Monthly Archives: December 2021

Don’t Just Stand There. Squint

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My approach to Clint is to grace him with a mighty hat and a bodacious cheroot. Outside the frame he’s packing heat, of course. Clint Eastwood personifies a school of movie acting whose slogan is “Don’t just do something. Stand … Continue reading

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‘Confound, Torment, Swallow Us Whole’

To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses. Thus starts Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay drawn from the afterword of her translation of “Trust” … Continue reading

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The Moons of Poesis

When reading poetry I try to think like astronomers. They are a doughty lot, trucking with the unexpected, stalking questions that defy asking. “What I really hope for is something we don’t expect” [John Mather, Goddard Space Flight Center, on … Continue reading

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Paula Rego Likes to Work

Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK. Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.” Anna Russell writes that the urgency of … Continue reading

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Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!

A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading

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Never Send to Know for Whom the Tale’s Told

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/09/last-call-for-fomalhaut/) Did the ancient Texans practice cannibalism? The jury’s out on the matter. It’s possible they gorged on animals rather than human flesh. Data fracking in the Huntsville Shale encountered coprolites of an extinct bovine species — possibly … Continue reading

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Mean or Not, It’s a Feat

Can a poem hurt the reader into glimpsing its cargo? The poem discussed is ‘From “Banana [ ],”’ Poetry, December 2021, by Paul Hlava Ceballos. I encounter poetry I perceive to be all kinds of icky: cryptic, elliptic, hierophantic, delphic, … Continue reading

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Last Call for Fomalhaut

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/02/what-we-know-about-astrids-predicament/) There was no continuing aspect to the rapture. It did not unfold — it was never folded. It simply was, was over, and that was that. Few in the Posse of Matrons had witnessed a Ministering to … Continue reading

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‘Except for Perhaps Poetry…’

In 1970, David Godine started a small publishing company in an abandoned cow barn in Brookline, Massachusetts. After a distinguished history of publishing select titles in well crafted editions, he has sold the company. I enjoyed reading what he did … Continue reading

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What We Know About Astrid’s Predicament

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/11/25/two-kukris-in-saltire-between-two-martlets-or/) Remember that the city-state enshrined in this telling was a last-ditch outpost on the sere waste of the Wisp Isthmus. Conjecture establishes that Astrid bint Wanda harbored a vestige of erased indigene biopolymer in her gizzard. One … Continue reading

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