Memoires
Stories of my Life: A Swiss Scavenger Hunt
Thursday, May 16th, 2024Joe Dassin was sweating bullets. He was scribbling frantically amid a pile of dirty coffee cups on scratch paper that he had covered with algebraic calculations. We were the only people in the Buffet de la Gare (train station restaurant) of the sleepy little Swiss border town of Chiasso, a couple of blocks away from [...]
Watering the Garrotxes: donkey farming in the French Pyrénées
Thursday, March 7th, 2024A region of distinction in decline
French Catalonians commonly call their region Roussillon, but as one ascends from the coastal plain that stretches from the city of Narbonne to the Spanish border, first into the foothills, then into the narrow, steep-sided Tet river valley known as the Conflent, different landscapes take on different names. The last [...]
Farm restoration – a Downeast Maine story
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021More a set of recalled vignettes than a systemic history, this essay will at least capture some of my photo archive in an explanatory framework.
Property purchase and rebuilding
As we drove up to the top of Ridge Rd. in Robbinston to the last visit on our hunt for a retirement farm in Maine, the vista that [...]
The Making of a Radical Worldview
Monday, July 20th, 2020Recently I was contacted by someone who had been drawn into the life of the alternative high school, Rochester Educational Alternatives, an experiment I attempted during our time in Rochester. A conversation ensued in which he wondered what in my background was responsible for my decision to create a radical alternative to public schooling. This [...]
Close Encounters with the Trots: A Sort of Socialist Mini-Memoire
Sunday, September 12th, 2010“What do two Trotskyites do on a deserted island? They found two Trotskyite parties!”
Taking their riddle seriously, Trotskyite parties tend to be fairly small, but there are many of them.
My acquaintance with the Trotskyite perspective has been a matter of brief glimpses over a forty year period. My friends in SDS in the sixties fingered [...]
