What is a Literary Journal, anyway? I might ask, I should ask? I ask. How is this literary journal set to manage what it is supposed to be doing? Critically responding to the contemporary world we live in? What does that mean to say these pretentious things about how I should be considering what I write, how I write, what I use to express whatI think? All I do know is that I do not ever know what I think until I write, or is it better put, unless I write. I recall as much being said somewhere in the mass of reading I have done. Writing most closely mirrors thinking I have believed. I had been taught to think. Even when all we do is tweet? I guess so. Writing does mirroring thinking, the kin d of thinking reflected in the manner and matter of the writing. So then, tweeting is how we think today. The illusion of being engaged while abdicating cognitive presence. I wonder why or how I mismanage so many of the affairs that need serious, intelligent and articulate responses.
Writing is salvation. Writing is sanitation. To sanitize the world through words, by writing? My sanity is contained herein, the words I use to express–what am I expressing, and how is it express. Do I have an axe to grind with power and monied elites? Of course I do, but I also have observations and critiques as well as explications and expositions in defense of democracy and the People. You will find these herein in the blog section as well as among the essays published in the pages section. I do not expect too many to take the time or to have the patience to persist i reading the way they would need to read. Toni Morrison as an interesting essay on reading that anyone interested in understanding what literacy is should read. It will open quite a few eyes, especially a good number of those formed by our contemporary understanding of literacy, of reading, of its place historically, politically, socially and intellectually. How many times can I join in a chorus of of course.
I am not herein at this time going to defend the western tradition of thought or literacy (thus, ideas about literature or the literary), nor the inheritance from our Greco-Roman heritage. I know that here in America this heritage needs defending and exposition more so than it does in Europe, or even societies and cultures ancillary to Greco-Roman civilization, themselves civilizations informed by Greco-Roman civilization as we see in Turkey or in the Franco-Phone world of Berber North Africa, or in an ancillary effect promoted in the former French colonial influence in the Arab Muslim world. I really do not want to have to think I should say something about what I see in the world when it pertains to how we must be, must think, must think to be, be to think, which way does it should it go?
The Falling Leaf Review 