To grass, in British underworld parlance, means to inform on others to the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the word “grasshopper,” Cockney rhyming slang for copper. The term has been around in Britain awhile, since the 1930's. In the 1970's, British journalists invented a new word, “supergrass,” to label an…
It is with at least a permissible dash of hubris that the literary and artistic population of any (that is to say, every) generation considers itself on the forefront of something. We are always looking for the pulse, the zeitgeist, the movement; be it an “ism” (say, modernism or futurism, both of which are, ironically,…
I’m a voracious reader. At any given time I’m reading at least three books. I know very little about today’s music, even though I was a radio announcer for several years, because all my audio listening is books now. I also love to reread books and re-listen to audiobooks. There are just some writers whose…
Uncle Frank wanted to be Ernest Hemingway. He was my mother’s younger brother, a dashing figure who often stayed with us when I was a child in the early 1950s. Then he’d be off, hitchhiking from our house in the San Fernando Valley down to Mexico to take in a bullfight. Death in the Afternoon…
