Le Temps Approche
revised and updated 20 March 2022 In less than a month, I will be flying to Paris to stay awhile and write – a dream I’ve had for some time now. I believe the change in scenery will do me good. I will spend my time on the Left Bank, expecting to see and contemplate […]
The Itch
The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone—more familiarly, the ITCZ (called the “Itch”)—is a belt about 5 degrees north and south of the Equator. It is an area where the northern and southern trade winds clash, causing storms and then pushing the air upwards and becalming the atmosphere into windlessness: the doldrums. Although the etymology of the word […]
Thoughts on The Use of Poetry
[Thanks to T. S. Eliot] What are poets good for? The 20th Century is not sure. Eliot thinks that by rights a poet should be useful: he ought to guard the language against becoming barbaric; and that he ought to be entertaining. But the poet must also, as Eliot puts it, “make us from time […]
I Am A Writer
I haven’t decided if this title should be emphasized this way—I am a writer—or this way—I am a writer. Of course, I could just give in to total emphasis and yell: I AM A WRITER, but that isn’t the point, not even close. At the end of December 2020 (the day after my birthday to […]
Old Habits
When I was in college and introduced to T. S. Eliot’s poetry, I fell in love. Something in his words, the arrangement of his lines, the ideas simply snatched me up in an intellectual embrace. I talked about his poetry so much that my boyfriend at the time bought me the collected works of […]
Creative Writing
Creative writing—fiction, poetry—like any art starts, I think, with a “gift,” a talent, a desire to create sense and meaning out of our lives. It may start with a conversation, an event, a memory, even an imagined idea—these are the “cloth” that all humans have; the writer, however, makes something of the cloth: gives it […]
T.S. Eliot
If it is possible to have a “hero” as a writer, then I choose T.S. Eliot as mine. Now being called a “paleo-modernist” (as if he were some class of dinosaur), I believe he speaks to every age that has succeeded him, that his poetry and drama are rich, inspiring literary works, and that the […]
Idiots
You want to know who are the idiots, traitors, anti-democracy jerks who are siding with the liars (Trump), criminals (Texas Attorney General Paxton), and their enablers (too numerous to mention)? Their names will go into the records of the U.S. Supreme Court on an Amicus Brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163403/20201210153048641_Texas%20v.%20Pennsylvania%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20106%20Representatives.pdf Let us NEVER forget them. And, by the […]
Let’s Not Forget
What will it take? How long must we wait? I am reminded of George Santayana’s warning: “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” But I remember, and so do those who went out of their way to vote for Joe Biden; must we be doomed because of the sniveling, ass-licking […]
Shame
The election is over. By all accounts, no matter what is done from this point forward, the result will remain the same: Donald J. Trump has lost. Yet, nothing has changed. His enablers – the likes of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham – and his lackeys – the worst of whom is probably the Gollum-like […]