Haiku Lichen

By Moristotle

Does lichen like you?
This one does; 
lichen likes you, Haiku.

¿Te gusta el liquen?
Este sí;

a líquen le gustas, Haiku.

Le lichen vous aime-t-il?
Celui-ci le fait;
lichen t'aime, Haïku.

Fiction: B-B Ranch (a short story)

Larry Bailie helping a friend put
up some fence in the Everglades

By Larry Bailie

My Aunt Pat and Uncle Dutch Bailie had a cattle business called the B-B Ranch, in a place in the middle of nowhere way out north of Naples called Corkscrew. They had no children, although she had a boy from her first marriage named Jimmy who was away in the Navy. Around Christmastime, my dad told me we were going to Uncle Dutch’s ranch to pick up meat for the family. I, being the oldest at the ripe old age of eleven, would go with him to help.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: The Carrion

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

The Rattle Foundation's publication “Rattle” is a very tough nut to crack for a lot of poets. They receive a lot of submissions and are very selective.
    Each month they do an Ekphrastic challenge and present a piece of art as a prompt. I have had several very good pieces come from this practice, but none has ever been one of the two chosen to be featured (one chosen by the artist and the other by the editor).
    “The Carrion” was inspired by Rattle’s October 2020 Challenge: a black and white photo of a cairn built on a beach with the dark shadow of a big bird in the background. As the world was just then dealing with the unknowns of a new disease swirling the planet, the photo seemed to reflect the pessimistic mood that many were sharing at the time.

Goines On: Earwax candles

Click image for more vignettes

When Goines inserted his hearing aids and snapped them on, the sound of the left one’s melodic signal was clear, as usual, but the right one’s signal was barely audible. Had his right ear gone almost entirely deaf overnight? 

    The phenomenon persisted for several days, interrupted two or three times by what felt like an audible “pop,” followed by a few seconds of normal hearing before the resumption of relative deafness in his right ear.

From “The Scratching Post”: Attention entrepreneurs!

By Ken Marks

[From the original on The Scratching Post, March 22, 2023, published here by permission of the author.]

Remember the collectible Trump Cards, the ultimate case of hucksterism and self-aggrandizement? Each of them sold for $99, and you didn't even get a physical card. Only a certifiable fool would buy one, yet to no one’s surprise, they sold out! Go ahead and click here. Laugh again.
    I’m reminding you of his cards as a point of reference, so you can contrast them to another set of cards that doesn’t yet exist but should before the year’s out. I think of them as the “Trump Disgrace Cards.” I see them as scenes from Trump’s fall from glory, ranging from his soon-to-come perp walk in Manhattan to a picture of a hulking brute molesting him in prison. Of course, the collection would not be complete without mugshots and pictures of his face at each of his sentencing hearings. If a photo of him in an orange jumpsuit holding a mop is obtainable, it would be the prize of the collection. (Although some might favor the one of Trump getting buggered.)

    As a bonus, the Disgrace Cards could include the faces of his many toadies and suck-ups when they get the news of a fresh conviction. And by all means Melania and his children should be included in this group.
    These should be linen cards, like the best poker cards but somewhat larger. The price of a card should be the production and distribution cost plus a profit of no more than 20%. Every effort should be made to ensure that something so desirable is affordable.
    So step up, those of you with some risk capital. It’s your chance to clean up!
[Read this in situ on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2023 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: “What Do You Need…” & “Hike” from The Katy Trail...

By Michael H. Brownstein

What Do You Need When You Walk
Forty Miles in + 100 Degree Heat

water

lines of cloud

a blue-gray sky like old skin

an understanding of things that set us on fire

Acting Citizen:Assessing What Went Wrong…and Right

By James Knudsen

Now that “The One-Act Play That Goes Wrong” has concluded, I would probably benefit from some assessment of what went right … and wrong.
    Topping the list of what went right was selecting this play. As a department we are still finding our feet following a pandemic-induced hiatus. My production was the first on the mainstage since March 2020, when “The Humans,” directed by Chuck Erven, and featuring yours truly, ran for two weeks just as the pandemic enveloped the world.

As Susan Spoke

Still She Speaks:

more moral tales

By Susan C. Price

[Susan “spoke” today’s column 10 years ago tomorrow, on May 25, 2013. It was titled Fourth Monday Susan Speaks. It’s still rewardingly readable and thought-provoking, and still interesting in conveying Susan’s circumstances at the time.]

