On Halloween

Fear and trembling

By Moristotle

Daily walks for days now in my neighborhood have made me witness to blow-up ghosts, goblins, ghouls (and cartoon Goofy’s) that neighbors paid hard-earned dollars for at Target or wherever these flimsy, quickly deflating toy balloons can be found. Are they competing with each other for ghouliest, or gaudiest?

All Over the Place: First People

By Michael H. Brownstein

Spring was not real yet, just a break from winter.

Mountain snow tumbled deep and wind carved

rock. We did not know rain. Then: a tunnel of light.

We came. We were curious and cold and light

Fiction: That Night(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

After such an enormous repast, they agreed to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, not, as you expect, reconsummating their union, but recovering delightfully from the premarital stress of the last eleven months, naptime passing like a dream, alternating with half-waking fondles, kisses, and trials of various nicknames and lazy talking that sometimes made little sense when sentences ended in snores, Paula sometimes wondering if she could tolerate eggs and who knows what all else cooked in bacon grease, Billy worrying what new joys butter would bring to his digestion and to his cholesterol numbers.

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (73) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Monday,
October 17, 1921,
1:00 PM

Frank had been at the engine behind the cargo hold for over three hours, and it was hot. Fucking hot. Ed, the little pussy, was upstairs nursing his busted arm and a bottle of Gordon’s Gin. Little pussy.
    Up there in the cool breeze suckin’ cool gin, while Frank bent wrenches and busted his knuckles over the carburetor on the Sterling with the sun sitting right on his God damn head.

From “The Scratching Post”: Sexual musings, Part 1

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, October 24, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

Empedocles missed his chance at greatness when he failed to give sex a place in his group of basic elements—earth, air, water, and fire. True, sex isn’t an element, but I don’t disqualify it on that account. It occupies our thoughts far more than earth, air, water, and fire combined.

Educated Fleas

     The omnipresence of sex was probably best recognized by Cole Porter when he wrote, “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.” That scope is well beyond what I could manage in a hundred blog posts, and besides, my obsession with sex isn’t quite that strong. Dealing only with human sexuality is more than enough, and even then, quite a lot remains on the table. There’s the plethora of how-to manuals, moral diatribes, boorish humor, titillating fiction, scholarly research, manifestos of grievances, legal argumentation, and social history to consider—enough to inundate the world’s largest library. And you’d still have to dedicate another city block to a library for porn videos.

    I can come to grips with this agglomeration only by focusing on social history, and here I discern two distinct eras of human sexuality….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Highways and Byways: Daddy’s Girl

By Maik Strosahl

Sometimes the best therapy for an unmoving pen is to read.
    I got home last night, exhausted. The work wasn’t really that hard this week but I am recovering strength, having just returned from my personal Covid experience a few days ago.

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (72) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Monday,
October 17, 1921,
8:00 AM

Ed steered one of the Stoningtons, the one named by its former owners the Honoria Bertrand. The other, previously owned by men presumably less romantic than those of the Honoria, just read “R.L.Frank, T. Kessler” along the bows, and currently floated at the dock back in Manatee Pocket in Stuart.
    The “Honoria Bertrand” had taken all of two days to become the “Horny Bitch,” and soon her name was shortened to the “Horny B.,” just to be mysterious, or so the sniggering brothers told each other.

From the Alwinac: Boston Symphony First Cellists: New Random Facts

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

During a recent visit to the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, I came across documentation of some interesting facts related to the orchestra’s principal cellists of yesteryear.

Carl Bayrhoffer, BSO first cellist for the latter part of the orchestra’s inaugural 1881-2 season, wrote to BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson in 1892, hoping to return to the BSO. At about the same time, a Mr. Underwood in Glasgow was asking Higginson about the workings of BSO as Underwood helped start the permanent Glasgow orchestra. Higginson may have suggested that Bayrhoffer contact founding BSO conductor George Henschel, because the following season Bayrhoffer joined the new Glasgow organization under Henschel, renewing the working relationship started a decade earlier in Boston.

Wilhelm Mueller, Boston Symphony first cellist from 1882-1885, was breaching his BSO contract during his final BSO season by playing in New York orchestras. The programs of the New York Philharmonic from the 1884-5 season show Mueller sharing the third cello stand with Adolph Hartdegen. Knowing that Mueller had accepted outside work prohibited by his current BSO contract, BSO manager Charles Ellis sought New York legal help, hoping to make an example of Mueller, because at the time several other BSO players were also in breach of contract. The result seems to have been that Fritz Giese was called in to serve in Mueller’s place that season, even as Mueller’s contract was still in force.

Fritz Giese cabled Higginson in May 1887 that he was delayed in Grand Rapids, MI, due to an unsettled case, the nature of which was not discussed. Then in Dec. 1888 Giese cabled Higginson from Philadelphia, asking to be excused from two rehearsals and saying that conductor Gericke had already agreed. Later in his last BSO season, Giese was out for several concerts due to injuries sustained when he fell out of a carriage in New York. At least as concerning at the time was the damage to his Stradivarius cello, for Giese had fallen on top of it....
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

All Over the Place: A Loosening of Teeth

By Michael H. Brownstein

It came from guns.
When you think it will hurt, it hurts.

