Fifth Saturday Fiction

Forget about it
(a short story)

By Bob Boldt

Midway through a late Sunday morning shower, my singularly resonant baritone rendition of “Toreador” from Bizet’s Carmen was interrupted by a loud trumpet blast from somewhere inside the house. Stunned, I instinctively punched off the hot stream and reached for a towel. My brain frantically raced through a half dozen or more desperate explanations to frame the outrageous stimulus within some rational or not so rational context. Car horn? Smoke alarm? TV? Radio? Sweepstakes winner fanfare? Musical burglar? Satchmo’s ghost?

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Since William Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court, it has made several rulings that have knocked the U.S. Constitution out of whack. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens, who deliberated on most of those rulings, has written six amendments to fix the damage and tune up the Constitution.

Thor's Day: Two options

Smoking or non-smoking?

By Anonymous

[Editor's Note: The image below was sent to us by one of our correspondents. You know how earnestly the question gets asked by people who believe they will consciously spend eternity somewhere.]

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean

Ask Wednesday: What is "crape murder"?

Some do consider it 
a crime

By Morris Dean

"Crape," first of all, has the variant "crepe," and the full common name for Lagerstroemia is crape myrtle or crepe myrtle, "a genus of around 50 species of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs native to the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, northern Australia, and parts of Oceania, cultivated in warmer climates around the world. It is a member of the Lythraceae, which are also known as the loosestrife family. The genus is named after the Swedish merchant Magnus von Lagerström, who supplied Carolus Linnaeus with plants he collected. These flowering trees are beautifully colored and are often planted both privately and commercially. Popular cultivars used in modern landscaping include the bright red 'Dynamite,' the deep pink 'Pink Velour,' and the purple 'Twilight' crape myrtle, which also has a bark that changes colors." –Wikipedia

Tuesday Voice

The sixties

By Ed Rogers

[Originally published on April 2, 2013. At the time, Paul Clark, aka motomynd, said of it: "one of the best, most all-encompassing, 'insider' perspectives of the '60s that I have ever read."]

Reflecting back on my life, as most of us old farts do, I realized that most people only know about the sixties through history books, newspapers, or bullshit stories that people like me tell. I don’t claim to have been in the belly of the beast, but I had a hold of its tail.

Fourth Monday Susan Speaks: Free the art!

Help, please help!

By Susan C. Price

My two drawers for paintings are full. My walls are full. The space under our bed where I've stuffed drawings is full. I keep making more art. Help... please...help me free the art!

Fourth Sunday from Jingle Jangle

Cousin Ray (excerpt from Chapter 1 of 
Jingle Jangle)

By Jim Rix

[Editor’s Note: Today we inaugurate a new monthly column featuring selections from the author's 2007 true crime book, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out. We lead off with a blurb from the dust jacket: “A must for readers of true crime and anyone wondering why so many innocent people are convicted in America. The book satisfies from start to finish, from the opening of Ray Krone’s horror story, through the compelling analysis of what went wrong, and on to the startling conclusion....”
                –Sister Helen Prejean, author of
                  Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents]

I first learned of his predicament during a phone conversation with my mother. In her eighties, my mother was still one of the brightest people I knew and we often talked about current events. In this particular conversation I asked her if she had watched the TV program the night before about an innocent man released from Death Row. I don’t remember now which network magazine show it was or who was profiled. My mother replied that she hadn’t seen the show, then added casually, “You have a cousin on Death Row, and he’s innocent.”

Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal

Fog

By James Knudsen

All places have something that the locals talk about with a mixture of pride and begrudging respect. In the Lancaster/Palmdale region where I taught theatre at Antelope Valley College, it’s the wind. The locals will tell you that the Antlelope Valley Wind Festival runs January 1st thru December 31st. And I’d venture a guess that most tropic regions will insist they have rain like no other place on Earth. Okinawa could hurl down precipitation with the best of them during the monsoon season I spent there in 1985. But, I must give Chiang Mai, Thailand its due. There I saw the rain start the way it does in the movies; one second nothing and the next, as if someone had thrown a switch, a torrential downpour. I could go on – the cold of Russia, the streets of Paris, the crazies of New York, but I want to talk about my hometown, Tulare, California and what it does better than anywhere in the world. Fog.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. –E. O. Wilson, from The Diversity of Life (1992), quoted in the frontispiece of Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 book, The Sixth Extinction

Thor's Day: Let's aspire

Before we expire

By Anonymous

[Editor's Note: the image was sent to us by one of our correspondents. We don't know who made the graphic, but it's a worthy thought, and a moral challenge.]

