Essay commissioned for the catalogue of MEREDITH MONK: Calling, Haus der Kunst Munich and Oude Kerk Amsterdam

Air/Light Magazine, Issue 7, Fall 2024

I never wanted to be born in Los Angeles. My childhood, I suspected, was misplaced. My mother and father were both New Yorkers. Thanks to a trove of correspondence that I discovered after my parents passed away within months of each other, I can pinpoint the exact date—August 1, 1941—that determined my destiny as a native Angeleno…

Los Angeles Review of Books, May 21, 2019

I WOKE UP around 5:00 a.m., disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. I did not know east from west, up from down, where I’d find a floor to take the weight of my body. The hazy proportions of the room gave no clue; curtains blocked the winter light. In the moment my eyes opened, I lost my connection to those essentials that are, as Proust assures his readers, held fast by our psyches during sleep: “[T]he sequence of the hours, the order of the years, and the worlds.”

Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2018

IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake's Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site.

Los Angeles Review of Books, October 5, 2015

Each person here respects the effort, the frustration of trying to locate the words, the sounds that form a sentence. After all, this is not an ordinary book group. This is the weekly meeting of the Aphasia Book Club, intended for those who have suffered damage to an area of the brain that affects the use of language. Larry continues:

When I read a book, it puts me in the future,

even when it’s written in the past.

Los Angeles Review of Books, February 27, 2013

We are all collaborators. On a more or less grand scale, for a day or a lifetime. All that differentiates us are the experiences and the circumstances, which allow us to gauge the extent of our compromises.

— Agata Tuszynska, Vera Gran: The Accused

June 27, 2011, Los Angeles Review of Books

Why have we never heard of Jacob Glatstein, a modernist whose prose is as mordantly humorous as Philip Roth, as eerie as Kafka, as weighty as Bellow? The answer is obvious: Glatstein wrote in Yiddish, and as Ruth Wisse, the editor of this volume, reminds us, "to a writer, language is fate."

L.A. Weekly, February 27, 2003

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s hands are delicately boned, with long, tapered fingers. As she gestures, you can’t help noticing them. If you’ve read her book, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, you can’t help thinking that these are the same hands that reached out to touch the shaking clenched hands of Eugene De Kock, the man known in South Africa as “Prime Evil” for his relentless pursuit and extermination of anti-apartheid activists.

Washington Post, December 1992

A visit to my friend, painter Scotty Mitchell, a working painter on Crete for 20 years.

A visit to a friend’s house in Beverly Glen during the AIDS epidemic in LA. , published in anthology ANOTHER LA

Reed Magazine, February 1999

Twenty-five years have passed since the winter we hosted Reed College’s poet-in-residence. We were living then on Southeast Schiller in a tiny two-story cottage set back from the street behind three towering European birches…

Contemporary Architecture, Vol 11, 1989/1990, Lausanne, Switzerland

Since childhood, Murch has been fascinated by ruins and abandoned buildings…