And what if these were excerpts from a polemic on the State of the State in America and how we persistently delude ourselves about the nature of freedom and the state of our democracy here and now, as we like to say tritely when we puzzle over just how to say what is obvious, I … Continue reading Double-think [Short-short Fiction]

Consensus, non-sensus . . . we can all disagree in this pseudo-democratic nation managed by power elites bent on keeping the masses semi-educated and semi-literate--but consensus in the end is the mandate. To disagree with mandated consensus is to become excommunicate and anathema, socially. If the President were Pope, I'd be excommunicate, I would have … Continue reading Consensus, Non-Sensus; the Polemic of an Angry Man

A Harvard Undergraduate Makes a List Sitting on a Yellow Chair in the Yard Near Massachusetts Hall where Emerson Once Slept I Any sane and rational discussion of Gay Marriage will have to address basic human rights as the primary concern for how and where gay marriage fits in our society--and it does fit in … Continue reading Human Rights and Harvard Yard [A Short Story]

. . . is a letter from an editor of an on-line literary review. The opinions are herein those of the Editor-in-Chief, a role the Publishing Editor likes to assume separately from that of Publishing Editor. He has complete control over content. The follow has been abridged by me. [ . . .] All social … Continue reading How a Letter from an Editor of an On line Literary Review Becomes Fiction; or, You Should Know the Boundaries between Fiction and Non-Fiction

A letter to the editor of an on-line literary magazine published by the editors, as they agreed, because of its succinct power. Let it be re-iterarted that all efforts at re-defining marriage are paramount to furthering our understanding of where Gay Marriage fits in the social equation of couple-unions today--and it does fit, that is, … Continue reading Gay Marriage (a few points made by an opponent of darkness) [Flash Fiction]

A journal entry by a parent of a public school student, the public schools in Brooklyn in the City of New York, after a parent meeting at the school his child attends, and at a time when semi-literate and under-educated can masquerade as literate enough and educated in itself educated by those who are the … Continue reading Bee Hive Nation [Flash Fiction]

"Humanity, a Journal of Social Commentary"   Gay Marriage is a Human Rights Issue   A blog entry by an anonymous man publishing in an on-line social commentary web-site called "Humanity, a Journal of Social Commentary. Just who he is is not important, or at least I am saying that it is not important in … Continue reading A Human Rights Issue Says a Man in the Blog Section of his On-line Social Commentary Website [Flash Fiction]

He says what he days about Hamlet and Shakespeare and literature believing in the standards of Canonicity, even while disputing the hypocrisies involved in the full standards of inclusion. He has had no problem saying things like "Hamlet's most famous soliloquy represents a hallmark moment in the birth of the modern." Why should he, he … Continue reading Birth of Consciousness [Flash Fiction]

We are all Hamlet's kin. Hamlet my brother is my father, I have said. The world is incestuous to start. Certainly we are lately less than kind to the father of Hamlet, not the Ghost King, if I can borrow from Cervantes for Shakespeare; the child of his brain. Cervantes alluded to Quioxte and Panza … Continue reading Shakespeare’s Brain [Flash Fiction]

I have come to bury Trump, not to praise him? The good that the rich do often gets lost in the ways they manage to make an awful lot of money from the thinnest veil of good they lay over whatever serious need exists in a society. I am not who you think I am; … Continue reading Hollywood Humanity [Flash Fiction]

  The kind of critique or commentary one needs to engage in a democratic society can only be achieved when literacy is raised above the levels we have come to accept as good enough, which I know from experience confronting remedial writing pedagogy in CUNY, are far from hitting the mark. We are talking missing … Continue reading Literacy Falling Apart

Let us return to woman--she is not determined by her biology. This seems simple enough to say, but has it been adequately articulated by us in her defense. This position was held by most of us in college when I was an undergraduate; this has become one of many clichés we accept in our arsenal … Continue reading Sacred and Profane

Of course, sex is natural. Of course, it is normal. Of course, I have said this before, many times before, word following word on how we can raise sex and sexuality to where they belong in our minds, or debase them the way we do, representing them as we do, dis-understaanding them as we have. … Continue reading Natural, Normal, Human

There cannot be a hierarchy of humans where liberty and equality are honored and respected differently. Her getting pregnant does not leave her subject to a man's will, even if she did give her troth to honor and respect the man, her spouse. We no longer maintain "obey" in our marriage vows, yet we maintain … Continue reading Pro-Choice is Pro Freedom

