Correspondence: Refresher

By Moristotle

After all the enemying, don’t you think your readers need a few days off from you-know-who?

Correspondence: Enemy of the people

By Moristotle

“Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase with a Fraught History” [Andrew Higgins, NY Times, February 26]. Excerpt:

Near and far in sestina

Piedmont eye chart

By Moristotle

[This poem was originally published on June 8, 2013.]

Questions have arisen about sunsets.
Why is one beautiful to me but plain
to the next person? Some want horizons
spread out under a big sky at a far
distance over vast space, but I want near
displays set against trees and local piedmont

The Loneliest Liberal: Mum’s the word

I’m going to be in a TV soap opera

By James Knudsen

It’s probably a safe bet to say, that among the contributors and consumers of Moristotle & Co., there aren’t a lot of soap-opera devotees. The genre is one of those things that elites on the coasts look down their noses at while they make high-minded jokes about the low-brow art form. Still, it does pay.

Book Review: Olive Kitteridge

Life as we live it

By Moristotle

[In Wednesday’s post, “A curious case of apathy,” I mentioned a book club I had participated in. The book reviewed today was discussed in that club, and the review, “Life as we live it,” was originally published on August 14, 2012.]

Correspondence: Donny Trumpp plays Johnny Depp

By Moristotle

Donald Trump’s affectless reading of “his” anti-anti-Semitism statement brings to mind Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s droll,tongue-in-cheek “apology” to Australia for illegally bringing her two dogs into the country: “Trump denounces anti-Semitic threats as ‘horrible’ after facing criticism” [ABC News, February 21]:

A curious case of apathy

By Moristotle

Entering the offices of my cardiologist’s practice yesterday morning, I felt (or, rather, failed to feel) in a way that I could only think was apathy. Apathy in the basic sense of lack of enthusiasm, or impassivity, or ennui. Usually, whenever I approach a receptionist – whether in a doctor’s office, a Starbuck’s, Elliott’s Pet Spa, or wherever – I feel primed to banter, to joke, to say something I hope will sound witty.

How do we choose to react to a joke?

By Victor L. Midyett

How do we choose to react to something we consider rude, politically incorrect, or demeaning to a situation or to ourselves? Do we first ask ourselves some questions? Or do we simply assume that what was said was intended to be demeaning? Was it said as a joke simply for a joke’s sake? Was it meant as a slam of “my kind” or of me in particular?
    I think that if we don’t know the answers to these questions, we are doing ourselves a disservice. As I have said before, OTHERS cannot MAKE US feel. We CHOOSE how we react to others and everything.

Lost time reading Marcel Proust

Hawthorns in blossom

By Moristotle

As a direct result of visiting Paris last year with my wife, for our 50^th wedding anniversary, I have finally been applying myself to reading Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [In Search of Lost Time]), which I had been meaning to read ever since my wife read it over 35 years ago, in the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation (1920’s), before we moved from California to North Carolina.

West Coast Observer: An abhorrent admiration

Let’s not have a repeat

By William Silveira

I happened to view the PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff on February 15, and I came away shocked and frightened for the future of our country and the world.
    I am sure that many of you have read about the glowing reports of the wonderful work Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were doing in Germany in the 1930’s. Their false and fatuous view of what was going on helped cement Hitler’s grip on power in Germany during that era. Among the Americans who were taken in by Hitler and the Nazis were Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy. Now I see the same sort of line being taken by Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, and a consultant to the American oil industry.

A history not of God, but of the idea of God

By Moristotle

[Originally published on March 19, 2008]

Karen Armstrong’s 1993 book, subtitled “The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” has the misleading but catchier title A History of God. She herself refers in the Introduction to “this history of the idea and experience of [emphasis mine] God in the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” [p. xix]. She admits that God might not really exist and that she wished, “when I was starting out in the religious life” [in the 1960’s], that she had been told to “deliberately create a sense of him for myself.”

Blossoms in winter

Flowering apricot

By Moristotle

I took these photographs last month, in our yard (and inside our home), in Mebane, North Carolina.

Correspondence: Educational advice for Trump resisters

By Moristotle

Betsy DeVos has some advice for us Trump resisters (satire by Andy Borowitz, in his New Yorker column “DeVos Says Trump’s Forty-Per-Cent Approval Rating Means More Than Half of Country Supports Him”):

To Valentine’s Day

By Moristotle

[A reader commented yesterday on this poem’s original post, on Valentine’s Day 2015, reminding me I had even written it (and might have republished it yesterday).]

Happier Valentine’s Day than this!

By Moristotle

“Unhappy Valentines: romantic holiday disasters” [various, Guardian, February 11]. Few things conjure up the idea of romance like an exotic trip with a partner, though the reality can be excruciatingly different, as these writers discovered....: