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Blue Bayou
Channel 9.1 (KQED) had a Roy Orbison concert reprise last night (we'd seen it before), in which he's accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, among others. Some way into the set, he did Blue Bayou, a song I...
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Self-Critique I
Coffee table books. Somehow, the phrase suggests decadence, frivolity, perhaps self-indulgence. There's by now a long tradition, over the last century, of books designed to exist as a kind of...
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Self-Critique II
Reflexivity in self-regard presents difficulties. Is regarding oneself critically an exercise in myopic delusion? Can anyone be truly objective about the products of one's own imagination? One's own...
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Self-Critique III
Can anyone be a fair judge of their own artistic effort? Writers and artists run the spectrum of attitude, from vain boastfulness and pride, to quiet modesty and tact. Courtesy suggests any artist must...
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John Ashbery [1927-2017]
When we remember someone we've known, who has died, we may choose, voluntarily or not, to recall them at a certain age in their life. We are all oldest at the point we depart life, but who we were in a...
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Giants in 2017 - Surveying the Devastation
At this moment, the San Francisco Giants are 60-93, dead last in their division, with the worst record in both leagues. In 2016, the team went 87-75, and made it all the way to the second round of the...
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Kaepernick - Hero or Victim?
I have been a fan of the 49ers, off and on, for over 60 years. My stepfather, Harry Faville, had followed the team from its inception in the late 1940's, and by the time television arrived in the...
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Northern California Fires
We're all familiar by now with the cluster of fires which have ravaged parts of Northern California over the last 10 days. Like most people, I have a feeling of futility about the damage that has been...
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A Walk in the Woods
For a long time, I've wanted to write a poem about an experience that was very vivid in my imagination, but which I've never quite figured out how to do. As anyone who has ever camped in the outback...
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Near the Arctic Circle
My maternal ancestors came from Northern Scandinavia. Norway, apparently. I've never been to Norway, but whenever I see a travel show on television about Norway, I try to imagine--from my "deep" racial...
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Indian Summer Buzz
Walker Evans Truck and Sign, 1930There's something wrong with America. We didn't sort out the classes and put them in their places the way they did in Europe. Things got really mixed up here. A lot of...
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Soglow's Igloo
I first began reading The New Yorker in the early 1960's, when my mother gave me a subscription as a Christmas present. But I had seen the magazine on newsstands as early as the late 1950's. In those...
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What Does it Feel Like ?
How are you feeling today?As the day opens up, broadens and elaborates into the complexities of living, are thoughts and feelings ascending into consciousness, appearing and moving?Today, everyone says...
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The Private Life and the Public Art - Salinger and Merrill
This last year, among the various books that I have read, were two full-length author biographies: Salinger, by David Shields and Shane Salerno, and James Merrill: Life and Art, by Langdon Hammer. The...
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Article 2
James Merrill, about whom I wrote in my last blog entry, is not a poet whom I had ever much admired. As an aspiring poet in the 1970's, I knew his books and comprehended his style. I knew vaguely that...
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Shit Hole Countries
This week, Donald Trump, discussing new Congressional proposals for immigration policy changes, was reported to have reacted strongly to certain suggested elements that were presented to him, in a...
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Winners Circle
In the continuing search for better cocktail mixes, one recent effort stands out, and has therefore been dubbed the Winners Circle. In horse-racing lore, the Triple Crown winner occupies the winner's...
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Cappy and Sabine
We think of genetics as a science now, not a mystery. Plato thought that the "soul""entered" the body at birth, which was all the Greeks knew of inheritance, and reproduction. We now know that...
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Who Speaks For Americans?
We live in strange times.The Democratic Party is holding the federal government funding package in Congress hostage to the Dreamers, who constitute something like .00216718% of the population...
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Spring Training
According to speculative reports I have read online, the San Francisco Giants' 2018 line-up is shaping up to look like this:Andrew McCutchen RFJoe Panik 2ndEvan Longoria 2rdBuster Posey CBrandon...
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