So-called “internet poetry” is a phenomenon I knew nothing about till I saw this critique of it by Rebecca Watts. Although the author finds the genre completely abominable, nevertheless her piece contains within itself some answers to the question of … Continue reading →
…some say in ice: Professor Valentina Zharkova gave a presentation of her Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field hypothesis at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in October, 2018. The information she unveiled should shake/wake you up. Zharkova was one of … Continue reading →
I’m not at all sure the Democrats are pleased about the timing of this: More Honduran migrants tried to join a caravan of several thousand trekking through Guatemala on Wednesday, defying calls by authorities not to make the journey after … Continue reading →
[Part I here.] I have come to conceptualize many of the people who are drawn most powerfully (and obsessively) to these extreme activities this way: they don’t want to live without them. And for some of the most extreme practitioners, … Continue reading →
I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even … Continue reading →
There have been two suicides of prominent celebrities in the news in the past few days: Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I’ll talk about them a bit later in this post, but I want to start with something more general—this … Continue reading →
Frost again: The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But … Continue reading →
I find that lately I’ve been pulling back ever-so-slightly from day-to-day politics. It’s not that I’m not writing about that sort of thing; I definitely still am. I just find that, for the most part, the stories du jour are … Continue reading →
—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s … Continue reading →
There are walls, and then there are walls. Robert Frost wrote: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass … Continue reading →
Yesterday’s post on stage musicals vs. movie musicals led somehow to me watching video after video on YouTube with great pleasure, and one of the greatest of those pleasures was to learn that Patricia Morison is still alive and kicking … Continue reading →
Molly Worthen has written an article in the the NY Times recommending the memorization of poetry: Since ancient times, humans have memorized and recited poetry. Before the invention of writing, the only way to possess a poem was to memorize … Continue reading →