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Posts published in “Essays”

Handel’s Executioners

The horrifying accounts of Thursday night’s execution of Kenneth Williams by lethal injection in Arkansas demonstrated not only the inhumane nature of this latest state-sanctioned killing, but also the power of religion to carry the…

A Sun of One’s Own

It was a day in name only, unidentifiable by simple observation. A look out the window, generally sufficient to get a rough idea of one's orbital position vis-a-vis the sun, was no help — it…

The Tyranny Of Food & The Freedom Not To Eat

In a land in which food has become a secular religion I have chosen to become a heretic and a non-believer. Once upon a time, I lived to eat. Now I eat to live. Not…

Horrible Harvests

The Savings Bank of Mendocino County published Rainfall amounts on a small card several years ago. I look at this card often due to a long rainy winter this year. The total amounts are high…

Mexico Roadblock

I still don't know why I blew through that checkpoint outside Mazatlan on my last drive North up through Mexico even though the police went out in the middle of the road with his machine…

20th Century Fred

Just arrived in the mailbox is a book called Dangerous Grounds, which recounts how coffeehouses set up near Army bases became hangouts for soldiers during the Vietnam War era. I started the first such enterprise with Donna Mickleson and Devorah Rossman —the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina— in the fall of 1967.

Joseph Conrad: The Sea As Morality

During any melancholy evening, no child with a vivid imagination, lying face down in bed with an open atlas, has hesitated to sail through every blue sea with the tip of his index finger, or advance with reckless abandon deep into the most dangerous jungle. With his mind filled with pirate ships, treasure chests, lions, and the tusks of elephants, there comes a moment in which the child detains his finger over some point on the map — the most exotic place possible, and thinks: “One day, when I’m older, I will go there.”

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