It must be facts for me; doubt is an end and not a means to understanding the limits of knowledge, of what knowledge is or could be, not what I know, but the end of all knowing. As a result, I have only things, facts as things, disconnected, more like confetti to throw into … Continue reading It Must Be Facts [A Short Story]

[Abortion in literature; Hemmingway etc.]     [When did wire hangers become the symbol of pro choice . . .] [curtain rods; wire hangers; other foreign objects used in self induced miscarriage]   I did not understand how they could do so. I could not understand how they could do so, I had no cunt, … Continue reading Looking at the Pyranees from the Mediterranean Coast in Cataluna [Flash Fiction]

I To restore what had been assumed lost but saved. I wish I could say succinctly just what reading has been, has meant, has represented, has done for me. What then must I do to convey to you . . . The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When did I read it?  I recall having read it, … Continue reading Nowhere Ever Again

I had an idea one day and thought I should put it down as I have here. Who I am is not important, a theme my writer-father has taken up again and again, one he has me assert here as I am the inferred author; he is the implicit author. Everyone who reads understands that … Continue reading Cows, Horses, Pigs and Women [A Short Story]

[The editors of The Review have accepted a letter addressed to them for publication in their on-line literary journal of ideas, particularly attentive to political and social commentary. Herein find the letter prefaced by a notice from the editors in the form of a polemic against Sharia Law, not Holy Qu'Ran or Islam, which the editors never … Continue reading A Vindication of Human Rights [a Short Story]

In the Roman mind, as in the Greek, beauty was always in form, only in form could beauty exist. Yes, form is beauty, beauty form; if this, then Truth is also in form. To inform becomes a kind of bearing truth. The aesthetics of Keats aside, there is too much exchange of information today, a … Continue reading Archipelago Americanus [Flash Fiction]

[Short Story.] What is it that anyone reading needs to know other than this is a typical letter from the editor of a literary review in the traditional sense of literary reviews, the author having been educated and trained in the manner he has been--was? More questions could arise, will arise, should?   From the … Continue reading ALL YE KNOW ON EARTH

Prologue The issue of Gay Marriage is not simply a social issue; it is not merely a legal one either, nor is it a complex of both, but more. Gay Marriage is a Human Rights issue; therefore, it is a philosophical issue that demands closer observation and deeper analysis. Gay Marriage does stand at the … Continue reading Gay Marriage

Prefatory Remarks Marriage--as it has been discussed by persons in various cultures, codified by laws and/or customs, ritualized in religious practices and understood by how a people anywhere define it, giving it specified and special choices in the words used--must be opened to investigation. This essay will attempt a re-definition of “Marriage,” at least with … Continue reading Gay Marriage–Merry Christmas

A Publishing-Editor of a literary review speaks of reading, speaks of the Canon, speaks of literacy--or writes about it, writes about Shakespeare, about Montaigne and about his grandfather, or the books his mother's father, born in Montmartre, Paris of a mother born in Geneva, Switzerland, had left in his cabin on his farm in the … Continue reading An Editor Speaks of Reading [A Short Story]

  In memory alive or in memory dead. What is that? I would like to know. I do not have to say it to you, that I know keeping him alive as I do day in and day out is far and above what marking the date on the calendar proves or disproves. This is … Continue reading Phases of the Moon and other Lunacies [Flash Fiction]

Skies Much Hazier When I was a Boy The sun's gravity is about 27.9 times the earth's gravity. The sun's temperature is about 15,000,000 degrees Kelvin at its core, about 5770 degrees Kelvin at its surface. The sun's eminence in human culture is unrivaled. Virtually every culture in its archaic period had some form of … Continue reading How the Skies in New York City Have Gotten Better Since I was a Child

All of the attempts to right former wrongs by multiculturalism have been perpetuated in an attempt to garner the resonance of truer voices, voices more real because they are more diverse. Brown eyed writers and blue eyed ones we used to joke were next, but with the culture of ignorance besetting all contemporary attempts at … Continue reading Multiculturalism and a New Golden Age [Flash Fiction]

