Author Archives: JMN

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About JMN

I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.

Skindance

Posted on December 11, 2025 by JMN

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Plenty of Ouch for the Wicked

Posted on December 8, 2025 by JMN

The fellowship is festive.Rectified canticles boom from the sanctum,Would you believe? … Marching as to war,All the pardoned felonsGoing on before… Rigor mortified, the righteousStiff-arm the anxious,The walking doomed. Worm meat.All told in the scriptures:They will go poof. Straight to … Continue reading →

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Mel Leipzig, the ‘Chekhov of Trenton’

Posted on December 5, 2025 by JMN

The acrylic canvases of Mel Leipzig, a painter christened by Peter Schjeldahl as the “Chekhov of Trenton,” reach me as analogs to the loudest arena-rock virtuoso guitar hero solos you can think of. They are an ostentation of look-what-I-can-do. They … Continue reading →

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Montserrat of the Heart

Posted on December 3, 2025 by JMN

When I thought I’d become a poet my head was as empty as a young male’s under-developed frontal lobe can be. In hindsight I can see it now. It was hiding in plain sight, the poetry, waiting for me to … Continue reading →

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‘The Things That You’re Liable to Read in the Bible…’

Posted on December 2, 2025 by JMN

“… They ain’t necessarily so,” goes the song in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. “If we could stop coming at the Bible postured as though we’re the ones that own it… to prop up, whether it’s theologies, whatever makes us comfortable, … Continue reading →

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‘Something Endlessly Inspiring and Strange’

Posted on November 29, 2025 by JMN

While Shakespeare’s plays must have stemmed from some personal experience, they take the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and, through an act of artistic creation, fashion them into something endlessly inspiring and strange. (Drew Lichtenberg) Inspiring and … Continue reading →

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Portrait of the Reader as an Exigent Mug

Posted on November 27, 2025 by JMN

“Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering, unceasing variety of torture. This is what the Divine Majesty, so outraged by sinners, demands.” (From “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce) I’ve been hearing a milestone … Continue reading →

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I Have a Bone to Pick with the Food Chain

Posted on November 24, 2025 by JMN

In a neighboring town I glimpsed a lone cow in a chute back of a meat processing plant. She was staring fixedly at something unidentified off to my right, heedless of my passing. Only one outcome was left for her.  … Continue reading →

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The Parable of Angus Burdoo

Posted on November 22, 2025 by JMN

“Interdependence is no longer our choice… It is our condition. We will either build healthy interdependencies and rise together or suffer through unhealthy interdependencies and fall together.” (Dov Seidman, quoted here) Picture a man who engenders a lovely daughter. In … Continue reading →

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Never Too Many Books

Posted on November 21, 2025 by JMN

… Peter-Ayers Tarantino[’s aesthetic] recalls that of maximalist bibliophiles of centuries past, including Marcel Proust and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was formed during a life on the road. In the Abstract Expressionism section, Tarantino extracts, almost without looking, a thick … Continue reading →

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