Ayutthaya

Once we were aboard the train heading north from Bangkok to Ayutthaya, the recent days slowly receded, subsumed by the langorous rhythm of the railroad. I’d spent the past week among the sex tourists, myself included in that category, at the Malaysia Hotel, where I was staying in Bangkok, and in the bars of the nearby Patphong district. Now, I was travelling with a friend of mine from Vancouver, Dan Gawthrop, a writer in his thirties who was living and working in Bangkok as a copy editor at an English-language... 
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Athens

At the centre of modern Athens is Omonia Square, a vast inferno of roaring, polluting traffic–at the time, in July 1996, under infrastructural redevelopment, so that ragged wooden hoardings and the pounding of pile drivers and jackhammers were added to its usual chaos. The square is surrounded on all four sides by shops, newspaper and cigarette kiosks, eateries, and slowly-moving glutinous crowds of people. But Thomas Marquard, my travelling companion, and I, who were staying at a cheap hotel behind... 
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"Arcadia" and "Art"

Arcadia The Argentine-born writer Alberto Manguel gave me a copy of his compatriot Tomas Martinez’s book, The Peron Novel, and inscribed on its flyleaf, "et in Arcadia ego," a phrase popularized in the Renaissance (and sometimes credited to Virgil). It means, "And (even) in Arcadia, I am," a stark reminder that Death is everywhere present–yes, even in the earthly paradise of that region of the Greek Pelopponesian peninsula, Arcadia, where amorous shepherds engaged in pastoral... 
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Apartheid

One day in the 1980s, when apartheid still existed in South Africa, I saw scenes of rioting in the sprawling black African township of Soweto on the evening television news. The visuals featured menacing armoured vehicles that were more tank than truck, rumbling through the racially segregated encampment of more than a million people, spewing tear gas and bullets. The next day, I was visiting my friend Tom Sandborn and said, as we sat at a picnic table in his sunny Vancouver backyard, "Tom, we’ve... 
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Alphabet

When I was four years old, my father (Morris Persky) bought a blackboard on an easel for me. Across the top of the blackboard, the alphabet was printed in white letters. My father’s method of instruction was to draw pictures I requested–a cowboy, say–and then to write the word on the blackboard, pointing out how the letters of the word related to the alphabet at the top of the board. Once I’d mastered the basics, he drew me complicitously into a routine in which I demonstrated my rudimentary... 
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Woody Allen

In a dream, I was having a conversation with the filmmaker and actor Woody Allen. We were in a busy university building, the foyer and staircase crowded with students on their way to classes. Allen and I were talking about Hegel. Yes, Allen was saying, Hegel on the subject of tragedy had been very important to him. But have you read Marulla? he asked, and was surprised when I said I hadn’t. Oh, you have to, he urged, as he approached the staircase to walk upstairs to the seminar he was conducting. Just... 
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Paul Alexander

On the cover of George Stanley’s You (Poems 1957-67) (New Star, 1974), there’s a detail of Paul Alexander’s painting "Twenty Questions." The title of the painting comes from a popular parlour game and television show of the period that I watched as an adolescent in the 1950s. Participants could ask twenty yes or no questions to figure out the concealed identity of some person or thing. The first determination to be made was, "Is it animal, mineral or vegetable?", as if... 
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After Lorca

In the winter of 1958-59, Jack Spicer gave a poetry reading at San Francisco’s Bread & Wine Mission, a proto-New Age storefront drop-in centre at the top of Grant Avenue in North Beach run by Father Pierre Delattre. I was in the U.S. Navy at the time, eighteen years old, stationed at nearby Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, my first posting after boot camp. Had I already read about, or seen a picture–in Life magazine–of "Hube the Cube"? This improbable poster-person for... 
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Of African Descent

My father owned or worked in a series of more or less failing grocery stores in black neighbourhoods on the South Side of Chicago for some twenty-five years, roughly between 1940 and the mid-1960s. His stores foundered because of the appearance of large, new, chain supermarkets, a feature of post-World War II capitalist development that doomed the corner groceries. It was also the era when the South Side, as historian Robert Stepto writes, "burgeoned as thousands of African Americans, almost exclusively... 
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Adolescence

While I was an adolescent, everything that is crucial to my identity happened. Because those adolescent experiences were so vivid, I could never accept the notions of the determining impact of the unconscious or the affective power of early childhood traumas with any enthusiasm. So, I’m not a Freudian even though it was the reigning psychological ideology during the 1950s. The general ideas of Freud are plausible in the abstract if not in the specifics, but I remain deeply resistant to the idea that... 
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