Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”
— Robert Frost
Tag: …wow.
I mean “wow.” Just … wow.
Why I Love: H.P. Lovecraft
IT’S THE WAY HIS PROSE wraps me up like an amorous and itchy octopus. It’s the slow building of his narratives. It’s his quaint and dark sense of humor. It’s his search for literary identity (“There are my ‘Poe pieces’…
Happy 2019!
MAY THE ARBITRARY DIVISION OF Earth’s orbit into 365.25 units find you better off now than you were last time we reached this point on the circle’s rim — and not nearly as good as you will be next time.…
Death steals everything except our stories.”
— Jim Harrison
Truth v. Lies
SOME TIME AGO, I HAD a Facebook encounter with a dear friend who’s something of an Evangelical Atheist. It all started when another dear friend posted the following “meme” to my “wall:” OMNISM: THE BELIEF THAT NO RELIGION IS THE…
Metaphoraging Roundup: 2018
IF A GOOD FRIEND HADN’T died this year and cured me of a years-long writer’s block, I wouldn’t be posting this. But he did, so I am, proffering 2018’s Top 10 Viewed Pages and Posts at this writing: 1. Home…
Eats: Freeform Chicken Meatballs with Carrots and Yogurt Sauce
THIS COMES FROM EPICURIOUS.COM, A foodie website whose daily emails are proffered hand-in-glove with that other Conde Nast staple, Bon Appetit. Their recipes are a something of a cut above basic cookery, just challenging enough to stretch your fledgling cook-wings…
First Graf: The Timetables of History
AN AWE-INSPIRING WORK, The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events by Bernard Grun is one of those books that have to be seen, and leafed through, to believe. (My own copy, of the 591-page edition First…
Why I Love: Star Wars
IT’S THE BLUE INTERTITLE PROCLAIMING “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” It’s the concept of the Force: nakedly nondual, essentially Taoist, but not preachy about it. It’s the costumes. It’s the sets (even the CGI ones,…
First Graf: Understanding Comics
THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE THE way you think about (as author Scott McCloud concisely defines it) “sequential art.” McCloud takes us inside the art form to explain how and why comics/graphic novels work. He tracks the 3,000-year history of Sequential…
My Chanukah With Ramana
THE TECHNIQUE IS SIMPLE: JUST lay on your back, breathing, and take a complete and negative bodily inventory: “I am not my legs; I am not my feet; I am not my arms;” “I am not my mind;” et al.…
First Graf: Ulysses
THERE’S NOT MUCH ELSE TO say about James Joyce’s magnum opus (although some would apply that descriptor to Finnegans Wake) that hasn’t been said, and by greater and more erudite scholars than this reporter: takes place over 24 hours in…