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The Emshock Letters

The quality and depth of the exchange between us was near the deepest, most basic level of my being. Before me stood a being in which existed, in a universal sense, the most extreme opposite to everything I had known or defined as light, happiness, pleasure, tenderness, compassion, love, goodness and well-being.

South China Journal

Yangshuo is a riverside village set amidst all the ancient landscape paintings of China. Tourist groups disembark here after a half-day boat trip down the Lu River.

Animals And Science

If we are seriously to challenge the use of animals in research, we must challenge the practice itself, not only individual instances of it or merely the liabilities in its present methodology.

Letter From unVacationland

The view from the kitchen window is pretty-damned decent, and would encourage one to go on cooking. All looks fairly right with the world. Old friends, guests for the week, are playing and laughing in the backyard despite the drawbacks of the K-Mart badminton set.

Miracles

There are those who say miracles are part of the good news, but I am not so sure that what they are referring to is actually so good. In hard times, many look for good news or seek out the bad — the former to disperse or suppress the latter or the latter to shore up and elevate the former.

No Bars To Freedom

Bo Lozoff’s Letters To And From Prisoners

Dear Billy,
Nice to hear from you. You know, you said that you were a coward and a real piece of shit, but if that’s so, then who was the sensitive, intelligent human being who was moved to tears by the story of Gandhi’s courage? That takes a lot of courage and openness, too, you know.

Letters From The Road

Greetings from the Laundry Basket, or more accurately THE LAUNDRY B SKET, a laundromat in Austin. The tall and weathered man next to me has been listening to Talk Radio: an anti-pornography Texan made the shrewd point that cigarettes can’t be advertised on TV. Then time ran out.

Red Dawn Over Tweetsie

When I saw “Red Dawn,” I realized that a private and relatively innocent part of my adolescence had become tribalized on a mass scale, and from that fact flowed a palpable undercurrent of menace that had never been there for us.

Why I Like Dead People

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.

Fear Strikes Out

A pen pal of mine in a nearby state recently published her first novel and was surprised when it was referred to under the heading of women’s fiction. She had never placed herself in any category, and wondered what the term meant.