Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Since the Four Horsemen of My Apocalypse (1. Cheney, and his sock puppet, Bush; 2.The Big Banks; 3. Big Pharma; and 4. America's Military Industrial Complex, for whom even Cheney served as a sock puppet) flushed America's and, very nearly, the planet's economy into...

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill

"Does it really matter what these affectionate people do -- so long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses!" -- Beatrice Campbell

My Facebook profile describes my "belief...

Well, OK: "Great"? I know, I know: my readers, the novel's readers, will be the judge of that, I hear you saying.

But, for me, it had to be that particular "aspirational adjective" because, in my generation of writers, we all saw ourselves writing...

"I don't know if I ever went to sleep or not. The next thing I knew his massive body was on top of mine. In a rough voice he started to repeat my name: 'Leslie. Leslie. Oh, Leslie.' His hands stroked my body in ways that frightened me. It felt...

"I think the trick now is to do something that's not just part of the noise." -- Larry Gelbart (Producer of the TV series, Mash)

Facebook ate my homework.

In fact, for about three months there, late last year, Facebook ate my marriage, my Yoga practice, the screenplay I'm...

"Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."
-- Bertrand Russell's rendering of "Occam's Razor"

There are many on Facebook who already question my sanity. Heaven knows, I myself question it much of the time. Usually, however, it doesn't answer me back in squeaks......

Let's get some things straight right off the bat. 1) I'm neither a genius nor a fabulously disciplined super-athlete. 2) I was never, ever, a "natural athlete" (a click murmur and early health problems, plus my usually being 3-4 years younger than...

"There are 10 times more microbes in the body than there are human cells, with trillions of bacteria concentrated in the mouth, skin, lungs and especially the gut."--Agence France-Presse

"The human body contains ten times as many bacterial cells as it does human cells. Biologists have now taken a census...

If I remember correctly, the poem comprised 61 lines.

I was 12 years old, and there was no way one could "get out of" the eighth grade at the Francis W. Parker School of Chicago without memorizing and reciting the poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in...

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there."
-- Rumi

"If you want special illumination, look upon the human face: See clearly within laughter the Essence of Ultimate Truth."
-- Rumi

"Lede: A lead paragraph in literature refers...

What most readers (my few; my treasured), who know me as an essayist, a writer of non-fiction, may not know is that I also write poetry, that I began writing as a poet . . . and that I then wrote (and published) jazz lyrics to tunes written by such...

"Although thirty spokes meet at the hub / it is the empty space at the center / Which makes the cart move."
-- from Lao-Tseu "Philosophes Taoistes"

After an almost 30-year relationship with yoga, I still pride myself on many things, and priding oneself on many things is like...

My family and a Korean grad student, Chinatown, LA, c. 1955

This year, I've been "house-cleaning."

That's just one of The 99 %'s euphemisms for "turning one's home upside-down looking for primo stuff one can profitably sell online for cold hard cash."

(We...

In the middle of my sixth decade (at age 54, Oh Best Belovéds), I abandoned the life of the mind, as I once conceived it, and gave myself over, quixotically, to inhabiting, more fully, my achey-breaky body.

I began to spend some ten to twelve hours a week practicing Iyengar...

My spouse and I experienced a turkey-less, stuffing-less, cranberry-sauce-less, and green-bean-casserole-less Thanksgiving dinner this year, and survived to tell of it.

When Rebecca (not her real name, but I'm taking no chances: her youngest son's a lawyer) invited us to join her and her extended family for their holiday dinner...