We have a new essay on Zamyatin, and new poetry on tap as well. Robert Mueller and Tony Jones return with more lyrical and creative writing. * * * * * My own writing and reading has slowed a bit as we move to the end of 2008. The holidays have seen me sinking into movies primarily. Nothing of stunning note, though I did enjoy watching the classic, Casablanca, again. My guess is, however, that my own…
Blind Spot The scam: the scene in Punch Drunk Love where the heroine is bleeding and Adam Sandler takes a tire iron to the toughs that just wrecked his car and his life. What I find disturbing is the concept that inevitably someone with issues like Sandler’s must of necessity find true love. I am the age of his character with neurological issues of my own, and I haven’t seen its ananke. A sweet film, but false advertising….
[Guest blogger Tony Jones] Religiophobia Blindered by heat-flashes of banality; the sacred barnyard tells us nothing except it has no room for us without our becoming at once greater and smaller. This is what it means to have the mind of Christ; to become as a child with the heart-space of a 1000 goslings, arrow-tipped with lightning. One of the reasons it’s hard to write good religious or spiritual verse – and I am well aware that…
[Guest blogger du jour Tony Jones] What’s the mystique about mysticism? (Or is the question itself just a misleading fork in the road, excluded middle term, dun leaves dead on a worm-ridden tree, as in “not seeing the forest for the … ”, regarding spirituality). When I watched Kung Fu as a young child, then as now I was entranced by the mixture of action and the ambiance of a kind of deep inner peace that drove it. I think…
We have some new poetry on tap from Sheema Kalbasi, Alessio Zanelli and Tony Jones. Sheema also tipped me off to a very good short film and hopes our readers will view the movie here. The filmmaker in question, Hossein Martin Fazeli, is also a poet. One I hope to publish here soon. __________ If I had another life to live, I think I would be a filmmaker. The ability to make art that way, to combine prose,…
Atonement Grind your teeth on atonement pangs. Lone rocks crop the low sky. You reach up with a steady hand. The clouds elude you. Walk the brown stream, dip in your hands and face, drink deep. Forget the water leads always down. Brown drops crumble in heat to ascend, as must you. 2. You’ve got to stumble three times. You try to walk, and that staggers your first summers. Drink love and fall forever. You enter the brown…
Friday, March 28th, 2008 Another way of saying “binary thinking” is “dualistic thinking.” It’s become something of a cliche in postmodernity to decry “western dualism,” so I’m going to avoid the phrase to stave off my own boredom and perhaps make a more trenchant point. I’ve noticed that North Americans are terrible about seeing things in (cliche again) “black” and “white”, good or bad, this or that. To some extent, just to use ordinary conversational english you have to…
Enumerations I am sitting in a wooden upholstered chair built in the nineteen fifties (I know because the table it came with had the original sales receipt from 1957) at my computer desk listening to Jimi Hendrix performing with the Band of Gypsies on New Years 1970 at the Filmore East almost two years before I was born. My cat Sibyl is sleeping behind me. She is almost 13. Hard to believe. She looks five and has the most…
To the Pain en faveur de la guerre a l’outrance Viet Minh in crazy hats, Hanoi is bombed again, the Empire will be lost. The giant across the ocean stirs in Pachydermian slumber and the dollars begin to flow like million-dollar drops down a stalactite. 2. de Tassigny is dead. Les Parachutistes, ils sont tous morts, lui. The Viet Minh are still there. My brother is all gone. 3. Tobacco stains on troubled fingers, rice paddies heaped to…