On Getting Rid of Stuff

I recently disposed of an old toiletry bag. It was an unlovely thing: pallid gray, the color of chewed chewing gum. It was given away free at the last baseball game I attended before leaving San Francisco to move to Europe (that was, um, 17 years ago), so it had the SF Giants logo on [...]

On Amazon’s Statistical Analysis of My Book

Amazon.com has a pretty nifty feature that’s a spin-off from its controversial Search Inside! program. Search Inside! allows users to read portions of a book, or search for keywords inside the text of a book, before actually buying it. Many publishers and authors are up in arms about it because they fear, probably correctly in [...]

On Being Asked for A Light

“Do you have a light?” That’s what the guy who cleans our street asked me, a cigarette dangling from his lips, flexing his thumb as though he was giving a lighter a flick. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.” I don’t smoke, never have, and don’t carry fire about on my person. Sometimes, though, the [...]

On Helping A Blind Woman Across the Street

Few writers can claim to have invented an entirely new form of literature, but Ramon Gomez de la Serna was certainly one of them. Born in the Rastro district of Madrid, Ramon (as he was invariably known) devised greguerias–acute observations of everyday life tinged by his surrealistic wit and then distilled into brief, aphoristic insights. [...]

On Nothing in Particular

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I [...]

On Finding a 25-Year-Old Letter from My Sister

It was in a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. My parents gave me this book in 1981 as a high school graduation present. There is an inscription from them to me in it. My sister must have recommended that my parents buy the book; otherwise, I don’t imagine they would have known at [...]