Saturday morning dawns a pleasant 32 degrees F. There’s a fresh snowfall. Today is a gift for our enjoyment. Weather forecast’s feature single digit days ahead. Every day is a gift, a bonus. One of the lessons which Thoreau has to teach in his writings about Walden Pond. Like a child greeting the morning…
To a Young Poet Zaina Alsous I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but…
I am reading a new book, the Self-Overcoming of NIHILISM by Nishiani Keiji, translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara. [Nihilism], an existential problemin which the being of the self is revealedto the self itselfas somethinggroundless… The phenomenon of nihilism showsthat our historical life has lost its groundas objective spirit,that the value system which…
Today is Wednesday, midweek. Snow is expected. I am happy that the snow will cover everything in a blanket of ice-white-crystal. I hunger to see all, everywhere, the possibility of purity. I know, I know this is a psychological need, a fabricated abstraction, akin to what Plato meant by “the good.” . Such abstractions…
I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy…
Yesterday was an unofficial American national holiday. The final game of the NFL season was held in New Orleans, The Super Bowl. Ostensibly the athletic championship is a thin pretext for one of the most expensive marketing spectacles of the year, fueled by many of our largest companies. The component of sport is a…
The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers,hitting the pages with the saw, and the red splotcheson the walls move around, coalescing and separating; A hammer and sickle appear,no, it’s a five-pointed star, or maybe a stylized arrow-like jeemnext to an elongated map… Is it a victory sign?A sun? A peasant?A…
A gray but mild February day, almost like a Southern winter day. Climate warming amounts to season after season of decreased snowfall, of fewer days of single-digit bitter cold… More heat means exponential acceleration, intensity, a supercharged process,… Opinions become irrelevant. A slow breaking of what we thought to be normal… I read two…
In the United States,Congress, the president and the courtsare supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government frombecoming too powerful. President Trump is showing uswhat happens when those checks and balances break down. The courts may still intervene,as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer…
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. -Carl Sagan I’ve got my hands on a copy of Palestinian poet Hisham Bustani’s book of…