When you think it will not hurt, it stops hurting.

The huge headlight heavy metals into your eyes.

Even closed, you can see a brilliant violet with purple lines.

The man over you is giant.

Acting Citizen: For Dana

By James Knudsen

As one known for being a clutch performer when the spoken word is needed, it is unsettling when the words are nowhere to be found. Such is the quandary I find myself in days removed from news that was not surprising, yet still difficult to process, compartmentalize, and...

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (71) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Monday,
October 17, 1921,
3:00 AM

Captain J. S. Blitch, Warden of Raiford State Prison, had enjoyed a hearty steak for Sunday dinner, even if it was from last year’s Angus steer culling. They had this freezing business down to a science, and this time of year there was fresh corn from up Tallahassee way, Vidalia Sweet onions from Vidalia Georgia its only self, a mere hundred and fifty or so miles away, and Cherokee tomatoes from North Carolina, in Blitch’s estimation the best God damn tomatoes in the whole wide world.

Fiction: Scrambled Eggs(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“Good morning, Sleepyhead! How did you sleep?”
    “I slept well. Very well! What are you doing up so early?”
    “Fixing you breakfast. I was gonna serve it to you in bed.”
    “A heavenly aroma of bacon awakened me, and rather rudely, I must say, as I had been in Tahiti, worried that the gray old boards would send splinters into my heels and ruin our honeymoon.”

Fiction: Sausage (prompted by a Story Challenge)

By Maik Strosahl

The following is just a little silliness playing with Michael Brownstein’s Story Challenge from August 8th. I did not require myself to follow any rules, it’s just some play with words to get these creative juices flowing after dealing with a couple weeks of the dreaded Covid.


“Kidnapped!,” cried the wife.
“Surely he’s been used
to train the fighting dogs,
ground into the dust
by a rabid beast near
five times our little Weiner!

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (70) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Saturday,
September 30, 1922

He could not believe that the Ashley gang had left them alone, even for a few weeks. They’d killed eleven hired gun thugs at Harlan’s fish camp, and Red had heard later that Skeeter and Rosalijo had killed three more earlier at Skeeter’s farm in Jackass Junction.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Miss Bossy

By Bettina Sperry

[Editor’s Note: This column marks Bettina Sperry’s return to the staff after a few years’ time-out. Let’s all welcome her back!]

Recently, I spent a few days watching one of my new chickens clearly thinking herself a Queen Bee. She gets herself into everyone’s business. She’s got an attitude. She is bossy. She is sure of herself and tells the other chickens what to do. She is a bully as she huffs and puffs her way around the chicken yard. Best of all, she does not think, nor understand, nor does she look behind her, but most importantly, she doesn’t look ahead of herself either.

Side Story: Why the “middle of the night” comments last month?

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

It has come to some readers’ attention that many of the comments I posted in September and early October bear a timestamp between 12 and 5 a.m. They wondered all sorts of things: was I suffering from insomnia, had I drunk too much coffee or been over-stimulated in some other way? Or what?

By Moristotle

From the Alwinac: Introducing my new online Alwin Schroeder biography

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

I recently uploaded the first installment of my expanded Alwin Schroeder biography. This first part covers Alwin’s ancestry and early childhood (1855-1868), with details on the musical activities of his father and older brothers in Alwin’s native Neuhaldensleben. Read it here.

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (69) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
July 18, 1920,
7:00 AM

The Citizens Bank of Tampa was considered Tampa’s first high-rise building of any kind. It was built in 1913 at 701 North Dale Mabry Boulevard, with ten stories, and was one hundred and twenty feet tall. That in itself had not been terribly interesting to Joe Ashley. The fact that Eli Witt, the founder of Have-A-Tampa Cigars, deposited his receipts into Citizen’s Bank on a regular and predictable basis was, however, very interesting.

From the Alwinac: Schroeder Student Spotlight: Ernest Lachmund (1865-1954)

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Among the Oscar Cobb opera houses highlighted in my previous post was one that existed briefly in Duluth, Minnesota. In a surprise Schroeder connection, one of the musicians who made his studio in the Temple Opera Building before it succumbed to fire in 1895 was Ernest Lachmund, a cellist, pianist, and composer who counted Alwin Schroeder among his teachers. I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the Duluth concert organization Matinee Musicale (founded in 1900) in unearthing a cello piece by Lachmund that hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. Cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing’s subsequent performance of Lachmund’s rediscovered Waltz-Serenade for Matinee Musicale can be heard here.
    Ernest Lachmund’s father Gustav Otto Lachmund had fled Germany following the failed 1848 revolution, going first to Missouri, where Ernest’s older brother Carl was born in 1853, then to Clinton, Iowa, where Ernest was born in 1865. Carl and Ernest both studied music in Germany. Carl attended the Cologne conservatory as a piano and violin student from 1867 to 1871, and Ernest followed in his footsteps, arriving in Cologne as a 13-year-old in 1878. Two years later Ernest was at the Royal Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, studying chamber music with Joachim Quartet members Joseph Joachim, Emanuel Wirth, and Robert Hausmann, and cello with Anton Hekking. In Berlin Ernest attended the first local performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle and heard Brahms as a pianist. Meanwhile Carl had become an ardent follower and piano student of Franz Liszt in Weimar, and Ernest himself observed Liszt’s classes during the summer of 1884....
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Goines On: “Jesus Christ!”

