April 10th is our publication date, quite a day in journalism history. First we have to go back to 1866, when a gangly 19-year-old Hungarian immigrant handed his last five dollars to a slick, fast-talking…
Posts tagged as “essays”
The intemperate genius John Bull was born in either 1562 or 1563. Let’s choose the later of these two possibilities and duly celebrate 2013 as Bull’s 450th. In contrast to the archetypal Englishman John Bull,…
The very first course that Norman O. Brown taught when he arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1968 was Myth & History and I was among the lucky people to hear him deliver that series of lectures. I was also privileged to meet with Norman in his office on two occasions to talk about various things, notably the fifty-page manuscript I composed in response to his lectures.
Met up with old friend Tom Woods yesterday for lunch, the only old Sausalito waterfronter in Colorado I know of since Jack the Fluke died. Tom came to with a bad hangover in Denver while…
November 28, 2012, morning: I'm sitting at my desk working. Along about 11:30, I hear the front gate click, and onto the property walks a man. Instant assessment: not a Jehovah's Witness, not a Mormon,…
Because my father was the minister at the Methodist churches in Boonville and Philo, and therefore I grew up in a church environment, I have always been drawn to the beauty and symbolism of the…
"Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around.” — Gregory McNamee After a severely stressful year of extreme physical challenges finally resolved by two successful surgeries, I am once…
One hundred seven years ago this spring, my oldest uncle, Jack Macdonald (then 18), woke in the house he’d grown up in here at the family ranch. He ate his breakfast hours before dawn, packed…
My uncle David Walton died in China on March 8 at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, just a week ago as I write this, yet I have already received an email with photographs from…