• Thoreau and Mr. Emerson: A friendship

    Friends, this introductory fragment from a book I long intended to write but perhaps will never get to do, for your edification. Thoreau and Mr. Emerson: A friendship   Friendship, like marriage or any other relationship, offers plenty of room for misunderstanding and irritation. Your best friend isn’t necessarily the person you would choose to…

  • Hemingway: Helping people to feel

    An excerpt from Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway [May 18, 2010] Papa, I suppose that “The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife” is built upon your life but is no word-for-word autobiography, even necessarily disguised autobiography — and critics who approach your work go wrong to think so. That’s right. A writer takes what he knows and…

  • Michael Ventura: “I want it to be true”

    MICHAEL VENTURA LETTERS AT 3AM – NOTES ON A LONG, LONG JOURNEY Austin Chronicle – January 11, 2013     The Dragon is a novel almost five years in the works. It may take another five. I keep a Dragon journal. Here are entries from this year.     May 4. I cling, as a novelist, to…

  • And I should believe you?

     I keep thinking about all the certainties I read about; all the people who know everything that is being plotted; the secret levers behind every news story; the “real” history that has been hidden from us; the true secret intentions of this or that person in the news. I lose patience. My thoughts go roughly…

  • At the time of the great change

    This conversation, which took place via Intuitive Linked Communication seven years ago, is of even greater interest to me today. [Wednesday January 4, 2006] (9 a.m.) All right, gentlemen, let’s resume. Who’s up? David [Poynter]. Let us describe the American Civil War as it appears from across the ocean. Okay, if that’s what you want. I…

  • Radio interview Saturday 1-19-2013

    You can listen live via http://www.kzum.org .  The program will be archived and available free of charge worldwide at http://www.eupradio.net by Sunday 1/20/13, at 12 noon Central.  In Lincoln, NE, the program is broadcast live on KZUM Radio, 89.3 FM. Here is the host’s intro:

  • KZUM radio interview online

    Had a nice mid-day chat with Scott Colborn of KZUM radio, Lincoln, Nebraska (www.kzum.org) about Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway. Always good when the interviewer knows the subject and asks good questions — makes the guest look intelligent! We talked last year about my book The Cosmic Internet, and I enjoyed that one too. This program…

  • A pretty smart horse

    YouTube and Facebook make it easier to share examples of things from all over the world, and on unintended result is that it becomes ever easier to see wrong assumptions we have held. We are getting so much evidence that animals reason, use tools, communicate, etc., that it is disproving the old assumption that there…

  • Michael Ventura: What Are People For?

    [Someday I will have to get around to writing my essay on Thoreau as the world’s first post-industrial man. He foresaw so much, generations ahead of time. He died in 1862! Yet not only would he understand the subject of Ventura’s current column, he alluded to it in Walden and other places, long before it…

  • Jung: The individual is a vessel of life

      From an interview of CG Jung by Georg Gerster conducted on June 7, 1960, for broadcast on the Swiss radio network, as found in the book CG Jung speaking. G: “When I asked you earlier about a critique of our civilization I… was thinking of the problem of our time, as they say. There…