Monologues and Vision I I see you, I dream you, I've dreamed you before, alone, I smell you, forrest of rain at dawn. I could not imagine, imagination was not yet dead . . . where did I hear that before? Yes, I question too much and not enough. What I intend has nothing exactly … Continue reading 6 I Smell You Forest of Rain; or, Six Ways of Looking at Myself (which does not infer that I do see myself or selves) [A Short-short Story]

The position of a traditional humanist in light of his culture's push for society to be more natural, as so many like to say about the things they do, the things they make, the ways they feel . . . which no one, as far as he can see, has any idea about, not really; … Continue reading Human Humane; That is All [prose poem]

How Similar is this to a Street Light Blaring through a Window like a Stampede of Elephants? by Lydia MacGregor Strident is as strident does. ---Anonymous He says, A woman with a nose as big as mine--and it is not that my nose is huge, but trust me, no woman wants my nose, unless she … Continue reading A Story by Lydia MacGregor [prose poem]

A story like any story and unlike every story, only like itself as are human-beings like every other human-being and yet unique in the whole of human history, itself the story of humanity, whether it is told or untold because stories are---they do exist; and they do exist independent of the telling. They remain there … Continue reading Plugs and Sockets [prose poem]

I came across this on a piece of paper left on a subway car bench on a Manhattan bound N-train I caught at Pacific Street on my way to Union Square. The title above was the title at the top of page one. I have used it here as the title of this entry for … Continue reading Pro Deo et Patria? [prose poem]

[Flash Fiction] I tell the story of a story told in writing of a story told in writing by someone who created a storyteller in the written text to tell the story of someone who becomes, in some minds, conflated with the storyteller; and the evidence of this is in the artifact found by a woman … Continue reading When 1 Person, 2 Persons, 3 Persons, More are Not Enough

"I still believe I am capable of murder. I know at least five or six bus drivers I would have already shot if I were crazy enough to think I could get away with it. I hesitate to say fat pig brutes reading at the seventh grade, but I want to think it," he says. What else … Continue reading Victim, Victimize, Victimizer [Flash Fiction]

Time: Evening Place: Rome [After an afternoon visit to the Sistine Chapel, at a caffe.]   He says what he says when he writes in his journal as he has written in one for how long now counting in the decades for sure. These are excerpts from his journal, his being whose? There is the he I … Continue reading The Sistine Chapel Tells, prose poem

Of course I believe in God. The universe is too absurd. Nature would create a universe that made more sense, he said to her, a woman he imagines listens to him as he listens to himself, talking to himself to others in himself at once. She pretends badly that she is listening to him. He … Continue reading Happy Marriage; or, Praise of Folly [prose poem]

  Pre-Prologue . . . and it was raining and raining and raining and there was nothing anyone could do about it or in it. Prologue It had begun to rain again. i The rain was coming down in sheets it seemed at one moment, in torrents the next, the gutters were awash, overflowing. When … Continue reading Rain Outside a Window in a Movie [A Short Story]

  falling leaf fallen leaves, late November morning- sun through the branches

Author's Prefeace There is a level of literacy coupled with a facility with the traditions of writing that allows a reader to do more than scrape the crumbs off a table as waiters do before the coffee and dessert. Do you have such acumen in  reading? I have argued a number of times that reading … Continue reading Memento Mori [Flash Fiction]

Infinite possibility is an avalanche waiting to bury me? Skimming pages is not reading. To read or not to read, now that is the question, whether it is nobler with the eyes to see the depth of the text, or with them, only look at the page, fooled by the superficiality of the paper, the … Continue reading Eight-hundred Words [A Short-short Story]

It looks like rain, it feels like rain, it is going to rain, I can tell. I am a sick man--no, not this. I am a hungry man--no, not this either. To fall or not to fall for her, for anyone, for anything, we are always falling for things, for others, someone somewhere, it is … Continue reading I Wait for the Rain [A Short Story]

Prefatory Remarks Everything in close-up. Totality is eclipsed? We imagine such a view. We think we know that this is the place, the location of . . . pornography is a grotesque metonymy. Metonymy is simply put, a part for the whole of the thing or the person, do you remember suit for business executive, sail for ship? Vagina for … Continue reading To Be Longing to Belong [fiction]

