Words don’t often fail me. More often, I fail them. This week, I’m posting to this site a work of poetry I wrote six years ago, called The Book of Lamentations. I had previously published it to my Yahoo website in 2006, where I took it down after a week or two, and to my […]
Entries from April 2011
War
April 30th, 2011 · No Comments
Tags: Poems · Politics & Law · Words
Damfino
April 29th, 2011 · No Comments
“If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will be separate and independent of the body.” — Plato, Phaedo (trans. Tredennick)
Tags: The Ancients
Weather report
April 28th, 2011 · No Comments
“Vortex reigns, having expelled Jupiter.” — Aristophanes, The Clouds (trans. Hickie)
Tags: The Ancients
Imagine that
April 27th, 2011 · No Comments
“Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?” — Plato, Crito (trans. Tredennick)
Tags: Politics & Law · The Ancients
Here’s an idea
April 26th, 2011 · No Comments
“Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy”. — Aristophanes, Lysistrata (trans. Lindsay)
Tags: The Ancients
De rerum natura
April 25th, 2011 · No Comments
“Art is imitation, not of things, but of the nature of things, and man is an imitator, not a creator.” — Huntington Cairns, The Collected Dialogues of Plato
Tags: The Ancients
Hitched
April 24th, 2011 · No Comments
Amtrak runs the Southwest Chief between LA and Chicago. Last week, Susan and I took it eastbound from Albuquerque. She was born and raised in Chicago* and we went there to be wed and to honeymoon. (*Onion-town, the legendary, big-shouldered, fog-footed Kenyan capital of the glittering island kingdom of Kansas, where edible dogs are raised […]
Tags: Other Stuff · Verandah
Settling accounts
April 14th, 2011 · No Comments
“You cannot make up for the evil things you do–they’re there forever. You can only add better things to your list of deeds in hopes of creating some kind of cosmic balance.” — Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Deer
Tags: Lit & Crit · Verandah
In case you were wondering
April 13th, 2011 · No Comments
“The forces called electricity and chemical affinity are one and the same.” — Michael Faraday, quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII
Tags: Lit & Crit
Tell them I said hello
April 12th, 2011 · No Comments
“Men of genius work from the centre outwards.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII
Tags: Lit & Crit
It was a beautiful dream
April 12th, 2011 · No Comments
“At this time, interest in natural philosophy was widely disseminated, and, in science, as in politics and literature, new ideas were readily welcomed.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII
Tags: Lit & Crit
Learning to draw
April 11th, 2011 · No Comments
The Weekly Alibi is an alternative paper in Albuquerque, going on twenty years old. I don’t often read it these days, as I am getting older and and am feeling the pressing need to slough off the unnecessary. But back in the 1990s and on up until the middle of the last decade, hardly a […]
Tags: Previously Published Stories · Words
Table manners
April 11th, 2011 · No Comments
“We always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.” — Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?”
Tags: Economics
Broke and losing the war
April 9th, 2011 · No Comments
“If any ventured to rise in opposition, he was presently put to death in some convenient way, and there was neither search for the murderers nor justice to be had against them if suspected; but the people remained motionless, being so thoroughly cowed that men thought themselves lucky to escape violence, even when they held […]
Tags: Politics & Law · The Ancients
Stiff upper lips and all that
April 8th, 2011 · No Comments
“Though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving successful.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VII
Tags: Lit & Crit · Other Stuff
We call them our elected representatives
April 7th, 2011 · No Comments
“Sir Thomas Gresham, writing on the coinage, lays it down as a principle that, if you have in a country good coins and deteriorated coins of the same metal current side by side, the bad will drive out the good, and Gresham’s law may often be applied to literature, to art and, especially, to journalism. […]
Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit
Short and sweet
April 7th, 2011 · No Comments
“Among English-speaking people, it is difficult to make a great reputation out of short stories.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. III
Tags: Lit & Crit
Welcome to the new world order
April 6th, 2011 · No Comments
“While life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, regarding the work of Ruskin
Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit
Ka-ching
April 6th, 2011 · No Comments
“We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.” — Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land”
Tags: Economics
Plan B
April 6th, 2011 · No Comments
“The virtue of men in office is briefly this, to do their country as much good as they can, or in any case no harm that they can avoid.” — Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Ch. XVIII (trans. Crawley)
Tags: Politics & Law · The Ancients
How to be right
April 5th, 2011 · No Comments
“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” — Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Ch. XVII (trans. Crawley)
Tags: Politics & Law · The Ancients
But we all do, if we live long enough
April 4th, 2011 · No Comments
“God forbid you should have to live with the consequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head, turning from this side to that, tossing between wrong and right.” — Nathan Englander, “Free Fruit for Young Widows”
Tags: Lit & Crit
Fan mail
April 3rd, 2011 · No Comments
There was a different story I was going to post this week, but I got a piece of fan mail drawing my attention to “The Year Our Children Left”, so I’m posting that story instead. It was published last year in Neon, a sharp online litmag out of the UK.
Tags: Previously Published Stories · Words
A soldier’s recommendation
April 1st, 2011 · No Comments
“Publish and be damned.” — Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1824
Tags: Lit & Crit