This morning a notice from Amazon popped up on my screen. The message said a customer had liked my review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant  but made no mention of whether or not he or she actually bought the book. (Blog 5/5/15)  Next I was reminded I’d written 13 reviews on Amaz

I came across an excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book, Living with a Wild God, recently.  (“Zapped by the Invisible World,” The Baffler, Vol. 25, 2014, pg. 13.)  I’ve  never read her any of her works but this segment spoke to my interest in mystical experiences. Sh

A funny thing happened on the way to the theater the other night.  A friend was driving and while we sped along the darkened streets, she admitted her vision wasn’t as good as it used to be.  Like me, she’s in her 70’s so I wasn’t surprised by her confession but noted it was

Pooh Bear Demystified Socrates observed that man is a social animal. If I’d have been his contemporary, I’d have added the words, “who likes a story.”  When a journalist writes, “First the king died and then the queen died,” we have an article. When an author writes, “F

POOH BEAR, POUND CAKE AND EZRA POUND Sunday, I took an imaginary walk in the park.  In reality, I was somewhere else, but as it was a sunny day, my mind kept wandering to the place where there are trees, a duck pond and an expanse of grass to sit upon. In my mind, I laid out a blanke

Here’s a fact that should give us pause: “Crime in Japan has become so rare that police often have nothing to do.  In 2015, there was just one gun homicide.  Guns are virtually illegal there.” (“News,” The Week, October 27, 2017 pg. 16.)  No wonder the Japanese have so ma

Recently, someone posted a remark by playwright Harold Pinter on Facebook.  It read, “How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I’ve never been able to write a happy play…”  I did a thesis on Pinter when I was

A new wave of innovation is hitting cyberspace which few of us know about and fewer will probably notice —  though the effect on everyday lives will be profound.  I write of Blockchain. Blockchain “…concatenates (or chains) cryptographically verified transactions into seq

Not long ago a celebrity made news by dying peacefully in his sleep.  A woman on Facebook noted his passing with the observation that people are destined to die the way they lived.  Her words were meant as a tribute to the deceased, but the statement went too far. Normally, I’d ha

Years ago, actress Dena Dietrich, dressed in Greco-Roman garb, her dark hair encircled in a crown of daisies appeared in a commercial for Chiffon margarine. “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she warned.  Then she stared into the camera, her eyebrow arched, leading us to un