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 a … Continue reading Remembrance is not a Day [Flash Fiction]

What good are my 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. What good are they, these eyes that look at the world, to the world . . . I am asking. I … Continue reading Standing Under [Flash Fiction]

To look, to watch, to gaze, to see, I see, I gaze, I watch, to guard, I look, at and for, all in themselves with my eyes, how many eyes, the eyes I have in my head focussed on objects and persons in the world,the eyes in my mind, the eyes of whichever self I … Continue reading Look Watch Gaze [prose poem]

DEAD AHEAD I am not a woman and thus do not have a womb and thus cannot bear children and thus will never have the dilemma of abortion before me; this should not, thought, keep me from understanding her sash is when she is wherever she might be facing this dilemma––and dilemma is certainly even … Continue reading Iceberg, Dead Ahead

for Julio Cortazar "By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species." ----Charles Darwin I He looks left. He looks right. He looks forward. He looks about the subway car to the advertisements. He looks once more to the people around him, what kind … Continue reading Cum Grano [prose poem]

What is it that he must say or must do? He thinks about this without the words, and he does so quite seriously as if he were supposed to listen to someone speaking to him over his shoulder, someone over and above the I-am everyone has at his disposal; that is, rather than he was … Continue reading Remembrance is not a Day [a short-short story]

How many self-conscious days passed before he could be completely relaxed, comfortable even, with the laughter of strangers, these others around him. When was it that he had become impervious even to the remote possibility that others were laughing at him, so loudly as others sometimes would, and in such close proximity. He often used … Continue reading A Wince [Flash Fiction]

Je me deux, said Rimbaud in a letter to a friend; yes, I two myself.  Has there ever been a more succinct yet eloquent expression of the human Self struggling with its unity? --Jay V. R. Absence is absence the way a chair is a chair or a pig is a pig and not a table; that … Continue reading 2 I and Thou [A Short-short Story]

  for Giorgio de Chirico These are the abbreviated facts about what he thinks about metaphysical thinking without getting into an explication of metaphysics, or so I think he should want to say about what he says, but do say so myself about him and what he thinks has thought will continue to think I … Continue reading An Archaeology of First Principles [Flash Fiction]

The coldest winter? The snowiest winter . . . polar vortices . . . superlatives were abundantly overflowing this winter. Cold winters in New York are not unusual; mild ones are not anomalies either. One winter colder than another is unavoidable; but we do get ourselves worked up over the superlative degree: yes, the coldest, … Continue reading [h] Superlatives [A Short Story]

I used to imagine Montaigne sitting in his study and saying "I'd like it if I could sit down one day and have an I-to-I with me and me and me." --Jay V. R. Having an I-to-I 'He' is for persons in English, he used to say. All things are referred to singularly by the … Continue reading 3 I to I [A Short-short Story]

Two cups of coffee . Two friends in Cafe Mogador. "I have a solution for crime," she said. "What is it?" He asked. "Crucifixion," she said. He asked, "Crucifixion?" "Yes," she said, "we must crucify criminals. Nail them to their crosses." "Crucify them?" He asked. I won't say how. "There is no other way, really," … Continue reading Salvation Now [Flash Fiction]

Prologue I dream, I read, I write, I rewrite, I see again everything in many forms, the same things revised. Vision, revision; I look at, I look for, I look to you . . . what is it that I see when I drop so much I have to carry, hold up, stand under? I … Continue reading 5 God’s Finger to Adam’s [A Short Story]

I did not know L----. I did not know his parents. I am not Jewish. If I were I would not be Orthodox. This is not a condemnation of orthodoxy. If I were Jewish I would most likely be like the friends I grew up with in East Flatbush Brooklyn, reformed. I am merely filtering … Continue reading [d] God the Ungodly [A Short-short Story]

for Frederick , Michel and William The non-locatable Self of many, many selves . . . is it necessary for me to draw this out? He could, you know, but then what does that say, really, all this drawing out in detail--is everything really in the details? He remembers something like this from his good … Continue reading A Dialectic of Selfhood [Flash Fiction]

