The triumph of the MFA mills is nearly complete. Most contemporary American writers of what is called “serious fiction” seem to be products of academia. And because academia is generally liberal, most American fiction writers seem to be leaning left these days. The MFA-mill/serious-litera… Read full post »

In the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men, Henry Fonda portrays the lone dissenter on a jury whose other eleven members all favor a guilty verdict. To my dismay, I found myself in just that position recently.

In the early morning hours of October 12, 2008, gunfire broke out at an AM/PM… Read full post »

This month, in recognition of Valentine’s Day, I’d like to tell you why the kitchen, rather than, say, the bedroom or the parlor, is the best place to audition someone you may be considering for the role of soulmate.

You can learn a lot about a person by fixing a meal… Read full post »

As an avid amateur baker and an enthusiastic eater, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen thinking about food. And when I’m not in the kitchen I can often be found curled up in bed with a good cookbook. My wife is much the same as me in this… Read full post »

When I was a boy I always contrived to sit near the globe in every classroom of my parochial school. That way, if the lesson was boring (which most of them seemed to be), I at least had something to focus my imagination on. Of all the many fascinating aspects of… Read full post »

Roughly nine percent of Americans are unemployed these days, and an additional 16 percent are underemployed. That means that about 25 percent of all Americans don’t have enough work to do. In the world of the American romantic comedy, however, the numbers are much worse. Almost all major rom-co… Read full post »

As I write this, I am sitting behind the counter of a small Sacramento used-bookstore. The proprietor is a friend of mine. He is tending to a sick relative for the next few months and so I am watching the store in his absence. He is paying me nothing for my… Read full post »

On August 16 of this year I will celebrate my 53^rd birthday. If my old high-school classmates reunited for the purpose of naming a “least successful graduate from the class of 1976,” I would almost certainly be it. For most of my adult life, I have been trying to earn a/… Read full post »

I saw a TV commercial last night that sums up a lot of what is wrong with modern life. In it, a lovely young woman tells a man of her own age that she is going to a bookstore to pick up a copy of some sensational new bestseller. She asks… Read full post »

According to the latest government statistics, about 20 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are without employment. I am among that “missing fifth.” I collect no unemployment benefits, so, as far as the government statisticians are concerned, I am not merely unemployed,… Read full post »

I am a cake baker. You’ll notice I said “baker” and not “artist.” I do not create eight-tiered culinary masterpieces that stretch four feet high and are decorated with scenes from “Shrek.” My cakes do not have PVC or copper pipes holding them up. In fact, I d… Read full post »

The current foreclosure crisis will someday produce its own memorialists, writers who will give us autobiographical poems, stories, screenplays, and novels about the horrors and hardships of home-loss. But until that wave arrives, those interested in immersing themselves in the literature of disposse… Read full post »

These days, even guinea pigs need an impressive resume in order to find work. I found this out the hard way. Several months ago, I began experiencing knee pain. Unfortunately, I had lost my medical coverage a few months earlier when my wife was laid off from her job. So I… Read full post »

Today Julie and I visited three of our “almost houses.” Six years ago, when we first made up our minds to move from Placerville to Sacramento, we began spending nearly every weekend in Sacramento, touring houses in the presence of a Realtor. We must have toured more than three dozen house… Read full post »

I spent the day in “Arabistan,” a book by William Perry Fogg, a 19^th Century adventurer and travel writer. The full title is “Arabistan, Or The Land of the Arabian Nights.” It was published in 1875 in a beautiful cloth-bound edition. I bought my copy recently from a Nevada Cit/… Read full post »

            The popular NBC sitcom The Office chronicles the working lives of the people employed at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of a fictional paper company known as Dunder Mifflin, Inc. The show gets a lot of things right about the conte/… Read full post »

Today, at a used-book store in Davis, California, I found a beautiful copy of Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” It caught my eye because its front and back covers were free of the usual promotional verbiage – no blurbs, no plot summary, no text at all except for t… Read full post »

The other day I promised to write an entire essay about “1066: The Year of the Conquest,” David Howarth’s short history of England’s most tumultuous year. Today I shall fulfill that promise. I read the book not so much for the history but for the prose. I was told by a… Read full post »

2009 was the year that I finally tackled Anthony Trollope. Well, perhaps I didn’t actually tackle him, but he was in my grasp for a while. Trollope had long intimidated me, both because he wrote so many novels (47) and because most of his books seem to weigh in at about… Read full post »

This past weekend I read a book called “1066: The Year of the Conquest.” I read it not because I had any strong interest in William the Conqueror’s invasion of England but because I had been told (correctly, as it turned out) that the author, the late David Howarth, possessed an… Read full post »

In early March two prominent American writers died within days of each other. Curiously, I once met both of them on the same day, about five minutes apart. In the summer of 1999 I attended the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee. Every student who attends the conference is entitled to a… Read full post »