Don't know what to make of the news that membership in organized religions is down in all fifty states. That's not quite true.  I've been trying not to let myself make anything of it.  For one thing, I'd just be talking out of my hat.  I don't know enough.  None of the articles I...

Empire of the Sun, French edition, Denoël (1985), with cover art ‘Singapour 1945′ by Ronald Seatle. Thanks to Herve for all cover scans. Interview by Tony Cartano & Maxim Jakubowski. Translation by Dan O’Hara. The following interview, originally titled ‘Le passé compos...

The last time Cal won in Tucson? 1995. A lot has happened since then, to say the least. Some of it has been great -- see my lovely daughter -- and some of it has been gruesome -- see 9/11 and its belated sequel, the global financial crisis. I'd started to think that the Bears would never win here. Y...

Part One is here. "What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds  that underlie the words.  Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let u...

All photography by Simon Sellars. Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to cl...

Being stuck at home the last three weeks mostly on my own has been a bit of a blessing and a curse. The rest has been nice, and a welcome change of pace from the mad whirl of the last 17 months. Looking back, it doesn't seem like I stopped to draw breath for much of the time since Sue died. Having t...

I feel really, really good today. My allergies were giving me hell when I woke up, but I went on a hard bike ride, exclusively in high gear, and seem to have suppressed my natural histamines with the help of this morning's Claritin. I'm starting to wonder whether I haven't, shamefully, taken the cue...

Looking back, I wonder why it took me so long to become a heretic. I was a loud-mouthed three-year-old when I was first brought into the Christian faith. I was indeed baptized, sang solos from the wood-paneled balcony (god love the 70s!), and began to love all the history and ritual from the faith t...

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion off and on over the past month. At first, as I noted in a previous entry, I found it hard to sustain my interest. The doings of gods and demi-gods only excite me insofar as they pertain to less powerful beings. And the prose, more "antiqued" than t...

I've been thinking a lot about circles of influence in the independent music world. Also on my mind have been their antecedents in the domain of literature and fine art, as in the first flowerings of "Bohemia" in pre-1848 Paris and its subsequent rhizomatic dispersals and revivals. The other day, th...