But granting that someone did sayin all seriousness thatthe poets lie too much: he was right – we do lie too much. We also know too little,and are bad learners: so we are obliged to lie. And which of us poets has not adulterated his wine?Many a poisonous messhas evolved in our cellars:many an…
Waking to an overcast day. A stiff wind continues to blow. There’s some relief from the high gusts of yesterday which transported a dust storm, yes giant horizon-wide clouds of yellow-grey field soil from farms to the distant west. A dust storm in Chicago. This is the American mid-west, not a middle eastern country…
My intention has been to learn more about Stoicism. Stoicism was (and is) a point of view as well as a practice located in history 4th century BC. Zeno of Citium facilitated a gathering on Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the north side of the Athenian market place. This view that you are…
Sometimes I have something in mind to write. At other times nothing in particular has come to me. Life is a moving current, languid, – then that sound ahead becomes a roaring white water. Just attend to the friction of movement, (there’s always friction) some topic will rise to the surface of consciousness about…
Wednesday is mid-week. Sometimes it happens in the middle, one is able to with a backward look, take measure of where one has come. Are we in the middle? In the middle of what? I was urged yesterday to abstain from glancing at my iphone news feed. None of those snippets was positive, “good…
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 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…
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…
An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in…
THE SECOND COMING Turning, turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconerThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Turning and turning in the widening gyreMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full…
