• Music

    Fourth Annual “Songs of Summer”

    June 20, 2016 - By 

    Today’s summer solstice accompanied by tonight’s full moon: yes, our cup may just be in danger of overflowing. Whether this confluence signals the beginning or end of some kind of SuperDuperNatural Age of Aquarius or some other magic moment in time, I do not know. What I do know is that I’m happy, at this age, to be offering a “Fourth Annual” anything, and hopeful we can all be upright and ready to boogie again for a few more “annual” this-or-thats still to come. And so: the envelopes, please, for this ritual of the season, which this year blends wistfulness and nostalgia,…

  • Personal Reflections

    Memories of Early Jobs

    June 16, 2016 - By 

     So my daughter is searching for a summer job, which, provided she lands one, will be her first job of any consequence, save for the very occasional child care gig or house-tending for vacationing neighbors. As a recent high school graduate, she’s a little late to be entering the job world—that’s right, a child of privilege, ’nuff said—but her quest has put me in mind of my own early jobs and the deep memories and images they have left me with most of a lifetime later. My first sort-of-real job was as understudy for my brother’s paper route. He was three years…

  • Politics/Culture

    Smackdown: Ken Burns Sounds the Donald Trump Alarm At Stanford Commencement

    June 12, 2016 - By 

    The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has carved out an impressive career excavating, chronicling, mourning, and celebrating the great currents of American history, all with a kind of studied, non-partisan neutrality that avoids the axe-grinding and advocacy that is so common to the documentary form. With his youthful good looks and tender, redemptive approach to the challenges and foibles of our people and their stories, Burns has largely managed to stay above the partisan political fray, forsaking the trenches of temporal combat in favor of personal narratives and anecdote that reveal ultimately larger truths of our shared humanity. But that was then—before June…

  • Fiction - Odds & Ends

    John Steinbeck’s Muddled View of Sunsets

    June 2, 2016 - By 

    Of course I was moved by The Grapes of Wrath, though I think East of Eden was a superior novel. And Of Mice and Men? Who wasn’t reduced to blubbering at Lenny’s sorry fate? I sure was! So this post is not to impugn the renowned and honorable John Steinbeck, champion of the dispossessed and travel companion of a dog named Charlie, among other estimable virtues. It is only to hold up the fact, in graphic detail pertaining to one short sentence of Steinbeck’s prose, that writers don’t always get it right, that they most always benefit from conscientious editing,…