Memory is as much fiction as it is non-fiction. The boundaries separating one from the other are difficult for anyone to trace. Remembering to see and say I know fact from fiction, I just remembered that "The Earth is flat" was once a fact. How do I recollect what I remember, separate what I remember … Continue reading Passing Through the Heart Again [Flash Fiction]

An Essayist Speaks of Essays Briefly "To die, to sleep, perchance to dream . . .[,]" and so, what dreams of death can philosophy prepare me for, Michel, when all of heaven and earth contain so much? --Jay V. R. The essays I have written . . .  what is there left to say about … Continue reading Critical Condition [Flash Fiction]

Everything works together toward one single idea here, and that a new anthropology is due. I understand that anthropos is ancient Greek for man and so anthropology is the study of Man; or, as we once held blanketly, all human beings. Our focus might have been cultural, ethnic, evolutionary; nonetheless, it was anthropology, and so, … Continue reading Toward Feminology

Bourgeois cultures have collectively created an overarching, overbearing civilization that has been the enemy of art, the adversary of the spiritual life of art, while pretending, only sometimes, to be the friend of the corporeal life of artists. This has been unwavering, this has remained steadfast, this has achieved ascendancy in the hearts, minds and … Continue reading Pimps and Prostitutes [Flash Fiction]

A man considers the character of a woman considering the character of a man and how she would like to put on paper what she imagines this man should say, believes he should say, she does, he considers, the man who initially does, as I do this man, as I have said, a man who … Continue reading Dark Waters [Flash Fiction]

Progress is not an inference drawn from chronology alone. We can move through chronology, pass through the years from one to another without inferring anything like progress has happened. Do you think history is progressive, whatever history is? Do you believe in progress happening correlative to chronology passing? What is this thing time? Do we … Continue reading Chronology [Flash Fiction]

The brute reality of a woman's biology displaces me from ultimate considerations where her right to choose an abortion is the subject. I am not a woman, and even if a woman is not in herself a womb, I am not a woman and thus do not have a womb and thus cannot bear children … Continue reading Final Hour

We have been selling our water for money for a long time. We sell our air for money, too. Certainly the rich can buy the loyalty of your sons and daughters, as they have our freedom, our civil liberties, our future, our nature. Oilmen send your daughters and sons to die for more oil under … Continue reading MEDIAtion

I grew up in a country and at a time where I could not support the notion that I could tell a woman what to do except in so far as it concerned my body and my person and what she could not do with impunity to me. No, I cannot tell a woman what … Continue reading Embryo Rights?

To be or not to be is the fundamental philosophical question. It is not only a question of suicide. It is to mediate being, to choose an actual existence. It is to remove oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being. Non-being is as close to a primordial nothingness … Continue reading Existential Hamlet Precedes Essential Hamlet

What is really behind DeBlasio's elimination of stop-and-frisk? We could ask; I am now doing such: what is behind this seemingly pro-active support for civil liberty? I know that most of us did believe and continue to think that Mayor De Blasio's policy change in the matter of stop-and-frisk was motivated by a need to … Continue reading States Accept Murder as a Means to Reduce Unemployment

There are people, organizations, institutions and leaders in politics that support the idea that a woman should be made to get an ultrasound and then listen to the fetus's heartbeat before she can go through with the abortion she has decided to get. In the case of a pregnancy not yet five weeks, as I … Continue reading The Search for a Fetal Heartbeat is an Effective Return to the Curtain Rod

When I was a boy and my father and I were avid followers of NASA and the space agency's progress to the moon, I learned that in every command capsule there was a rather conspicuous red button to push if the mission should need to be aborted on the launch pad. Less than a decade … Continue reading Abortion is a Woman’s Parachute

Where then does this writing of history begin, and it is history that anyone writes when they write about themselves or another and another and another, each line creeping along, petty word after word until the last syllable; where does it end? How do we understand history apart from historiography? How do I understand my … Continue reading A Few Words on History and Historiography [Flash Fiction]

  Kierkegaard said in his journal well over a hundred years ago that it was a "positive starting point" when Aristotle asserted that "philosophy begins in wonder." Wonder, not doubt was the place for all love of wisdom to begin. What child does not know that life begins in wonder. Socrates was no nihilist; his … Continue reading Philosophy is Wonder [Flash Fiction]