[If I were Humpty Dumpty--what would I do if I were? And why do we assume that Humpty is always an egg?] I I feel like Humpty Dumpty sitting on his wall, my wall, do not sit on the wall, the fence, which side are you on, boy, which side are you on? No fence-sitting … Continue reading [b] The Perils of an Anthropomorphic Egg [A Short Story]

Hockey was once touted as the world's fastest game . . . I remember the old Garden on 8th Avenue between 48th Street and 49th street, I think, yes, I can see the marquee outside the front like a theater marquee, the lobby entrance with the banner reading, Hockey, the world's fastest game, or was … Continue reading Re-memory [Flash Fiction]

  I daylight fading shadows stretching infant fingers into their skins I see a leaf fall from a tree, the last leaf on the tree I see. The woods I walked when I was a boy by Aunt Mae's in the Berkshires; Housatonic River Valley tributaries webbing the terrain . . . what is there … Continue reading [c] Falling through Bamboo [A Short Story]

The character of this piece has not been well drawn in the specifics that pertain to him and to him alone, but have been drawn in type, a die if you will, casting--no pun intended, unless there is an unconscious intention to what I say, and I guess I could agree with that without having … Continue reading Macrocosmically Me [Flash Fiction]

He cannot say with any accuracy what it was he felt when the doctor came out to tell him his father had died, having been outside the room as the team with the machines tried or did not try to save him, his dad, as he thought later, not having trusted the hospital his father … Continue reading Less Than; or Looking for More from Where it is not Likely Going to Come [Flash Fiction]

Anolie hears the clock in the hall ticking. She pauses to listen to the clock ticking. She thinks about the tick tick tick of the ticking clock in the hall ticking as other clocks might tick, may have ticked, she thinks she can recall; the clock continues to tick like it has for as long … Continue reading Had Fallen [Flash Fiction]

A singular vision is an exceptional one. A singular person is a person of exceptional qualities. Now a singularity in astrophysics is another term for black hole, an exceptional occurence in stellar evolution. The matter of a particularly massive star at the end of its life collapses, thus increasing its density where then its gravitational … Continue reading Toward a Philosophy of the Self in Analogy with Singularities [Flash Fiction]

A man discusses another man and in discussing this other man touches on a few significant points that could appear in anyone's theory of being, what it means to be, what it might mean not to be---and how this not to be is either the cessation of being or the endurance of becoming. This limits … Continue reading He is therefore He Thinks [Flash Fiction]

[What the man says he sees, he sees as he says, and so says surely he sees it, thus why he says what he says how he says it when he does.] the Character Sketch of a Man Fighting Off Pessimism Can Show You How to Engage Your Next Meditation On Death I see a … Continue reading How the Character Sketch of a Man Fighting Off Pessimism Can Show You How to Engage Your Next Meditation On Death

She thinks again about what she wants for lunch. She pauses once more about what she should get for lunch. A third time about maybe having what she had decided on having when she was leaving the park earlier, a few minutes ago, the number of them that it takes to walk to where she … Continue reading In My Whole Life, I Never Saw a Rabbit [Flash Fiction]

[I am going to tell a story {in the first person} of a man who tells the story of a man who has very strong political opinions about international politics, geopolitics in the middle east, and the role of the United States government in what he sees as the overarching political dogmas and received ideas … Continue reading Media, Messages and Menschen? [A Short Story]

A man and his manuscript in a cafe in Barcelona. A vacation sometime now several years ago. His mother is still alive, will be for at least another fourteen months when she will expire on his birthday, or so it will have been figured by the neurologist, just what dead is he will have no … Continue reading Other Eyes [Short Fiction]

The Minutes Buried [A Short Story]   If I were another kind of man, I might write something completely different from what I have here written, what I had written in the past, about my review, this literary review that had begun as a literary essay review, one I originally called The Literary Essay Review, the … Continue reading What If You Were Another Kind of Man?

