I did not know Clancy Sigal well, but I read almost all of his books, including Going Away, Weekend in Dinlock, Zone of the Interior, Hemingway Lives!, plus A Woman of Uncertain Character—which is about his mother—and Zone of the Interior, a…
Posts published in “Essays”
Every time I knock politely on a door, the traditional and accepted manner of requesting ingress, consultation, or succor from whomever is behind it, and am greeted with a firearm — and it's happened enough…
Histories of the organ draw a stark distinction between the instrument’s origins in antiquity, where it was deployed in the arena to accompany gladiatorial combat, and its later life in Christian Western Europe as a…
Two weeks ago, the Board of Supervisors held its second meeting eliciting public comment and discussing proposed changes to the county’s newly created cannabis ordinance. At the outset, the Board was addressed by the representatives…
A stern visage, the very picture of 19th century rectitude, looked down on passersby from a banner at the corner of McAllister and Larkin, fin de siècle San Francisco. The banner celebrated the adjacent law…
In 1968 I was a 17-year-old philosophy major living in the dorms at U.C. Riverside. Along with all the usual adjustments to living away from home, like eating dorm food, one incident is nearly as…
I ditched my last substance addiction on May 28th, 1988. I was at a party talking to the wife of a friend. As we conversed, I put a Marlboro into my mouth and said, —You…
Word on the street is, things are pretty rough out there, "out there" being the world in general and the United States specifically. I hear, and read, about it every day, in forum after forum,…