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean

Ask Wednesday: Are there as many odd numbers as even?

No...but... yes...but....

By Morris Dean

[Originally published, under the title "More even than odd," on January 10, 2011.]

I was amazed one morning to discover a "proof" for something that is quite counter-intuitive. I mean, there are as many odd numbers as even numbers, right?

Tuesday Voice: Growing up in America

Climbing rocks

By Rolf Dumke

Reading the NY Times article of the spectacular recent climb of Yosemite's El Capitan – “Pursuing the Impossible, and Coming Out on Top,” by John Branch, January 14, 2015 – I felt certain college memories resurfacing.

Third Monday Musing

Only the dead know

By Ed Rogers

As a young man, I didn’t give much thought to death or dying. However, as you get older you begin to notice people who are younger than yourself passing away.

Sunday Review: Words and Pictures

Sometimes it's war

By Morris Dean

Words and Pictures (2013, directed by Fred Schepisi) is set in an upscale preparatory school in Maine that hires accomplished professionals as teachers of its advanced courses, including Jack Marcus, a writer who has taught English there for a number of years, and Dina Delsanto, an artist just joining the staff as an art teacher.

Third Saturday Fiction

Prologue & Chapter 1, Rainforest Day One, from the novel Far Stone

By Steve Glossin

[Editor’s Note: Begun over ten years ago, Far Stone remains so far unfinished. It features the character Big Bob Tilden, who has appeared on Moristotle & Co. before – most recently on August 26 last year, when Bob took a wild camel ride across a Saudi Arabian desert.]

By AD 900 the Classic period of the Maya was ending. Their major cities were being abandoned and the monumental architecture was slowly being claimed and hidden by the Jungle of the dense rainforest. The inhabitants of Masuul, located in the heart of Maya region between Calakmul to the south and Tikal to the north would stand vacant until it was rediscovered by the archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, on 3 May 1922.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just announced that a record-breaking number of endangered Florida panthers were killed in 2014.
    What little habitat remains for this endangered species is under constant siege from development, oil drilling and mining. The development on their habitat creates a profound threat to their survival and led to the death of 33 Florida panthers last year.

Thor’s Day: The creation of the world

Based on a Yoruba myth

By Bob Boldt

Some years in the future, Obatala and his sidekick Oduduwa were reminiscing about how they created the world. Obatala, in his retirement, had resumed his drinking. The palm wine was flowing. As night fell, all gathered to hear about the first creation of the world and how the tribes of man were created. The fire grew stronger as the blue light of evening fell and a chill night blew all around.

Ask Wednesday: How does your flowering jade plant look?

Happy and optimistic

By Morris Dean

The jade plant's taxonomic name is Crassula ovata. Some people apparently also know it as a friendship tree, a lucky plant, or a money tree. It is native to South Africa, and is common as a houseplant worldwide.

Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Winter reflections

By Bettina Sperry

In the cool mountain air, I bathed at my wishing well. At 9 o’clock on an August morning, my shower curtain was the green grass, vast pastures, mountains, and blue sky. The water was cold and clear. Almost as if seeing my farm for the first time, I recognized the abundance of water available to the life on this farm. A creek winds its way through the length of the property at the base of the hill. Another branch feeds into it near the house. A pond rests above the northern pasture. Farther beyond the farm, up the winding road a few miles, is a man-made lake. It is where the eagle soars.

Second Monday Music: Two reviews of Baroque performance

The Seicento Baroque Ensemble of Boulder, Colorado

By Chuck Smythe

The first Seicento Baroque Ensemble concert of the new, 2014-2015 concert season was titled “Dies Irae” (days of wrath). It was held on Halloween weekend, and featured some appropriate seasonal music: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d (you know, the one in all the movies!), and the Witches’ scenes from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” Act II, Scene 1. There were also motets by Cannicciari, Bertulosi, Byrd, and Kuhnau.

Sunday Review: Before the Rain

A tale of the unexpected

By Christopher-Joseph Ravnopolski-Dean

You have picked the wrong film if you expect a banal happy-ending fairy tale from Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994, from the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, titled Пред дождот [Pred ‘dojdot] in Macedonian Bulgarian). Indeed, in the beginning we are promised a “tale in three parts,” and when we see the mesmerizing Macedonian natural surroundings, we are more than willing to believe the promise is true. Yet, the ensuing events make it impossible for the film to fit such a conventional form. It is still a tale because of the love stories, the sense of magical reality, the illogical and fantastic events, the reminiscences of the middle ages, but its content and construction continuously reveal an unexpectedness unusual for fairy tales.

