Goines On: The morning after

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Goines’ first impulse upon waking from a sleep whose soundness was only interrupted a few times by a need to urinate is to check for news of last night’s “debate,” but he successfully resists until after he has prepared Mrs. Goines’ fruit and their coffee.
    The news is that “debate” definitely needs to be put in quotation marks.

Goines On: The debate

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Goines has been trying for several days to decide whether or not to watch tonight’s debate between President Trump and Joe Biden. A friend he has been discussing the pros and cons of it with thinks it’s a waste of time if you already know who you’re going to vote for, and Goines does know that – in fact, Goines has already voted, and so has Mrs. Goines. Anything is a waste of time, the friend summarizes, that makes no difference to the outcome.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Animating spirit, first cause

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 27, 2009.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

All Over the Place: Monotony

By Michael H. Brownstein

Day by day
only we can put out fire.

Clouds hunger for companionship,
a stain of precipitation.

Time slows to a penny,
a tone in the hand

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Acting Citizen: Science shows...

It could still get worse

By James Knudsen

Let me be the first to admit the obvious: 2020 is not over yet, it could still get worse. And lately, I’ve been learning a lot about the ways it could get worse. My wife, Andra, likes to fall asleep to something soothing, like scientific shows playing softly on the television. A recent favorite is, “How the Universe Works.” A better title would be, “How the Universe Will Eventually Conspire to Incinerate Planet Earth to a Cinder.” That’s usually what the scientists explain will happen should the topic of that evening’s episode happen. Actually, I misspoke, when the topic of that evening’s episode happens. Because given enough millions or billions of years, all of these things are going to happen. Things like...

Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [6]

Detail of “Island Woman”

Two Paintings
and a Bonus

By André Duvall

As you may have gathered from the Father’s Art posts so far, Dad favors working with oil paint. “Island Woman” is one of the few cases in which he uses some acrylic, in order to give a flat, two-dimensional look to the black portion of the painting. He also chose to use the rough side of the Masonite to give it more of a canvas look and texture. “Island Woman” is Dad’s second open-frame painting, inspired by the use of black in his first one, which will be featured in a future post.

Mary’s Voice: Posthumously Speaking 18

Detail: signature, year

On the occasion of her 95th birthday (tomorrow)

By Mary Alice Condley (1925-2007)

[Editor’s Note: I am grateful to Mary’s & my cousin Billy Charles Duvall, the son of our mother’s sister Florine, for his discovery of today’s painting, and to his son, André Duvall, for explaining its background in tomorrow’s installment of his Father’s Art column. Thank readers in advance for their 24 hours of patience!]

Goines On: Handiness

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On his morning walk, Goines encountered a neighbor’s pruned cypress tree lying across the sidewalk, entirely blocking it. With hardly a thought, he easily kneed it onto the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb.

Ten Years Ago Today: Sacrifice is for the little people

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 22, 2010.]

“Anger is sweeping America,” wrote Paul Krugman in “The Angry Rich” on September 19 in The New York Times. “I’m talking about the rich,” he said.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Things as they were

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 20, 2009.]

This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler’s review had reminded me [“Things as they are,” September 19, 2009]. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply “The Necessary Angel.” In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I’d written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously “the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school,” I’d say that I have found it – I mean more by the fact that I’ve kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?

All Over the Place: Endurance

By Michael H. Brownstein

She tells me she can no longer abide her Agent Orange pain

sleeting into her,

staining her skin into angry insect bites.

It’s like going to a party where you do not belong,

she explains, hands cracked,

and there are so many people you never wanted to know.

11 Years Ago Today: Things as they are

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 19, 2009.]

This week I was reminded by a review in a recent New York Times Book Review (August 23) that my freshman year in college I wrote a paper for Philosophy I on a book of essays titled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The review, “The Plain Sense of Things,” by Helen Vendler, was of a book of Selected Poems of Stevens, edited by John N. Serio.

Now available as a whole: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café

Click image to go to the novel

By Moristotle

We now fulfill our promise to publish the whole of Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café, which you can read in its entirety at your own pace in our Back Pages. The author plans to have it available by the end of the year in paperback and as an e-book, for sale on Amazon.

The Parting (a poem)

By Shirley Skufca Hickman

He hands me a form stating:

Permission to withdraw from English 1-A.

His hands are shaking,
and he tries to make a joke.
“I got caught in a draft.”

Dreams of day and night

Photo by Vic Midyett

By Moristotle

The first is a dream of night, real as real:
    Siegfried has returned from having left us,
    from being gone away,
    his nubby hair stiff in short sprigs
    because it is weeks past his last grooming.
    It feels so real on my imagined finger tips,
    stroking him as he sleeps on top of our covers,
    himself as real as a character in a drama,
    as real as the person he had been for us:
    daily, nightly, always, forever.

12 Years Ago Today: The wisdom to know the difference

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 15, 2008, without an image.]

