“If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give.” — Sidney Bechet Shortly before I began teaching at El Paso Community College, […]
Glass jars of home-canned tomatoes fill the cupboard over my refrigerator, ’50s icons in a 21st century kitchen. If I could, I would pull one down, unscrew the gold metal band and pop off the lid underneath to release the fresh aroma of tomato. It would be a reminder of summer’s abundance, a buoy against
I think I was 13, poking my eyes along the titles of books lined up on a long folding table at some church basement rummage sale, when a title called out to me – Life in a Putty Knife Factory, by someone named H. Allen Smith. In those days, I often selected books simply because
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Praised by such different souls as Ernest Hemingway, Donald Barthelme, Simone de Beauvoir and Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Algren remains at best a rumor in his own time. They misspelled his name on his tombstone, and when the City of Chicago renamed a street in his honor, the residents complained so bitterly about the change that
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My mother read to me from the time I could turn over from my back to my belly. Soon as I could walk, she began taking me to the little library on Central Street, and soon enough I’d run through all the wonderful books for kids the librarians knew of and could afford to buy.
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I’d learned a lot of blues songs, quite a few famous and obscure standards from the 20s and 30s, some Irish tunes, a few old Burl Ives songs and others from the dread folk music revival years, a few Dylan tunes. (While I’d dug Dylan’s early lp’s, he was leaving me pretty lukewarm as
Zimmerman’s Syndrome Read More »