“And thus the stage was set for Maria to go through several days of dark anguish and exquisite joy, alternating back and forth like a small reciprocating two-cycle engine.”
Surprising Potential
The Deep Feels
“This poor woman’s poetry . . . was the kind of poetry that focused on how the poet felt. True, there was not much here to distinguish it from the vast watery sea of how all the other poets felt, but Taki-Smith had a peculiar genius for it. Her volume of verse that had won the Pulitzer Prize was not titled The Pale Parabola of Joy, but it might as well have been.”
About Twenty Yards Wide, to be Exact
“His grandfather was a revival preacher named Stump Hutchins from the Tupelo old school, and was capable, whenever he got going good, of preaching a pretty wide swath of blue ruin.”
So Let’s Call It the No Legal Footing Lock Down
Introduction: At the beginning of this month, I wrote about the scriptural understanding of quarantine. Take those principles as the base line. What we are currently doing does not line up with that description at all. As in, not even close. Better to be safe than sorry. And at least to me, it is interesting …
Deadly, But Hard to See
“If that conversation had been the North Atlantic just several generations back, there would have been U-boats everywhere.” Flags Out Front, p. 117 ...
Letters About Our Close Call
Letter to the Editor: Concerning "One of Our Bees is Missing", you have probably answered this somewhere in the last couple of weeks, but if we had not shut anything down, how many thousands ...
Priced to Move
“Maria could see at a glance that Willow must have settled in on some peculiar kind of feminasty revenge and that she needed to be near Tom to do it. Her outfit was like a sale at Macy’s—forty percent off—and Maria started to fume, but then checked herself. No need, no need.”
One of Our Bees Is Missing
Introduction: Now that we have sprayed the whole jungle with Agent Orange in order to find out if anything nefarious was going on in there, the answers are starting to come back. Not any more. Say that in your best Inspector Clouseau voice. Not any more. Now that we survey the damage, along with the …
Audio Reading of Post
Dantesque Lighting
“The ceiling of the room where the cocktail party was held was thickly covered with numerous chandeliers, the hotel ballroom kind of chandelier, and with all of them putting out the kind of light you might see at the lower wattage end of a brown out. The lights, however, were not flickering, which made you realize that somebody was doing it all on purpose. Despite the lighting, and perhaps because of it, the room was filled with major media figures, television personalities, editors and other detritus from the publishing world, a handful of decrepit rock stars, and throbbing electropop. Oom cha oom cha oom cha. Oh, and money. The room was full of money in very adult amounts, Manhattan scale, while the crackling envy and flirtation levels were all still stuck in junior high, Hoboken scale. The ‘atrocious lighting,’ as Dr. Tom summed it up, made it look like one of Dante’s circles done up in sepia tones.”