He lives by the principles of universal democratic humanistic co-existence because he is not in a position to live as arbitrarily as his hypocritical self is inclined to do. If he had the means, he would join the hierarchically arranged social structure of economic and power elites, as so many with money or positions of … Continue reading Down Palace Walls [A Short Story]

The conch he had found on the shore in Rockaway he thinks he can remember, having had it for years on his dresser, always present on his dresser, the whole in its side a reminder of the tumult of life he tried to mean one day he also thinks he can recollect, remembering what he … Continue reading Cracked Conch [Flash Fiction]

Sunset behind the Verrazano Bridge is beautiful today he imagines she might think, seen as it would be from a standing vantage by the benches where she sits: She says she sees a little blonde girl in a blue dress with buttercups in her hand for mama "who sits on the bench," an offering, she adds … Continue reading Buttercups, a Pen and a Lunch Special not for Dinner [Flash Fiction]

[All words in quotes herein are verbatim from the lips of their speaker to the ears of this teller.] "My boy's running with other boys in the park by our home next to Gravesend Bay," he said, not out loud, under his breath, to feel the weight of the words on his tongue, he used to … Continue reading Running, Laughing, Leading [Flash Fiction]

A boy and a girl reach out their hands to each other standing in the grass behind the benches in a row along the path outlined by them and the grass behind, as I have said. This grassy place, in the park with the children that play away from the other children who rush and … Continue reading To Each or not to Each this Spring [Flash Fiction]

Cars in herds around the park on the streets around the park. Horns sounding now like sheep in flocks before shearing. I see a wasp on a daisy in the grass behind the bench I sit on in the park this late afternoon, rush-hour. Cacophony. I see a woman standing with her baby in her … Continue reading Bleating [Flash Fiction]

Time: Then. Place: There. He remembered having read that "truth is in tautology." He did not wonder who said that. He can only see himself obliquely in a past, a kind of vignetting in the mind . . . what is  that about tautologies? You might ask. A tautology  frames the essence of Truth--a truth is a truth … Continue reading A Robin is a Robin and not a Sparrow [Flash Fiction]

  I say so many things as I have said so many other things and will say yet so many more things. "So, If I save a life, I save the world?" He asks his friend who says that that's right, "Yes, that's what has been said," I say. "So, If I save myself, I … Continue reading What Many Would Call Trite [Flash Fiction]

Preface I woke to find myself in a dream, and in the dream I said what I said, clearly enough and to another and another, although I cannot recollect if in the dream I actually saw anyone's face, for I might have been talking only to myself in everything I said to another . . … Continue reading Of Himself Standing in a Dark Basement [Flash Fiction]

A man not so unlike any other man, but certainly in many details unlike every other man, this one and that one and another one, each of them (us) is part of the general scheme of things we call human, all too human, what we mean when we say that--what do we mean when we … Continue reading If [A Short Story]

A man speaks about a man who writes in his journal about what he sees as similarities between Kerouac and Thoreau in the matters of diction and voice,  world-view(?) and affinities for the characters they describe, and although he does so, this man speaking of another man,  he does do so without quotes or other … Continue reading Side-by-Side [Flash Fiction]

What is the Plain of Truth? I ask in earnest. I thinkI must set out into this world to look for this plainess. What is the plan--I must open the eyes, open the ears, empty the mind--thinking is in itself prejudice, no? That is belief, as I have said, I used to say. To know … Continue reading The Rats who Tried to Bell a Cat [A Short-short Story]

I don't understand the love that needs to lie to itself to go on loving, she said. She paused. She said no more on this. She continued to look out the kitchen window at the sparrows flocking on the fire escape this morning. If your son or daughter is an asshole, and I mean a … Continue reading In Two Hours; or, You Would be Mistaken [Flash Fiction]

Some formalist reflections on authorship--and I am not going to begin a journey some contemporary graduate school asshole is calling meta-reflection,which is what everyone in philosophy used tp understand by the term, 'meditation,' clearly not the meditation practiced by anyone seeking enlightenment, but then western philosophy in its use of the term meditation is surely not … Continue reading I Wish I did not Have to Endure the Words formed by so many Insipid Graduates of Universities who Continue to imagine that They must Be the First to Have Ever Thought What They Think because No One Had Smart Phones or the Internet as It is Today, Then . . . in That Time Before [Flash Fiction]

