One evening at dinner, my friend Christopher J. Garcia asked me, “What’s your favorite silent film?”  More than a few came to mind, such as those by the German Expressionists, Pandora’s Box starring Louise Brooks, and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.  I replied, however, “The Passion of Joan of Arc… no, wait. The Penalty with Lon Chaney.”  […]

During graduate school, I completed a seminar in twentieth-century poetry in which the professor used the stock market as an extended metaphor for the rise and fall in popularity of the poets we discussed.  For example, for him, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound represented solid blue-chip stocks whose names would appear forever on […]

During the early and middle 1970s, I imposed my own curfew for Halloween trick-or-treating.  I could return home no later than 9 PM.  From house to house, my speech was always the same:  “Yes, thank you for the candy, and I’m glad that you like my costume, but I must get home at 9 PM […]