Ian’s brain had weak connections between the neurons that shaped thought. He never felt empathy or sympathy for anyone, no matter how badly that person suffered. He tortured the family cat when he was a little boy just to test his own indifference to pain. This didn’t bother him at all. It didn’t help that […]
Moose rose from his stool in Mother’s Saloon at last call and tossed four twenties on the bar, not knowing how much he owed and not caring. He strolled out the front door and onto Ocean Beach. He peeled off his t-shirt and tossed it in the sand, then lumbered toward the water in his
Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the
Dostoevsky on Avoiding Life Read More »
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
Charles Dickens on London in November Read More »
A brief article and photograph by Kevin Arnold Ray’s marriages were provocative. One of my poet friends, Deidre Farrington Schoolcraft, can become piqued at Raymond Carver because, even after his first wife Maryann’s continual sacrifices for him, Ray divorced her and, by marriage, bestowed the rights to Ray’s work to Tess. Deidre wrote a poem
Raymond Carver’s Wives Read More »
Walt had just finished a three-day conference on education theory in Anaheim that was long on theory and short on substance, but this didn’t really matter to him. The only reason he attended was to get away from home for awhile and take in L.A. culture. He wanted to look around a little and see