I love being at the ocean. I love watching the ocean seawater waves coming to shore one after another and another with nothing petty about their movement, their rising, swelling, turning, curling falling all of a sudden in a thunderous crash, and all over again and again, the silver sinuosity of the eavelet caps out … Continue reading Reading Juan Ramon Jimenez by the Sea [Flash Fiction]

I am skimming pebbles on the surface of Onota Lake in Pittsfield. It is the summer of 1968, July 22. In exactly one year, Apollo 11 will make its way back to earth from the moon. The craters in the moon's surface have been made by meteor collisions. I do not know if it is … Continue reading Skimming Pebbles [Flash Fiction]

A fictional editor of a fictional review writes an "About Us" entry in the review he publishes with the help of no one, himself being the whole of the staff, everything is written by him . . . he asks a friend to read the text of his proposed "About Us" section for the literary … Continue reading How Hamlet’s Advice to the Players is Sound Advice to You and Me

Created equal . . . something I say, I think we understand, I have heard, I know we have said we have wanted this. I sometimes do not remember where I have heard it, that all of us are created equal . . . something I assume I know in the marrow of my bones, … Continue reading Beware the Frost in Early Spring [Flash Fiction]

He died. I don't recall if unexpectedly. We made it to Pittsfield to bury him. I helped carry his casket. I had helped carry the casket of Aunt Mae, of Cousin Michael who had come home in a bag, all of them that summer. Two in June; one in September; I do not recall which … Continue reading How Doubt Has Become the Image of Truth for You, for Me, for Everyone

A man asks a question, Is there a market in America for the literary essay? The man answers his own question with an I doubt it; he then pauses. He thinks about what he has asked, asking himself questions the way he has, the way he has grown accustomed doing while writing essays as he … Continue reading To Be Afraid or not to Be Afraid [Flash Fiction]

He wonders why she has to be the way she is, how she is. She wonders why he has to say what he says, Imagining he says whatever he does, She does, Because it upsets her.

https://youtu.be/Kq2qsAZ1hn0

He is not really a misanthrope, I would say about me in the third-person, if I wanted to speak about me without you thinking it was me saying what I was saying . . . about me; although I think there might still be some of you who imagine him to be one no matter … Continue reading Musings [Flash Fiction]

I have always found Sancerrity better than sincerity. Sitting on the banquet in the corner diagonally across from the entrance under the mirror at right angle to his face and the poster of La Bete Humaine, starring Jean Gabin, he sips a glass of Sancerre, a bottle he has ordered, on the table, not on ice, coming up. … Continue reading Medium, Never Well [a Chap Book of prose poetry]

If I were a spider, my webs would have purpose.

Prologue I remember my days in university. What do I remember from my days in university? Questions made to order, someone said, I heard her say it, I didn't say anything to her about how trite she sounded when she said it. Questions asked, questions formed, what they do to us--to me--when answering is not … Continue reading Banana Tree

A Fictional Essay on the Truths of the Matter   The Real Author I do not understand how we do not understand how gay marriage and abortion rights are related, connected in one notion of human rights, absolute, universal and transcendent (and really, go fuck yourself if you are of the mind to insist that … Continue reading In Some Dictionaries, ‘Martyrdom’ Follows ‘Marriage’ [a Short Story]

A man writes of another man, an unnamed man sitting in a cafe, himself who writes an essay in his journal, an essay we do not get to see entirely, only the excerpts the man who writes of the man who writes the essay allows us to see . . . A man sits at … Continue reading A Man at a Table in a Cafe Sometime Late in the Year 1999 [Flash Fiction]

He writes: Reading Patti Smith's M Train. Got it for Christmas. Was in a biography of T. Williams at the time so did not begin reading it right away. Picked the former here up after the latter was put down (not like horses). Put it down again--much in the way of final revisions for my book,  poetry … Continue reading A Flower of Evil [flash fiction]

One Here we are in the garden of my vanity, across the lawn we go, the grass is high, has not been cut since I do not know when, and down the hole we go with the whole of human history, anonymous me I can say with impunity . . . . I write essays … Continue reading Alice Buconiglio; or, Under the Hedge [a Novella]