The following made me think that:
a. what is so simple to me is NOT CLEAR to many,
b. maybe none of this...life...is simple,
c. i have no business discussing ethics....

[Before] Acting Citizen: Our need for centripetal force

When Acting Citizen
Was Loneliest Liberal

By James Knudsen

[Acting Citizen’s Fourth Saturday column appeared here originally 10 years ago today, as “Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal: Our need for centripetal force.” It was great then, and it may be even better today. Plus, 15 thoughtful comments ensued over the course of the following few days – comments thoughtful then, and still relevant.]

It’s late and I’m facing a deadline. I can’t blame writer’s block, I don’t lack for ideas. If anything, I feel like John Travolta in Phenomenon where his character has so many ideas that picking one is the problem. For instance, I think I know the cause of many of our problems with guns. Or how ’bout this one—a compare and contrast of the artistic model versus the capitalistic model? As a last resort I could just go on an extended rant, like the one I posted on Facebook last night, regarding the mendacity of conservative opinion makers of the lower biological orders. Or motomynd’s taste in cars...too easy.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Ghosts of the Allagash

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

For National Poetry Month in April, I have been putting together origami poetry booklets that I will be handing out in various locations around Mid-Missouri.
    I revived a title I used while with the Poetry Society of Indiana (formerly the Indiana State Federation of Poetry Clubs) for a booklet in 2007. For that project I cut a pomegranate in half, then took a very low-resolution photo. We called the booklet “Poemegranate,” and it included the creative efforts of 11 poets from around the state.

The original “Poemegranate”

The invitation inside its cover

From the Alwinac: Posthumous Dialogues: Roumen Balyozov, Bulgarian Cellist-Composer, and J. S. Bach

[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.]

Listen to Balyozov’s Baza i nadstroika (string duo version of Bach's first cello suite)

During the month of March my thoughts often turn to Bulgaria, not least because this is the month of the martenitsa, a kind of good luck bracelet that Bulgarians exchange on March 1 in anticipation of the coming spring. In the Bulgarian calendar, March is named for Baba Marta (Grandmother Marta), the feminine figure that deftly navigates the challenging transition from winter. Musically I try to spend extra time this month with the music of Bach, whose birthday is celebrated on the 21st. Recently I discovered this exquisite string duo arrangement of Bach’s first cello suite that deserves wider attention, and it got me thinking about the arranger, a Bulgarian musician with whom I collaborated on a number of projects over the years.
    Roumen Balyozov (1949-2019) was one of the most colorful personalities in the Bulgarian artistic community. An accomplished cellist, he was for many years a member of the Symphony Orchestra of the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR). He is best remembered as a composer, a kind of self-styled Bulgarian John Cage with an insatiable appetite for musical provocations. It was Rumen (Balyozkata), with his impossibly thick glasses, long unkempt hair curling out from a quasi-Amish black hat, and a toothy smile that made his eyes twinkle and his nose wrinkle, who knew more about the American avant-garde than I—resident American musician of Bulgaria—did….
_______________
Read on…on the Alwinac website itself….

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

Goines On: Babble

Click image for more vignettes

Goines’ head during the night was the rocky bed of a running stream of catchy but unmemorable thoughts, images, projections, and memories, some seeming at the time to be kernels of poems or stories he might write, but most conveying no sense that he might actually have enough mind to write them. Enough mind during the present days? Or enough mind left forever?
    At one point, he did have a sense he could write something, but the babbling stream soon rushed again, before eventually trailing off into an hour of mindless sleep.

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle

All Over the Place: Introduction to The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside and Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Over a decade ago, A Kind of Hurricane Press published on their site my book The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside and Other Poems. Amy Huffman was the editor (and an excellent poet—much better than me) and she had published a lot of my work. I was quite flattered when she requested a book from me, and I complied.

Carbonation (a sonnet)

By Eric Meub

Sweet treatises upon your auburn hair,

Encomiums on dinner, dance and dress,

And epigrams let fall from each caress:

These are the tributes, love, I daily bear.

Deploying every stratagem of craft,

I use (perhaps abuse) internal rhyme,

The syntax torture into sense sublime,

While metaphors weigh anchor fore and aft.

St. Paddy’s Day jokes

What’s not to like
still, 10 years later?

By Jack Cover 

(1942 – 2014)

[These jokes appeared here originally as “Sunday Review: St. Paddy’s Day jokes,” on March 17, 2023. That was ten St. Patrick’s Days ago, and they drew more than twice that many comments.]

