On Writing: A new novel…The Guns of Lana’i...and a modest proposal. My new fiction about a disenfranchised people fighting to get their island back. Hawaii vs. Haoles

On Writing: Alan Rinzler, On Publishing Past, Present and Future. Is the editor a soul mate to the writer, without whom the poor sot may never finish the sanity-threatening project on which he/she has embarked?

On Writing: Alev Lytle Croutier’s Harem: The World Behind the Veil. Like that of most other people in the west, my understanding of the harem was a salacious one, and very inaccurate.

On Writing: Art That Isn’t There. I’m at it again!

On Writing: “As dramatic and emotional as it gets.” When Clara Was Twelve.

On Writing: Alexander von Humboldt, On Everything The greatest man since the deluge.

On Writing: Edith Wharton. This book is where you should start.

On Writing: Eduardo Galeano. The historian of the Americas.

On Writing: Fiction Begins in Borneo? Well, maybe not there. But it could start anywhere.

On Writing: Fiction Courses Are A Fiction. Following the line of least resistance will run you into a wall.

On Writing: Finnegans Wake? “Lots of fun,” says he.

On Writing: For International Women’s Day. An excerpt from my new book, An Arena of Truth: Conflict in Black and White.

On Writing: Gabo Returns! At last, Colombia publishes it’s own.

On Writing: Gosh , It’s Cold Out There! Keep looking. A good novel is out there somewhere.

On Writing: Great cruelty. A review of SAY NOTHING by Patrick Radden Keefe

On Writing: How To Write Fiction If you want a primer on how to write fiction, please read Dubliners.

On Writing: How’s that Novel of Yours Doing? The Hemingway goal hasn’t worked for me or, I suspect, for others.

On Writing: Irvin D. Yalom: A Conversation. “I hate to be love’s executioner.”

On Writing: Learning to Write about New York. I was aware of John Updike’s remark that “the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” Now that I was living in New York, I understood how accurate his observation was.

On Writing: “Light’s Like Water”. A story by Gabriel García Márquez. Translation by Terence Clarke.

On Writing: Love In the Time of Cholera. Why this is my favorite novel.

On Writing: Marilyn Yalom. An historian. A great conversationalist. A fine writer.

On Writing: New York! Where’d they ever get this place? And what about the book?

On Writing: OMG!@e-speak. Not emailing, not texting, not even tweeting has risen to the challenge.

On: Writing: Pablo Neruda and the Perilous Andes. Neruda was no stranger to extreme punishment for his political views, and rumors have circulated since his death that he too was murdered while in hospital after Allende’s death.

On Writing: Prolific? What’s That? A lot of books all at once? Maybe not.

On Writing: Rejection. “Really, Mr. Clarke, you have no talent for literature.”

On Writing: The Bohemians in San Francisco. If, like me, you live on Russian Hill in San Francisco, or if you care for fine and adventurous writing, Ben Tarnoff’s The Bohemians: Mark Twain and The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature is for you.

On Writing: The Gift: Among the writers I know, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift is almost always required reading.

On Writing: The Long Confinement of When Clara Was Twelve: It wasn’t bad!

On Writing: The Novel? I don’t find much engagement in novels that feature the undead.

On Writing: Timothy Ferris’s The Science of Liberty. Liberal democracies did not simply spring from a void.

On Writing: Waiting. A little advice for that novel you’re writing.

On Writing: What Is It About David Copperfield? Uriah Heep’s sweat.

On Writing: What To Write About. Oakland? No.

On Writing: Where the Peacocks Sing, by Alison Singh Gee. “The preternatural glow over the Indian night sky.”

On Writing: Why Would You Write A Trilogy? Because therein lies a story.

On Writing: Wilfredo’s Debussy. “The loss of that piano broke my father, almost as much as the revolution did. It broke his heart.” A New York story…

On Writing: Yellow Fox. Journalism was once a completely respectable profession.

On Tango: A Story by Terence Clarke: “The Three-Cornered Hat”

On Tango: Ada. Nonetheless I’m afraid. I’m afraid to love you.