Afterwards; or, an Afterword [a short story]   This is not an ordinary tale told by an idiot, but by a person who imagines his readers charitably. Should this stand instead for a good repast; should this tale be told by one who seeks to keep his readers sane, that is sanitized to the condition of … Continue reading When the Tale is Told by an Idiot; or, How You Imagine Fiction Gets Said

Prefatory Remarks by an Anonymous Author If what is an author, is a question, then what is an expositor, is another . . . and this then amounts to what, here, now? Is this yet another fictional exploration of the role of expositor in an essay, and what the expositor becomes when the essay is … Continue reading In Formation [a short-short story]

VIII I am approaching the idea of Gay Marriage from more than the position of civil rights, which is how it wound up in the Supreme Court, which is a very good thing to have had happen. We must understand, though, that it is not the Court that gives Gay Couples the right to marry. … Continue reading Gay Marriage VIII

How much more do we need to know about Ms. Finestra? What esle should I say, or allow her to say--I do not feel that I am impeding her from saying anything that could be said about her, or in her defense, or in aside. Whatever she would need to say would be said. Whatever … Continue reading Before the Law, or, From the Notebook of Chiara Finestra, April, 1995 [a Short Story]

A man on the Alewife-bound Redline to Harvard Square from Park Street Station at Boston Commons down the hill from the gold-domed Statehouse Building and right next to Park Street Church whose graveyard has the grave of Paul Revere is reading Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. He is on his way to Harvard Square to meet a friend for … Continue reading Having Forgotten the Cork Screw [prose poem]

A man in a bistro on a chair at a table across from a woman sitting on the banquet in the far corner diagonally opposite the entrance on the right as you walk in is talking as they have been talking about this or that or some other thing, now another, then yet another, whether … Continue reading A Man in a Bistro Talks of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” [flash fiction]

A Specimen from an Anatomy of Melancholy Sun in the train through the window, shadows cast--a woman plays with her braid, sitting. There, a face of a man asleep, across from me on this train, Manhattan-bound, to meet her after theater class, to go for a drink. I had a slice before I left. Margarita. A … Continue reading How to Read the Face of the Man Across from You on the Train

The sun this morning yellow through the curtains of the living room windows looking east; this morning looking out the window with her gone, my coffee is bitter and lukewarm in the cup on the saucer on the sill, no spoon, as I take my coffee black, no sugar, espresso from the espresso machine that … Continue reading A Matter Of [Flash Fiction]

"Sunsets from the Brooklyn Bridge," she says, "are the most beautiful. You have to go up there and see, she said," saying said, said saying . . . words, words and more words would only be subtraction. Years later, I still only imagine she is right.

. . . a polemical piece written in the form of a letter to a friend by Jose Detras and presented here in its entirety. I came across the text in hard copy, the original, from the hand of a friend of mine from Madrid, who hand inherited the papers of Jose Detras's friend Federico, … Continue reading Hysterical Historical [A Short Story]

Part VIII, next week, Tuesday, March 29th, 2016.   VII All of the former points made in previously published parts notwithstanding, we still see attacks on abortion clinics and a savage opposition to the availability and distribution of birth control, both of which run parallel to the sometimes savage and even violent reactions to the … Continue reading Gay Marriage VII

  Pre-prefatory Remarks Diatribe. A forceful and bitter attack against someone or something, ideas, maybe; unwanted presence, perhaps? Tirade. Invective. A long, angry speech of criticism or accusation, probably both. Polemic. A strong verbal or written attack on someone or something. Preface Hallucinating Van Gogh crows on a canvas I dreamed, I think I dreamed, I remember it … Continue reading A Fictional Essay by a Fictional Essayist in a Fictional America [A Short Story]

  I continue to draw myself into arguments with myself over how I am going to accomplish the tasks I continue to avoid. I avoid; I a void. What am I next?  

