One night I had a dream unlike any I’d ever had before. In it, I felt a strange, acute mental anguish that was entirely different from any conscious feeling I’d ever experienced. In the dream, I went to my grandmother, who was deceased, and asked, “Someone else in the family…

The next morning Roberta came round to enlist volunteers for a Dada art performance. Seely had buried her head in her requisition book and frowned with feigned concentration, trying to appear too busy to be conscripted. But when she saw Stuart dragging a splintered chair…

I’m hard, congealed anxiety, poised on the edge of a chair. My hands are shaking, feeling so barely assembled, I half-expect my fingers and thumbs to start dropping off. I’m so nervous I can’t remember which foot to put on the stool; so, after an eternity of indecision, I…

At one of the guest lectures I attended, painter Nathan Oliveira described an evening when he’d presented a slide show of his work to a number of artist friends. “Why, you’ve got a whole exhibition’s worth here!” they’d enthused. “But they’re all the same painting!”...

That fall was the beginning of a second Renaissance in my life. In the first place, Ella moved to Berkeley; instead of rare long-distance telephone conversations that I could ill-afford, at long last I had my best friend close at hand. In the second, I’d always wished...

Back in California before the semester started at Tiburon College, I missed being out in the wild hills around Cadaques so much that I started driving mornings to the wilderness parkland that extends for thirty-two miles along the East Bay hills from Richmond to...