Choosing is a woman's birthright, as it is any person's birthright, and this choosing to have an abortion is not an easy one for any woman or teenaged girl to make. Forcing women to make choices that are unavoidably illegal would be for what reason, to what effect? I would not want to be in … Continue reading Birthright

If there are children who do not want to participate in Halloween Parties or Parades, then that's their prerogative. Forcing them to participate would be a violation of their civil right to choose not to participate. However, eliminating parades and parties for all children because some children might feel left out, perhaps because they are … Continue reading Milford Drops the Ball on Its End Run for Democracy

Do you imagine that Congress works for the People and not government in itself for itself by itself? I am genuinely asking because that is something I cannot understand--how you the People, and not a State serving Public, believes, with how far we have come from understanding or being able to articulate what Public Service … Continue reading Imagination Not Dead, Yet

The Emancipation Proclamation did not give human rights to the slaves. The slaves emancipated by law had human rights before the proclamation. Lincoln did not make slavery immoral, religion did not do that. The immorality of slavery and the unalienableness of the human rights of slaves was and is irrespective of what the society said … Continue reading Before the Law

Now, if Roe versus Wade were a complete fabrication, if it were a docudrama, would that mean that the majority ruling was somehow made weaker, argumentatively? Would the truth of it, whether true or not in the most pedantic sense of trueness become other than true? Roe versus Wade is just as strong in support … Continue reading What If Roe Vs. Wade were a Fiction?

Jeremiah's Lamentations on the woe and misery and decadence of third century BC Jerusalem is never too far from our social and political critiques; the energy behind Jeremiah's pronouncements while lamenting the political and the socio-economic conditions of the Jewish people in Jerusalem is informative of our commitment. What more do you want me to … Continue reading Jeremiads

There will always be dilemmas for her, even if aborting an embryo is legally sanctioned. This is not to say that legally sanctioning abortion is a fool's errand. To each woman her own personhood, her own psychology rooted in her biology, her physiology and her experiences? She has reason; she is capable of reasoning, of … Continue reading Woman’s Dilemmas?

A woman is should be the first line of any discussion when any thought of her right to choose anything comes up in any forum. In her is, there is no longer any subtracting devices such as who, what, when, where, how or even why. None of these questions are pertinent or relevant to her unalienable right … Continue reading Woman is not Perdition [Flash Fiction]

Who is she, again, the question gets asked and asked, and oftentimes asked without the intention of waiting for an answer, a particularly annoying contemporary trait we have all acquired. But how many of us avoid asking any question like this at all? Responses are not answers; I've asserted this before in other essays. There … Continue reading Woman is a Choice

How much is left unknown at the end of a relationship? How much do the happiest spouses really know about one another. A lover dies, a spouse is put in her tomb and who was she? No one was; the one who is not who she will be when she becomes who she was. But … Continue reading A Monologic Imagination [A Short Story]

A woman is and in her is, not what?  How many methods of discovery do I employ in my investigations? The limits of knowing what questions to ask can help or hinder any investigation I endeavor. Who am I is who I am? My name is not my being; what is in a name? A … Continue reading Discovery [short fiction]

License granted to a speaker to speak about what has been spoken on the contrast between conformity and obedience, an issue that the inferred speaker here speaks about but could be spoken also by an actor, who having prepared himself as an actor, organically, could then  create a role for himself, after, of course, he … Continue reading Conformity versus Obedience [Flash Fiction]

There is a ritual life in our entertainment world, one we gratefully participate in, one we no longer have the desire to live without, one fro which we fail to see the danger in the matters of managing our democracy. This is true enough, for sure; but then there is often nothing more difficult to … Continue reading A Nose for News, a Nose for Truth?

The Falling Leaf Review is not outside the western traditions I have alluded to here in both the pages section and the blog posts. It is a defender of this tradition which gives it the intellectual impetus to be the critical journal it is. With the force of this tradition behind it, it will levy … Continue reading There Needs to Be More Literary Reviews; A Polemical Position

The State is, as fore-stated and after-stated, for itself, by itself, of itself, with itself, self-contained for always, every state the mortal enemy of what is best in the simple separate person. This person must remain macrocosm, however, even to the people themselves in order for the people to maintain in counter-balance its power and … Continue reading Pluralism II