My friend, Jay, has just emailed me. (I am sipping my coffee, just brewed, and I am cutting and pasting his email in my blog): Soon to see my book ready. The final proof being reviewed. A minor correction before I agree to setting it for publication. It is his poetry manuscript entitled Land's End. It is … Continue reading The Book is Ready? [Flash Fiction]

I am  a poet, an editor, a teacher, a thinker, a human-being. I am what I like to call a lover of literature. I sometimes say that you have to love literature too much to love it enough--I like to say her for literature. Diatribes and tirades are my forte, a strength I acquired as one of … Continue reading To Essay; a prose poem

I There were no ice flows in the Seine the February we were there, crazy in Paris in the winter. Who goes to Paris in the winter--many it seemed from our wanderings, but it was cold--yet there were no ice flows. We walked the water's edge and feared falling in and drowning, as she said, … Continue reading D’Arc that Brings Light [a Short Story]

Brendan the Navigator was the proposed title for the following piece, differing from the one given to it here in the text, within which the following was contained: A Brief Note on the Voyages of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Irish Monk, Seaman and Saint, as a Preface to a Minor Salute to Saint Patrick, and without any … Continue reading Brendan the Navigator[Flash Fiction]

I am a New Trinitarian. God is He, She and It. There is a way of using traditional trinitarian theology in understanding this idea. After establishing the basic X, Y and Z of the trinitarian theology, we would only need to develop the argument metaphysically in order to appropriately handle the pronomial references for God … Continue reading A Heretical Trinitarian Speaks of the Trinity [Flash Fiction]

Today is the Ides of March. I am planning to re-read Julius Caesar in commemoration.  I remember that this play was the first of Shakespeare's plays I had ever seen on stage. I was in 9th grade . . . I had never before seen a Shakespeare play on stage. Is that true? Perhaps . . . … Continue reading Memory

  In traditional marriage, throughout all the English speaking world, a woman becomes a wife; a man, a husband. In English, these titles, if you will, reveal something intrinsic in the traditional mentality concerning marriage. 'Wife' comes from the Anglo-saxon word for female, not woman or spouse. In this context, female is equal to breeder, … Continue reading Gay Marriage VI

  My book is ready, or so I have assumed, perhaps out of impatience--I do not think so. I am still waiting for the final proof to arrive--how long should that take. I do not get what the publisher is saying or not saying--the not saying having more to do with what I do not … Continue reading Tangental [Flash Fiction]

  Anonymopusly speaking, Ginny, Ginny, come out of your dark room, deny your doctors and refuse that glass of milk. What if, Anonymous said, if this were an untitled manuscript by an anonymous author found on the D Train in the New York City Subway one afternoon? What if I were that person who found this … Continue reading Anonymously Speaking [a short story]

What is it that any man can say about what gets said from him in the guise of others he is not aware of, or not completely in control of when he does at least have an inkling that there is another voice speaking the words he says or writes or thinks, sometimes thinking taking … Continue reading Form Beauty Truth; an Aesthetics of In/Formation [a short story]

Every time I am anywhere there are a number of birds in clusters of flocks or groups if we cannot call such a small numerical congregation of any like birds a flock, I cannot help but imagine what I would do near any of these birds if I were destitute and living on the street, … Continue reading Noble Boozers [Flash Fiction]

I took my students into the middle of traffic on 86th street and generated what they already knew of English warnings and exclamatory clauses. I made sure that before we entered the middle of traffic during rush hour that they only use English. Running, screaming, and panting heavily are universal human responses to on-coming traffic, … Continue reading A Fictional Report on an ESOL Lesson that Might Have Never Taken Place [Flash Fiction]

Prologue What do I remember from my days in university--yes, what do I remember? I am not asking you, nor am I asking me in the way you might assume of you were someone from our contemporaneity who believed what they might say they believed having been formed by any one of the many academic … Continue reading Considerations on Being from Under the Banana Tree

for the Prophet Jeremiah A revised republication of a former blog entry by a man who writes a political blog that he publishes alone and with all the madness inherent from doing the likes in this society of vision through the ass and where doubt has become the highest wisdom. The anus is our third … Continue reading Trump Trumps All Reason [Flash Fiction]

Part VI next week, Tuesday March 15th, 2016. V Homosexual unions in and of themselves do not produce children, and as such, do not qualify as rightful marriage in the mind of many objectors. I mean, if marriage is to be restricted to heterosexual couples, then the presumption is that marriage must have something to … Continue reading Gay Marriage V

