“If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” –Charles Fort Fort, chronicler of strange natural phenomena, proposed to begin with frogs, including those that purportedly fell from […]
On the Table: A Tale of One Un-American All-American Family
The dining room table that sits in a corner of my apartment is a storehouse of memories. Until I went to college, my parents, my two brothers and I sat around it and ate together almost every night of the week. My parents are no longer alive. My brothers will certainly have their own memories […]
More from the Vault: Where Dreams Go To Die
The following piece appeared in issue #8 of Hard Crackers, which can be purchased here. I get to work late and hung over. I rush past the reference desk, past the remaining display of Black History Month books that Eleanor is replacing with a “queer movements in the 80s” theme. Clocking in, I say hi […]
Rain Day Blues in Frisco Town
When I arrived in San Francisco in May 2021, I brought with me three umbrellas, which had been useful in Sonoma County where it often rained 40 to 50 inches in a year, though there were also years of drought. Extreme weather was the norm. Two of my umbrellas, one black, the other red, would […]
From the Vault
The Hard Crackers project is just over five years old. During that time, we have published almost a hundred articles in nine issues of our print journal and posted more than 350 articles on our web page. It had always been our intention to keep the two types of articles more or less separate, but […]
Indigenous Peoples’ Day – Isandlwana, The Mother of All Battles
This particular written project got percolating in my head when one of my co-editors, John Garvey, told me this. John recently asked his granddaughter whether she had Columbus Day off from school. She corrected him, “Grandpa it’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Now that the script has been adjusted to fit the current politically self-righteous […]