Fenton Johnson's Blog

Science, Drugs, God

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock   Regardless of what one thinks about the therapeutic potential or lack thereof of psychedelics, the long piece by Michael Pollan in the New Yorker of 9 February 2015 enters […]

Obituary for Fenton Johnson, the Dog

Writer and writing maven Cynthia Newberry Martin maintains a blog in which writers chronicle our daily lives.  She asked me to write the July entry, with a prompt from Annie Dillard:  “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  But when I sat down to write, I was preoccupied with […]

Summer Solstice at the Garden of Memory

Some years back Sarah Cahill, now an accomplished Bay Area pianist, was writing an article for a local paper on elegant and not-so-elegant public restrooms in the Bay Area. She wandered into the Chapel of Chimes, designed in 1926 by Julia Morgan, one of the first, maybe the first prominent woman architect, to serve as […]

On the Literature of Social Justice

Here’s a link to my quick look at the roots of the literature of social justice, published in the excellent online magazine Terrain:  A Journal of the Built and Natural Environment: http://terrain.org/2014/reviews-reads... In autumn 2014 I’ll be teaching a graduate craft of literature course through the University of Arizona Program in Creative Writing called Literature […]

About “Dallas Buyers Club”: thoughts from an eyewitness

  About Dallas Buyers’ Club:   Outside Matthew McConaughey’s performance as Ron Woodruff as alternative therapies peddler, the film was pretty thin – a response that’s not surprising from one who lived through those times.  Screenwriters Melisa Wallick and Craig Borten take as their template the stock 1950s Western plot:  Texas renegade confronts bad guys […]

Why after Mozart’s Requiem I May Never Again Sing Classical Music

A bass is by disposition and nature a heavy lifter.  Think of a jazz trio – there’s always a moment when the pianist and the drummer stand back and let the bass have its solo, but the audience listens politely and waits for it to be over because finally we listen to music for the [...]

The Apotheosis of Flowers

OK, here's a chance to get more people to read about Larry Rose, and fold in another great San Francisco tip.  Recently psychologist Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger and, most recently, Marriage Rules: A Manual for the Married and the Coupled Up, praised Geography of the Heart:  A Memoir on All Things [...]

Research and the Memoir

Remarks delivered at the Associated Writing Programs 2012 Conference, Chicago, Illinois, 3 March. Read remarks in PDF format. Life is research; thus, the memoir. Research deepens and enriches memory.  I search for prompts, which in turn direct the research, which in its turn sparks memory.  I take issue w/ the panel description's use of the [...]

Mozart’s Last Joke

Mozart’s Last Joke Learning Mozart’s Requiem  — the centerpiece of the University of Arizona Community Chorus spring concert, April 29, 3 pm, FYI – is an intense and wonderful experience.  I know the piece well, and have said on previous occasion that its Kyrie is the cry of a desperate dying man for mercy for [...]

Mozart's Last Joke

Mozart's Last Joke Learning Mozart's Requiem  — the centerpiece of the University of Arizona Community Chorus spring concert, April 29, 3 pm, FYI – is an intense and wonderful experience.  I know the piece well, and have said on previous occasion that its Kyrie is the cry of a desperate dying man for mercy for [...]