Side Story: What exactly came of those 1960s protests?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Ed, your “Hippy vs Protester” was great, as always. Have you ever pondered why Richard Nixon might today be considered too liberal to be the Democratic nominee for president, much less be nominated as a Republican? What exactly happened to all that positive liberal change the 1960s protests were supposed to bring to this country? —Paul Clark

Reply by Ed Rogers

Goines On: “Nemesis” meets its nemesis

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Goines’ friend Mark asked him whether he’d read Lord Jim or Nemesis. Goines recognized Lord Jim as a novel by Joseph Conrad, and he thought he had read it, but he couldn’t remember what it was about. Of Nemesis he had no recollection. A shallow Google search revealed a novel by Isaac Asimov, which surprised Goines, because he didn’t think Mark read sci-fi. A slightly deeper search revealed a novel by Agatha Christie. Funny, Mark didn’t read detective fiction either.

Calling All Activist Poets

An opportunity to submit work to the River Heron Review’s timely issue on socio-political events

By Geoffrey Dean

Moristotle agreed that we ought to pass along to other poets an invitation from the River Heron Review that came into my mailbox yesterday. The Review was “established [in January 2018] to support the arts through the sharing of poetry in its online journal, at readings, workshops, and by making public the transformative power of poetic expression.” Read the invitation below.

All Over the Place: Do Black Lives Matter?

Because of How Saddened I am by Racism

By Michael H. Brownstein


[https://youtu.be/75Giyui9ZB0]

Acting Citizen: Which Story Will Be Told?

By James Knudsen

Sixteen years ago we were in a place similar to the one we’re in today. It was an election year. An incumbent president was seeking a second term and I was pondering which story should be told.

Black Mountain – Intermission

Part 3 has been delayed

By James T. Carney
Photos by Detmar Straub

A lightning strike in the mountains of western North Carolina has left the photographer without a way to access the photos we need for Part 3. Thank you for your patience.

Copyright © 2020 by James T. Carney & Detmar Straub

Running through the Dark (a poem)

By Ralph Earle










To pursue the shimmering molten twilight
without a thought for the dark flowing in,
my feet follow watercourse thoroughfares
through the moonlit vines and branches.
I do not judge the brightest spots as true,
trusting instead the crackle
of dry leaves underfoot. I cross the creek.
I climb the ridge, leaning steadily
into love, my scant path leading me on.

Copyright © 2020 by Ralph Earle

Side Story: You knew Hunter S. Thompson?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Paul, you or someone else said you used to know Hunter S. Thompson? There is obviously a story here. Tell! —Chuck Smythe

Reply by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Black Mountain – Part 2

Hiking with the Tour Group

By James T. Carney
Photos by Detmar Straub

We caught our flight from London to Dubrovnik and took a van across the border and along the Adriatic coast to Petrovac. This part of Montenegro is a great tourist center in the summer; people – particularly Russians – flock there to enjoy the sun and the beach. Prior to the 2008 Great Recession, there had been a great building boom along the coast. The Great Recession ended that, leaving a huge number of half-finished apartment buildings between the road and the shore. Apparently, Montenegrins could not obtain financing for a whole building, so they financed construction on a stage-by-stage basis, which meant that the project was incomplete when the financing dried up.

Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [Intermission]

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Serialization suspended to await book publication

I want to explain to my loyal readers why the serialization of Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café has been suspended. My editor and I have determined that the story’s mix of backstories, flashbacks, and foreshadowings does not lend itself well to a presentation in installments. Readers will be much better served by a printed book in hand (or an e-book on a screen).

Black Mountain – Part 1

Straub (L) & Carney (R)

Bunker and Tower of London

By James T. Carney
Photos by Detmar Straub

For reasons that I do not understand, I have always been fascinated by the areas encompassed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighboring lands to the south of them. Certainly, the interest is not inspired by genealogy since I have no ancestors south of the Alps or east of the Elbe. In all events over the years I have made four trips to the area on pleasure and on business. My last trip there, in October 2015, was to Montenegro (“Black Mountain”), which country was part of Yugoslavia but was for most of its history semi-independent. Today it is a small country of perhaps 600,000 people (the population of Glasgow). It was recently the scene of a Russian plot to overthrow the government and install a pro-Russian regime.

All Over the Place: My Son Takes His Daughter to the Synagogue

For Father’s Day (Part 2)

By Michael H. Brownstein

My son and his wife go to the synagogue

The Friday someone decides to reopen the city.

After days of heat and humidity, sun stroke,

Sweat, mosquitoes and giant horse flies,

Rain and then more rain, a cold rain, the grass

Slippery, the street a small stream and a pool.

Goines On: Heavenly Productions, Ltd.

