[reverse via the paragraphs] How many times do I ask myself who I am? I live a life and only occasionally wonder about what should be the surest thing in that life, my being. What do I know better than my to be or not? What could I know as well? Why being at all … Continue reading Being with a Bow [Flash Fiction]

To kill or not to kill, that might be a question, if not the. Is it nobler to imagine a world where killing would be unnecessary? How many slings and arrows of fortune should I have to endure? Is it be better to end them by ending their source, Or continue to sleepwalk my way … Continue reading Questions To Be [Flash Fiction]

Lesbian, in other words Witch; or should this be otherwise: Witch, in other words, Lesbian. --The Author 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 resonance in the words used--must … Continue reading An Author’s Preface to a Lost Story: Marriage is as Marriage Does [Flash Fiction]

Here is an extract from a previously published critique of American Government by a man given to diatribes in his essay writing, but not incoherent rants, and of course you should be saying right now that there is a connotative difference between diatribe and rant, and the one given here is that diatribe has more … Continue reading Bureaucrats, Politicians and Cronies [Flash Fiction]

[. . .] IV Popularity and plurality have taken over our ethics, which is why we always defer to star actors and actresses as spokesmen or spokeswomen. Truth is numerical, arithmetic, additional. This is the prelude to the will to power. This is what we suffer socially and economically today. We have no other reasons … Continue reading Popularity is not Plurality [Flash Fiction]

III Again, doubt, doubt and more doubt is what we teach, what we expect, what we receive from our ideas that there is no Truth, there is nothing transcendent, there are no absolutes, there is no Absolute, and, of course, that everything is relative, itself an error a lot less than human. We have become … Continue reading Sum Total [Flash Fiction]

  I reveal certain prejudices when I say Beauty--a neo-Romanticism we might conclude, but then the Romantics had more heart while yet keeping their heads. I don't have to look long to see how in love with doubt as a form of wisdom I have come to be in this culture--just reveal that you actually … Continue reading Reason Truth Beauty [Flash Fiction]

  Facts, facts and more facts--give me nothing but facts, or so we could say Mr Gradgrind would say . . . did say in similar words, I remember Hard Times by Dickens. I read it for an Urban Sociology class now nearly four decades ago. Ours is another call for needful things. The one … Continue reading The Highest Wisdom [Short-short Fiction]

From a law student's notebook found on a chair next to the chair the editor of this review sat at for lunch at 9 Tastes Thai on JFK Blvd. in Cambridge one semi-chilly afternoon in early May waiting for an undergraduate student who was attending Harvard at the time Once a suspect goes to trial, … Continue reading Guilty versus Not Guilty [Flash Fiction]

Midwives would have managed the induced miscarriages in any society. They would have left themselves opened to the accusations of witchcraft. You cannot imagine that this was not true for most places in medieval Europe and elsewhere. Now, even if induced miscarriage could always be made to look like accidental miscarriage, and thus be a … Continue reading The Pursuit of Property [Flash Fiction]

My feet dig themselves in the sands as one two three or five gulls want a jump on low tide here pecking for clams, back ad forth they go avoiding the wakes that drown my feet over my ankles in the surf soaked sands.

The word 'form' is from the Latin forma. Forma also translates, beauty. In the Roman mind, as in the Greek, beauty was always in form. It had to be in form. Only in form could beauty exist. So, form is beauty? Beauty form? I know where this is going; I suspect you do as well. … Continue reading Form, Beauty, Truth

[. . .], so then, an individual human life is plural---singular, certainly, yet plural. A paradox; a conundrum? Of course this singular-plural life is both a paradox and a conundrum. What then should I--do I have to--say about the individual human life? Any choice a person makes in determining his I-ness amounts to an oppression of … Continue reading A Fragment Abridged [Flash Fiction]

Small Press, Big Impression To write or not to write, that is the question every writer faces, must ask himself or herself, at what answer or response is it aimed? I am shooting arrows blind. How many days is it acceptable to let pass when writing a blog--is this a blog? Is it not a … Continue reading How Many Days Should You Let Pass When You Are Writing a Blog?

This I is persistently we. Of this, I am certain, but then this kind of offhanded certainty often masquerades as science. Again, I know that I is we mostly by faith. To know; to have faith--I do not want to put one or the other above either in any ascendancy, faith or science. We becomes … Continue reading The Self Toward Philosophy [Flash Fiction]

To be or not to be is the fundamental philosophical question; it is not only a question of suicide; it is to mediate being, to choose an actual existence, thus to remove oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being, as close to a primordial nothingness as anything related … Continue reading I Cannot Get Myself to Believe in a Primordial Nothingness [Flash Fiction]

for Emerson A man, a person, an American, a New Yorker, educated, we like to say, university so, speaks of himself in relation to his Self, mostly incidentally, on paper, but as if he were talking to friends over drinks waiting for dinner as they do sometimes, several of them, have diner together for no … Continue reading Self-Relevance [Flash Fiction]

The difficulty anyone faces when trying to connect with another is that the I is already a plurality. I am we, for sure. There is no room left for anyone else, it seems, or so I believe. Of course we are familiar with Shakespeare's all the world's a stage . . . all the Self … Continue reading The I is We [Flash Fiction]

DOUBLE-EDGED AXE I would like to live in the trees with the chimps. I am not sure that even the chimp-me could beat a baby baboon against a tree. It’s not if a chimp were me, but if I were a chimp? Take the baby baboon by the feet and swing thus . . . … Continue reading Labyrinth [Flash Fiction]

What though is the Self? Could it perhaps remain distinct categorically from what we mean by psychology, mentality or personality? Who am I inside? Who do I become outside? Outside in this place, at that time, here or there, then or now . . . wherever however whenever? Should I ask, what are they, when … Continue reading I Cannot for the Life of Me Delineate the Differences between Self and Soul [prose poem]

daylight fading shadows stretching infant fingers into their skin Source: Haiku ii

[ . . . ] Mind is certainly void of any tactility as is also the human soul--and I reassert herein the tangibility of both mind and soul irrespective of either having no tactility. Tactility, we must remember, is not the sole verifier of the real. I am not going to play ping-pong between the … Continue reading Competing Acceptance [Flash Fiction]

An editor republishes in his current review an editorial he published in another review he was publishing on line as many as ten years ago. This piece is a reprint of an earlier version, revised, How could I resist reissuing this critique of one of America's great agencies of control and information gleaning for the State, … Continue reading Spy, Spying, Spied [A Short-short Story]

The Falling Leaf Review is managed as a critical journal, and 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 … Continue reading To the Breach Once More [A Short Story]

  He is who is he is as I have said before about others in one or another circumstance. Who he is when he is where he is how he is--I am who I am even if I forget who I am, not necessarily from amnesia but how everyone forgets himself from time to time. … Continue reading Sometimes in the Mirror [Flash Fiction}

Nausea comes and goes in waves. An ocean of nausea. Tides come in and tides go out. Storm surges raise the height of the waves sometimes, overcome as you are with this special nausea. I remember one time after having seen a production of Beckett’s Endgame, I met up with friends and drank myself until … Continue reading Mourning Becomes Nausea [Flash Fiction]

  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]

for Hamlet, My Brother, My Likeness; and for my special friend Oscar A man would certainly have to have a heart of stone, as Oscar had said, not to laugh at the Devil Himself in Hell. The fault of my fate--our fate? What fate? Whose? This fate, socially and politically, of course, is not in … Continue reading The Question? [Short Story]

[A text is one that speaks to us, we have said. A text has something to say and all we have to do is listen. I also imagine that this is naive. This is a kind of passivity in the manner of interpreting? What is it that we hear when we listen to a text; … Continue reading A Short Neck Among Giraffes [A Short-short Story]

for James Baldwin   I cannot fathom the depth of character, of mind, or of soul that is necessary for compassion. I have mastered the art of appearing to be compassionate, when in turn of fact, I am anything but understanding in a degree that qualifies as compassionate. A society bred on the idea that … Continue reading Nativity [a Short Story]

Polemic is a mask to wear, as is critique of any kind, as is diatribe, tirade, letter to posterity, essay, personal, literary, critical . . . every essay is a work of fiction, one kind or another;things made, we understand, but also in the way all theories are in themselves fictional in more than one … Continue reading Faith and Belief [Essayistic Fiction]

History, like time, is an ocean, not a river, it never goes from point A to point B. We do imagine we are more compassionate today than in the past because like most ages, we believe ours to be the best of times, even with as many problems as we envision for our age. If … Continue reading Circus Bread, a Polemic [Flash Fiction]

I wear many masks. I have worn many. I will wear many, many more; I will have worn and re-worn uncountable many by the time I die. Who I am not as important as who I will have been? Remember Solon, my friends, if not, reexamine your Herodotus; it's early on. I It does not … Continue reading Waiting for Myself (A Non-Utilitarian Reckoning by an Anonymous Reader Alone?) [Short Fiction]

Love of country cannot be equal to love of state; that is, no more than the public can ever entirely be the people. In the America I had been raised to love, the government was never your friend, and that was something I was taught by an ex-Marine father who was yet always faithful. He … Continue reading My Brother, My LIkeness [Flash Fiction]

A letter from one friend to another several years ago. Dear Alice, Do you remember when John Lennon had said that woman is the nigger of he world? I remember this clearly, I think; at least I can imagine myself recollecting this one or more times in the about this further ago past from whenever … Continue reading Minstrel Show [Flash Fiction]

All black and white photography is the world in shades of gray . . . I won't be able to wait for the film to go away, to fade out--I am not able to talk the truth of monochrome without one or another allusion or reference to the film made--how many shades of gray are … Continue reading Monochrome 4 [Flash Fiction]

To tell or not to tell, what is this telling or this tolling, sum-totaling all our words we speak in creeping phrases until the last syllable of recording our story, our story is history, the history becomes other than dead in the telling, all tales told, all is tolled, herein now, the form of a … Continue reading Barnum and Obama [A Short-short Story ]

Of course, sex is natural. Of course, it is normal. Of course, I have said this before, many times before, word following word on how we can raise sex and sexuality to where they belong in our minds, or debase them the way we do, representing them as we do, dis-understaanding them as we have. … Continue reading Constitutionality; A Polemical Short Story

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 [Flash Fiction]

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 … Continue reading The Journal is the Journey [Flash Fiction]

To Ask or Not to Ask To ask or not to ask--we have learned to ask questions as a means of not receiving an answer; we have learned to respond at times as a means to avoid answering. What is it we do when we ask? Is it the question to question? Asking and questioning … Continue reading How You Have Learned to Ask Questions as a Way of Avoiding Answers

Let's not forget this Thanksgiving that the Pilgrims were political radicals, and the Mayflower Compact is one of the great liberal documents in history.

The 'we' you find anywhere in my essays is the conventional editorial we, the we of most social commentary, the we that sets before it, as a rhetorical strategy, you and I, not solely the collective plural. I am not separate from you, another form of the I and thou we all need to understand … Continue reading We, Another Mask [Flash Fiction]

  The Delights of My Autopsy [A Short Story] Considering what it is I write and perhaps why it is I write what I do when I do; considering context for the writing, the where, the when, the to-whom I write--what? What should come next? To write or not to write has been my be … Continue reading THE DELIGHTS OF MY AUTOPSY [a short story]

It is not antisemitic to be anti-zionist, any more than it was anti-German to be anti-Nazis. Zionism does not have to be a right-wing politique, but it has become one. Zionism is not in itself Jewish; there are plenty of Christians, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox who are also Zionists; there are also plenty of Muslims … Continue reading Imperialism, Colonialism, Nationalism, Zionism [A Short-short Story]

Progress is not an inference drawn from chronology alone. We can move through chronology, pass through the years from one to another without inferring anything like progress has happened. Do you think history is progressive, whatever history is? Do you believe in progress happening correlative to chronology passing? What is this thing time? Do we … Continue reading Inference Drawn [Flash Fiction]

Can is able to, can is allowed to, can is know how to, and this has everything to do with what gets recorded. The history of DNA, for instance is not what was initially recorded or acknowledged by the Nobel committee, or passed down in other historiography, finding its way into textbooks and then taught … Continue reading Hypocrite Reader [Flash Fiction]

A three page essay on Israel's place in the continuum of European colonialism and the fateful fall into imperialist politics, written by a political science student as part of the preface he is writing for his thesis. The essay was written independent of the thesis which has been completed. The Preface is currently being composed … Continue reading Part of a Preface [Flash Fiction]

Is Islam in itself an impediment to democracy or is it the village mind of hundreds of millions of muslims living in third world poverty around the world, barely literate enough to read even Holy Qu'ran, let alone anything that would foster democratic thinking? We have to be better educated about history and more honest … Continue reading Islam and Illiteracy? The Questions of a Polemicist [Short-short Fiction]

Spleen. I vent my spleen in these books, the notebooks and journals I keep, have kept to a number of them in excess of twelve thousand pages of entries. Yes, listen my hypocrite readers, I could say, in the garden of my vanity, flowers of evil thrive . . . it’s not enough to say … Continue reading New York, Spleen [Short-short Fiction]

[Fiction] Who am I? I ask. I do, regularly? How often? How many times I have I could not count. A familiar refrain of mine, the inability to count how many times I have done something, read something, seen something heard . . . I do ask this question, how should I say? Now and … Continue reading Longing for Actuality; Looking for Selfhood; a Dialectic

A Trial of Ideas by a Man Who Writes a Blog for a Website Dedicated to Political Commentary   He says for himself what he says for himself when says what he says for himself, I have heard him say similarly, in words almost like these. He writes a blog for a Political Commentary Website. … Continue reading Beginning or End [Flash Fiction]

A man and his friend are at the bar in a restaurant in SOHO. They are having a beer, pints. It is lunch time. They are talking as men talk at bars over beers all across the western world--no? Did you have a look at Muslim protests against the ISIS bombings in Paris--where were the … Continue reading Men Only Protest? [Flash Fiction]

I had been reminded one night by a Hasidic student of mine that stoning is still part of Jewish law, but that they cannot stone anyone in America. Perhaps this is the progressiveness we should be most proud of; however, we have always preferred ropes to rocks. Yes, rocks and ropes will harm me, but … Continue reading Correctly Political [Flash Fiction]

I heard a man in a coffee shop in Brooklyn where I was having breakfast. I was at my table with my journal, as usual, going everywhere I go with pen and paper. He was a man not so unlike any other man; he was unlike every man. Do you need to know more about … Continue reading A Man in a Coffee Shop Said [Flash Fiction]

The French were never freer than during the Nazis occupation, you said; or so you said this hypothesis had been presented by Jean Paul Sartre in his short essay, "The Republic of Silence,"which you read, you said, when you were taking a seminar in existentialism, I think it was, I think I remember, and it … Continue reading French Heideggerean Existentialist Philosophers [A Short-short Story]

The Centers Will Not Hold. The kind of critique or commentary or exposition one needs to engage in a democratic society can only be accomplished effectively when literacy is raised above the levels we have come to accept as good enough, which I know are far from the mark. We are talking missing the target, … Continue reading Political Entropy [Short Story]

I do not know what Joe Monte thinks or would think if he were still alive. It is not likely that he is alive. I have no words for Joe now, nor did I then when I was a boy in his grocery buying Boar's Head ham sliced on the non-kosher slicer. I have no … Continue reading Yet Sympathy Demands Nonetheless [Flash Fiction]