When my Great Aunt Anna was young she looked a lot like Katherine Hepburn when Kathrine Hepburn was young--did you ever see photos or films of Katherine Hepburn when she was young . . . they were practically the same age I think I recall having learned, but maybe not. How could I have expressed … Continue reading Monkeys, Wordprocessors and Infinite Time [Flash Fiction]

[A polemic in commentary on the state of the State, the state of politics in America from the singular voice of the character of Populus, itself a mask worn on another mask worn. All political philosophy is fiction.] I Populus speak for myself in as much as when I speak for myself I speak for … Continue reading Kettles, Pots and Political Frying Pans [Flash Fiction]

To see is to understand? To look is to know? To feel what I felt. Everything seems now to be all balled up. How I wanted to express everything, say everything possible, the scopes I could manage, macro and micro and everything in between, around, outside and inside, what was there to say that I … Continue reading Who is She? What is She? [Flash Fiction]

So you imagine that JFK was a great champion of freedom. You believe that he had a moral center, that he was not both a security risk to the US and a travesty as a leader of a free people, a man ruled by his appetites, a man whose moral compass was demagnetized. You must … Continue reading One Fell Swoop; JFK’s New Left Legacy [Flash Fiction]

I am sure you imagine that knowing what the weather was like should tell you something else you might need to know to understand--but why do you need to understand? Why do you need to believe you need to understand and that I am obligated in some way to fulfill your irrational desire, and it … Continue reading Part Four; or, Obligated in Some Way [Flash Fiction]

"I want to know what he said he said," she said to me. I said, He said he said, "Do I have to apologize up front to any Arab Muslim or Pakistani person I know who might be offended by what I am going to say? What am I going to say that might or … Continue reading Xenophobia and Other Preoccupations Rooted in Observations Refracted through the Prism of American Civilization [A Short Story]

  Hark the herald angels sing--did they not blow their trumpets signaling the recreation of the universe at the Incarnation of the Son of God who is begotten not made before time and creation; all that nativity stuff that I took more seriously than Macy's could or would, but I did not go to church, … Continue reading A Day not so Unlike any Other Day [Flash Fiction]

i What good are eyes if they only see what they are told to see? I have always seen what I've been shown, with or without the light necessary to see as I should see. What good are they, these eyes that look at the world, to the world, for what? We look for hope, … Continue reading Standing Under [A Short-short Story]

  . . . and once having read Kerouac's description of the rising Merrimack River rushing overflowing, there I was in the middle of things, she had died all of sudden, how is any death not all of sudden even at fourteen? I was in Lowell--we had made it to Lowell after the funeral. I … Continue reading Archetypes and Repetition [Flash Fiction]

Could you or I examine the way we were taught, have been, are . . . the way we have been taught to read, more exactly; yes, just the way literacy has been engaged--could we examine this apart from the way we have sold the way we have taught it? Literacy, reading and writing? I … Continue reading Where the Bee Hive is the Nation; Do You Examine the Way You Have Been Taught to Read?

  They watched the moon in the sky above the ocean. They watched the few strands of clouds that passed across its full face. They then looked to the reflection the full moon left on the ocean water, the color of squid ink. They watched the band of full-moon light as it rippled in reflection … Continue reading The Sea of Tranquility is on the Moon [Short Fiction]

American pluralism is where being American now means that the people have lithified, where they have become a monolith of the most massive proportions. Pluralism here is a brand of politics seriously devoted to praying before the icons of our media, in imitatio de stelle, and we do look to our media icons for guidance, … Continue reading On Kosher Pastrami [Flash Fiction]

Without being an antagonist to the history of Western Civilization, or the idea that there is even such a thing as western civilization, or without becoming an intellectual opponent to bourgeois cultures and their collective economic civilization, I can say that virtually everything about Capitalism is obscene. I can say this without concluding that Capitalism … Continue reading Herodotus Said [A Short Story]

And here we find our narrator, our expositor, our lyric interluder speaking for himself, by himself, with himself participating in what he is talking about, we still assume that what is said on the page in words written, either in long hand on a word processing program like Microsoft Word, the journals he has kept … Continue reading Kosher Pastrami on Club [A Short-short Story]

