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Shoah Business
Here in Las Vegas a secondary school teacher told her class that claims about the Holocaust were not so, the usual mouthings of someone out of control on primary levels of who she is. The whole discussion about deniers involves many layers of disquisition and analysis. In any case her inflammatory comments did not belong in the classroom. Word spread and the event hit the papers, here in Las Vegas, really a pretentious boonie town. I associate to Miss Kitty’s bar in “Gunsmoke,” all kinds of riff raff. When you read the local papers you get a stringent conservatism that is not…
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On Being a Radical Librarian
Back Story: The particulars — Jane is studying to become a librarian, all of it done through distance learning, library-speak. She comes to this with degrees in liberal arts and teaching, a children’s author as well as a former journalist. Having grown up in a Mormon family she is what is now known as a “Jack Mormon,” divesting herself of what was a deleterious conditioning by this cult founded by a charlatan from upstate New York. In my interactions with her now and then I see, detect and sense, the inhibitions and self-imposed restrictions which are the traces of her…
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Thinking
I’ve put Freud away for a while — Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism , his trilogy swan song at the end of his life, but not for too long. In their place I am rounding up the cattle in my new work, trying to incorporate major changes, which are always difficult, you know, spreading the width between paragraphs to inset new revisions as if a dentist asking to say open wide; it is my recalcitrance to revise with new material or better material, when I feel it is all over with. I may have about 20…
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3:AM Musings
From a literary friend and editor of an online mag a response to “Archipelago,” one of the stories I am working on now for my next book. Beyond the pale, beyond good or bad taste, it just exists, a written splat thrown up into the sky, hanging there insolently. As I try to hit the literary nail dead on in these stories I know I am not hitting them right on, for all is oblique and indirection. I am “field testing” some of them by submitting to journals online and off. The best time is at this moment as I seize the day…