Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. And let’s start off by wishing the following Valley folks hearty congratulations on their January Birthdays – Shirley Hulbert, Eva Johnson, Jim…
Posts published in January 2011
I met with Gene for our chat a week or so ago in the unofficial ‘meeting room’ upstairs in the Farrer Building in downtown Boonville. Eugenia ‘Gene’ Donnelly was born, in 1932, the youngest of…
This is to nominate Lillian Hellman, the playwright, for inclusion on VeryImportantPotheads.com . The site is run by the highly competent Ellen Komp, whose biographical notes blend scholarship and gossip. I took a class from…
I wonder how Mark Twain would feel if he knew his novel Huckleberry Finn has been rewritten in such a way that the meaning of his book is entirely changed, and that such an execrable mutation of his work is about to be afflicted on the next generation of American schoolchildren.
Six dead and Gabrielle Giffords, a 40-year old congresswoman hanging to life by a thread. In the wake of the lethal fusillade in Tucson Republicans came close to confessing to complicity by reason of incitement.…
With their re-make of True Grit the Coens have shot and stuffed the original animal: so often, in the sights of big game hunters, the Western species refuses to go extinct.
The Grateful Dead? Those guys and their fanatic, tie-died, permanently stoned followers? The band that made interminable music which a noted poet and writer I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle called “unspeakable, self-indulgent dreck”?…