A friend asked recently, well, what are you reading now that you’ve stopped doing the radio show (for which all my reading energy was spent)? Honestly, I wasn’t really reading anything. Dipping into many things…
Browsing Category Briefs
Glorifying War Shall Not Grow Old
Concerning War Movies (prompted by a conversation about Peter Jackson’s movie They Shall Not Grow Old). In J. D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Buddy Glass [the author’s alter ego] comes across these…
Cutting Down the Clouds
This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever,—Fair Haven Hill, Walden, Linnaea Borealis Wood, etc. etc. Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds! Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, January 21,…
Absolute Solutions Necessary
Only two things to do: 1. zero out carbon emissions 2. exception: all technological and scientific labor exploring new solutions may continue. What we can’t do: continue using electricity; continue “producing” anything. All systems are…
Bikes and Women
In Bloomington recently a man was run over and killed while riding his bicycle. A hit and run. It occurred to me that riding a bicycle is like being a woman in the USA. Neither…
LeRoi and Ornette – Becoming in Time
I was listening to a PoemTalk (PennSound) about LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) Jones’s early poem “Kenyatta Listening to Mozart” and one of the guests mentioned that Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come came out in…
Explanation and Example: Capitalist Nationalism
**Reformist consciousness was famously described by Gramsci as “dual” or “contradictory”; on the one hand accepting the permanence of the system, on the other rejecting the effect of its operation. The most basic expression of…
Building the Insanity In: Ex Machina
This is not a movie review. This is me thinking about empathy. Last night, lonely little ol’ me sat in a hotel room in Laramie, Wyomig (inauspiciously named for Jacques LaRamie, a French or French-Canadian…
By Metaphor Alone
Motivation matters. If the scientific method (which we make into the massive all-encompassing abstraction of SCIENCE to compete with the millennia-eating abstraction GOD)…if the scientific method is a metaphor premising failure (we do not know…
Pea Soup and Poetry
A poem, for me, is often very clearly a response to what I am reading and the way it fits into my material existence. The poem in other words is both a reflection on literature…