Not All Is Bad (Really!) — articles and commentary on the world
Nearly half of the USA’s children start school in the middle of August. Another 12% begin before Aug. 14. The kids certainly feel this; their summer vacation has been cut short, and right now they often stand in summer mornings’ heat waiting for a bus, or else stand in summer afternoon’s blazing heat and ozone-poisoned […]
I am an artist by temperament and intellect; I look for insight in the beauty and the grotesque as beauty as ways to explore, help define, and enjoy the human comedy. This is not so difficult, as I need only look around with ears, if not eyes, open to the environment. I came to political […]
Questions are democracies’ currency. There is no subject unqualified for scrutiny. Shields of authenticity and stamps of approval in a dynamic cultural and political environment ought be rare. Questions cause changes of mind; answers help implement those changes.
Thomas Mallon has asks, in the Spring ’07 issue of The American Scholar, some 10 difficult yet revealing […]
My insomnia is fickle.
Usually, then, my nighttime perambulations are of the mental variety. So, I am awake much longer than if I had just turned on a bedside light and picked up Roland Barthes’ “Elements of Semiology.”
Yeah, I almost fell asleep typing the title.
Nevertheless, at 1:45 a.m. this past Saturday morning, bored, I turned on […]
I have stacks of books in my home, books in every room: stacked vertically on shelves in my library, their spines peer out like a bouquet of various eyes; I have stove-pipe stacks of books on my dining room table; book stacks like pillars of an ancient temple surround my laptop; spread like a dropped […]