From “The Scratching Post”: Out of the mouths of idiots …

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, March 14, 2023, published here by permission of the author.]

Back in early 2020, I wrote a piece titled “Thinking the unthinkable,” arguing why a divorce between the Red and Blue States was thinkable, if not desirable. I followed that with a companion piece, “The necessity of divorce,” offering a plan for getting through the messy separation process. Not surprisingly, the feedback was sparse. Few people are willing to come to grips with the unthinkable.

    So I decided to bark up other trees … until now. A month ago, the frumious Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the same separation in a couple of tweets. My reaction was mixed. I was happy to see that a public figure had put the idea into mass circulation, but I cringed to see that the advocate was MTG. In today’s politics, her face is to buffoonery what Washington’s face is to patriotism. Why couldn’t a Republican intellectual — pardon the oxymoron — like Thomas Sowell have been the spearhead? As time passes, it seems that neither he nor any other Republican is willing to take up the banner. I’d be discouraged but for a recent survey of 1,000 likely voters. It found that 34% of them agreed with the idea, and nearly as many Republicans favored it as didn’t.
    The silence of Republican politicians is easy to explain. They gave up on thinking at least two decades ago. (Truth be told, they never liked it much after Reconstruction.) Then came the ultimate retreat — the refusal to speak their minds for fear of alienating crackpots in their leadership and base. They’ve given leadership a bad name.
    Mitt Romney, a Republican of a different stripe, scoffed that we’d disposed of MTG’s idea in the Civil War. Steve Schmidt, a former Republican and “never Trump” activist, also chimed in. He claimed MTG had “called for a second American Civil War.” Both men ignored a key sentence in one of her tweets: “National divorce is not civil war.” Maybe they would counter with, “Yes, but the very attempt to enact a divorce would lead to civil war.” That’s quite a leap. The attempt might also lead to a deeper examination of grievances and eventually to a reconciliation. Or it might lead to the creation of two new nations with two different constitutions. Is the danger so great that separation must not even be discussed?….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2023 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.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Seventh Avenue Jesus

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

Back in Indiana, there used to be a guy who would walk from downtown Indianapolis up Meridian Street and Highway 31 out of the metro area. Somewhere up north he turned around and made the long trek back.
    It was the image of that man that inspired this poem, which I set in New York City. What always impressed me about the little time I spent there was the variety of people you could encounter in just a small area, such as Central Park.

Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [10]

Detail from “Origin of
the Hattieville Bison”

By André Duvall

Almost all of my father’s art that I’ve presented so far have been oil paintings (except for one with acrylic and a couple of sketches). Oil painting is Dad’s preferred medium and comprises the majority of his work.
    Today’s presentation, in contrast, shares two pieces with three-dimensional elements, both created within the last eleven years. Both were inspired by objects he collected while taking walks along the several curves the Arkansas River makes between Little Rock and North Little Rock. From its banks he has collected rocks, driftwood, and plants such as trumpet vines. Both works featured below were also inspired by the bio-evolutionary and geological processes on Earth.

Review: Why Marry? (theater review)

Originally published
on March 11, 2013

By Donald Munro

[Editor’s Note: We re-run this today in recognition of the recent opening of The One-Act Play That Goes Wrong. We have been unable to find a review, so we can’t report whether whatever was supposed to go wrong did.]

All Over the Place: The Problem with Marvin (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

Marvin called time and temperature many times during the week. He felt he needed to hear another human voice and too often he felt the recording was a real person talking only to him. Then one beautiful Thursday morning, he dialed the number and the voice said, “Marvin, get outside. It’s a beautiful day. Just beautiful. Go to the park, sit on a bench, go to the zoo, wander around. Go.”

As Soon as Gotten

By Pat Hamilton







No sooner had I gotten my second wind than I broke it.

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.

Goines On: Letting go

Click image for more vignettes

While reading an interview about “giving advice that a person can hear,” Goines wondered how the person being interviewed might advise him on something he was contemplating doing.
    He had been worrying about why a few friends had at some point in their correspondence just stopped replying and gone distant on him. How could he ask them why they had abandoned him without driving them farther away? What could he ask them, how might he put the questions?

