On Independent Bookstore Day, 4/30/2022 My father and stepmother moved to Pittsburgh around 1976. Soon after that I visited the city for the first time since babyhood (we lived in the North Hills when I was two). My father was and remains a passionate reader and book-buyer and by the…

Reflections On Power Pop Occasioned by the release of Keep Your Eye on the Sky (Rhino Records, 2009). They called themselves Big Star and never made it big or found stardom, and there, along with a 2:49 song called “September Gurls” that shimmers and chimes with all the hopeless longing…

A deleted sequence from Moonglow, with some notes on its composition and the reason for its deletion. Introduction This is not — surprisingly — an excerpt from my novel Moonglow. That’s surprising to me, at any rate, because the incidents related in “The Sandmeyer Reaction” were central to my idea of…

I first met Stephen Sondheim at his home in New York City, a few months before I was to hand him the 2013 Edward MacDowell Medal in a ceremony at MacDowell, in Peterborough, NH. I was starstruck and stupefied, that first time; he would have none of it. I desperately…

Blashfield Address, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 2013 — One day in the late spring of 1983, toward the end of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, I stopped by during office hours to see my poetry teacher, Ed Ochester, up on the fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning. I had just been asked to join…

NOTE ON NAREK Born into the upper-caste, politically prominent qNaqoan kinship unit in 2364 (Earth reckoning), in the Romulan capital, Ki Baratan. Parents, uncles, aunts, siblings and cousins — up to 270 can live in the most prosperous (or the most impoverished) kinship compounds — all had careers in Romulan…

Reading the accounts of Scott Rudin’s present and former employees, of the abuse they suffered and were expected to endure at Scott Rudin Productions, has broken my heart. In the roughly twenty years that I regularly collaborated with Scott, I worked with and got to know many of his employees…

Version recorded by Prof. Ramdha of K’mu University, Romulus. — This myth is believed to descend from ancient Vulcan, long before the Time of Awakening and the departure of those rebel Vulcans who eventually settled on Romulus. …

Condensed from various SI (Starfleet Intelligence) analyses, accuracy unknown. Two Romulans, goes an old Romulan proverb, three conspiracies. As Vulcan culture is rooted in logic, and Klingon in honor, the foundation of Romulan society is secrecy. Their culture is an endless series of variations on themes of concealment, the covert…