Let us return to woman--she is not determined by her biology. This seems simple enough to say, but has it been adequately articulated by us in her defense. This position was held by most of us in college when I was an undergraduate; this has become one of many clichés we accept in our arsenal … Continue reading Sacred and Profane

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 Natural, Normal, Human

There cannot be a hierarchy of humans where liberty and equality are honored and respected differently. Her getting pregnant does not leave her subject to a man's will, even if she did give her troth to honor and respect the man, her spouse. We no longer maintain "obey" in our marriage vows, yet we maintain … Continue reading Pro-Choice is Pro Freedom

Memory is as much fiction as it is non-fiction. The boundaries separating one from the other are difficult for anyone to trace. Remembering to see and say I know fact from fiction, I just remembered that "The Earth is flat" was once a fact. How do I recollect what I remember, separate what I remember … Continue reading Passing Through the Heart Again [Flash Fiction]

An Essayist Speaks of Essays Briefly "To die, to sleep, perchance to dream . . .[,]" and so, what dreams of death can philosophy prepare me for, Michel, when all of heaven and earth contain so much? --Jay V. R. The essays I have written . . .  what is there left to say about … Continue reading Critical Condition [Flash Fiction]

Everything works together toward one single idea here, and that a new anthropology is due. I understand that anthropos is ancient Greek for man and so anthropology is the study of Man; or, as we once held blanketly, all human beings. Our focus might have been cultural, ethnic, evolutionary; nonetheless, it was anthropology, and so, … Continue reading Toward Feminology

Bourgeois cultures have collectively created an overarching, overbearing civilization that has been the enemy of art, the adversary of the spiritual life of art, while pretending, only sometimes, to be the friend of the corporeal life of artists. This has been unwavering, this has remained steadfast, this has achieved ascendancy in the hearts, minds and … Continue reading Pimps and Prostitutes [Flash Fiction]

A man considers the character of a woman considering the character of a man and how she would like to put on paper what she imagines this man should say, believes he should say, she does, he considers, the man who initially does, as I do this man, as I have said, a man who … Continue reading Dark Waters [Flash Fiction]

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 Chronology [Flash Fiction]

The brute reality of a woman's biology displaces me from ultimate considerations where her right to choose an abortion is the subject. I am not a woman, and even if a woman is not in herself a womb, I am not a woman and thus do not have a womb and thus cannot bear children … Continue reading Final Hour

We have been selling our water for money for a long time. We sell our air for money, too. Certainly the rich can buy the loyalty of your sons and daughters, as they have our freedom, our civil liberties, our future, our nature. Oilmen send your daughters and sons to die for more oil under … Continue reading MEDIAtion

I grew up in a country and at a time where I could not support the notion that I could tell a woman what to do except in so far as it concerned my body and my person and what she could not do with impunity to me. No, I cannot tell a woman what … Continue reading Embryo Rights?

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. It is to remove oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being. Non-being is as close to a primordial nothingness … Continue reading Existential Hamlet Precedes Essential Hamlet

What is really behind DeBlasio's elimination of stop-and-frisk? We could ask; I am now doing such: what is behind this seemingly pro-active support for civil liberty? I know that most of us did believe and continue to think that Mayor De Blasio's policy change in the matter of stop-and-frisk was motivated by a need to … Continue reading States Accept Murder as a Means to Reduce Unemployment

There are people, organizations, institutions and leaders in politics that support the idea that a woman should be made to get an ultrasound and then listen to the fetus's heartbeat before she can go through with the abortion she has decided to get. In the case of a pregnancy not yet five weeks, as I … Continue reading The Search for a Fetal Heartbeat is an Effective Return to the Curtain Rod

When I was a boy and my father and I were avid followers of NASA and the space agency's progress to the moon, I learned that in every command capsule there was a rather conspicuous red button to push if the mission should need to be aborted on the launch pad. Less than a decade … Continue reading Abortion is a Woman’s Parachute

Where then does this writing of history begin, and it is history that anyone writes when they write about themselves or another and another and another, each line creeping along, petty word after word until the last syllable; where does it end? How do we understand history apart from historiography? How do I understand my … Continue reading A Few Words on History and Historiography [Flash Fiction]

  Kierkegaard said in his journal well over a hundred years ago that it was a "positive starting point" when Aristotle asserted that "philosophy begins in wonder." Wonder, not doubt was the place for all love of wisdom to begin. What child does not know that life begins in wonder. Socrates was no nihilist; his … Continue reading Philosophy is Wonder [Flash Fiction]

Choosing is a woman's birthright, as it is any person's birthright, and this choosing to have an abortion is not an easy one for any woman or teenaged girl to make. Forcing women to make choices that are unavoidably illegal would be for what reason, to what effect? I would not want to be in … Continue reading Birthright

If there are children who do not want to participate in Halloween Parties or Parades, then that's their prerogative. Forcing them to participate would be a violation of their civil right to choose not to participate. However, eliminating parades and parties for all children because some children might feel left out, perhaps because they are … Continue reading Milford Drops the Ball on Its End Run for Democracy

Do you imagine that Congress works for the People and not government in itself for itself by itself? I am genuinely asking because that is something I cannot understand--how you the People, and not a State serving Public, believes, with how far we have come from understanding or being able to articulate what Public Service … Continue reading Imagination Not Dead, Yet

The Emancipation Proclamation did not give human rights to the slaves. The slaves emancipated by law had human rights before the proclamation. Lincoln did not make slavery immoral, religion did not do that. The immorality of slavery and the unalienableness of the human rights of slaves was and is irrespective of what the society said … Continue reading Before the Law

Now, if Roe versus Wade were a complete fabrication, if it were a docudrama, would that mean that the majority ruling was somehow made weaker, argumentatively? Would the truth of it, whether true or not in the most pedantic sense of trueness become other than true? Roe versus Wade is just as strong in support … Continue reading What If Roe Vs. Wade were a Fiction?

Jeremiah's Lamentations on the woe and misery and decadence of third century BC Jerusalem is never too far from our social and political critiques; the energy behind Jeremiah's pronouncements while lamenting the political and the socio-economic conditions of the Jewish people in Jerusalem is informative of our commitment. What more do you want me to … Continue reading Jeremiads

There will always be dilemmas for her, even if aborting an embryo is legally sanctioned. This is not to say that legally sanctioning abortion is a fool's errand. To each woman her own personhood, her own psychology rooted in her biology, her physiology and her experiences? She has reason; she is capable of reasoning, of … Continue reading Woman’s Dilemmas?

A woman is should be the first line of any discussion when any thought of her right to choose anything comes up in any forum. In her is, there is no longer any subtracting devices such as who, what, when, where, how or even why. None of these questions are pertinent or relevant to her unalienable right … Continue reading Woman is not Perdition [Flash Fiction]

Who is she, again, the question gets asked and asked, and oftentimes asked without the intention of waiting for an answer, a particularly annoying contemporary trait we have all acquired. But how many of us avoid asking any question like this at all? Responses are not answers; I've asserted this before in other essays. There … Continue reading Woman is a Choice

How much is left unknown at the end of a relationship? How much do the happiest spouses really know about one another. A lover dies, a spouse is put in her tomb and who was she? No one was; the one who is not who she will be when she becomes who she was. But … Continue reading A Monologic Imagination [A Short Story]

A woman is and in her is, not what?  How many methods of discovery do I employ in my investigations? The limits of knowing what questions to ask can help or hinder any investigation I endeavor. Who am I is who I am? My name is not my being; what is in a name? A … Continue reading Discovery [short fiction]

License granted to a speaker to speak about what has been spoken on the contrast between conformity and obedience, an issue that the inferred speaker here speaks about but could be spoken also by an actor, who having prepared himself as an actor, organically, could then  create a role for himself, after, of course, he … Continue reading Conformity versus Obedience [Flash Fiction]

There is a ritual life in our entertainment world, one we gratefully participate in, one we no longer have the desire to live without, one fro which we fail to see the danger in the matters of managing our democracy. This is true enough, for sure; but then there is often nothing more difficult to … Continue reading A Nose for News, a Nose for Truth?

The Falling Leaf Review is not outside the western traditions I have alluded to here in both the pages section and the blog posts. It is a defender of this tradition which gives it the intellectual impetus to be the critical journal it is. With the force of this tradition behind it, it will levy … Continue reading There Needs to Be More Literary Reviews; A Polemical Position

The State is, as fore-stated and after-stated, for itself, by itself, of itself, with itself, self-contained for always, every state the mortal enemy of what is best in the simple separate person. This person must remain macrocosm, however, even to the people themselves in order for the people to maintain in counter-balance its power and … Continue reading Pluralism II

Intelligent people can come from anywhere. Stupid ones do come from everywhere. The Democratic ideal has been abdicated in favor of a pluralistic one, a hallmark of twentieth century politics everywhere, certainly; a current politique in favor among a broad spectrum of college educated administrators and fellow paper pushers (paper in the ether?) managing America's … Continue reading Pluralism

Every day is coffee day for me. Just be around when I realize I have forgotten to get coffee the day before. I love my espresso machine. Even though the first espresso machine in the world was in Naples Italy, I do not feel any special affinity for espresso coffee because my father's mother's family … Continue reading National Coffee Day [Flash Fiction]

Some words on news and propaganda or news as propaganda by a man not so unlike any other man, but a man as different from every other man as any man could be, each man unique in the entire history of human being, no one now or who has ever lived or who will ever … Continue reading The Words of an Anonymous Man on the nature of News and Propaganda [Flash Fiction]

  a mask this face I Wear, blue, not sky, but me, grey, November in mood   --jvr

The last of my sake In its cup on the table Shaking as I write.

Some daughters are crazy--they tell their mothers everything. Other daughters are just as crazy--they tell their mothers nothing.

Humans are not so much illogical as they are determined in their actions by an overriding, overarching logic drawn from errors in their premises.

    A robin, three wrens, A few sparrows, all bunched, Pecking the grass.

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 I am going to say might or might not offend someone who is Arab Muslim or Pakistani, but that cannot be a consideration if what I am … Continue reading Is Littering a Civil Liberty?

A U. Cal Berkley report on air pollution in China states that roughly 17% of China's yearly casualties are directly related to air pollution. 1.6 million people annually die from air pollution. The smog is so bad in Chinese cities that nearly 4000 people a day die because of it.

An expositor writes a piece about facts, figures, numerals and percentages of populations in relation to the numbers bandied about for rhetorical/political effect, and perhaps how they can be used, have been used, what they say or do not say, much the way photographs say what we want them to say by either looking or … Continue reading Glass Houses and the Stones in Hand [Flash Fiction]

    Sun flowers recut In smaller vases--petals Turning at the tips. --jvr

A fragment of a conversation had among friends at the Dock Street Brewery in Philadelphia a couple of decades ago after a day at the Cezanne Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. The fragment is from one friend who suggested that they go to the Dock Street Brewery to eat and drink.  The unpainted patches in … Continue reading Meta-painting? [Flash Fiction]

  Falling leaf fallen Leaves, late November morning, Sun through the branches --JVR

Facts in themselves are not knowledge; knowledge in itself is not wisdom

What has he said? I could ask. Have I said? Said how difficult it is to say what another is thinking when this other says nothing, remains mute--what do we know about another? Each of us does have to look inside--this state of anotherness makes other like me.  How difficult it is to know what we … Continue reading Another Thinking [Flash Fiction]

To self-publish or not to self-publish, that might be a question for some, but not for many in our overly self-indulgent culture--solipsists, all of us? If I were Scarlett O'Hara, I'd consider this tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but creeping along in petty paces before I decide to publish one of my many books of … Continue reading To Cover or not to Cover [Flash Fiction]

Who imagines that Apple is a more consumer favorable company than Microsoft? Who believes that Apple is day to Microsoft's night, or even the lesser of two evils? Can we be that naive? Yes, we can. When we had the option of thinner models or upgradable ones, we foolishly chose the former, so now we … Continue reading Apple of Our Eye

Semi-literacy infers semi-illiteracy and it is the latter that is growing, not just in the number of persons who are semi-literate, but in the average degree of semi-illiteracy in the simple separate person; the inability to read having become painstaking in how the average retail manager handles policy in his or customer service. Simple transactions … Continue reading Semi-literate is Semi-illiterate

Obama's argumentative postures aside, no one with any historical acumen can think the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy or Castro in Cuba got rid of all bureaucrats.  No totalitarian regime or coup d'etat by whatever petty dictator ever got rid of the bureaucrats that were working before the blow to state.  The horror … Continue reading Only the Mountains and Bureaucracy Last Forever

  [A Reissue of an Older Critique of American Government] Bureaucracy is not something apart from bureaucrats; that's a sleight of hand bureaucrats perform more expertly than any dealer in a game of three-card-monty. Any magician would pay to perform with the straight face of your local bureaucrat, or our great and trusted President Obama.  … Continue reading Obama, O! Bankers, Again to their Gain (a reissue)

What we have become is the techo-bureaucratic state; each of us increasingly co-opted in the over-bureaucratization of American life.  This however is done in the name of serving freedom, of being the first in protecting our liberty; this is also present in the rhetoric of President Obama, whereby our great articulate leader shames us into … Continue reading Techno-bureaucrats

I maintain an allegiance to Platonism that no one I know would care to understand let alone endeavor to figure out; and that's as far as believing that ideas are real.  Now the idea that the rights of the individual, as well the metaphysical weight of the individual politically, have been abdicated for a lumpen, … Continue reading Plato, Plato, Come Out of Your Cave

I imagine that the only way for me to conclude for you would be for me to say what I would say as if I were God, seeing, hearing and knowing at once

Politics has a metaphysics; all topics of discussion do.  Metaphysics is not only a discussion of reality, or philosophers spinning their wheels, or an intellectual endeavor equal to hypothesizing how many sprites could fit on the head of a pin, but what is ultimately real.  Metaphysics has veracity beyond the cloudy vision with which most … Continue reading Evidence of things not seen?

Liberty without responsibility is a privilege, not a right. Rights are manifest in liberty and equality. Where privileges reign instead of rights, often made to masquerade as rights, a system of inequality and the lack of liberty exists. Rights flourish with respect where equality is a primary condition of all social relationships. Rights carry responsibilities; … Continue reading Rights, Privileges, Liberty

Is it trite to say that every day is in itself a journey; or, is it just a tautology. A day trip is a day trip, but what were trips to be taken in a day. What do I do in a day--to day or not to day, what is the journey taken? All is … Continue reading Journey, or What Used to be Made in a Day?

The fault of our linguistic limitations lies not in our language but in ourselves.

"Sartre's reversal of what we had called traditional metaphysics does not require us to disband with metaphysical questions. To state propositionally that existence precedes essence is in itself a metaphysical question," he said, a man not so unlike any other man who might say something like what has been said here, as I think I … Continue reading Heaven and Earth [Flash Fiction]

All prefaces to the books I have read have been afterwords, afterwards when I read them, they having been written after the fact of the book. Even an author's introduction I never read before the book. I mean every author's introduction could only have been written after the book was written. You cannot introduce a … Continue reading What I Take to Be Obvious

What you would like to hear and what you should hear, or how you should hear it, have little to do with one another. What I believe and what you believe and what we need to know, need to hear, should examine apart from our belief must be considered if any headway in understanding in … Continue reading Ironies Never Cease [A Short Story]

Questions need to be formed appropriately, and that is rhetorically and intellectually appropriately, although too many I talk to have little idea that there is an appropriateness to questions other than some topical or situational appropriateness that panders to emotions in the basest ways. ---A Fragment by an Anonymous Author "What is really behind DeBlasio's … Continue reading The Man Who Asks: “Do States Accept Murder as a Means to Reduce Unemployment?” [A Short Story of a Kind]

How else are you going to see human except by seeing humane? They are contingent as they are one word in French, humaine.

Nature is opposed to civilization. Your centrally heated home, the Lakota Teepee and the Hawaiian thatched roof hut are all civilization, not nature. In our efforts to make things more natural we have also allowed them to become more uncivilized in ways we did not imagine possible, nor in ways we can discern anymore. We … Continue reading Civilization and Nature

We are and You and I are are rhetorically different strategies.

Poor people everywhere are not rich, thereby not affluent, perhaps undereducated, for the most part almost certainly semi-literate, although thoroughly alphabetic. In being poor, certain correlations with crime and violence get disseminated as they have also been proliferated among the affluent and the more highly educated. Correlation has often been confused with causation and this … Continue reading Explanation is not Rationalization

Psychosis reaches you in a place in the mind that knows no distinctions of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, class. There is a place in the mind that is beyond these or apart from them. You see that I believe in mind.

A definition of “Marriage,” at least how it has been articulated socially in English speaking countries over the past millennia or more, is paramount to furthering our understanding where Gay Marriage fits in the social equation of couple-unions today. And it does fit, more easily than any of us on either side of this pro/con … Continue reading Gay Marriage is Marriage

Our greatest, most potent, most persistent, centrism is con-tempo-centrism. The temporal myopia resulting from this is our greatest problem politically, as well as socio-economically, as well as in all matters of humanism or in any defense (if any) we muster for humanity. We seriously misunderstand our nature and our nurture through a corrupted understanding of … Continue reading Con-tempo-centric

Contrary to the etymological fallacy, whereby one asserts that a word's meaning should be or is what the meaning of its traceable origin was, is the etymological persistence hypothesis, where the etymology of a word, and the connotative history of the word in a culture, remain residual in the word's understanding, and is present even … Continue reading The Etymological Persistence Hypothesis

The monied elites in America are an aristocracy of oligarchic power who are more entrenched in that power than at any other time in our history. They are all of a kind more or less than kin that America has endured since its inception as an alleged democratic nation, the kind of nation that chooses … Continue reading Does Anyone at Least Half-literate Recall the Terrible Forty of Athens?

Obama put at ease outrage over Bush, over monied power elites in America's ruling class of greed. But Obama's in the hands of the banks as he pretends to speak against Power and Money for the people, those of us naive enough to have succumbed, as I have on more than occasion, to Obama's eloquence. … Continue reading Obama and His Governing of the Elite, or is it for the Elite?

How have we not made Mammon our God, or convinced ourselves that we can serve both God and Mammon--better put, that we serve God best by serving Mammon. But then saying something is so has made it so for so long that we fear speaking enough to attack the First Amendment as a significant problem … Continue reading Freedom Revised

I have met very few people, even among those most of us today would call educated people, who have any idea what they are saying when they refer to the act of reading, the performance of reading. We have for too long separated reading and writing as distinct categories of operation--is that mental operation? Certainly, … Continue reading What is Reading When Reading is Separated from Writing? An Opening Statement

On this day in 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by the fascists in Alfacar, Spain, just outside of Granada in Andalusia. 86 years before his murder, Honore de Balzac died in France, August 19, 1850.

Jean Renoir was right when he said that there would have been no Hollywood without Chaplin. Let other people think what they think about how other people did what they did to create Hollywood--Chaplin, the world's first universal man, was it. He created movies, if you excuse the hyperbole that is virtually not hyperbole. Bravo, … Continue reading Bravo, Charlie; A Polemic in 59 words

for Daniel Defoe He found a text in printed pages, Times New Roman 12. The pages were left without a name reference on a radiator in a classroom at his college. There was no class in that room the period before or the period before that. He made no inquiries.He kept it and read it … Continue reading Different Points; or The Polemical Position of Someone Who is not a Religious Fanatic (a fictional essay)

Let me say then that these blog entries are organized around many different kinds of writing. I imagine we expect this plasticity--that we expect many different kinds or forms of writing to take place within the confines of the blog and to be at home there. These entries can also be also autobiographical . . … Continue reading Web Log Writing

El Salvador, or the Savior, or the One who brings Salvation is the name of a Central American country and remains a cruel joke (reminiscent of the jokes told by guards in the Nazis camps) for all women in the country. El Salvador just might have the strictest abortion laws in the world, certainly the … Continue reading Salvation is not for Women????

An essay by a man who writes haiku and publishes an on-line literary review. He imagines that there is an audience out there for what he writes, but he is wrong. He imagines that there must be someone who cares, who agrees or who understands; he is again mistaken. No one cares what he says … Continue reading A Haiku Is When; or, What Can Your Brevity Hold?

Marriage is no longer an exclusive contract to breed. Traditionally, breeding rights and legal rights over the brood were settled by the marriage contract, but if marriage is to be about love and not a contract to settle breeding rights and husbandry, then marriage includes gay marriage. I do insist that gay couples refer to … Continue reading Marriage Redefined

I still see far too many Arab Muslim women dressed inappropriately for NYC summers. I do not understand how more of their elderly women do not suffer heat stroke or actual strokes or heart attacks--and I would like to see medical statistics for Arab Muslim women from the middle east and if there is not … Continue reading Wearing a Blanket on the Beach

  Summer, of course.              

In itself, for itself, the writing . . . How much more could be said about how my writing--how any writing--is indeterminable. Why I write could be reduced to an act of survival. I would not live if I did not write. How could I? I understand the rhetorical edge. It cuts me at its … Continue reading The Writer [Flash Fiction]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041244/Polygamy-Investigation-Muslim-men-exploit-UK-benefits-system.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

"A man who had come across this piece here delivered it to me transcribed in his hand on another piece of paper that I took and transferred into my computer from where I uploaded to my website and publish it for your perusal, and do not ask me why I have not said 'read,'" a man … Continue reading Holy Wisdom? [Flash Fiction]

Know your audience. --a freshman composition adjunct lecturer's mantra to his class   A man says to a woman he has met in his journal as he sits at a table in a café over a cup of coffee and a croissant for breakfast one morning sometime a decade or more ago: I first read Hiroshima, … Continue reading Nouvelle York, Mon Amour [A Short Story]

There is no telling it like it is anymore. Everyone is spinning his wheels around and around at a dizzying rate. Truth? That's laughable for most. Little 't' truths? Props in a shell game we like to play. All of us submit to the new politique where everyone is psychopathically polite. Emily Post had nothing … Continue reading The Politics of Being Polite?

For the Prophet Jeremiah. The perpetual demand from criticism that it be specific or specify with strings of isolated examples to prove what it is saying is one of the great diversions of criticism, one of the crippling effects on critique. It establishes a pretext for criticism that  stands with the first and last step in our guiding epistemology: … Continue reading Jeremiah Was a Prophet and not a Bullfrog

What we know even when we know a lot is too little. We do often preclude too much too often. We do become full ourselves by what we imagine we know. Overcome are we by the facts we accumulate--a false sense of wealth. Facts, facts and more facts at our finger tips; instant knowing, just … Continue reading Epistemology 101

You do know that  a story is a story is a story, and that you are not supposed to get indignant over how a narrator chooses to narrate in the story he tells. Therefore, to confuse narrator and author is debased enough, but to confuse author for the man is just as grotesque in its … Continue reading Narrator, Narrating, Narrated; What’s an Author to Do? Asks the Man [Flash Fiction]

The Milky Way from out back of Aunt Anna's house in Pittsfield, the Berkshires, at night, the broadest swath ever seen by me anywhere including at night out in Montauk, how dark it is supposed to be there on the South Fork, the extreme East End; Via Lactae, as the Romans called it, the Milky Way, a … Continue reading Awesome Nights

a short story Length in Tolstoy equals the desire to make more money; length in Tolstoy was the hunger to be paid more. Lev was paid by the word. Anna Karenina and War and Peace are as long as they are principally for this reason (--is this really a reason or merely an explanation [not exactly the same]?). … Continue reading How Tolstoy Affected the Form of the Novel

Person in English comes from the Latin persona, and this means mask, as in what covers the face. This should give some insight to what we mean by personality and how personality shifts, changes, transforms with context and by the presence of other players--dramatis personae. Yes, I used to say and have said before in other writings … Continue reading Personality is Maskality

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

Remember what I have said and will say again---Vermeer was the first artist directly influenced by photography. His camera obscura was photography without the chemistry of film processing or other chemically treated plates. He used his camera to set perspective, to see how light played with the projection/representation of images. His use of the rudiments of photography helped him … Continue reading Vermeer and a Photographic Perspective

When I was teaching freshman composition, and issues of identity were raised or brought up as topics for papers, there were no light skinned African Americans who did not discuss how their lighter skin was a source of exclusion or aversion from some darker skinned African Americans in their community, or how questions of authenticity … Continue reading Chiaroscuro

According to the Lakota calendar, I am born in The Moon of the Falling Leaf; thus, The Falling Leaf Review published by Falling Leaf Press.

There is nothing herein that stands opposed to Gay Marriage; if there are any questions, they are targeted at how marriage has been defined culturally, and linguistically over the millennia. An examination of the etymology of the titles given to the two heterosexuals joining in current matrimony will reveal that marriage has as its chief, … Continue reading American Puritanism and Gay Marriage {a repost from five years ago}

There's an anecdote about a man on a road who sees the Buddha but does not know it is Buddha. The man sees the Buddha approach and even from a distance down the road can see that the Buddha is greatly illuminated, that he is surrounded by a special aura, something more than charisma allows. … Continue reading Be Awake [Flash Fiction]

Every President has a choice when she or he ascends to the Oval Office, and that is irrespective of how much Money and Power have supported a candidate's successful Presidential bid--and this choice is whether or not he or she will be the Bitch of Money and Oligarchic Power or a Champion of the People … Continue reading Moloch’s Whore

It seems reasonable that a universal humanity should be defended, and that that defense should be well articulated. Woman has been prime for this kind of defense for a very long time. Hers is a humanity less than deservedly respected, even now when we think we are honoring and respecting women, socially, politically, institutionally, ethically, … Continue reading Unalienable Human Rights are Universal Human Rights

The problem with many determinisms is that they are not scientific at all, and instead are misguided, or misapplied, quests for God.

Remember, always, always, remember . . . reading is not superficially skimming the page, nor is thinking ever randomly passing images in the mind or playing hop-scotch with words.

Woman is not determined by her biology. This seems simple enough to say, but has it been adequately articulated by us in her defense. This position was held by most of us in college when I was an undergraduate; this has become one of many clichés we accept in our arsenal of received ideas about … Continue reading Some Remarks on Women’s Rights

What We Now Teach our Children; a Monologue   It is interesting for me to observe in our pedagogy and in our media how one or another determinism is set against free-will, turning free-will into a fanatical idea in a cult of the individual. All this meant to destroy the idea of freedom, undermine the … Continue reading An Actor Prepares [Flash Fiction]

Perhaps swallowing dogma whole only leaves one with a socio-political gastro-intestinal distress, as if there is an analogy for gastro-intestinal processes or disruptions in what we can call the political mind; but then we do speak of the body politic, don't we? In my understanding, from what I see, what I hear, what I personally … Continue reading “Live Free or Die” Might be a Motto, But . . .

It is sad to say, but say I must, that the following is not in the cause of the growing Know-Nothing Party fear of the current Republican frenzy to out-do one another in the many forms of contemptible politics or politicking. Bill the Butcher from Scorsese's Gangs of New York I am not; Donald Trump I could … Continue reading Shooting Dice and Other New York Games of LIberty

It is not only the President's responsibility, but every citizen's obligation to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, and I do not care what my Church or Priest says or your Minister or your Rabbi or your Imam says.  There is no law above the Constitution here in … Continue reading All Enemies Foreign and Domestic

https://youtu.be/IggI_fXnMrE

When privileges are offered in place of respect for rights, freedom is forestalled.

Today (July 11th, 2015) is the 4th anniversary of Leiby's murder, July 11th, 2011.   I did not know Leiby. 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 … Continue reading God the Ungodly; a reprint

https://youtu.be/KP2BUYEGKjI

Here is now and there is then. Time and space are an indissoluble unity. Every destination remains there until it is here, and then the journey is a was there. It is only the journey that is perpetually here. Arriving at a destination is cumulative in the moment of arrival. There is no extension. It … Continue reading Here and There

Are all the waiters now in the Carnegie Deli Chinese? I went there recently, I think it was New Year's Day, the year I saw DeCaprio and Scorsese's fiasco, The Wolf of Wall Street--I was not offended by the movie, except by the screenplay, how adolescent the writing was, written, it seemed, by a man and … Continue reading Confused, Confounded, Conflated

And that government of the power, by the power and for the power shall not perish from this earth unless We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish and maintain our responsibilities to the People, bearing our weight in counterbalance to the State, which will always attempt to impose its weight … Continue reading A Question of Balance

The conditions of totalitarian rule are such that fear, a prime factor in totalitarian control, displaces good people from their goodness. Evil does need nothing more to flourish than for good people to do nothing.

All who participate in the cult of biography should be murdered. There is nothing to be learned from a writer's biography, and that is in spite of whether you believe writing is impersonal, in itself contained, transcendent of time or place, and able to stand alone for the whole of some real or imagined fucking … Continue reading A Fictional Voice Shouting Into the Abyss Speaks Obliquely of Romantic Agony

Newspapers are written to hypnotize you. That's their method and their goal. All media are ruled by charlatans. News and information through media are all part of the confidence game. Information is really only about In Formation.

With bureaucrats having greater and greater control over, under and through education, literacy lessens at an alarming rapidity. Literacy is never the concern for bureaucrats. What the French have called alphabetisme is the target, the goal, the all embracing directive of, in, or from any program beholding to State funding. Bureaucrats never imagine that they need literacy; … Continue reading Bureaucratize

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 it … Continue reading Re-Memory [Flash Fiction]

  To essay or not to essay, that might be a question, but how would it amount what the father of modern consciousness said? The question to essay or not to essay would beg other answers than the one our most famous Dane had queried. What do I swear to when I write an essay? And … Continue reading What Another You Does [prose poem]

I'm halfway through reading Big Sur. Can't say anything but Love it, Began it on a journey to Land's End, the south side of the south fork all the way at the tip, the Point, again, The End, Long Island, New York. Brother Ti Jean. I've been to Lowell, Massachusetts. Walked by the Merrimack River seeing … Continue reading Brother Likeness [Flash Fiction]

It is I or it is me--it's me is okay. What is this It is I shit. The French say, c'est moi; they do not say c'est je. Understand? C'est moi; It's me.  I am a staff of one. I am everyone and everything herein. I am the whole review, all of it, all of what goes into it, every … Continue reading It is I [Flash Fiction]

Is it true that philosophy is not a tradition of theories, but a tradition of the literary, and do we call them fictions, otherly formed fictions? Is that what I imply by calling this a fictional essay? If it is a fictional essay, then the essay form is being employed in the service of fiction, … Continue reading Historicity and Hysteria [Flash Fiction]

Black and White Film [Fiction] Who wouldn't prefer snow to rain? I ask rhetorically, secure in the notion that snow must be universally preferable to rain. I know it is for me in December. I prefer 28 degrees Fahrenheit with snow to 38 degrees Fahrenheit with rain. Yes, I would prefer 30F with snow to … Continue reading Who Does Not Prefer Snow to Rain? Or, How Black and White Photography Helped Me Form a Renewed Idea about Truth

To be literate or to be alphabetic is a question that should be posed by any society that sees itself in conflict over just what the society is or should be or where it is going or where it has been, has come from. Being alphabetic, what is sometimes referred to by me as having … Continue reading Look at Me, I Can Spell My Name [short fiction]

This critical journal, this literary review, with its pages of Essays and its blog, where some of the essays are initially worked out, expresses the views of its author, Thomas Sarebbononnato, who is also the Publishing Editor, sometimes referred to as the Editor-in-Chief. The essays are all of them literary in form, and many are … Continue reading C’est Moi, The Review; or, A Blogger Blogs about His Literary Blog [Flash Fiction]

There is only the writing here. What else should there be? My only answer to the questions that plague us, hound us, haunt us, hunt us . . .is the writing, what I write when I write in response from my conscience. Each of my simple responses . . . my sword and my shield … Continue reading Ma Plume est Mon Droit

Our early human ancestors completed cave paintings because they did not have mirrors? A man asks another man, then pausing to wonder what he might have added or how he might have phrased the question differently . . . wondering perhaps if his question makes any sense at all, then waiting for a response that does … Continue reading Prime, Primitive, Motive; an Anonymous Author Writes of an Anonymous Man Having Spoken to Another Unnamed Man [Flash Fiction]

Me, a word I use in French sometimes, moi. The rays of the sun from behind the clouds one day on the beach lying and reading and sipping the beers we brought from our room, the beers that we bought yesterday in town, a summer ale, I think, or was it the Lobster Ale I'm … Continue reading A Deer, a Doe [Flash Fiction]

  "We should take care of the misery in front of us," she said. She said that we needed not to consider the larger issues of the world; that every issue we think we need to emote over as we do pathetically insipidly are all connected to people who suffer them and show us their … Continue reading Candles, Lumens and the Sum of Light [a short-short story]

THE LESSENING OF DEMOCRACY To read or not to read is a question I might ask, yet do not; but to write or not to write is the question, something without question what I need to do, must do in order to be, to live. My to be or not is combined with this to … Continue reading How Under-Education is Contingent and Reciprocal in the Loss of Liberty

[A Short Story] An essay writer publishing an essay in his literary review revealing what it reveals about both his being and his existence, perhaps. What this then would say about us saying about him is as old as the form of the essay which all writers of the form cannot escape, and that is … Continue reading When Horse Shit Passes Itself Off as Bull Shit; or, The Essay Writer and You

Rhetorical questions are not withstanding--do not take the time to think of an answer, or even a response to any rhetorical question posed herein. Posture tells a lot about you, I have heard. Pose is an accurate way of describing the questions--they are posed as nudes are posed, and they are not naked as nakeds … Continue reading Art of Rhetoric, The

There is a way for literature to be bad literature--bad in form, bad in style, and bad in diction, for only several of the ways literature can be bad. This we should know, but do we, and how do we if we do? There are always examples of what a form should not be in … Continue reading The Good, the Bad and the Literary?

We fear questions because asking is always a form of taking.

All good reading is re-reading. --Anonymous A man says, I've ben reading Kazantzakis and remembering Kerouac, not that they have a lot in common, I mean, not that their prose style is similar. They might just be mutually exclusive in the manner with which syntax is handled, manipulated, in the telling of a story. But … Continue reading Satori in Brooklyn [Flash Fiction]

What then must we do in face of power and money and decadent politicians and Presidents who are the bitches of Wall Street or protected by Oil gangsters? Do I have an axe to grind with power and monied elites? Of course I do, but I also have observations and critiques as well as explications … Continue reading The Falling Leaf Review

I owe more to Francis Bacon than I admit. I owe a lot to Orwell and Camus, I know, I have said as much as many times asI have mentioned influences on writing, saying something about how I used to write a lot of essays when I was in university--at university--essays personal, essays literary, essays … Continue reading Fried Egg Sandwich [Flash Fiction]

The media are the messages? What medium do we consider first? There is no medium more effective in being the messages it disseminates than another. This review is a part of print media as well as social media. How could any medium not critique itself if it is to be serious about things other than … Continue reading Media, Messages, Criminals and Business

Et Cetera I like asking questions, have always liked asking questions, had never had much fear about asking questions, had also had a sensitive understanding of the inappropriateness of some questions, of what to avoid asking, when and where and with whom, to whom. At least what I had assumed was a sensitive understanding. I … Continue reading How Going on about What You Write Might be Interesting