Posted on: December 29, 2008
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.
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Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca.
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 thoughts would not add anything new to the libraries of critical assessments regarding that great story of Rick and Ilsa and the madness in Morocco.
On an entirely personal note, Ingrid Bergman always reminds me of a former girlfriend.…
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Posted on: December 29, 2008
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.
2.
Will the comet shearing a rut through
the heart of the sky, so beautiful
and seeming benificent now on the horizon,
destroy us or is that law of physics
going to be suspended as well?
My life went up in smoke, but the vapors
concretized and reassembled themselves into
a castle of limestone which is where I live
now, with an empty heart that magically generates
enough fire to power cities, to the amusement of
blackbirds that flock in the willows.…
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Posted on: October 18, 2008
Emily Dickinson. 1846. Photo by William C. North
[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 the terms spiritual and religious are not synonyms — is that the “truths” of religion/spirituality are so public — known by millions and millions — of people that to even utter them in their publicly known form is to start from the realm of cliché and banality. This doesn’t mean those truths really are banal, it just means that they have been pounded deep into the wagon-ruts of collective consciousness, where they often lie lifeless, or at least embalmed.…
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