revealed, Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis as their party’s presidential candidate, Republicans nominated Vice President George H.W.…
Much of the spirit of City Lights Books and City Lights Publishing found their way into the pages of AVA, and the AVA found its way to City Lights on Columbus Avenue, the best little…