Avant Garde & the Widowed Image

What’s left of the avant-garde–there isn’t much because anything can be packaged and made mainstream in this county–continues to insist on the (highly problematical) concepts of innovation and marginality. The old is relegated to the dustbin of history, and the new is briefly given its moment, usually by an outsider. This set of ideas replicates […]

The Law Isn’t Justice

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. – Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye. Page 53.

Schiller on How to Survive As an Artist in the Age of Social Media

In the modest stillness of your heart you must cherish victorious truth, display it from within yourself in Beauty, so that not merely thought may pay homage to it, but sense too may lay loving hold on its appearance. And lest by any chance you may receive the pattern you are to give it from […]

Rhyming Reminder

Don’t forget: In “Listen to Her Heart,” Tom Petty rhymes: Behind her and my girl. Don’t take it all too seriously. Language is fun.

Spilling Blood for the Remission of the Sin of Spilling Blood

…we have the saddening spectacle of men courageously dedicated to a worthy cause letting their nobility grow so distempered by impatience that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish love of liberty from lust for blood. Ad we find by their charismatic arithmetic that ‘if all the slaves in the United States–men, women and helpless babes–were […]

Franzen/Giraldi Fiction as Religious Text

With near-unanimity, [Shirley] Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as, she said, “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict […]

Poem Published: Elegy on a Former Student’s Dying

Essay Published: An Indispensable Conversation

Fathom Magazine has recently published an issue centered around friendship. They asked me to contribute to this issue, which also happens to be their 5th Anniversary. Over the last five years, they have published several of my poems, essays, an interview, and even a fictional story. This essay on friendship is entitled An Indispensable Conversation […]

John Erickson Contemplating His Own Death

It’s going to happen. I hope that I’ll be prepared for that… I have some satisfaction in thinking that I did what I could to dignify the memory of my parents, the people in my community and my church. I didn’t shame my wife. And I brought some laughter and smiles to children and families. […]

Patrick Kavanaugh – Provincialism vs. Parochialism

Parochialism and provincialism are [direct] opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on any subject. This runs through all activities.  The parochial mentality on the other hand […]