It is not unknown to me how many men have had, and still have, the opinion that the affairs of the world are in such wise governed by fortune and by God that men with their wisdom cannot direct them and that no one can even help them; and because of this they would have…
GEN-X BEWARE! And all you ever-ambiguous Blank Generation folk, among whom I number myself, you ought to wake up too. For once again, the post-war Baby-Boomers, arguably the most pampered, selfish and programmatically self-indulgent generation in American history, are preparing to take care of themselves at the direct expense of their younger brothers and sisters,…
The ivy crept over the house, a green plague, relentless. The house, that human construct lay beneath, consumed. Some looking would call it quaint, ivy covered halls, hallowed halls. I called it death, a slow strangulation, a suffocation within the leafy legion. Its progression was incremental, measured in inches, brick by brick, one crumbled mortar…
What a pain, a nuisance, annoyance, what trouble, what a bother and botheration it is to inconvenience oneself, to overstrain, extend oneself, to get all hyped up, psyched up, to overexert oneself, all set to trouble oneself, almost kill oneself just to maintain a “vanity” web site year after year after year! Now in the…
From Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism (1989): I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one
dies of
thirst and cold, that “extra-temporal” history, that absolute of time and space
where there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one goes crazy
with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is
unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and
women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world
as it is!), of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are legends,
but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with architecture,
religion, plants, animals–rivers have boats on them and in which men drown,
drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but in time and
space and history. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Just keeping track of the shifting lies, misrepresentations and bait-and-switch tactics of the Bush Administration as it slithers toward that Holy Grail of Right-Wing American politics, the dismemberment and destruction of the New Deal’s Covenant with America, the 1935 Social Security Act, is a dizzying, mind-numbing task. And it’s meant to be. It’s among the…
the ills of marriage, but none of the fruit
the mundane, the insipid, the better left unsaid
tenderness, intimacy, joy
threadbare in the tedium of being
better to lie fallow
to await another season
As if the Cold War nostalgia of the Bush League of Neo-Con Beltway
Imperialists and God-Is-On-Our-Side Red State Evangelicals weren’t bad
enough, now comes the purportedly left of center editor of
The New Republic, Peter Beinart, issuing his own retro clarion call for “a new liberalism,”
A Fighting Faith,
as he styles it, in a black and white world of American might and right
locked in another life or death, existential battle with the forces of
totalitarian darkness and their fellow travelers at home and abroad.
She is gone, the one you wanted, that effervescent blythe spirit. I buried her, walled her off, it is the same. I built the wall myself, mixed the mortar, carefully laid the brick. Silence. I cursed you both as the mortar dried. The housewife remains.
I don’t watch prime-time American network television any more, nor the HBO and other comparable cable fare that increasingly dominates evening viewing and day-after conversation in its stead. To the amazement and despair of friends, family, and other die-hard friends of “Friends”, I have thus far refused to watch even a single episode of “The…