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The psychology of “faith the substance of things hoped for” wouldn’t let go of Goines. He wondered about scientists who believe in the divinity of Jesus. Do they accept Christianity’s doctrine of salvation out of a deep need to know things beyond science’s reach, things they can then expect God to reveal to them someday?
    Remembering his college logic studies, Goines thought of another thing the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem could have been doing with the “faith is evidence” maneuver – establishing an axiom to throw in whenever he couldn’t prove something any other way.

Goines On: Evidence of things not seen

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Goines’ notion the day before, that faith itself could somehow seem to amount to evidence, kept nagging at him. He now remembered a Bible verse to that effect, the opening verse of Chapter 11 of a letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem, thought to have been composed about 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion: “...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” – as though faith, or true-belief alone could transform a thing believed into a fact. The resurrection of Jesus, for example, which the letter writer seemed to think lacked other evidence. Otherwise, why the need for faith?

Goines On: Previous Jessica experiments

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On his walk the morning after imagining the Jessica experiments, Goines realized that, in a way, they had been conducted many times already, by religions other than Christianity that indoctrinated their followers in the same sorts of ways to believe that if they did or believed thus and so, they would be recompensed for whatever suffering, pain, injustice, or other injury afflicted them, and saved from death in the end.

Goines On: A Jessica experiment

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The day after remembering the Jesus experiment, Goines thought of a corollary, or reverse experiment, one that would seek to establish whether a stand-in for Jesus could elicit the same sort of experience. If so, then that would suggest that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus (or of his stand-in) that produced the Jesus-experience phenomenon, but something about people’s psychology.

Goines On: The Jesus experiment

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Inside the McDowell book Goines’ nephew had placed a cordial handwritten note that suggested Goines might “start with the table of contents and go to the chapters that pique your interest.” That didn’t sound too daunting, and Goines was bound to try it.

Goines On: The tome was empty

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Goines’ nephew reported that his mother was much improved, “thank the Lord Jesus for that,” and Goines had automatically said amen, for he too was glad his sister was doing better. But Goines knew that his nephew was aware he didn’t subscribe to the divinity of Jesus, and Goines felt a tinge of regret that he had said amen. Perhaps unwisely, he clarified, “I meant amen to your mother’s improvement, not to Jesus’ having anything to do with it.”

All Over the Place: I Cut the Grass with My Son

For Father’s Day

By Michael H. Brownstein

My son, no longer a boy, tall and taller,

Leans into the lawn mower on the hill,
The last quarter acre of land, the grass
Tall, too, lanky like him, allows itself

To shape shift, the first days of September,

The sun on fire, the air on fire, I am melting,

My hair loose over my face like a wet mop,
My shirt discolored with everything pouring
From me, but there is shade and somehow
A light breeze. My son is as composed as can be,

Poetry & Portraits: Pinot

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Pinot
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on July 12, 2014]

It’s nearly bedtime, but I’m seeing shapes
Beyond the window, on a hill of grapes.

Sharing the Gift of Music

Last Ensemble before Social Distancing 2020

By Chuck Smythe

As you know from my several posts about the Seicento Baroque Ensemble of Boulder, Colorado (most recently on January 12, 2015), I concertize with that ensemble, singing tenor. When we began “social distancing,” we had to take some time off from making music together. However, as Amanda, our artistic director, informed us by recorded statement, “While we cannot gather together in the concert hall, we can still share our love of music.” Here is a sample from the concert we recorded in an empty church prior to social distancing, two settings of “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Baroque composers Franz Tunder (North Germany) and Salamone Rossi (Northern Italy) [7:46]:

Copyright © 2020 by Chuck Smythe

West Coast Observer: Del Bosque Farms and Water

By William Silveira

After the publication of my observation (“American Hypocrisy”) on Alfredo Corchado’s article in the New York Times, “A Former Farm Worker on American Hypocrisy,” I decided to do some research on Del Bosque Farms, and I found a very interesting post regarding that company on a website sponsored by the American Farmlands Trust, an organization in the United States that works to protect and conserve farmland.

Two Is Enough: Housing is for the birds

A photo I pulled off the net

By Vic Midyett

I love having birds around! We have finches and tits. And I think starlings. Saw a white pigeon even. Before we left here 13 years ago for Australia, I had around the place six bird houses specifically designed for bluebirds, mounted on posts the height of fence posts, but none of them were still here when we returned.

Coal Country (a vignette)

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

In a split second, my friend Buckshot had a knife blade through his hand, all the way through, so that the point was protruding maybe two inches out the back. When that happens on TV, or in the movies, all hell breaks loose. Looking back some 40 years, I still marvel at how everything went into slow motion. Playing it back, I can still see the scene, and what led up to it, almost in stop action, frame by agonizing frame.

A Father’s Personal Impressions

Of “A Little Slice of Fife”

By Brooks Carder

My son Marshall has told the story of our golfing trip to Scotland so well that it doesn’t need a different perspective to be told from. But perhaps I can add to the story by citing some of my personal impressions and experiences.