In Remembrance: The Man David Lance Goines

By Moristotle

Today we pause to remember the man whose last name I use for the name of my fictional character Goines. David Lance Goines died on February 19 in Berkeley, California, the city where I was born about two and a half years before Goines was born in Grants Pass, Oregon (May 29, 1945).
    “Goines” was familiar to me from the posters of his that my wife and I have long had hanging on our walls, and “Goines” was irresistible for the easy puns it gives way to.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Pumpkins in the Corn& Flutter By

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

Years ago, while in training as a driver in Kentucky, I was put in a hotel for my trainer’s home time. Kali and the boys came down and surprised me with a visit and we took some time to visit Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home at Knob Creek.
    Lincoln himself said his earliest memories were of living on a farm there. One memory he shared was of planting a garden with his sister Sarah. In one row, he would plant pumpkin seeds and the next she would sow the corn. The following night, a big rainstorm sent water rushing into the creek, flooding the fields and wiping out that garden.

Goines On: Erotic clouds

Click image for more vignettes

Mt. Rainier thrust through the thick clouds covering the land between Portland and Seattle. Goines took photos as their flight approached Seattle, not knowing for sure yet just which mountain peak they were seeing, and learning only latter that his photo was virtually identical to Wikipedia’s.
    At their departure gate in SEA, waiting for their connecting flight homeward from a visit to the Portland area, Goines followed his wife to seats with enough surrounding space for her rollator and the two roll-on suitcases he was managing.

Asking Susan about Giving Advice

...that a person
can hear

[First appeared as “Ask Wednesday: Ask Susan – About giving advice that a person can hear” on May 11, 2015.]

During the venerable run of your “Ask Susan” columns, whenever we have forwarded you a question, you have always seemed to rub your palms together in delight, often replying within only two or three days. Giving advice seems to be your métier, or calling. What do you think of that? Does it feel like a calling, or just what does it feel like to you?

All Over the Place: Hunger Pains (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

I’m finished with the second box of matzo and we still have a hundred or so miles to go. One piece of matzah every ten to twenty miles. It keeps me awake, and I like the way it crunches, changes texture, leaves a slight film in my mouth. I always take a five- to ten-mile break between each piece.
    “Hey,” I wake my wife, “I need a bathroom and I’m out of food. We’re coming on to Dwight. I’m going to get some food for us there.”

Goines On: Death and taxes

Click image for more vignettes

About an hour before the 6 a.m. alarm sounded, Goines was already awake and thinking about the fiasco with TurboTax the day before. Unlike last year’s fiasco, he had received this year’s 20%-off postcard in time, but when he got to the final step for submitting the income tax returns, TurboTax provided no option to specify the offer’s “service code,” but went ahead and charged the entire fee to his credit card.
    Goines immediately called TurboTax support and after several frustrating go-arounds with their superficially intelligent “chat” assistant, who seemed unable to comprehend Goines’ demand to “speak to a person,” he was at last transferred to a person – a young-sounding male.

Interview: Susan C. Price of her brother

Jonathan Price
at retirement

your turn to
answer the questions

By Susan C. Price

[This interview appeared originally almost ten years ago, on March 20, 2013, as “Ask Wednesday: Susan C. Price of her brother.”]

what led you to writing?
    I’m not sure I’m writing yet. I’m always a bit disappointed or reluctant. So even to admit I was “led” sounds to me disingenuous. I’ve always wanted to write, or at least wanted to have written. Great literature has intrigued me from early on, and so I became an English major rather than a math major (even though I had done well in math in high school and college) and the more I’ve read of it, the more I’ve wanted to read. And so as you read more and more literature that you enjoy, the cockamamie notion that you could, or even should, write some surfaces. The trouble is, it’s not easy...

Interview: Jonathan Price of his sister

Susan C. Price
with her interviewer

Some questions 

for snoopy

By Jonathan Price

[This interview appeared a little over ten years ago, on February 13, 2013, as “Ask Wednesday: Jonathan Price of his sister.”]

I assume that your answers will be outside the bounds of propriety—
    Always, I hope.

...but will conform to the knowledge that they take electronic form and are sent out into the ether, and may thus be redacted or reduced by interviewer/interviewee, to avoid insult, injury, truth, boredom, and so as not to violate the Geneva Convention unduly or to hamper the brother-sister relationship. Skip any questions that seem inappropriate. More may follow at some date....

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: The Machines Are Taking Over

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

A poet friend of mine posted an amazing picture, then announced it was generated by artificial intelligence.

“Jungle Angel,”
free from Pixabay,
purported to have
been AI-generated