Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “essays”

Helen Gurley Brown

Why am I writing about Helen Gurley Brown, famed editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and a champion of sexual freedom or a promoter of sexual enslavement, depending on your particular socio-political orientation? Well, because Helen Gurley Brown just died at the age of ninety, and though many people consider her a traitor to feminism, and many others see her as a pioneering feminist and social revolutionary, Helen was one of the very few magazine editors in America in the 1970’s and 80’s who would publish my short stories about the challenges facing men and women in the chaos of sexual and social change that arrived with the birth control pill and the dawn of the feminist epoch; thus I have no doubt about where I stand regarding Ms. Brown’s place in the history of psycho-sexual discourse.

River Views

Last week in the Mendocino County Clerk-Recorder’s office a great grandfather was not permitted to pick up a birth certificate for his great grandchild because the rules only allow a parent or grandparent to do…

Civil War

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”  — Abraham Lincoln…

Crazy Drifters

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to step back and let the boggling wash over your dome, reflecting on all the types who have somehow found their way to Humboldt County. How do they find us? Why do…

River Views

Bruce McEwen’s July 18th article in the AVA detailed the ill-fated trip of Kevin Dirksen and his two children after parking their van near Ukiah’s Walmart on the way to the Sierra Nevada World Music…

Goff & Krishnamurti

I would not have gone to see Krishnamurti (since I didn’t know who or what he was) had not my Philosophy professor Robert Goff urged his students to go; and Goff would not have been my Philosophy professor had I been accepted into a Creative Writing seminar

River Views

Quicker fellows than me at the AVA noted online in the July 14th “Mendocino County Today” (“Mendocino County Today” appears in the AVA’s print version as “Off The Record”) that the comment section of the…

Jehovah’s Witness

A friend recently wrote to me about his philosophical discussions with a Jehovah’s Witness, and his letter brought back boatloads of memories of my friend Woody, an African American Jehovah's Witness, an elder in his…

-