Click image for more vignettes

Goines had just sat down in the barber’s chair. The barber was a young Hispanic woman who introduced herself as Hermina. Goines asked Hermina how she was doing. 

    She said, “Very well, thank God!”
    Goines thought, What the heck? and said it too: “Indeed, thank God.”
    And then he couldn’t help himself; he asked, “And which god do you thank?”

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (68) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
September 3,
1922

Ma Middleton had been cooking since before dawn. Red had helped cart wood for the stove and been rewarded with extra coffee and biscuits, with ham and redeye gravy.
    Ramon had come back from Wauchula with his family on Monday, the third of September, two days after the attack. He brought his family to retrieve the body of their brother, son and cousin, Luis Xian Alejandro Alvarez y Gomez.

From “The Scratching Post”: Bye-bye, Betsy

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, September 24, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

My feelings about the late queen are complicated. They’re vaguely tranquil with an admixture of fatigue. I struggle to think of anyone who’s made a similar impression on me, and only a few are close.
    One was Frida, a cashier at the cafeteria of a place where I once worked. She took our money with robotic speed. No matter that her queue was the longest; it was always served fastest. As her hands flew, she nevertheless took time for a “How are you today?” I always replied with something like, “Two ticks from suicidal.” She would invariably break stride and commiserate until I showed my readiness to move on. She loved an opportunity for small talk, and it was always good-hearted small talk.
    Queen Betsy also had a good heart, or so I believe. She cared deeply about her family, especially if they were blood relatives. She loved animals. If you were a dog or a horse, you were treated with special regard. She was very engaging with titled people and heads of state. I can’t recall a single misstep, even with impossible boors like Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. But she assiduously avoided any conversation that touched on policy and never revealed a point of view on any issue of consequence. Her raison d’etre was to preserve the notion that the Royal Family was the rock upon which the greatness and goodness of British civilization rested.
    Given all that, let’s fantasize by appropriating a well-worn Hollywood concept .... Suppose, as the result of some cosmic burp, Frida and Betsy undergo a personality swap....
_______________
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

All Over the Place: Defining a Soul

By Michael H. Brownstein

You are the rhyme in beauty,

the great half smile of first quarter moonlight,

the radiance of sunrise over Lake Michigan.

Story Challenge #6

Featuring
a disturbing setting

By Moristotle

Thanks to Michael H. Bernstein for another challenging beginning, which he submitted modestly as “potential.”

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (67) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Friday,
September 1, 1922,
concluded

He came up to the north side of the culvert and saw Jueve down in the canal, holding Jumper above the black water in the culvert pipe. The truck they had shot up was still tilted over the canal with the left front wheel hanging over the edge. Blood was dripping heavily from the front seat, puddling on the roadway and trickling into the canal.
    Damn, Red thought, that’ll bring the ’gators for sure and for certain.

While you’re busy making other plans

Renewed from December 15, 2009

By Moristotle

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.¹

​In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

Renewed from November 1, 2009

By Moristotle

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone’s ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (66) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Friday,
September 1, 1922,
continued

From up here, he could see the road north for maybe a quarter mile, before the lakeside trees and bushes obscured it. The land between the road and the lake was about a quarter-mile wide, so what Red saw out the north door was pretty much a square, with the road on his left side and the lake shore on his right.

Animated spirits remembered

13 Years Ago Today

By Moristotle

[Published originally on October 3, 2009.]

Having found Poet’s Walk gentle and fairly level last Saturday, I took my wife there today—and Siegfried, who was thrilled by the “new book” (as my wife phrased it) of all the unfamiliar scents he could put his quivering nose to. He and I had to walk ahead so that he wouldn’t in his eagerness continually run into her. But once, when we got far enough ahead (only ten or fifteen yards) for him to feel some disquiet apparently, he stopped and sat to wait for her, and in so doing reminded me of Wally’s doing the same on an autumn walk in Duke Forest two or three years ago. (I thought I’d blogged about this, but if I did I couldn’t find the post, unless it was “In the woods,” but the incident isn’t mentioned. I remember now, and mention here, Wally’s animating spirit.)

All Over the Place: A Death to a Student

By Michael H. Brownstein

[My student was rushed to the hospital when he had a problem breathing. Shortly thereafter, he passed away. It destroyed all of us—except for a seedy preacher who wanted to garner more money from the grieving.
    Another student decided to hold up someone with a gun she found. He took it from her and shot her twice in the chest. She died instantly.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 7)

Click image to see
all published parts

“But back to Peggy. You’ve given the facts, but what’s the real story? I don’t see the woman. Did she sleep with the new president?”
    “She must have. I don’t know. She had his ear, and what secrets did he reveal? Secrets of state.”