A cousin wrote me yesterday that she’d meant to call some of our relatives in Arkansas to see whether they were okay in the wake of Hurricane Ike, but that “like always” she’d put it off and not done so. I told her that either our relatives are okay or they aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
    Her reply surprised me:

Side Story: A return to Tadpole Creek

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

Ed, Paul Clark’s “Philosophical Nightmare” about feral pigs prompted a suggestion that we might re-run your Tadpole Creek story “about the wild pigs in the bottom [you] had to pass through to get to the church on New Year’s Eve.” Thank you for generously reminding me what you say below. —Moristotle

Reply by Ed Rogers

All Over the Place: Ends

(After an Aztec myth)

By Michael H. Brownstein

They gave me five wives for a year

and asked me to walk to the stone knife.

I did this willingly, not like the tales of history,

but because I had to.
I was a god,
the closest one to the sun,
the owner of the heart that grows larger.
Without me the sun will stop in the sky.
I alone walk the steps.
I alone meet the knife.
I alone give my heart.
I am sun.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Poetry & Portraits: Surprise Party

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Surprise Party
By Eric Meub

My current flame has given me a vase.
A vase. I spread a smile across my face
And gasp and gush about the thing too long:
It’s bright, exuberant, completely wrong.

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part Three

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Taking up arms, or not, was now a serious moral dilemma. So…back to Google and YouTube to see how one might go about shooting a few pigs. After watching just a couple of video clips I realized it might be a good deal more exciting than I at first imagined:

14 Years Ago Today: “The American’s Creed”

Site of the speech, more than
half a century later

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 10, 2006, without an image.]

This morning I came across the text of my eighth-grade graduation speech. Typed single-space on seventeen 3x5 cards, its opening paragraphs say that the graduating class has just recited “The American’s Creed,” written by William Tyler Page. [I later found out that Page wrote it in 1917 for a contest, which he won, in competition with over 3,000 other entrants.] The eighth-grader I was says he’s privileged to speak on the second of the creed’s two paragraphs: “I therefore believe it is my duty to my Country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its Flag; and to defend it against all enemies.”

13 Years Ago Today: All in or All out

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 9, 2007.]

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Søren Kierkegaard’s view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as more accurate) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of accuracy, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

Overthinking

By Blake Adamson

My mind races ahead
Questions, questions, questions
My mind races ahead
Tomorrow’s too soon, but too far away
My mind races ahead
Winding up my back, and tightening holds
My mind races ahead
Crying would be nice, but my eyes are dry

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part Two

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Wild hog 101: Let’s start at the beginning.
    As detailed in Part One, my friend’s farm had recently suffered an invasion of feral pigs – also colloquially called wild hogs or wild boars. Like most non-hunters, I was oblivious that feral/wild pigs/hogs were a problem. But I quickly learned that my friend’s farm was on the cutting edge of an ecological disaster now sweeping through Virginia and North Carolina – and much of the rest of the country – having long since overwhelmed the rest of the Southeast.

All Over the Place: Why I Teach

At the start
of a new school year

By Michael H. Brownstein

I never went to war. Korea ended a year before I was born, and we lost the war in Viet Nam the year I began college. I never had the hard, comfortable friendships true battle inspires, and I never had comrades passionate enough to link into that all-purpose male code – one man laying his life down for another. No, not me. I never had that.

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part One

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

When the text came in from my old friend Lee, I wondered if it was a prank. “Neighbors tell me wild hogs are trying to take over my farm up there. You’re closest, could you go by and shoot them?”

14 Years Ago Today: Billy Graham

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 4, 2006, without the image.]

A letter to the editor in the current issue of Newsweek reminds me that forty some-odd years ago a nephew of mine (then eight years old) went to a Billy Graham crusade and got saved.
    The letter writer, Ernest J. Zenker of Mandeville, LA, was responding to the magazine’s August 14 cover story, “Pilgrim’s Progress”:

Share Byedon with others

With a confession from the editor

By James Knudsen

Fits nicely on a 4"x6" index card and just $.35 – that’s thirty-five cents – to mail, first-class!

Goines On: Chocolate and tomato

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The Goineses had a neighbor who brought them huge, sweet tomatoes from his garden. The neighbor brought with them the sweetest smiles of neighborliness, too, so sweet, Goines knew, that only an offer of chocolate in return might do for thanks.
    “Hershey’s milk chocolate,” Goines texted him, “or Toblerone?”
    The neighbor said chocolate wasn’t necessary, but if Goines was trying to turn over his stockpile, he preferred milk chocolate. “Just a little please,” he added.

11 Years Ago Today: Compassion and Justice

[Originally published on September 1, 2009.]

An email discussion I’ve been having about health care reform with a small circle of Yale classmates recently put me in mind of something I’d read about the political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). I’d read, perhaps in an obituary, that he held something like