On Tango: Adriana Varela: From Rock to Tango

On Tango: At The Heart Of It. Pablo Estigarríbia and Adrian Jost.

On Tango: Big Nose in Buenos Aires. You walk down a sidewalk in Buenos Aires at your peril.

On Tango: Coffee, Tango and Luigi Pirandello. The Café Tortoni, Buenos Aires.

On Tango: ¡Dos chicos increibles! Two Incredible Kids! Ariadna and Federico Naveira

On Tango: El Colectivero Polaco Goyeneche. Roberto Goyeneche wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea as a singer of tango.

On Tango: El Tanguero Obama. He’s got it in his heart.

On Tango: “Ernesto”. A little boy and Piazzolla

On Tango: “Ernesto y Julietta.” I come here to weep.

On Tango: First the tango. Then the language. “There are certain things you’ll never understand,” Nora said.

On Tango: First the walk. Then the tango. “You don’t know how to walk,” Nora said.

On Tango: La Divina María Volonté. Her destiny is tango

On Tango: ¡La Milonga! ¡Vamos chicos!

On Tango: Los Filipini. Elegance. Style. Kindness.

On Tango: My love, let us stay here. A tango.

On Tango: Pablo Estigarríba and Adrian Jost. Young masters.

On Tango: Piazzolla, Before & After. The kid, the maestro, the music.

On Tango: Remembering Horacio Ferrer. The iconic Argentine poet and tango lyricist.

On Tango: Rubén Juárez. The Voice. The Instrument.

On Tango: The film Tango Negro. Black lives matter in tango, too.

On Tango: Tears for Orlando Paiva This man was a tanguero.

On Tango: The Gods of Tango. A novel by Carolina De Robertis

On Tango: The Line of Dance. What should be the first rule of tango is often ignored.

On Tango: The Man Who Signed Gardel. Not a household name, Max Glucksmann built Agentina’s recording and film industries from scratch.

On Tango: The Two Popes. Tango and The Papacy?

On Tango: Tinta Roja. Depending on the singer, it can break your heart

On Tango: What DJs Do. The same, again and again.

On Tango: What Does The Pandemic Have To Do With Tango? Quite a lot, actually.

On Tango: With Gavito. A word of advice from one of the greatest dancers of Argentine tango ever.

Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True. Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him.

On Being Sequestered. Gosh! Me!

Pepe Le Moko and The Battle for Algiers. The two best films ever made about The Casbah also happen to be two of the best films ever made.

Saddle Up! And Don’t Forget your Hat. Until recently, I never myself owned a cowboy hat. Then I met Jimmy Harrison.

Silence. The new rudeness is silence.

The Candidate. It came to me last night in a dream that I haven’t understood Donald Trump.

The End of San Francisco? The San Francisco Art Institute and why it must be saved.

The Green Schoolyard. In San Francisco, a child pulls a carrot from the ground. Thus the result of the kind of education that may save the world.

The New Ireland. God save the Irish for having voted it in.

The Soul of Juan de Pareja. I’ve always sympathized with Juan de Pareja and worried why he was suffering so deeply in such seeming silence.

These People Are In Charge of The San Francisco Public Schools? Yet another example of the San Francisco School Board’s current loss of reason.

The Trouble With San Francisco. Surprises in architecture. The New Gherkin versus The Leaning Tower.

Women vs. the Drowned Hulk. The Church is beside the point.

A Year in Champagne. Everyone loves it. Few know how difficult it is to make it.

A Year in Port. It’s extraordinarily hard not to like the people of Porto.

Basic Training. There is a difference between education and training.

Borneo. Fifty years ago, I moved to western Borneo.

Hanoi Hannah. Hannah played the best rock ‘n roll of any station I could reach, so I listened to her as often as I could.

Justice Done: The People vs. Monsanto

Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True.  Shakespeare the saddened.

No Irish Need Apply. As it was with the Irish, the current hate-ridden xenophobia about illegal immigration will prove to be ill-advised.

Now at 280 characters, do we call it “tweet-tweet?”

On Disruption. A much-revered business practice that can kill the soul.

On the Fire at Notre-Dame. April 15, 2019