The Eastside View

Originally published, in a slightly different form, in The Open Hand Celebration Cookbook (New York: Pocket Books, 1991) F OR NEARLY FIFTEE...

V AS YOU DER, SHARLIE ? If I heard that once from my dad, by the time I was ten years old, I must have heard it a million times. Only this m...

letter to Whiting "C ULTURE," OF COURSE , is etymologically as well as (or indeed therefore) intimately related to terroir . ...

W ENT TO A TALK last night in town. Christopher O'Sullivan, a historian, spoke easily and interestingly about the presidential candidac...

T HE OTHER MORNING the woman who was cutting my hair mentioned that she was thinking of moving to Oregon, because she has kids in school, a...

Forcados line up to taunt a bull in Newman O NE LIKES ONE'S RECREATION out of doors and varied, and so it was that we took in a perfor...

T HERE'S A PROBLEMATIC DIALECTIC in poetry (I associate it with Ron Silliman) between language poetry and the "School of Quietude....

so i'm sitting in the car in the parkinglot lindsey having gone into tj's to get some selenium the radio's listening to a callin...

R ENEWABLE MUSIC, Daniel Wolf's admirable blog , continues to stimulate me every time I tune in. Most recently: One of the qualities I...

A DAY AT THE BALL PARK , even if your team loses, is better than a day away from the park; only a day of tramping in the countryside can be...

A NOTHER ONE OF THOSE nice dreams: sitting at a piano with a couple of teenaged students who were picking out tunes. I suggested the pickup...

The decor and tensility of Couperin The pomp and glory of Rameau. The bourgeois masterly Bach. The worldly resourceful Handel. The wit and c...

Lindsey among the Matisses T HOUGHTS OF MORTALITY crowd the aging mind; I'm sorry; I can't help it. Not even an unusually distracti...

T HE COUNTRY'S SECOND-FAVORITE PLAY This year? Moliere's Tartuffe , they say. Second most frequently produced, That is, and now its ...

photo: Rome, January 2004 A H, FERNET BRANCA . The first time we traveled in Europe, in 1974, we traveled with another couple, who we met in...

Y ES, IT'S ONE of the couple hundred books in the case of Books Waiting To Be Read: Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence . Lou H...

T HEY SAY OURS IS a "Mediterranean climate," meaning wet winter, dry summer. We had just under a tenth of an inch of rain on Tues...

I WROTE ABOUT Michael Kincaid's little book Solar Margins here a few months ago, and the other day a letter arrived from him, with a ...

T WO INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS are going on within my user group (NCMUG, the North Coast Macintosh Users' Group). One concerns archival...

N OTHING MORE INTERESTING than the intersection of ethical quandary with practical quandary. Case in point: Eating in a restaurant (whose n...