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 tagged as “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…
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,…