notanotherbookreview

  ACTIVISM Part 2 This is a personal essay through the imperfect filter of memory. I began this series, when a friend asked what the year was like,  how was activism organized. Here's the second part of my answer. It was late August 1969, when I arrived at Syracuse University, then a hard-partying campus. I remember rescuing a naive roomate through a window, after she unknowingly drank quaaludes at a raging frat party. But the war was to intrude on such campus fun and games. That fall we freshman went about our business often oblivious to teach-ins on campus. They were also held in public schools sponsored by local business. Unlike rallies, the purpose was educational. Speakers, usually teachers, gave slide shows explaining the history of Vietnam and the French involvement, current politics and rationales for U.S. involvement. Financial and human costs were updated. (Our body counts kept rising, despite the napalm, we made and dropped) At the end of a teach-in, there wa...

  Borough Hall  Mid-Century Memoir. "What was it like in 1969 when young people tried to remake the world?"  Answers-PART 1 "Normal".  PART 2 "Activism"  next week. This is a personal essay through the imperfect filter of memory. "What was it like in 1969, when young people tried to remake the world? " I was recently asked this and found it difficult to summarize that time, when "normal" became something else.  2022 is also an era of intense social upheaval.  How the "normal" of 1969 spurred serious generational change is useful to understand, especially with conservative groups lobbying to turn back the cultural "clock."  Life  Magazine  featured Haight-Ashbury's hippie mecca, yet racist conservative George Wallace was elected in my high school's mock elections for the 1968 race against Richard Nixon. "Times were achanging" somewhere else than my Philly borough, twenty minutes away from downtow...

  I recently learned that The Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, is now a banned book. It is more than ironic that a book celebrating American grit in the inhumanly gruelling time of the Great Depression is banned in 2022, a time of unprecedented national hardship. In Grapes , The Joads, a family of tenant farmers, flee their Oklahoma home amid drought, poverty and bank foreclosures that make survival untenable. There is no hope in the Dust Bowl and, like thousands of others, they've seen handbills advertising jobs in California.   The story begins as Tom Joad, paroled from prison, where he was incarcerated for a homicide in self-defense, is hitch-hiking home. He meets a preacher, who he remembers from childhood, and they travel together. Tom finds the farm home deserted and goes to his uncle's, where the family is staying after the banks evicted all the farmers. Tom's family is loading what possessions remain into a Sedan-truck, when he arrives. The farm ...

3/29 I did this interview with Carla Sarett, novelist, short story writer and poet.  https://youtu.be/bAxQKhTz98c      at SMOL small press fair.  if you have interest. 3/4/22 A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press, 2/7/22) is an old fashioned new romance set in pre-Covid New York, Philadelphia and L.A., as a young woman finds herself.  I like Emma Roberts for the role of  Bella, a smart, funny self critical young woman overly aware of being too skinny, demanding, lazy and just weird to attract a man that she might want. She becomes a graduate student almost by default. It's the "almost" that's at issue, since Bella is a woman who doesn't yet know her own strengths. On the far side of twenty, she only knows she needs to be on a path. As the story opens, Bella's got a job she barely does and considers herself without ambition, a person who would rather watch movies all day than work. Her tolerant boss also knows she's not living up to her potential. So B...