It’s not unusual, however unfair, for people to look askance at outsiders who dress, talk, or act differently, especially if they come in groups. One such group, commonly known as Gypsies, have been maligned, even…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Propaganda. The motivation for this book is obviously Ms. Lee's desire to ameliorate the national media clamor against the southern states brought on by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A…
Willie Fisher was born in 1903 at Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, the second son of a man who had been a revolutionary agitator alongside Vladimir Lenin in the 1890s in Saint Petersburg. Charged with sedition,…
As an addict — as a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, ginuwine, for-real, tweak-seeking meth-missile — I have been known to take some fairly extreme measures to acquire the necessary chemicals in order to harmonize my various physical…
I recently came upon an old book I inherited from my grandmother Goody, The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Literature published in 1939, a seventy-five-year-old book that has provided me with several days of enjoyable…
Eureka rots with addiction. Under every rock, behind every edifice, in almost every bush, is the shivering, hungry, sweat-stained son or daughter of good people. Often, they’ve stolen from you, rifled through your garbage for…
I was grumpy on the way to Garberville. "Garberville sounds like a stupid name, anyway. What the hell does it even mean?" I groused. "I'm just guessing, but maybe there was a person named Garber…
In 1976 I was in New York when the play Comedians by the British playwright Trevor Griffiths opened on Broadway. I was so inspired by the play—I saw it twice—that when I returned to Oregon, I quit my job as a landscaper and moved to Seattle to concentrate on writing plays and trying to get them produced.
Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize…