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Reading Poets and Writers
Jane and I were perusing the most recent issue. I was looking for contests to enter with my latest book. Jane was reading selected poets. I scanned an article by a pontificating ass. We soon agreed that the poetry was dreadful; I composed a poem at the moment which reflected the existential and pompous in not a few of the poems. I concluded, given my background as a therapist and naughty human being, I would have a tough time of it in a writer’s workshop — or they with me. The cant and pretentiousness is too much to bear among…
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I Am More Than Convinced
Watching Obama orate, speechifying with flair and gospel tinged repetition, I see the suckers lining up. What has he really done that prepares him for the presidency or, for that matter, what has Hillary done that prepares her for that office. By the time one runs for the presidency, the truer aspects of character are debrided, and what is left is husk. Americans “hunger” for change, they also hunger for more — of anything. We have gone beyond the Gilded-Age, for we are now saturated in the fats of excess. We are Roman. It is essentially the old saw that…
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Some Observations that Go Unobserved.
It is almost 5 AM and inhibitions are loosened, time to fulminate. In 1972 Nixon won handedly over George McGovern, a real war hero, a man, as time has proven, of not inconsiderable integrity. I had grown up with Tricky Dicky during the Fifties, and I was just stunned that this nation put him into office. We are such poor judges of character. A psychopath became President and there are enough learned articles about Nixon to sustain that DSM III diagnosis. Here was Nixon walking beaches fully clothed down to his buttoned cuffs; the always moist upper lip; that deathly…
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Day-Lewis Redux
“There Will Be Blood” has proven a vexing movie for me; my simple test for almost anything literary or cinematic is that it moves me on many different levels, somehow touches my soul. I have concluded that the film is great but like “Citizen Kane” has a coldness to it, although the furnace/sled ending and Hermann’s music forever roasted in me primally — the loss, the abandonment, the agonies of memory forever left to the self and unknown to the world. Sheer heart-rending. Watching Daniel Day-Lewis is like watching a slide into third, legs outstretched, spikes high, going for the…