Why did it take the horror of Paris for Obama and other western leaders to raise the intensity of their military responses to ISIS? Do we not have the will? I see there has been no way, not really, for too long. You do see that the responses have ben raised in their intensity. I'm … Continue reading The Polemicist Speaks Again of the Media President and Politicking over Politics [Flash Fiction]

Dear Reader, I have come to bury the idea that we should live in a society that cannot respect a woman's basic human right of choice. I have come to bury the notion that men have an appropriate bearing through legislation in curtailing a woman's right to choose, and not just abortion, but her sexuality … Continue reading Letter from the Editor; or, Pro Choice is a Two Way Street [Flash Fiction]

All media sell sets of values, they control perceptions by controlling the stream of images, by manipulating the ideas that are received through their organs. Control the organs of information and control the stream of images and the received ideas of the culture--anyone in control of the Media can control information and manipulate public opinion, … Continue reading All of a Piece; the American Media and Reactionary Politics from the Middle East; Part Two

Dear Chiara, I know you remember when you and I discussed at length just what a woman's position in this world is--and missionary position was culturally enforced only so women could be kept under men. But we must always remember that there was something Edgar Poe about abortion, something downright gothic horror, before Roe versus … Continue reading Second Sex Still? (A Letter from Jane) [Flash Fiction]

An angry young college student speaks of the American Media and Reactionary Politics in the Middle East. You will always know the names of the Israeli Soldiers who are killed while in Lebanon, but you will never know the names of the Palestinian children murdered by State sponsored terrorism at the hands of the Israeli … Continue reading All of a Piece [A Short Story]

http://bit.ly/1PHduuG The title says everything.

"Sharia Law is the Enemy of Freedom and an Affront to the Holy Wisdom Herself" ---an imagined man speaks as he would speak in the minds of those who would imagine what this imaginary man would say when confronted with the imagined reality of Sharia Law On Holy Wisdom A diatribe set up against positions … Continue reading Religious Freedom Does not Trump the Constitution [A Short Story]

What I am socially, politically, could help you to understand more about me? It could help you to know something about what I think about my place in politics? in the political continuum that I understand American Democracy to be? Should there be more is not the issue; will there be more is also not … Continue reading I Am We the People [Flash Fiction]

There is a transformation of the Freudian Es or Id as we like to say in English, preferring in this instance, Latin to either Freud's German or our own Anglo-Saxon. The Freudian Id is that It-monster that resides within me, yet apart from any of the mediating forces of my humanity. This monster breeder, the … Continue reading Laughing at the Devil [Flash Fiction]

Everything from one end of the monochromatic scale of black to that of white I am able to imagine when taking photos. I see color arrangement in monochrome. The black and white film I buy at B & H on 9th Avenue across from the Cheyenne Diner I have used for decades now--is it that … Continue reading A Chinese Box of Closets [Flash Fiction]

Lifeboats; lifejackets; parachutes–how is anti-abortion not letting steerage drown in the icy North Atlantic? The Titanic did not have enough lifeboats; this was understandable given British received ideas on liberty, individuality, human and civil rights; just how and when a man, a woman or a child of another class or ethnicity or religion deserved consideration; … Continue reading Iceberg, Dead Ahead

We cannot hope to have normal relationships between men and women, between any partner and another he or she chooses mutually and reciprocally, if we still want to criminalize sex out-of-wedlock, which is what we would be doing if we were to criminalize abortion. This is also what the opposition to Gay Marriage fears; legitimacy … Continue reading The Anti-Criminalization of Sex

Let me say as I have said before, and will likely say again--will likely need to say again (irrespective of discernible gain): We must be ever watchful, be ever on guard, where human rights are the matter. It is necessary for us, for everyone everywhere-- as it has been true for all time: human rights … Continue reading Human Rights; Another Look

