Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 In December of 1916, more than six years after the death of Mark Twain, his final novel was published. Whether it was published in full remains a matter of mystery but what is known is that it had appeared throughout his later years in fragments and different versions. In its final (if not “finished”) form, The Mysterious Stranger is among Twain’s most exasperating works, painfully reminiscent of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno . It is, however, a revealing look into the mind of a grieving genius who had endured the loss of his wife and daughter and its release makes a valuable addition to Twain’s cannon.   Like the works it by Kipling and Carroll it is an episodic telling of encounters with a supernatural being visiting our world, in this case Satan, though not Satan himself…but Satan’s nephew who shares his name and arrives in 16th century Austria and tantalizes a group of young boys with shocking and often nihilistic teachings on t...

 In 2017 as part of a larger tour of Hollywood and its surroundings I took a trip p the Santa Monica Mountains to visit Will Rogers State Historic Park and joined a tour of the ranch house, polo grounds and stables. I did not know then I was seeing what would in less than a decade become lost history. By the second day of the LA wildfires the ranch house and stables were among the many cultural markers lost to the inferno. Their destruction pales in comparison to the thousands of homes destroyed, the thousands of people displaced and the lives lost. Nonetheless, the loss of what was a testament to a fascinating character, a uniquely American success story, is a blow.  Memorials and honors to Will Rogers abound west of the Mississippi. Most notable among them is the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, near where the Will Rogers story truly begins. Rogers was born in 1879 in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory near what the coming railway would soon influence rechr...

 Urban exploration, as the term is used by the seekers of crumbling architecture, has a distinct appeal from the more popular and not specifically named spectacle of ancient ruins. The latter offers clues to a long-vanished world, a life so abstracted from our own that any narrative assembled from the remnant pieces is fueled by speculation. Urban exploration hits closer to our shared cultural home. It offers pieces of a familiar world and a life we know. For some an abandoned urban landscape evokes specific memories but, even for those visiting the shattered remains of a once thriving location, there are enough commonalities to imagine the place at its peak with relative accuracy. Whether or not we knew the now decaying place in person we bond over the shared history, a bond formed by remnants of a shared culture, history or routine. There is a haunting bittersweetness, then, to most such spots not entirely different from visiting a cemetery or a memorial. Most abandoned areas tel...

 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...