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….

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 2

By Roger Owens

In Windows 10, you hold the power button down for 15 seconds, then release. Press it again and begin tapping “F11,” until you see the boot menu. You select “Troubleshoot” from the menu, and then click “Advanced Options.”
    By this point you feel a little smug; that feeling gamers report when “reaching the next level,” that sort of thing. You are now confronted with options including one known as “System Restore,” and when you click on that, you get to chose from a few dates in the not-too-distant past at which time, in your fondest dreams, your system had not been corrupted by God only knows what virus, power surge, plague, disaster, war, famine, or election gone awry that might have had illicit cyber-congress with your hard drive and impregnated it with some vampiric succubus.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

The Loneliest Liberal: Santa Claus’s reindeer don’t pull a van

By James Knudsen
Dear Santa...I want some clarity about whether I should purchase a minivan again. Do I need another minivan? Maybe. I just think they’re the most practical platform out there and they were on their way to conquering the American roads until Arnold Schwarzenegger had to have a Humvee, sparking an SUV craze that we still haven’t recovered from. Thanks a lot, Arnold. Anywho, if you run across a low-mileage, second-generation, KIA Sedona (or rebadged Hyundai Entourage) that’s had a recent valve adjustment, you can just put it under the tree, by the curb.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Thunder Down Under:
Travel memories

By Vic Midyett

I sure miss the adventures Shirley & I had while travelling around Australia as “gray nomads”! For example, I took these two photos in 2014 near a town called Sawtell in the state of New South Wales (where Sydney is). The temperature was very nice that day, as you can tell from the next photo because Shirley wasn’t bundled up!

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Adventures from Bulgaria: Summer in the Mountains – Day 1

Eastward  from Borovets

By Valeria Idakieva

At the beginning of January 2017, I started thinking about doing the Bulgarian part of the European long distance path called E8*. In Bulgaria the route starts in the Rila Mountains and crosses the Rhodope Mountains, reaching the Turkish border. As usual, my preparation consisted of obtaining information and waiting for August when I could run away to the mountains. Finally August came and I was soon getting my backpack ready for the summer adventure. I could not make it light enough, but it was not the first time I’ve had this problem, and I knew I was going to get used to its weight anyway. I got on the bus and headed for Borovets – a ski resort in the Rila Mountains where my route started. The next day rose a bright blue morning with fresh, cool air, and I eagerly followed the path, which weaves along a beautiful river.


Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Work-wife mentality and the matter of sexual harassment

By Sharon Stoner

Jill Filipovic’s January 20 NY Times article, “Donald Trump and His Work Wives,” goes to a vital organ of the matter of “sexual harassment” (and other offenses, in or out of offices). The terms “work wife” and “work husband,” she explains, originally described “typically benign egalitarian workplace intimacies: a close co-worker with whom you share not only tasks but also complaints and office gossip.”

Monday, January 22, 2018

In Your Dreams: A national lottery

Tower of London chopping block
And the winner is

By Moristotle

Last night I had another installment of a recurring dream.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Correspondence: Dogs on and off the leash

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Moristotle, how well do you wash your hands after you & Siegfried return from your poop patrols? The story “The Parasite on the Playground” from The New York Times [Laura Beil, January 16] points out that “Adult Toxocara roundworms live in the small intestines of infected cats and dogs. The eggs are excreted in their feces.” And “they can be ingested by children playing outside; the worm’s larvae have been found in the brain...perhaps impairing development.” [Read more.]
    [Uh, not as well as I should, I see!]


Saturday, January 20, 2018

Thunder Down Under:
Sunflowers for an Office

“Sunflowers” (detail)
Painting by Shirley Deane/Midyett

Text by Vic Midyett







A friend of Shirley’s wanted a sunflower painting for her office. So, of course, Shirley painted one for her:

Friday, January 19, 2018

Correspondence: cummings & Goines, and other funs

Self-portrait by ee cummings
Public Domain
Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

There is such joy to be found in helping others, you’d think there’d be more of it.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Road Trip to the South

By Don Richert

My wife, Tati, and I decided to take a 26-day road trip to several different cities and historic areas in the Southern United States. We left our home in New York City on Sunday, December 17, 2017 and took three days to drive to Nashville, Tennessee. We visited the Parthenon in Nashville, an art museum inside a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens. Around the top of the facades of the front and back of the museum are re-creations of the statues that were there in the original Parthenon. Inside the museum, there are casts of the ancient statues, as they exist now, and explanations of how the statues were recreated.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Movie Review: All the Money in the World

A Moral Fable

By Jonathan Price

For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Many souls are being lost in the pursuit of wealth in this film (2017, directed by Ridley Scott) Very few souls seem worth saving, perhaps that of Paulo Getty’s mother Gail (Michelle Williams), devoted to her son. risking the world and abandoning her divorce-gained custody of her other two children to get him back. Perhaps also worth saving is her aide and eventual co-conspirator, Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg).

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Give it up for Ralph Earle!

Four poems recently published

By Moristotle

Our friend and colleague Ralph Earle was recently honored to have three poems published in the online journal of poetry & art, Triggerfish Quarterly Review, Issue 19


Monday, January 15, 2018

Owed to a little dog

By Sharon Stoner

Things are really getting me down right now, and I am frustrated. For one thing, my dog, Timmy. Ordinarily, when I wake-up and take off my CPAP mask, he comes out from under the covers, sits on my chest waiting for his ears to be scratched, and then flops down for a belly rub. During this routine he never barks or makes any other sound. But what has he just done?

