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California Music and Personal Transformation of True Nature From Vulnerability to Artist Leading the Way:  Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom   Originally published 25 October 2014 [Note from On Being (2019): "They were desperate to take down that wall, in so many ways, as the documentary Both Sides Now: Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970 demonstrates. Joni's realness in her Songs in that very moment will send chills through your body. She is the very Moment of change that through this Being even the institutions would be altered. Even in vulnerability, Joni's Being never wavers.It is more formidable than Ben Hur, far more powerful than armies. With an unshakable spirit she sings, 'We've got...

The Glorious Happenstance of Destiny in All Place and Time The Art of Mapping Real Life in Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City:  A San Francisco Atlas and Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City:  A New Orleans Atlas     Originally published 16 October 2014 In the great flux and flow of life, the western mind since the time of Aristotle has divided each and every thing into categories and given permanent labels from a language which itself is divided. From its “religion of exile” that began in a moment of great split, the Fall from the Garden,¹ intention became separate from knowing, good became an opposite of evil, light separate from dark instead of a natural cycle of it, judgments of right...

Completing the Story of Richard V. Francaviglia’s Go East, Young Man:  Imagining the American West as the Orient “The lives we live depend upon the stories we tell.”  Lee R. Edwards (paraphrasing Joan Didion) “The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake . . . but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.  It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”  Joan Didion “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become...

A Look at the Ordeal of Making the Real Visual in Picturing a Different West:  Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather   Originally published 2 June 2014 “You can scarcely understand what it means . . . that enormous territory . . . the cradle of faith in the New World . . . the beginning of momentous things.” Willa Cather in Death Comes For the Archbishop “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” Georgia O’Keeffe In Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather (Texas Tech University Press, 2007) author Janis P. Stout closely researches and explains the history...

Gangster Tour of Texas by T. Lindsay Baker, 2011, Texas A&M University Press, 318 pages, index, B&W photographs, paperback, $21.00 Review by Rosemary Briseño, PhD Why are outlaws a provocative bunch, their criminal endeavors enticing? What is it about lawbreakers that popular culture has embraced, whose cold-blooded exploits of criminal, vicious behavior against innocence and humanity are illuminated, even celebrated, in various mediums such as television, film, and music? Perhaps it is the criminal’s cruel gift to silence decency and conscientiousness that allows the animal inherent within all of us to roar, to intimidate, to frighten . . . a feat many of us would love to exercise, but few are actually willing to practice, since normal people worry that their peers might...