Questions need to be formed appropriately, and that is rhetorically and intellectually appropriately, although too many I talk to have little idea that there is an appropriateness to questions other than some topical or situational appropriateness that panders to emotions in the basest ways. ---A Fragment by an Anonymous Author "What is really behind DeBlasio's … Continue reading The Man Who Asks: “Do States Accept Murder as a Means to Reduce Unemployment?” [A Short Story of a Kind]

How else are you going to see human except by seeing humane? They are contingent as they are one word in French, humaine.

Nature is opposed to civilization. Your centrally heated home, the Lakota Teepee and the Hawaiian thatched roof hut are all civilization, not nature. In our efforts to make things more natural we have also allowed them to become more uncivilized in ways we did not imagine possible, nor in ways we can discern anymore. We … Continue reading Civilization and Nature

We are and You and I are are rhetorically different strategies.

Poor people everywhere are not rich, thereby not affluent, perhaps undereducated, for the most part almost certainly semi-literate, although thoroughly alphabetic. In being poor, certain correlations with crime and violence get disseminated as they have also been proliferated among the affluent and the more highly educated. Correlation has often been confused with causation and this … Continue reading Explanation is not Rationalization

Psychosis reaches you in a place in the mind that knows no distinctions of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, class. There is a place in the mind that is beyond these or apart from them. You see that I believe in mind.

A definition of “Marriage,” at least how it has been articulated socially in English speaking countries over the past millennia or more, is paramount to furthering our understanding where Gay Marriage fits in the social equation of couple-unions today. And it does fit, more easily than any of us on either side of this pro/con … Continue reading Gay Marriage is Marriage

Our greatest, most potent, most persistent, centrism is con-tempo-centrism. The temporal myopia resulting from this is our greatest problem politically, as well as socio-economically, as well as in all matters of humanism or in any defense (if any) we muster for humanity. We seriously misunderstand our nature and our nurture through a corrupted understanding of … Continue reading Con-tempo-centric

Contrary to the etymological fallacy, whereby one asserts that a word's meaning should be or is what the meaning of its traceable origin was, is the etymological persistence hypothesis, where the etymology of a word, and the connotative history of the word in a culture, remain residual in the word's understanding, and is present even … Continue reading The Etymological Persistence Hypothesis

The monied elites in America are an aristocracy of oligarchic power who are more entrenched in that power than at any other time in our history. They are all of a kind more or less than kin that America has endured since its inception as an alleged democratic nation, the kind of nation that chooses … Continue reading Does Anyone at Least Half-literate Recall the Terrible Forty of Athens?

Obama put at ease outrage over Bush, over monied power elites in America's ruling class of greed. But Obama's in the hands of the banks as he pretends to speak against Power and Money for the people, those of us naive enough to have succumbed, as I have on more than occasion, to Obama's eloquence. … Continue reading Obama and His Governing of the Elite, or is it for the Elite?

How have we not made Mammon our God, or convinced ourselves that we can serve both God and Mammon--better put, that we serve God best by serving Mammon. But then saying something is so has made it so for so long that we fear speaking enough to attack the First Amendment as a significant problem … Continue reading Freedom Revised

I have met very few people, even among those most of us today would call educated people, who have any idea what they are saying when they refer to the act of reading, the performance of reading. We have for too long separated reading and writing as distinct categories of operation--is that mental operation? Certainly, … Continue reading What is Reading When Reading is Separated from Writing? An Opening Statement

On this day in 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by the fascists in Alfacar, Spain, just outside of Granada in Andalusia. 86 years before his murder, Honore de Balzac died in France, August 19, 1850.

