I was 13. It was 1958. We lived at what was then the outskirts of suburban Fresno. Down the street about half a mile was a large boysenberry farm. (Boysenberries are an early 20th Century…
Posts tagged as “essays”
My daughter and I returned to Paris under the blazing sun of July. We were coming from Burgundy, where I had written a sad, angry note for this column, after the mass murder in Nice, about how our cultural baggage is obsolete and doesn't help us face the horror of our times; about how the myth of Paris had died in our arms. But I was wrong about one thing. Because, although culture in the abstract no longer anchors us to this complex, fucked-up world, there do in fact remain places--a few--from which we can rethink our role in the world and imagine alternate ways of organizing life.
I recently completed my new novel Magenta and brought the book out in handsome coil-bound photocopies, each copy signed and lavishly numbered, available through my web site or by bumping into me in Mendocino and arranging an exchange.
A fixed surveillance camera, recording in Cleveland on November 22, 2014, captured a 12-year-old African-American boy, Tamir Rice, pointing a toy gun at imaginary targets. The boy was playing alone in a snowy park pavilion…
The staggering incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time. The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction.…
So it’s Friday and I’m having one of those mornings where I feel certain the universe is an all-powerful sentient being picking on me for no good reason. Put another way, I’m feeling sorry for…
“Adults should face the fact that they don't like adolescents,” wrote Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, shortly after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, “and that they have used high school to isolate the…