Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 As customary as it may be to speak of the early deaths of artists as untimely, the case of Sam Cooke is indeed the story of a career cut short at the height of its powers. Cooke had already built a prolific career in R&B and pop by the time he was shot dead under mysterious circumstances in Los Angeles in 1964. But his posthumous release, the hauntingly beautiful “A Change is Gonna Come” hinted at the direction his musical career was headed as the Civil Rights Movement picked up steam.  Music had been in Cooke’s blood almost from an early age. Born to a Baptist minister in the Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1931, the young Cooke was singing in the choir of his father’s church since he was six.  Before Cooke was twenty he joined the gospel group The Soul Stirrers. It was with the Soul Stirrers that Cooke’s remarkable vocal talent became recognized in such recordings as “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “End of My Journey”. Church music never fully left Cooke’s soul ...

If you think book antiquarians have no use for the digital world, consider my anecdote this morning. Among the most valuable books in my library is a first edition of Winston Churchill’s autobiographical My Early Life: A Roving Commission , published in 1930 by Butterworth, London Ltd. I bought it from an antiquarian over a decade ago when I was compiling Churchill’s written works. I inspect old books, especially scarce ones, extensively. Oversights do happen, however, both on my end and on the sellers’. Usually, these blights that slip by are discovered upon reading the volume. This morning, however, I had quite a shock. I happened to pull out My Early Life in preparation as it is one of the upcoming volumes on my to-read list. To explain my alarm, which evolved into panic and then dismay, it is necessary to describe the book. Inserted sporadically throughout the pages of the text are several matte sheets containing illustrations, mostly of Churchill in his younger years. These illus...

 It’s been almost a decade since I first hosted Thanksgiving. That summer I had moved into my first house in Revere and I wanted to carry on the tradition that my grandmother had carried on ever since my father came to America in the early 70s. My grandmother, of course, was going to be a guest and I was following her recipe for turkey and, especially, the stuffing…or so I thought.  Thanksgivings at my grandparents’ apartment were always joyous occasions and the very compactness of the quarters were my grandparents lived aided in drawing everyone, my sister and I, my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, closer.  We drowned out the noise of the Macy’s parade my grandparents would have playing on their rabbit-eared TV and not the other way around. And in true Italian fashion it wasn’t just turkey. A full course of spaghetti and assorted meats in sauce had come and gone by the time the stuffed bird arrived.  And this was no ordinary turkey. My grandmother always bought i...

 In an age of divisiveness nothing should be a surprise as a point of contention. No, not even Bigfoot, and I’m not talking about the head-butting that always surrounded North America’s fabled wild man. Believers have always stood firm while the calls for logic from scientists have been in vain. What has changed is the increased hostility between the two.  This, too, was inevitable for the supernatural is, after all, a religion and few subjects elicit stronger passions, especially when drawn into the political arena, than dogma. Look no further than the quarrel with the church of the flat earth for proof.  Not surprisingly, the quarrel reaches a pitch when Patty enters the room. Patty is the christened name given to the supposed female sasquatch filmed by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in 1967 in a piece of footage which has since then become the Shroud of Turin for Bigfoot hunters.  Patterson had been such an aficionado since at least 1959 when he began reading abou...

  Between 1893 and 95 a number of song titles, among them “Daisy Bell”, “The Sidewalks of New York” and “The Streets of Cairo”, sparked a mini artistic revolution. The singer, Dan W. Quinn, became one of the pioneers in recorded music. Music was not reinvented per se but it became a popular commodity and we have been witnesses to this evolution from vinyl to cassette, from CDs to mp3, right back to the resurgence of vinyl. In the dawn of the 20 th century a number of artists jumped on the musical bandwagon, including Marie Cahill, the Haydn Quartet and even Sousa’s Band began recording their standards like “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “In the Good Old Summertime”. With the growing popularity of ragtime, many found it easy to transfer their vaudeville hits to record or cylinder. Solidifying the industry was the establishment of a flurry of record companies to compete with the trail-blazer Edison Records, chief among them the Victor Talking Machine Company. In as much as the ...

  Though it remains a divisive work, Victory is almost universally classified as Joseph Conrad’s last significant novel. The varied responses themselves reveal much about the regard he held in critical circles at the time of publication, his use of literary devices (not altogether uncommon for Conrad) and the global state of affairs. The latter, perhaps, was a misunderstanding between author and readers; Conrad began writing Victory in April of 1912 and finished in May of 1914, a month after the assassination of the Arch Duke of Austria, often marked as the catalyst for the war. By the time the novel was published in October of 1915 it was greeted by a very different world than the one in which it began life. England was facing off the Central Powers and the Lusitania had met its watery grave. Victory , thus, came about as a relic of a bygone literary era. Conrad’s only explicit acknowledgement of the new world stage was the very title. He had rejected “Victory” originally precis...

  When my grandfather arrived from Venezuela in 1985 and joined us settling in Dorchester, finding a Spanish-speaking doctor was among the many challenges. This was a greater challenge in the 80s (even in Boston) than it is today, but the Carney Hospital was there, and my grandfather had a dependable doctor a few blocks away. Since then, for nearly forty years, the Carney has served my family. Even for those who saw a physician elsewhere, the Carney was there if a rush to the emergency room was ever needed. As a child my appointments were at the Neponset Health Center where I came to know not only my doctor but the nurses and staff well. When I got sick with mononucleosis at the age of seven the clinic became my second home. I refer here not only to the frequency of my visits but the comfort and reassurance my family was given here by the medical staff that had known me since infancy. After college, when I had to decide on a regular primary care physician, the Carney seemed an ...