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 bureaucrats … Continue reading We Have All Enlisted; or, Some Ideas on the Nature of State Control by the Editor of a Political Commentary Review Published on-line by Himself [Fiction]

II Capitalism is Obscene Without being a Marxist, I can say that virtually everything about Capitalism is obscene. I can say this without concluding that Capitalism is in itself evil. I am not going to venture an analysis of socio-economic systems. I do not assent to Capitalism being an evil, nor do I agree that … Continue reading Capitalism is Obscene [Flash Fiction]

I All the World is a Stage The pornographic, which is a prime connotation of obscenity, if not the most widespread synonym, permeates all commodities, all communication, all interactions. Public space shrinks and becomes oppressive, almost as if everything and everyone were in extreme close-up, as are sex acts in a porno film. At the … Continue reading OBSCENITY [Flash Fiction]

Would I prefer snow to the drizzle that seems terminally expressed by the color of the weather these last several days, a mood evoked by the grayness of today and yesterday and the day before that? Perhaps I would--what would I? Another question to beget other questions about weather and mood. My soul is romantic, … Continue reading Monochrome [Flash Fiction]

According to the United Nations, China has the highest incidence of sexual slavery in the world. Wait a second! China also has the highest incidence of humans in the world too. We could take the percentage of incidence of anything and probably find the highest number of occurrences in China, no? Maybe not for everything, … Continue reading Populations and Percentages; Facts, Figures and Indications Gone Awry

II How can I hope to understand what individuality can mean when true political and social individuality is so countermanded by one kind of pluralism after another, contradicted by one determinism or another in assault against any or all notions of free-will. This assault on free-will is backed up by these aforementioned pluralisms. It is … Continue reading Individuality Divisible

We are faced with a crisis in civilization, as they have been repeated around the world across time (is that then 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. Neither is. The Review is managed as … Continue reading I Miss the Moon Sometimes When I don’t See Her in the Sky [Flash Fiction]

We do moo and baa together in one or another social or public forum and call it our Ode to Freedom. Can we, though, articulate any sense of freedom other than entries by figures and calculations in the ledger books of state? Have we so relativized meaning that we can no longer say anything about … Continue reading Politeness and the New Politique

People versus the State--what then must we do--what then can we? Louis Quatorze said, L'etat, c'est moi, when asked his opinion about the Political State; the state, it is I, he said. Today, the modern state has no such illusions of absolute singularity, at least not since Mao or Stalin, maybe Pinochet or Pol Pot. … Continue reading People versus the State

What passes for remedial instruction in many community colleges is often not intended to be better than what we still sponsor in our high schools. I have taught in some of our community and four year colleges for more than a decade and a half. If democracy is slipping--and it is--it is because we who … Continue reading Everyone’s a Genius for Fifteen Seconds

[. . .] Monday the 16th of May [. . .]. Morning. Let me say again something I have said before, that no government, no administration, no man, no other women, no Law can take a woman's rights away. These intermediaries in her life may stand as impediments to her choices or her choosing; they may … Continue reading From the Notebook of Chiara Finestra [Flash Fiction]

Bureaucrats do perform a sleight of hand more expertly than any dealer in a game of three-card-monty, or with a face that any magician would pay to perform with. No state can do without their bureaucrats; they conform to any state anywhere at any time. Do you imagine the Nazis or the Fascists in Italy … Continue reading Pseudo Live Motion Saints [Flash Fiction]

You must know by now that public and people are not synonyms, and not solely in the connotations I am providing for us ini this paper; I cannot count how many times I have had to defend this statement no matter how often I use it in discussions of politics with friends and colleagues--imagining that … Continue reading Pluralism III

  A fragment of an essay found among the papers of a man who recently died, found on his desk at his apartment by his son home from college for the funeral. It was posted on his son's blog a week after placing the urn on a shelf at the man's home now solely occupied … Continue reading Cornerstones [Flash Fiction]

