Reading Sara Ryan’s Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned
Within reach from my desk is a small wooden box. Inside is a snake’s skull, the gift of a friend…
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Herman Melville Meets Donald Trump
I spent a day reading Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson’s mid-century meditation on Melville, Moby-Dick, and the American idea. Halfway…
Distressed Stucco
Wandering through the apartments of Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, the late critic Robert Hughes noted how deeply architect Le Corbusier…
Mary Oliver & Gerard Manley Hopkins
Last week I read Gerard Manley Hopkins at length for the first time (I’d read “Spring and Fall” several times…
Poem up at Ambit
I’ve neglected to update this page for a few months, so I have some back-filling to do. The first piece…
Grid-bolted Desks
The twenty-seven desks of Bunche 3117, a small UCLA classroom, remain bolted to the floor, as they have been for…
Meditation and Story
Washing the dishes, I listened tonight to “Carols of the Times,” composer Bob Chilcott’s introduction to the Festival of Nine…
Reading Bill Mohr, Hold Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992
Twice I’ve seen the poet and critic Bill Mohr hold aloft a copy of Laurence Goldstein’s Poetry Los Angeles. Mohr…
Los Angeles Made Wild: Eloise Klein Healy, Artemis in Echo Park
Eloise Klein Healy is one of those writers whose style became associated with L.A. after the 1960s: loose lines, conversational…
Infinity Mirror: Hans Eijkelboom, People of the Twenty-First Century
Hans Eijkelboom is a photographer. In his brief and helpful afterword, the critic David Carrier characterizes Eijkelboom as a modern…
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