Sunday, January 14, 2018

On Franklin Hill Farm: The rustle of brown leaves

A poem of an afternoon’s experience










By Bettina Sperry

With a keen and cautious eye,
I saw two pups
playing and rustling around
like two brown leaves
atop a rolling mountain.

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Poetry & Portraits: Passover

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Passover
By Eric Meub

A breakfast table mystery: I see
each section – Datebook, Sports, Society –
but not the front page. Mother starts to shrink
when asked about it, busy at the sink.


Friday, January 12, 2018

Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil

By Roger Owens

In just the next few days, life, for my wife and me, will be turned on its head. The Devil has invited us to dance. It’s not the kind of invite you can turn down. You see, there’s this lump. Yeah, that kind of lump. It’s been x-rayed and ultra-sounded and mammogramed – the medical equivalent of an RSVP for the invitation, if you will – our grudging, involuntary response that, yes, we will be attending the ball. We really have no choice, do we? They, and the biopsy tomorrow, may be the first salvoes in what could be a long, hard war. Or what could be, heaven forbid, a short, deadly skirmish. It’s like this: by itself, the lump isn’t too terribly scary; lots of women have them. They could be fibroids, which run in Cindy’s family, while breast tumors do not. Even if it’s a tumor, they can do so much these days, right? Right? But then there’s this cough. The cough has been around for a few weeks, a bit longer than we have known about the lump. Just a holdover from that bout of bronchitis last year, you understand. Or so we have been telling ourselves; but then, the lump. Yeah. So now the cough has grown claws and teeth and turned into something entirely different than a “lingering viral infection.” Quick: name another situation in which a “lingering viral infection” would be a thing to celebrate!

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

On Franklin Hill Farm: Frozen in time

And in photographs

By Bettina Sperry

Listening to my cows, I stopped for a second. Continuing on, dried hoof prints and crevices remained in the frozen run.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

A casualty of the cold

...or the holidays

By Moristotle

Is it wrong of me to feel sympathy (if not empathy*) for this stark casualty of the cold? But, wrong or not, I do somehow suffer at the sight....

Monday, January 8, 2018

An Immodest Proposal

A Birthday Surprise Ruined in 750 Words

By Geoffrey Dean

Cover Design by
Jennifer Dean Neumann


The project started in my mind as a collection of Moristotle poems that I could read to his granddaughter. Of course, he could read them to her himself, or record them for her, or even write new poems for her, but these are other projects and not how the one I’m writing about here evolved. I got my sister involved early, and we agreed that the goal was a full-fledged publication of the “Selected Poetry of…” sort that we would present to Moristotle on his birthday in 2018. I’ll call this Plan A.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Seven Years Ago Today: Taking myself too seriously?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 6, 2011, with an additional reflection at the bottom.]

The episode of my new blog pic and its attendant quotations (from an old friend and from Henry James – another old friend of a sort) led to my realizing that I seem to have been taking myself a bit too seriously lately (and for who knows how long before that).

Friday, January 5, 2018

Correspondence: The Grump’s still here!?

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Once again, Donald Trump embarrassed himself and the country on Thursday in a New York Times interview. One of the best reactions was tweeted out by filmmaker, actor, producer, husband, and father Rob Reiner. “Rob Reiner pretty much nails what the majority of Americans think about Trump's NYT interview” [Leslie Salzillo, Daily Kos, December 29]. Excerpt:

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Correspondence: Behold!

When the four got back to the hut, they were barely
recognizable. These were all men in their 20s and 30s...
they look ancient, weather-worn and leathery, almost
like those prehistoric bodies dug up from peat bogs.
Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Winter on Franklin Hill Farm

A prose poem to gratitude and worry

By Bettina Sperry

The bitter cold is here and the local temps approach zero each night. This morning our temps were in the negative. I do love cold weather and tend to stay outside working in it and finding farm things to do, but this prolonged deep freeze is making some things impossible to do, and consequently, rearranging my routine and tasks. As well, everything takes longer to complete. While I’m wrapping up year four on this farm, there are improvements yet to be made, fencing to be updated, paddocks to be completed, and a building or two to be added, God willing.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

My winter doldrums

By Sharon Stoner

My personal editor wrote me, “Keep warm. Or are you already air-conditioning down there?” (I live in “sunny Florida.”)
    Well, I told him, it’s 41° ‪at 11 a.m‬. Up from 28° last night. I think that the AC will be off for quite a while. Hard freeze this morning.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#15)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Horse Balls didn’t want anything to do with it. A Caesarean section done by a high school student? Even, he admitted, a very bright and talented high school student who knew his anatomy as well as he knew his Socrates? On a poor woman not even quite dead? Not that he didn’t know the procedure, but he was sure it was different in real life from in the manuals. People weren’t line drawings, they bled and screamed and died. Of that much he was sure; he’d seen it last night. So it took all the persuasion Louise had to make him do it. By this time Porcelain was barely breathing. She coughed out great clots of blood. Horace was certain she had broken ribs that had punctured her lungs, and there was nothing he could do about that. He came to a decision.