Tombstone

My father took me to one movie, in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Our small town had two movie theaters then, the Roxy and the Ford, but we went to the State, in…

Tucson: the Desert "Civilized"

We’ve been living in Tucson, Arizona, for nearly a year. We came in January to escape the winter, planning to stay for two or three months and then move somewhere else, maybe Boulder, Portland (for…

Appendix to cheap motels and a hot plate

The original draft of the book had the following appendix. We decided not to use it. An abridged version has been published at www.mrzine.org. Do you think I should have included it in the book?…

Alan Greenspan: Class Warrior

[Note: This first appeared in Counterpunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/yates10102007.html. It is based upon a story in the book.] Alan Greenspan's new memoir has put his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman on the hot seat, as critics…

The injuries of class

One of the themes of Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is work. More specifically the theme is dead-end work, how there is so much of this in the United States. Work has always been…

dining in Portland / Letter to Eric Asimov

Eric Asimov is the New York Time's wine critic and a restaurant reviewer. Yesterday he wrote a glowing tribute to Portland, Oregon restaurants and some Portland chefs. Karen and I wrote him a letter, posted…

School Starts/Remembering Wyoming

I taught my first class this past Tuesday. It is a large lecture section of seventy students, in a course titled "Globalization and Labor." It was the first time I was in a classroom like…

What's It All About / A Rant about…

We drove the long and dismal trip from Washington DC to Amherst, Massachusetts on Monday, August 20. It was overcast and rainy, matching our moods. It had been a long and difficult ninety days on…

Familiar Territory

The last stops on the book tour were in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington DC, with a stop in Johnstown to visit friends. Much of this was familiar territory. Milwaukee is an industrial city hard…