Jean Renoir was right when he said that there would have been no Hollywood without Chaplin. Let other people think what they think about how other people did what they did to create Hollywood--Chaplin, the world's first universal man, was it. He created movies, if you excuse the hyperbole that is virtually not hyperbole. Bravo, … Continue reading Bravo, Charlie; A Polemic in 59 words

for Daniel Defoe He found a text in printed pages, Times New Roman 12. The pages were left without a name reference on a radiator in a classroom at his college. There was no class in that room the period before or the period before that. He made no inquiries.He kept it and read it … Continue reading Different Points; or The Polemical Position of Someone Who is not a Religious Fanatic (a fictional essay)

Let me say then that these blog entries are organized around many different kinds of writing. I imagine we expect this plasticity--that we expect many different kinds or forms of writing to take place within the confines of the blog and to be at home there. These entries can also be also autobiographical . . … Continue reading Web Log Writing

El Salvador, or the Savior, or the One who brings Salvation is the name of a Central American country and remains a cruel joke (reminiscent of the jokes told by guards in the Nazis camps) for all women in the country. El Salvador just might have the strictest abortion laws in the world, certainly the … Continue reading Salvation is not for Women????

An essay by a man who writes haiku and publishes an on-line literary review. He imagines that there is an audience out there for what he writes, but he is wrong. He imagines that there must be someone who cares, who agrees or who understands; he is again mistaken. No one cares what he says … Continue reading A Haiku Is When; or, What Can Your Brevity Hold?

Marriage is no longer an exclusive contract to breed. Traditionally, breeding rights and legal rights over the brood were settled by the marriage contract, but if marriage is to be about love and not a contract to settle breeding rights and husbandry, then marriage includes gay marriage. I do insist that gay couples refer to … Continue reading Marriage Redefined

I still see far too many Arab Muslim women dressed inappropriately for NYC summers. I do not understand how more of their elderly women do not suffer heat stroke or actual strokes or heart attacks--and I would like to see medical statistics for Arab Muslim women from the middle east and if there is not … Continue reading Wearing a Blanket on the Beach

  Summer, of course.              

In itself, for itself, the writing . . . How much more could be said about how my writing--how any writing--is indeterminable. Why I write could be reduced to an act of survival. I would not live if I did not write. How could I? I understand the rhetorical edge. It cuts me at its … Continue reading The Writer [Flash Fiction]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041244/Polygamy-Investigation-Muslim-men-exploit-UK-benefits-system.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

"A man who had come across this piece here delivered it to me transcribed in his hand on another piece of paper that I took and transferred into my computer from where I uploaded to my website and publish it for your perusal, and do not ask me why I have not said 'read,'" a man … Continue reading Holy Wisdom? [Flash Fiction]

Know your audience. --a freshman composition adjunct lecturer's mantra to his class   A man says to a woman he has met in his journal as he sits at a table in a café over a cup of coffee and a croissant for breakfast one morning sometime a decade or more ago: I first read Hiroshima, … Continue reading Nouvelle York, Mon Amour [A Short Story]

There is no telling it like it is anymore. Everyone is spinning his wheels around and around at a dizzying rate. Truth? That's laughable for most. Little 't' truths? Props in a shell game we like to play. All of us submit to the new politique where everyone is psychopathically polite. Emily Post had nothing … Continue reading The Politics of Being Polite?

For the Prophet Jeremiah. The perpetual demand from criticism that it be specific or specify with strings of isolated examples to prove what it is saying is one of the great diversions of criticism, one of the crippling effects on critique. It establishes a pretext for criticism that  stands with the first and last step in our guiding epistemology: … Continue reading Jeremiah Was a Prophet and not a Bullfrog

What we know even when we know a lot is too little. We do often preclude too much too often. We do become full ourselves by what we imagine we know. Overcome are we by the facts we accumulate--a false sense of wealth. Facts, facts and more facts at our finger tips; instant knowing, just … Continue reading Epistemology 101

You do know that  a story is a story is a story, and that you are not supposed to get indignant over how a narrator chooses to narrate in the story he tells. Therefore, to confuse narrator and author is debased enough, but to confuse author for the man is just as grotesque in its … Continue reading Narrator, Narrating, Narrated; What’s an Author to Do? Asks the Man [Flash Fiction]

The Milky Way from out back of Aunt Anna's house in Pittsfield, the Berkshires, at night, the broadest swath ever seen by me anywhere including at night out in Montauk, how dark it is supposed to be there on the South Fork, the extreme East End; Via Lactae, as the Romans called it, the Milky Way, a … Continue reading Awesome Nights