Odessa: it doesn’t sound like a particularly Russian word. Maybe Spanish, or Italian. Actually, it was named after Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s (if Homer existed) great epic poem, The Odyssey. Any word, when it …
March 12, 2008
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Stories by Thomas Lux (RIP)
Tie Ilya Kaminsky up, make sure he stays at SDSU
23 Reader writers describe the regime of editor Judith Moore
Busy Fingers Are Happy Fingers — Joe Deegan Mother Reader — Barbarella Build Your Writing Muscles — Ollie Let the Tape Recorder Do the Work — Matthew Lickona Faith — Abe Opincar Make Something Better …
August 16, 2007
Too Many Passive Verbs
Judith Moore called me in the fall of 1995, when I was living temporarily in Laguna Beach and teaching at UC Irvine for a semester. Judith was familiar with my poems and deduced from some …
August 16, 2007
Eric Von Sydow and Steve Piccus do double hypnosis
Some people believe God to be the first hypnotist: He put Adam to sleep and took out a rib to make Eve. It's a leap, but today hypnotism is used as an alternative to anesthesia …
November 11, 2004
KWest Taxidermy's Kevin Moreau is San Diego's waterfowl specialist
“I could love a duck!” the American poet Theodore Roethke wrote hyperbolically, manically, in one of an astonishing series of longish poems usually referred to as “The Lost Son” poems. I’ve always liked ducks myself …
January 1, 2004
JunkBoy inhales condoms through his nose and pulls them out his mouth
One thing I’ve learned: go looking for fire eaters and you don’t know what you’ll find. After putting out the word that I was looking for fire eaters (I have a few, um, unique friends …
June 5, 2003
Who's up in San Diego at three a.m.
There is no night anymore. In or around cities, in suburbs and small towns, there is no night. It still gets dark, and the days still get longer or shorter. Lights are everywhere — large, …
February 27, 2003
Bob Parks, self-taught custodian at San Diego Natural History Museum, gives me a tour.
In Bob Parks’s first (and only, as far as I know) brush with the law, he was presumed a corpse. He was about 11 years old. He’d been lying facedown, very still, for so long …
April 11, 2002
Chula Vista's Family Protection Unit goes after abusers
Cops like to tell stories. They’re good at it. They’re trained to think in specifics, to make precise observations. Atop an arrest report, right beneath “officer’s report,” it says “narrative.” On one of my first …
January 18, 2001
29 Reader writers on their fathers
To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …
June 15, 2000
Blue Milk Tickets
My father went to work 6205 days in a row, give or take a few, from 1945 until 1962. Until I was 16 and my cousin, Jackie, 18 or 19. We were both old enough …
June 15, 2000
A walk on Coronado bridge's big blue catwalk
Cars have gone over twice. One with three drunk sailors somehow jumped onto the railing and then over into the water. Was there a moment, a second or two, when the car teetered on the railing?
March 16, 2000
The Red Book of crime scenes at Chula Vista's police department
Simply shooting oneself, jumping off a bridge, hanging, etc., doesn't count.
January 20, 2000
One San Diego sculptor, Guillermo Castano, teaches another, Carl Glowienke
The first two or three times I met Carl Glowienke he wore a tuxedo. We weren't at a society function. He wasn't on his way, each time, to the prom. For his day job — …
August 12, 1999
All Americans were casualties of the Vietnam War
The boy has the ball in the air, right where he wants it, just high enough so he can drop his left foot and lift his right to keep it in the air (though he …
June 3, 1999
Luck and loss at the Palomar Card Club
I’d been unlucky in love. Ergo: time to try poker. I hadn't played in many years and then I played badly, impatiently. But that didn’t matter. Only the adage alluded to above mattered. And one …
December 3, 1998
Oddities and mortality at Gaslamp's Museum of Death
THE MUSEUM OF DEATH can be described as a bit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not by way of Barnum and Bailey (with the emphasis on Barnum, as in P.T.), a dash of Madame Tussaud’s, …
January 29, 1998
One of the last dairy farms in Southern California
Dogs were a problem sometimes. The Pauma Mission Indian Reservation borders one side of the property, and sometimes their dogs pack up at night; and they, unlike coyotes, will attack a vulnerable cow, one giving birth.
July 25, 1996