Dreamers Rise

McCay's work had its limitations. His dialogue is, for the most part, utterly lifeless, and displays none of the dazzling wordplay and p...

Now that we may have entered the twilight of the newspaper, this may be as good a time as any to look over some souvenirs from what was, at ...

J. G. Ballard died on Sunday. The BBC, in its report of his death, refers to him, perhaps a tad dismissively, as a "cult author."...

One warm August night, unable to remain asleep, I rose, dressed, and went outside, hoping that a walk by the water's edge would help cal...

The building was easy to miss. It was narrow, recessed a bit from the street, and identified only by the peeling number 62 of a faded gold d...

Pete Seeger didn't write this ribald little ditty (it's by Canadian songwriter and guitar maker Grit Laskin ), but he did record it,...

One evening he was returning home from a weekend trip a few hours away. He had planned to avoid the city but had missed a sign, and not know...

The artist and printmaker Carla Rippey is a native of Kansas City who has lived and worked principally in Mexico since the 1970s, long enoug...

This blog is the successor to the web journal / electronic broadside of the same name which I began in 2004. I have reposted and backdated h...

High on the bluffs, in a bare room looking out on the city, a man waits for the approach of night. He stands by one window, his back against...

She motioned to the waitress for the handwritten bill, then folded a ten and a couple of singles neatly under her empty coffee cup. As she p...

At the corner of 57th street she waited until a downtown bus pulled along the curb, stepped inside, fished a token out of her purse and drop...

She stayed on in the office after the others had left, doing a bit of cleanup on an article that had been passed on to her for a quick polis...

He walked down the quiet street, feeling the evening damp on his face and neck, keeping his hands warm in the pockets of his coat. Along the...

It had snowed the morning before, six inches of soft powder, then after an afternoon of brilliant sun the temperature had dropped overnight ...

“There is amongst us a set of critics who seem to hold that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there a...

As the year waned and the days grew shorter she spent most of her weekend morning hours in bed, asleep if she could stay asleep or just thin...

According to the liner notes to this 1997 record by Peter Case , “this album was composed on a '60s Smith Corona manual acoustic word pr...