Second Saturday's Sonnet

Hetch Hetchy

By Eric Meub

[Originally published on January 11, 2014]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The grasses hissed beneath the oaks that mark
these fields. But now her swimming pool has spread
a net of light up into shadowed bark.
An over-irrigated oak falls dead.

Fish for Friday

"I am Charlie," the signs say,
in solidarity with those killed in Paris

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

We are too. "Terrorists Strike Charlie Hebdo Newspaper in Paris, Leaving 12 Dead." Excerpt:

Officials said late Wednesday that the suspects in an assault on a satirical newspaper in Paris had been identified as two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, 32 and 34, and Hamyd Mourad, 18.
    A manhunt for the suspects continues across Paris after the brazen and methodical slaughter at the paper, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead, including the top editor, prominent cartoonists and police officers. It was among the deadliest attacks in postwar France.
    The assault threatened to deepen the distrust of France’s large Muslim population, coming at a time when Islamic radicalism has become a central concern of security officials across Europe.

Thor's Day: Jesus loves me so much

The Bible tells me so

By Anonymous

[Editor’s Note: The cartoon below bluntly but eloquently reveals the psychopathology of a contradiction sitting at the heart of Christian theology.]

Ask Wednesday: Ask Susan

Should I take him back?

By Susan C. Price

[Questions are followed by answers and then, inevitably by ADVICE...you DID expect that...didn’t you?]

I split up with the father of my kids nearly three years ago. We were together for five years before he moved back to Canada. But over the past month or so we have been getting very close again. He’s in an unhappy relationship and wants to move back to give our relationship another go. He cheated on me when we were together, but now I feel that I’m making him cheat on her with me. Am I a fool if I get back with him after all this time apart? I’m really confused about it all. –Cassie Mae

Tuesday Voice: Will you give this to my Daddy?

A terminal at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport

By Anonymous

[Editor's Note: Contributed by a correspondent, who didn't know who wrote it, or even whether it really happened. But it could have.]

Last week I was in Atlanta, Georgia attending a conference. While I was in the airport, returning home, I heard several people behind me beginning to clap and cheer. I immediately turned around and witnessed one of the greatest acts of patriotism I have ever seen.

First Monday with Characters

Edited by Morris Dean

Geoffrey Dean, visiting

After a birthday and pre-Christmas celebration on the 21st, I and my significant other flew to Minneapolis to spend Christmas with her family before heading to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit my sister and relatives on my mother’s side.
    I hadn’t been to California in about a decade, and it was especially interesting to see it at this traditionally chilly time of year. California cold is, well, warmer than in most other places. The dark green pine foliage and high palm trees give the western shore of the Bay Area a Rome-meets-the-tropics feel. I enjoyed Christa’s enthusiasm on seeing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, and she called Sausalito “charming” rather than “touristy,” the preferred descriptive, I imagine, of the average Californian.

Sunday Review: Potpourri of year-end films

Interstellar, The Theory of Everything, Diplomacy, & St. Vincent

By Jonathan Price

In the last month and a half there have been a flurry of films worth seeing, though of varying degrees of excellence and certainly varied in genre and subject.

Thirst Satyrday for Eros (in fiction)

Portrait of the author
by Susan C. Price

William the Conjuror (a short story)

By W.M. Dean

Editor:
    I haven't written many letters to editors. Certainly none on the subject of this letter, a subject that I've never even talked about with anyone—strange as that will seem to your more sophisticated readers. But, truth is, I've been until very recently a modest, retiring fellow.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

"Cruise Ships Are Unregulated Trouble on the High Seas." Excerpt:

Cruise ships have become the symbol of all that’s gone haywire in the tourism industry.
    The largest of these floating hotels are the size of horizontal skyscrapers and carry as many as 6,000 passengers. They cross the seas polluting the water and air and overwhelming their ports of call....
    Every day the average cruise ship dumps 21,000 gallons of human waste, one ton of solid waste garbage, 170,000 gallons of wastewater and 8,500 plastic bottles in the ocean. That’s according to the Environmental Protection Agency – cruise ships are under no regulatory obligation to monitor or report what they release.

Thor's Day: What’s Your Story? What’s Your Landscape?

By Bob Boldt

In Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” from the collection Crossing Open Ground, he states that the purpose of storytelling is