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ON MARLENE As I look back at memorable summers in Woodstock I had no idea that they were to be so impactful as to obtain the status of emblematic experiences. I was purely experiencing people and place, not observing, which is the more reflective stance to assume. Nearing my end as it is the autumn of my life, I can take a better measure of who I was and who I am at this moment. It is the gift of old age, if you avail yourself of it. The separating and divorcing of my wife was manumission, but a slave…

    COTTON CANDY AND KITES Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach and then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, or the El above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set for “Nightmare Alley.” Steeplechase Park was here, as well as the dizzying spire of the parachute jump which still stands like a frozen, rusted Transformer. I rode that aerial ride at 17 and it was frightening; in those days you “sat” on a skimpy wooden plank with…

What does a writer do when he is in psychological pain, devastating hurt? Agony is the better name, and suffering is its coverlet. He makes up a song for himself, an air to play over and over again until the pain is extinguished and he is soothed. It is a fabricated ritual to slake the immediacy of the anguish. By telling himself about himself there is a measure of the repetition in all that and this very repetition can alleviate the outrageous hurt, the attack upon the self. In this expression I just want to cut through and get to core truths, reflections, or generalizations…

    PLATO’S CAVE In March of 1968 I was sitting in my apartment on Ash Avenue watching a black-and-white TV when President Lyndon Johnson spoke to the American people. I recall vaguely his reiterating that he would not accept a nomination to run for president again and repeated that he would step down at the end of his present term. The police riot at the Chicago Democratic convention was months away. Since I was self-absorbed in the disastrous relationship with my estranged wife and with the ongoing passion of an affair with a married woman, Marlene, I had no…