[Originally published by the Publishing Editor on Mar. 4 2010 in The October Revue] What shall not perish? We have seen the results of an economic elite making billions of dollars in a three-card-monty-economy. You don't imagine that economics is not a shell game, do you? Perhaps we will actually start producing things at home … Continue reading Of the Elites, By the Elites, For the Elites

And what if these were excerpts from a polemic on the State of the State in America and how we persistently delude ourselves about the nature of freedom and the state of our democracy here and now, as we like to say tritely when we puzzle over just how to say what is obvious, I … Continue reading Double-think [Short-short Fiction]

Consensus, non-sensus . . . we can all disagree in this pseudo-democratic nation managed by power elites bent on keeping the masses semi-educated and semi-literate--but consensus in the end is the mandate. To disagree with mandated consensus is to become excommunicate and anathema, socially. If the President were Pope, I'd be excommunicate, I would have … Continue reading Consensus, Non-Sensus; the Polemic of an Angry Man

A Harvard Undergraduate Makes a List Sitting on a Yellow Chair in the Yard Near Massachusetts Hall where Emerson Once Slept I Any sane and rational discussion of Gay Marriage will have to address basic human rights as the primary concern for how and where gay marriage fits in our society--and it does fit in … Continue reading Human Rights and Harvard Yard [A Short Story]

. . . is a letter from an editor of an on-line literary review. The opinions are herein those of the Editor-in-Chief, a role the Publishing Editor likes to assume separately from that of Publishing Editor. He has complete control over content. The follow has been abridged by me. [ . . .] All social … Continue reading How a Letter from an Editor of an On line Literary Review Becomes Fiction; or, You Should Know the Boundaries between Fiction and Non-Fiction

A letter to the editor of an on-line literary magazine published by the editors, as they agreed, because of its succinct power. Let it be re-iterarted that all efforts at re-defining marriage are paramount to furthering our understanding of where Gay Marriage fits in the social equation of couple-unions today--and it does fit, that is, … Continue reading Gay Marriage (a few points made by an opponent of darkness) [Flash Fiction]

A journal entry by a parent of a public school student, the public schools in Brooklyn in the City of New York, after a parent meeting at the school his child attends, and at a time when semi-literate and under-educated can masquerade as literate enough and educated in itself educated by those who are the … Continue reading Bee Hive Nation [Flash Fiction]

"Humanity, a Journal of Social Commentary"   Gay Marriage is a Human Rights Issue   A blog entry by an anonymous man publishing in an on-line social commentary web-site called "Humanity, a Journal of Social Commentary. Just who he is is not important, or at least I am saying that it is not important in … Continue reading A Human Rights Issue Says a Man in the Blog Section of his On-line Social Commentary Website [Flash Fiction]

He says what he days about Hamlet and Shakespeare and literature believing in the standards of Canonicity, even while disputing the hypocrisies involved in the full standards of inclusion. He has had no problem saying things like "Hamlet's most famous soliloquy represents a hallmark moment in the birth of the modern." Why should he, he … Continue reading Birth of Consciousness [Flash Fiction]

We are all Hamlet's kin. Hamlet my brother is my father, I have said. The world is incestuous to start. Certainly we are lately less than kind to the father of Hamlet, not the Ghost King, if I can borrow from Cervantes for Shakespeare; the child of his brain. Cervantes alluded to Quioxte and Panza … Continue reading Shakespeare’s Brain [Flash Fiction]

I have come to bury Trump, not to praise him? The good that the rich do often gets lost in the ways they manage to make an awful lot of money from the thinnest veil of good they lay over whatever serious need exists in a society. I am not who you think I am; … Continue reading Hollywood Humanity [Flash Fiction]

  The kind of critique or commentary one needs to engage in a democratic society can only be achieved when literacy is raised above the levels we have come to accept as good enough, which I know from experience confronting remedial writing pedagogy in CUNY, are far from hitting the mark. We are talking missing … Continue reading Literacy Falling Apart