pro NOTES to the Reader

• A literary web journal dedicated to the literary essay?
  1. What could anyone be thinking who is attempting to publish and promote something like this on line?
  2. Is there a market for this kind of reading?
  3. Is there a market for reading at the level necessary for the literary essay, if any representative essay in the journal were exhibitive of the essay written in the tradition of the form?
• A literary journal does have a metaphysics.
  1. This journal, with its pages of Essays and its blog, where some of the essays are initially worked out, expresses the views of its author, JVR, who is also the Publishing Editor, sometimes referred to as the Editor-in-Chief.
• The essays are social and political commentary, although not primarily or ultimately.
• There are also critiques of culture,
  1. of language, of art, of music,
  2. of history, of historiography, of philosophy,
  3. of religion,
  4. of media, of film, of people, of behavior,
  5. of psychology, of pedagogy, of bureaucracy,
  6. of ethnicity,
  7. of love, desire, reason,
  8. of knowledge, literacy . . . what else should I include?
  9. Everything?
     • One could not include everything, but in attempting toward everything–and the toward here is important to note–
     • The journal achieves its perpetuation, realizes its purpose. In perpetuity is the desire of its editorial staff, whether that’s many or one.
• The Falling Leaf Review is a critical journal.
  1. The writing is in the tradition of essay writing as inherited through a nearly five hundred year old legacy begun with Montaigne.
     • I don’t want to debate the merits of this tradition, nor do I want to defend Western Civilization, as it seems to be in need of defending–
     • yes, we are faced with another crisis in civilization, as they have been repeated around then world across time, what we like to call  history.
• There is no need to ask me if I think history is progressive; you might as well ask me if I think the ocean is progressive.
  1. Neither is.
• All time is one, Einstein reminded us.
• Where then does this journal take us–take me.
• This review made up of the literary essays and a blog, in some places on-line cached as The Essay Review and in others boxed as The Falling Leaf Review, formerly The Essay Review . . .
  1. where then does it go, does it arrive, take us; what does it–can it–achieve
• Questions keep coming.
• Clearly into the world of thinking as it has been developed by traditions in the west since antiquity we explore.
  1. Yes, I do not ever know what I think until I write, unless I write–
     • the writing is where I find out how I think.
• Writing is salvation as it is sanitation, sanitizing me–
  1. my sanity is contained herein.
  2. All sanity is about sanitation.
  3. 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, upper case by necessity.
       • How could I not?
• A belief in the power of the People makes what I have to say other than simple diatribes against power from a simple separate person whose lonely voice is swallowed by a cacophony of social noises–no!
• People is a word that demands the upper case here and elsewhere, when we are talking about Jefferson’s We the People.
  1. The People are an institution of power.
  2. The fore mentioned simple separate person is often more easily dismissed by power than honest, genuine and passionate critique that employs the energy of a form that has often been used against poewr and has never really been employed by power.
• The Literary Essay then is most importantly an organ of Truth, also by necessity in upper case. 
  1. Moreover, the quality of the writing, even among the Jeremiads, is what carries the critique, giving it the power it has as a rebuttal for elites and refutation for elitist politics as they are made manifest in societies around the globe.
  2. Again, I am not herein at this time going to defend a western tradition of thought, nor the inheritance from our Greco-Roman heritage.
• Humanism is an idea, a goal, a tradition that has not been abandoned in these pages, and it is in its pages that this journal needs to be explored.
• The Pages section contains the essays, themselves several pages or more on the topics therein exposed.
• Exposition seems to be an art reduced to a craft managed by the received ideas or the sound-bite mentality dominant in our media, even our print media, itself being reformed by social media.
• Ma Plume et Mon Droit.

The Publishing-Editor/Author is JVR.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright JVR 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015