I looked to the clouds gathering on the horizon . . . Thomas Sarebbononnato To tell a story of woe; to write down what has been suffered; to see what is afoot; to see where we are going, maybe where we have been; to understand what has been; these and more are what we are … Continue reading Wire Hangers, Curtain Rods, Queers and Guns; a Short Story

". . . [A] duty brought me here to the house of Hades. I had to consult the soul of Teiresias the Theban." Odysseus to his Mother in the house of Hades The Odyssey, Book XI Translated by Robert Fitzgerald I I have to re-imagine space, how I look at objects in place, what I … Continue reading Blind Prophet; two chapbooks of poetry

For Constantin Stanislavski I hear the pot in the kitchen, the sound it makes when the coffee is almost ready, a pot for to make espresso on the stove, a pot from Italy, brewing espresso on the same principle as volcano's erupt. My little Vesuvius, I call it, and I'm only discussing the coffee pot and … Continue reading Espresso Pot; a Short Story

Hot Dogs at Ditch Plains? The distance between places in a city like New York is easy to determine. I count streets, I count avenues, or both, and I know approximately how far one place is from another by counting the number of blocks I have walked. Numbered streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn, for instances, … Continue reading Ditch Plains Dogs; a Short Story

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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]

I would never use the word if it weren't for the fact that no one has the ability to use another. I don't look for synonyms for 'bicycle." It is suitable for all referencing. There are two cycles, two circles, two wheels. I use it irrespective of whether the word suits my taste. I use … Continue reading Feather Dusters, Full Moons and Bloggers [Flash Fiction]

The exchange of our personal facts is too free and too easy. The kind of information exchanged today is the kind we kept close or offered only to our kin. Now we open the book to those who are not kin and a lot less than kind. But then facts are in themselves things made, … Continue reading Permeation [Flash Fiction]

I sit with espresso in a cup, I bought the other day, made in  Portugal. I used to have plates fired in Portugal. What having had plates from Portugal has to do with having a coffee cup made in Portugal is beyond me. I am having a piece of pastry leftover from her birthday two … Continue reading Recollections in Something Other than Tranquility [Flash Fiction]

What else is there to say about the wilderness, a social landscape laid barren, made waste by our social and political ineptitude. Yes, what could I say about the desert we have understood from how many of our formative stories--Moses, the Baptist, Jesus, Mohammed, who else in the wastelands of societies and their politics. Call … Continue reading Into the Wild [Flash Fiction]

I cannot imagine a world without wine. I can imagine Paris without people who are not French. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to imagine such a heinous thing as a world without wine; I cannot fathom the thinking during prohibition that lead fucking Protestant gringos in American California to destroy three and four hundred year … Continue reading Cruel and Unusual Punishment [a Short-short Story]

There were no ice flows in the Seine that February--we were there in February? Crazy to be in Paris in the winter. Who goes to Paris in the winter? Many, though, it seemed, at least from the observations made in our wanderings--the lines for the Eiffel Tower were long--but it was cold, very f*%&ing cold. … Continue reading D’Arc that Brings Light

[ . . . ] . . . so look for Serial Essays upcoming in February and March, particularly "Gay Marriage" and "In Itself American." The former every Tuesday through February and March; the latter, every Wednesday in February and March, culminating on the final Thursday, the 31st. You must dedicate yourself to reading, which means penetrating the text, … Continue reading Serialized Essays [Flash Fiction]

Do me a favor, take that newspaper and press it to your nose, no do it, trust me, I'm not going to do anything fucked up, just put to your nose, up against it, your nose to the paper, good, now  keep it there, do not move it no matter what I ask you to … Continue reading Beyond Living [Flash Fiction]

  I can spell cannot be the call out of our literacy. No it cannot. A, B, C, D and so on, yes, Alpha, Beta . . . what next? I do not mis-spell my name and so I should say that I am proud of my literacy? Reciting the alphabet is not in itself … Continue reading Spell, Spelling, Spelled; The Magic of Technology [Flash Fiction]