Deeply moved by a concert of music by Martinû and Mozart, a man gives $50 to a street musician, a Venezuelan bass player whose musical inventions are reminiscent of Eric Satie and Bill Evans. The…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Perhaps I deserved to spend a stormy night on the side of Highway 101 in a crapped-out Ford Courier pickup, watching the lightning flash and freezing in a wet wool blanket I had found in…
It was my very first sixth-grade faculty meeting at Little Lake Valley Middle School. There were just four of us, all men, but we were waiting for one more teacher before we could proceed. That…
The possum baby slashed and jerked its way around Joanna’s uterus in a river of milky white mucus and blood. “Ya muthafuckin’ beast!” she wailed at it, her back grindin’ into the bed while she…
The Turks were so patient for putting up with me this fall as I cycled around the western half of Turkey. I cringe now when I recall the many times, while in conversation with strangers,…
“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.” — Nadia Boulanger During the four years in the early 1990’s when I ran the Creative Writing program for the…
“As you walk, you cut open and create that riverbed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.” — Nikos Kazantzakis In 1965, when I was 16 and deeply unhappy, I went…
Dear AVA, I don't know what all the fuss is about. “Awesome” is the most phenomenally iconic word ever. Actually I buried and mourned it long ago, interred it with a host of other cheapened,…