There are too many people here in the United States who are entrenched in cultural norms other than those native to our country, and too many of these assuming an authority for their separate religious laws above that of the Constitution of the United States. Let me announce--let it be pronounced loud and clear throughout … Continue reading Practicing or Not Practicing Religious Freedom; a Polemic from a Highly Politcized Liberal American Thinker [Flash Fiction]

Honor. We always do everything for honor whenever we do anything for the state, as the United States of America is mostly and persistently a government of the state, for the state, and by the state. What do we do for culture when we continue to ignore it, abuse it, refuse to understand it, continue … Continue reading Honor [Flash Fiction]

Editor's Preface An essay written on race, on color, on ethnicity, on the relationship of one to the other and some of the effects, although generalized, on those identified as one or the other, particularly African-American Americans with respect for the identification (or is it identifier; or is it marker) of black by a writer … Continue reading Black is Black [A Short-short Story {in the form of an essay on color}]

Pastrami's not pastrami unless it's kosher pastrami, but who makes the best kosher pastrami you could have argued until doomsday back in Brooklyn, at least, I think, until the seventies--was it in the seventies that everything started to change, the New York I knew, the Brooklyn I was raised in, the what it was about … Continue reading The Verdict; or, A Day at Central Jury Imagining Kosher Pastrami [A Short-short Story]

A man or a woman speaks obliquely of the rivers of Truth. One could imagine that this is spoken on stage in a theater as a short-short piece, a theatrical vignette--a performance art piece, perhaps one time with a traditional comic mask and another with a traditional tragic mask---I would like to create a Mask … Continue reading Theater of Cruelty; or, Monologue on the Nature of Choice [Flash Fiction]

"So I saw in my dream that the man began to run." I have to run in my dreams. I have tried to run faster in dreams without success. I have moved about in my dreams, seen in close ups in my dreams, extreme close-ups, persons in extremis,  only parts, everything succumbing to the demands … Continue reading In Similitude [Flash Fiction]

The journal of Thomas Sarebbononnato December 11th 1:05 AM I should get to bed. I have to pick up my check tomorrow.   1:12 The only kind of an-archy the state would ever put up with is the kind where its obligations to serve are minimal or absent. However, the way we educate only ensures … Continue reading A Day in the Life [A Short-short Story]

The television is another cave, one cave looking into another cave. Our movie theaters are caves of a kind--why we never drew the analogy--escapism the greatest desire of those producing movies. The mind has become a cave today; the skull itself rather cave like. Caves are anywhere we reside in our familiar darkness. The shadows … Continue reading Our Caves [Flash Fiction]

The following is a pragmatic critique of the systems of inequality that persist in democratic societies where Money and Power have abdicated their responsibility to the people, and whereby the people have abdicated their responsibilities to themselves and to their rights, which can never be cached as privileges. Wherever or whenever rights are, the privileging … Continue reading Systems of Inequality [Short Fiction]

We did imagine liberating ourselves by freeing ourselves of traditional metaphysically drawn ideas about Truth and truths. We did revise our primary  inquiry in epistemology. As I have said before and will say again, we placed Socrates's first step in knowing, I know nothing, at the end of what has amounted to a masquerade in the … Continue reading Liberation Polemic; a Fictional Essay

Duality is what it says. Dual is two. A duality is something in two; there are two parts, perhaps of one whole, but if one whole, the sub-parts must be exclusive. When light can be said to maintain the properties of both wave and particle; this is duality. Duality focuses on the twoness of one … Continue reading Duality versus Dichotomy; a diuscussion

Understanding terms,. the connotations given to terms that appear central to the meaning of a paper an essay a story should somehow be explicated; defining terms and the special sense one gives them should be revealed if anything like communication is intended, no? Duality is what it says. Dual is two. A duality is something … Continue reading Duality or Dichotomy; Toward an Explication [Flash Fiction]

DEATH IS NOT DYING by Jay V. Ruvolo   She says my soul is her blank slate, a clay tablet for her to impress. She passes through my heart again, what she isn't sure she believes. I call out her name in my dreams. I wake waiting for her to respond. She continues to hammer her … Continue reading Death is not Dying

