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  At What Price Peace? The State in America only pays lip service to the exercise of freedom. Presidents in the State of the Union rarely ever serve more than their image. The State was incapable of respecting in the least the kind of freedom he had once believed was his birth right. I cannot … Continue reading At What Price Peace; or, Coming Home to Roost with Coffee and Croissants [a Short Story]

I Where have all the good readers gone? I would like to ask this question openly, but do not have the courage to ask this question, by thus doing I would challenge too many of the grossly absurd assumptions of too many of my colleagues who I respect in spite of what I know to … Continue reading Where Have All the Good Readers Gone? [a Short Story]

Prologue It is a mistake to say that the Reign of Terror saved France, or so it has been said by many, and to which I can only agree. The Terror certainly destroyed the revolution. Only the insane or the most savage satirist can say the guillotine was an instrument in the installation of democracy. … Continue reading The Days of the French Revolution Have Been Forgotten [Short Fiction]

Prefatory Remarks We are all too keen on looking for any reason we live in the political shit we live in--any reason but the one that would point to our complicity in the mess we have made of our politics. Complicity is difficult to take; you only have to look at any divorce at any … Continue reading Consensus, Non-Sensus; the Monologic Voice Among Other Voices [A Short-short Story]

Here is a letter by an unnamed author. The manuscript was found on the steps of the Harvard Library one early spring, a sunny, yet chilly day in Cambridge. It is presented here in its entirety, and not knowing what genre it was originally intended for, I have assumed that of the philosophical letter--there were … Continue reading A Letter Concerning Political Understanding by an Anonymous Author [Short Fiction]

A fictional essay is just that, an essay in form, but fictional in as much as it is the mouthpiece of the essayer. Just as we do not confuse author and narrator, not unless we want to grossly abuse the critical process--we do not confuse the author with the expositor of the essay. Please be … Continue reading Media Body Snatching [A Short Story]

Diatribe, invective, rant, tirade, polemic; no two words are completely synonymous; no two words are interchangeable in every context of use . . . usage. A forceful and bitter verbal attack, a diatribe; a long and angry speech of criticism or accusation, a tirade; to speak long and loud in a wild, impassioned manner, to … Continue reading Sawing the Air [A Short-short Story]

In the course of our contemporary human events, a man speaks of politics American . .. What shall not perish? A question begets yet other questions. What then should I ask? A government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite? Is this what we have? Of course it is what we have. Do … Continue reading An American Polemicist Speaks [Short Fiction]

I could not take my eyes off it at the Met. There have been many paintings I could not take my eyes off of, but this one, so large, tremendous, I recall having said as I walked into the gallery where it was hanging, Caravaggio's La Deposizione, Christ being placed in his tomb, the two … Continue reading When the Soul is a Chariot [a short-story]

"I came across an observation made in a pocket journal I used to carry--it was last year, last June, past midway, approaching the summer solstice. I must have ben eating sushi, where I do not know . . . sushi chefs talking crazy talk to my ears not understanding Chinese. What is it about languages we do … Continue reading Monkeys and Men [Flash Fiction]

  The political and the literary are each distinct ways of seeing the world. Each is a unique means of understanding the limits of Truth (yes, upper case necessary). Both are ways of adjusting the focus on the lenses we use to recognize and to identify people, places and things in the world, ordering that … Continue reading In Itself is Always For Itself, Whether By Itself or Not; a fictional essay

All is through the glass darkly . . . and so the New York Yankees a soccer team by my say so aside, the political state metaphysically opposes the religious at every turn. It has so since the Renaissance. The birth of the modern world was the death of the medieval ecclesiastical. America's hostility to … Continue reading Through the Glass Darkly [Flash Fiction]

Part V, next week, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. IV The acceptance of Gay Marriage will change how the traditional role of woman in marriage has been and continues to be defined against her personhood. Nothing as archaically constituted as traditional marriage should have endured for as long as it has without addressing the way marriage … Continue reading Gay Marriage IV

A photo of my father in a frame on my desk--I miss him. I see him clearly when I focus--I do not have to close my eyes to see him. I do not though see him as I do a person sitting on my couch, but I see him as he had sat on my … Continue reading Alive in My Mind [Fiction]

The past is not past. What does that mean? Of course, it is past, just as remembering the past is present. So, remembering the past is not past. Does this mean that what I remember is the past--I can only use the material of the past in memory and call it remembering, no? So then, … Continue reading Where Have All the Greetings Gone? [Flash Fiction]

