INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ART’S ROLE in shaping cultures and individuals have to recognize the difference between censorship (an external restraint based on fear and loathing) and self-control (an internal restraint arising from the artist’s desire to communicate).
NextWave SF: “Retropunk”
FIRST CAME CYBERPUNK. THEN STEAMPUNK. And by 2021, … RETROPUNK. 
Shiny robots. Gleaming atom-powered spaceships. Martian canal races. Alien arcologies in the jungles of Venus. Male pronouns. All the glory of a big exploitable universe sans angst or post-apocalypse modernism. AND NO %$#@!ING VAMPIRES.
Remember, you heard it here first. “Retropunk: Yesterday’s Future, Today!”
Illo thanx: public-domain.zorger.com
Synoptipitch: Firefly
“The Guest House”
SOMEONE WHO LOVES ME SENT me this poem. I offer it to you in the same spirit.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
(By the 13th-century Persian Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. Coleman Barks is the translator, but the original was written in Truth.)
Five Summer Haiku
(THESE WERE WRITTEN JUNE 21 on the unnetworked “writing laptop,” which I only mention to explain the last verse and thank you for not skipping ahead. And now, this.)
So soon the heat comes
after long weeks of spring rain.
Sweat follows storm drops.
Summer’s popsicle
And a pool to eat it by.
What more do you need?
Dappling sunlight
dances on the patio:
cool green tree cavern.
Lemonade tinkles
in an ice-filled glass alive
with summer music.
Roll out the bandstand
and strike up the musicians:
It’s summer solstice!
Pithyism #1,914
ANY POLITICAL IDEOLOGY WHICH BEGINS “If only people would…” isn’t worth the breath needed to finish the sentence.
Dorothy Parker Nailed It
(From the should-be-better-known blog Letters of Note, here’s a desperate telegram dispatched by a wall-stuck author to her (apparently, or at least in Ms. Parker’s mind) neck-breathing editor. Between this and the previous post my own writer’s block should be dang near invisible.)
