Parvum Opus (Latin for small work) is a weekly column on the English language, and more, that I've been writing since just before Christmas of 2002. I'm an English teacher, writer, and editor: one of those compulsive readers and proofreaders. In the Middle Ages, when the great universities were established in Europe, students studied the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The Quadrivium consisted of arithmetic; geometry; music, harmonics, or tuning theory; and astronomy or cosmology. Someday, I may change Parvum Opus to Trivium Pursuit. My...

In 1980 Ray Vincent left San Francisco because he was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He moved back to Barberton, Ohio ("Magic City") to live with his mother, who was a nurse, bringing with him a package of poems and stories. But it was in San Francisco that Ray felt at home, synthesizing his life with poetry. Most of Ray's writings reflect the events of those times, his own life's events and passions. This book is a collection of his work of more than a dozen years in those unsettled and idealistic times, and includes memories of Ray from some of his friends.

I conceived, yeah it's a pun, the idea for this story before reading that activists are demanding that the NHS provide womb transplants for gender switching individuals. That is, men who want to call themselves women. The most grotesque biological sci-fi fantasies can become real if "activists" decide to impose their version of reality and good and evil on susceptible individuals and private and government organizations and especially when they can get other people to pay for it. Warning, this story isn't suitable for anyone. It is a grotesque horror story but no more than the reality I read...