All Over the Place: My Town’s George Floyd Protest 2020

By Michael H. Brownstein

No life matters until all lives matter. Black lives matter, too.
Are we not human? Do we not love our children, eat with forks and spoons, go to school and go to work?
Give me liberty, give me justice, do I not have a right to breathe?
                    —Protest signs

Joining Michael’s march

A few other poets managed to put their boots on the ground in time to join Michael’s march.

We Will Be Heard

By Geoffrey Dean

Filled with feeling, yet stunned by disbelief,

I froze like a pond in the depths of winter.

This happened here?
This happened
Again?

Your final agony ended my long lethargy

As tears rushed down like a river of melted ice.

This cannot happen.
This cannot happen
Anywhere.

Thumper

By Eric Meub

As Harry Potter puts it, “You-Know-Who”
Is hexing Pennsylvania Avenue.
The President, we learn, is quite annoyed
At all the fuss surrounding Mr Floyd.
The protesters have vowed to make a mess
Of his insightful Rose Garden address.
There’s been no looting, curfew’s not begun,
And yet, by all means, something must be done.

The Policeman’s Club Descends

By Bob Boldt

With each blow the black crucifixion arises anew.

“You got to move”
blues echo down Wall Street.

Follow the long chain of slaves who traded in

cotton for the automobile assembly.

While pharaoh keeps killing black leaders

with all the brutal indifference
of a wheat harvester’s scythe.

Black blood has fertilized a reincarnation

the powerful will never understand.

They Marched

By Neil Hoffmann

They Marched in tens.
They Marched in hundreds.
They Marched in thousands.

They Marched in tens and hundreds of thousands.

Millions marching.

From Maine to California they marched.

From Florida to Alaska they marched.

From Texas to Minnesota they marched.
In towns and great cities they marched.
Across the land they marched.

Photo Op

Bret Stephen’s summation of Trump’s inversion
of Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address

By Moristotle

The President of the United States

threatens military troops to quell unrest

How can this man be President,

this devil child playing at toy soldiers with real ones,

playing at war against citizens equal under the law?

He used police to clear the way for a photo op

Men with guns emptied the square with bangs and flashes and gas

They broke the crowd in pieces

Dream Deferred

By Moristotle

George Floyd died with a police officer’s boot on his neck in Minneapolis

Before him, it was Breonna Taylor, shot dead in her Louisville apartment

Before her, it was Botham Jean, shot in his Dallas apartment

Before him, it was Philando Castile, shot five times at close range in his car in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota

One day before him, it was Alton Sterling, shot at close range on the ground in Baton Rouge

Goines On: Goines speaks to G

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Goines’ heart sped up the morning he realized that he knew almost as much about his creator as his creator knew about him! Goines, a character in his creator’s fictional portrait, on a par with his creator!…So why had Goines been content to let the author lay out Goines’ thoughts and doings without Goines ever raising his hand to speak out to him?

A Little Slice of Fife – Part 6

Carnoustie Golf Links

By Marshall Carder

Bert had agreed to drive us around the council area of Fife up to Carnoustie (in the council area of Angus) and arrived very early the next day to collect us for the hour ride. We were well rested but full of anticipation and downright fear of facing such a tough course, but at the same time we had just played three straight days on the most hallowed ground in golf, so we almost felt like we were going to be able to handle it.

Side Story: Performance art?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Paul, in your May 22 post on “Coronavirus Math & Russian Roulette,” you introduced a photograph of yourself with the words, “And I’m being very careful, just in case,” which I took to mean you were really locked down. The caption did puzzle me though: “Interpretive Art Lockdown Series, Quarantine Day 137: I AM SHEEPDOG!....” ??? —Moristotle

Reply by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

A Little Slice of Fife – Part 5

Celebration

By Marshall Carder

We had finished our jaunt around the world’s most famous course and now it was time for reflection. We tipped and thanked Paddy, our caddie, and made our way up to the pub on the corner for some libations and grub. Brooks ordered the haggis and the rest of us went for the fish and chips. Sitting on the bench against the wall, Brooksie was practically lying on his right side but clearly intending to be seated. I asked him if he wanted to sit up and he replied that he had found a comfortable position that was not hurting so he wasn’t moving. But even in that state, the pure sense of joy was radiating from him. Over and over he kept making comments about how great it was.

Hippy vs Protester

Let’s get something straight

By Ed Rogers

Reading Chuck Smythe’s story “A Creek Runs through It” the other day brought back to mind the misconception that we were all hippies back in the sixties. We had long hair and dressed the same as the hippies, and smoked the same weed and listened to the same music as the hippies. However, we were as different as night and day.

Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [17]

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17. Ras woke up, half out of his seat belt

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

A Little Slice of Fife – Part 4

On the Old Course

By Marshall Carder

As the sun rose the next morning, we were all up already. There was very little banter, for we were all a little tired and perhaps a bit nervous about what we were about to undertake. So, with all of our hopes and dreams hanging in the balance, we emerged from our beachfront home and started the walk toward the course.