Ashes, Ashes, All in Urns in a Niche Supplied by the United States Government   I recall praying for my mother as she lay dying--or was it that she was lying dead, only kept going by a machine--what was it that was going on in her there under resuscitation, red, green and yellow lights blinking, … Continue reading Cre[m]ate [Short Fiction]

  ONE I pray before a triptych at the Met, Ave Maria Plena Gratia, genuflecting as Gabriel before the Queen of Heaven. I remember having been told that Protestants and Jews were too materialistic--I had family who said as much at the tables we'd sit around for holiday dinners, most of them religious holidays turned … Continue reading I and Thou [a Short Story]

Without question . . . I know what is meant by living stone. I understand what Goethe meant when he said architecture was music frozen in stone. I know statues and architecture are different, but how much are they really different from one another. I'm not even sure how different architecture and statuary are different … Continue reading Frozen in Stone [Fiction]

III The primitive ways we have understood marriage over the centuries has affected how we think of it today; how could it not. The way we have thought about many things over the last millennium that persist in our discourse affects how we think about them today. Just what the implications were for women in … Continue reading Gay Marriage; a few more notes

  We have a professional military in America of a nearly incomparable size, that is, greater than almost all nations with the exceptions perhaps of China and India. This professional military, even when many are career soldiers and might presumably retire from active service without entering the job market, is a feeder trainer of many … Continue reading I is We [a Short Story]

Part III, February 11, 2016 II Traditional marriage, for a long time coming, has needed a re-articulation, a re-definition. This re-definition is necessary because the institution of marriage has been stuck, as alluded to above, in an archaic understanding of men and women, and has suffered the subtractive legacies of patriarchy, and the power plays … Continue reading Gay Marriage II

Part II tomorrow, February 10th, 2016. I We have to understand that the idea of Gay Marriage demands a re-look at, as well as a re-examniation of, the institution of marriage, and that is not so much marriage today, although it does insist we do so; but marriage as it has been enacted in societies, … Continue reading Gay Marriage I

The following are a series of letters sent to Alice Buconiglio in the summer of 2012, July, written by a friend of hers while she, the friend, was on vacation in Madrid. Who goes to Madrid in July? You might ask. The answer would be, the same friend who went to Paris in February, but … Continue reading Letters from Madrid [A Short Story]

Another and Another and Another One. I remember my Dad reading MacBeth to me when I was a boy, one of the Folger Library editions we used to use in school, one of Julius Caesar we used in 7th grade. I was maybe 7 when my Dad read MacBeth to me. I remember noting that … Continue reading What I Remember from When I was a Boy [fiction]

I loved L'Acajou--it's not there anymore as my mother is not here anymore, as the past is not here anymore, and what was past is past never present, and what we remember is not past but now, contemporary. Shall the twain ever meet. I held her hand until her heart stopped beating, my mother. She … Continue reading The Barbarian Invasions [Flash Fiction]

It is not that the past is not past, but that what we think is the past cannot be the past, could never be the past, could only be what it is when it is where it is, this string of what when and where the most important--present in the mind as a present time … Continue reading Shedding Skins [Flash Fiction]

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Grotesque Comes from Grotto Meaning Cave Where We Come From or the Cave in Which We Dwell   My opposition to how political correctness has mismanaged the defense of the rights it has purported to be an advocate for is not in line with Donald Trump's "Know-nothing" populism. Re-examine the Know-nothing Party of the mid-nineteenth … Continue reading Cave Dwellers, All [Flash Fiction]

My opposition to how political correctness has mismanaged the defense of the rights it has purported to be an advocate for is not in line with Donald Trumps "Know-nothing" populism. Re-examine the Know-nothing Party of the mid-nineteenth century and Trump does not appear as if he fell from the sky, or rose up from the … Continue reading

A short-short Story in a monologic voice; or, as, we might say, the essayistic voice, I have grown accustomed to wearing--and we do wear voices as we also wear masks, persons, personality, maskality, what is it about personality and the selves of the Self?  What we have here are some of the opinions of Thomas … Continue reading A More Perfect Union [A Short Story]

  An essay found on a chair in a cafe in New York, waiting, as the man was, to see if he would see Patti Smith come in to have coffee and brown bread as she describes in her latest memoir that he bought in hardcover recently to read. He has followed her for many … Continue reading Looking for Patti Smith; or, Gay Marriage is a Human Rights Issue [A Short-short Story]

Absence is absence the way a chair is a chair or a pig is a pig and not a table; that is, until the pig dies, is stuffed, taxidermy style--I think we could say, taxidermed. A taxidermed pig could be set as a coffee table before a couch. Then the pig would be a table, … Continue reading Absence is Presence [A Short-short Story]