Welcome statement


Parting Words from Moristotle (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….
Showing posts with label Third Monday with Bob Boldt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Third Monday with Bob Boldt. Show all posts

Monday, November 16, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

My grandmother’s house
(a short story)

By Bob Boldt
The movie never changes. It can’t change. Every time you see it – it seems different because you are different.
            –James Cole, from Terry Gilliam’s movie,
            Twelve Monkeys
The war with Germany was over. We had recently defeated Hitler and my dad was home from the European theater. His unit was not scheduled to go to the Pacific. I wasn’t sure what the name “theater” meant. When the Germans surrendered, I was in a theater, and after the man in the projection booth shouted out “Germany surrendered!” all the service men threw their hats in the air. I remembered the white screen with no film in the projector, the shadows of all those hats flying high in the air, and the happy whoops and hollers filling the theater. Soon after that my dad came home from the Navy.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

Vagaries (a short story)

By Bob Boldt

The photograph, by French director Chris Marker (1921-2012), was the inspiration for my short story. The image begins Marker’s 1983 documentary, Sans Soleil [Sunless]:
The first image he told me about is an image of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness – and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images but it never worked. He wrote me, “One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

Monday, September 21, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

Le Morte d’Arthur

By Bob Boldt

Having lost all the color of life, the white, blue, and green tinted naked body lies so very flat on the cold stainless steel table. The silence of the room is rendered even more desolate by the faint hum of the refrigeration unit laboring to keep the others preserved in the morgue across the hall.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

This was the end – Chicago 1968

By Bob Boldt

The tear gas canister landed barely four feet from me. Its dark gray hull came hissing past like some small, badly piloted extraterrestrial craft spewing white toxic fumes. I watched as the lake breeze moved the alien cloud away. I remained seated, head bowed, pretending to pray, in deference to my Christian friends.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

The Grand Inquisitor: 
Loosely adapted from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

By Bob Boldt

[This piece was written in October 2004 near the conclusion of the career of John Ashcroft. I live in Missouri, where our now ex-Attorney General’s strong imperial convictions, corruption, and even stronger religious fanaticism are legend.
    I am a believer in the concept of eternal recurrence. I have said elsewhere that I am certain that if Christ were to return to this sad world ruled by an empire that could teach even the Romans a thing or two about brutality and iron-fisted control of subject peoples, he would certainly be re-crucified.
]


Monday, June 15, 2015

Monday, April 20, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

The art of painting (verse)

By Bob Boldt





The heavy drape is rumpled loosely back.
We are invited to view creation.
Here an empty chair has been provided
for an observer, patron, or voyeur.
We draw back farther the heavy curtain
and willingly leave our modern time
for what we think is Vermeer’s stable life.
Why such passion in this our modern age
to enter and to rest our eyes a while,
serene within this ordered universe
of softlit rooms, amid the brick-a-brack,
virginals, maps, and portraits of his town?


Monday, March 16, 2015

Third Monday with Bob Boldt

Orwell rebooted

By Bob Boldt

Someone recently asked me what I thought about a statement attributed to persecuted whistleblower, Thomas Drake: “If everything is a target, there is no target.” I said I thought that what he was driving at was, the bigger the haystack the harder to find the needle. When you collect everything on everybody, the amount of data is so overwhelming that anything relevant is nearly impossible to find.