What good are eyes, though, we could ask, when we see not the Truth, nor any of the minor 't' truths of our political world, or our lives as we live them day in day out and so on until we die as absurdly as we have lived. Lear must ask the same when he … Continue reading To Keep or Not to Keep [Flash Fiction]

What I say I say for all people. I speak for all people everywhere . . . Sexuality is often feared even in the west; it is certainly feared in the Middle East. The alleged sexual freedom or liberation of the west is not what it pretends to be, although there is a working out … Continue reading Sexuality, Feared [Flash Fiction]

Be quiet, be still. Shut up and keep your eyes opened, but in this shutting up, in this closing your mouth, my mouth, I am intended to reach the silence at the heart of Truth--yes, Truth, the capital 'T' kind, no longer of my kin, by my kin and for my kin, all my relatives … Continue reading Both Sides of the Coin are One Coin [Flash Fiction]

Rippling bay waters gently lapping tin-foil-wavelets in the sun shade here parasol by the shore. Source: At the Shore

VIII "Would you have Oedipus's courage?" I remember this question. I recall it from Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I could ask if would have Saint John's courage, his Dark Night of the Soul, as vivid and as articulate an account of an individual's conflict with despair--to ward off despair is a supreme act of faith? Despair … Continue reading Truth, Justice and the Oedipal Way [Flash Fiction]

Seen is the Scene [a polemicist speaks] A series of observations concerning knowing, seeing and understanding. There are many ways for the sighted to choose blindness. Some of them are as simple as not choosing to do what is necessary to know. To see, to know, to understand--the latter, understanding, is not what it purports … Continue reading What is Seen is the Scene [Flash Fiction]

[A letter not so unlike other letters to the editor written on the subject of gun control. If there were more people who could write 500 intelligent and articulate words on any issue or subject concerning our rights and our liberty, we would live in a much different---a far, far better world.] Dear Editor, The … Continue reading Assault Weapons and the Constitution (A Letter to the Editor from a Concerned Citizen) [Flash Fiction]

Blindness has given Tiresias other eyes. We should be so lucky to have them. The wise understand this; the fools never will. A fool will always form a thousand questions to keep the wise man playing hop-scotch. Hop-scotch or ping-pong, the idiot's delight in argument, his intellectual acumen never veering far from either. How blind … Continue reading Taught to Dis-see [Flash Fiction]

An informal symposium, a small gathering of friends of a friend, the latter not present except by his absence. The absence of someone is a kind of presence because it is felt, it is recognized as a lack which is a want which is a supposed to be which is a longing which is presence … Continue reading Hard Times for History and Historiography; an Informal Symposium [A Short-short Story]

It is in the role of our civilization's tricksters--as it is the role of tricksters in all cultures everywhere for all time--to be a champion of freedom, yes, champion, a competitor for liberty on the field of life. I am not one who thinks that the only culture or society within which any notion of … Continue reading Tricksters are for Civilization [Flash Fiction]

An Op-Ed piece published in a mainstream paper in the imagination of its writer because no mainstream print media outlet would publish anything like this in its pages, having succumbed to the demands, the wishes, the impulses, the greed, corruption and fraud of the Monied and Power Elites who rule our governing bodies through the … Continue reading Determinism and Free Will [Short Fiction]

Love in a country where more than 50% of all marriages end in divorce, where a philosophy of individualism persists in degrading a person's self-awareness to the point where his only philosophical choice is solipsism, and where this remains our most fervent mysticism, love of anything, including freedom, but also humanity, could not help but … Continue reading Licenses to Gratify

Would I venture into Hades as had Odysseus? Of course not, is the response. Would I venture into Hades as had Orpheus? I would like to think so. I might conclude that I do not need the answers to these questions, but I couldn't conclude that the answers would be useless or fruitless. In spite … Continue reading Blindeness and Other Scenes [Flash Fiction]

I could ask what more would anyone need to see, to hear, to read, to think about . . . but we do not read, we do not think, we have not taught thinking or how to think, randomly passing images in the mind or playing hopscotch with words passing for what we used to … Continue reading The Public vs. The People [A Short Story]