The room is rectangular, with hospital green walls that match the metal bed where the girl lies quietly. A half-open window faces her at the far end; a yellowed shade flutters with the light August breeze. Sparrows cheep busily outside. A battered wringer washer sits next to a big sink in the corner. The girl’s […]
Room: A Child with Polio Read More »
This is a story about shoes, 300 pairs give or take, and my 30-year relationship with a significant other named Amy, who lived in Kansas with her parakeet, and whom I never got a chance to meet. Amy and I were introduced to each other in the early 1970s through N.O.S.E., or the National Odd
In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full
The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop Read More »
Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither. The book disappears, reappears, disappears,
The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again” Read More »
On the landing of a high school stairway one day, I happened to witness the unhappy ending of a friend’s romance with one of our school’s acknowledged beauties. He had been pleading whatever case he thought he had for a while when she issued her verdict, with the haughty finality available to the beautiful young.
The Problem with Cancel Culture and Literary Censorship Read More »
A harmonica? The thing’s only four inches long! All kinds of notes are missing! Harp players have to show up with a briefcase full of different keys, just to play! They’re so tinny and shrill! So why would a serious musician ever choose the harmonica to play music on? Admittedly, this is good question. But
A Full-Tilt Tribute to the 1896 Harmonica Read More »