Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Slave Quarters

By Roger Owens

If one does an internet search for the Stephen Foster Memorial or the Stephen Foster “Culture Center State Park” in White Springs, Florida, a veritable cornucopia of interesting information is presented. Directions to the site from Jasper, where I spent summers as a child, are basically “Get on Highway 41 and drive southeast until you see White Springs.” One will be informed of the camping, the hiking, the bicycling, and the carillon bells playing Foster’s most popular songs all day long. There are demonstrations of quilting, blacksmithing, and the making of stained glass. In January, there is Stephen Foster Day, and in May there is the Florida Folk Festival. Of course, much of the most interesting information, as is true with many histories and Federal investigations, is what is not revealed.

Goines On: The last sunflower

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Goines thought he had better not trust his thinking of the previous afternoon. He had seemed to become delirious from pulling weeds in the humid heat for too long that morning. He had even pulled up one of Mrs. Goines’ dahlias and the only sunflower that survived from those a friend had given her.

Book Authors’ Corner update

Titles have been added to the collage

By Moristotle

With apologies for months of neglecting our Book Authors’ Corner, we have updated its collage of covers (see below). We have included covers not only of a few recently published titles, but also of several not-yet-published books, with links to excerpts from them on the blog (if there are any):

All Over the Place: Of leks and lies

By Michael H. Brownstein











of landscapes of leks and booming tantrums
leaders
of
racist
lies

Goines On: Weeds and wolves

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Goines had pulled that weed in the cypress mulch path only yesterday or the day before. And today it has sprung back. Amazing, really. To Goines and his wife, it was a weed, and weeds were weeds – to be pulled up, roots and all if possible, and trashed. But to the weed itself, it was all there was, it was its life, with a lineage, really, as old as Goines’ maybe. He wondered briefly whether pulling a weed was of the same order as killing a rodent or a wolf that threatened a farmer’s livestock? He couldn’t fathom it.

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [10]

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Chapter 10. Claude

Claude woke up up the next morning in a bed at the local cat house. His head hurt, his mouth was dry as a desert, and he had the shakes. He pulled the pisspot from under the bed and threw up.
    Somehow he got dressed, but when he checked his pants for money, there wasn’t any. He pulled off a sock and removed the two twenties, wondering why no one ever thought to take his socks off. He walked to the café on the corner and had breakfast. By the third cup of coffee, he was feeling better.

Goines On: Kidnapped

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As usual, Goines tapped on the house-style bird feeder after releasing the perching assembly to listen for any rustling of blacksnake inside. No sound. And then he felt the roof release on the far side for possible feel of snake body (and for the possible sting of a bite, like the one that had surprised him some months ago). Neither. Hearing and feeling nothing, and with the roof raised for light to stream into the interior, he then craned his neck to look through the feeding-window openings. No snake sighting either. The birds would be safe for some time today anyway.

Movie Review: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola’s failed translation of Joseph Conrad

By Rolf Dumke

I found Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) wonderful. But I think that his celebrated Apocalypse Now (1979) contains too much slaughter. And, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Coppola agrees so far as to say, “Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”

All Over the Place: The language of blue

By Michael H. Brownstein











The squint of sky between twig and nettle
wallpapered azure, sapphire, soft blue:
Mark your soul, Mr. Bowerbird. Create
turrets of royal blue and cyan, Collect
pen tops, blue orchids, for-get-me-nots,

Poetry & Portraits: Hindsight

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Hindsight
By Eric Meub

Assuming we survive the present age,
What will the story look like on the page?
How will our failures and successes rate?
What will they say about our head of state?

Goines On: The turtle snaps

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Goines returned to the big green electrical box where he had seen the turtle two hours earlier, right before he texted George its precise location. He had not heard from George, and Goines was apprehensive what he would find this time. There had been that tractor clearing brush, so there was even the possibility the turtle might have been….

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [9]

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Chapter 9. Changing World

Claude came in late that night, long after James had gone to bed. Clara and he had a long and revealing talk. Claude had thought his father was turning his back on his new sister and her mother, and he was surprised to learn it wasn’t J.F. but Clara who had decided to raise the child on her own.

Goines On: The hoot of an owl

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Goines was emptying the dishwasher when he heard what sounded like an owl hooting, and he wondered what the owl was saying, what he might be alerting other owls to or warning them about.

Goines On: Nightmare

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Goines seemed to have to race his electric toothbrush to cover an entire quadrant before the device’s 30-second beep. He supposed that perceived time was very slow this morning because he had gone deep into dreamland in the hour or two before arising. His psyche probably couldn’t have delivered the quartet of dreams any other way than by sedating him – otherwise he would have woken himself up to escape them.

All Over the Place: A coloring of mood

By Michael H. Brownstein

yesterday the sky witch blue
well lit
not a single cloud stain
the sun
bright yellow