By Moristotle
[Originally published on October 27, 2009, not one word different, but another image has been added and a different image of Spinoza substituted.]
Having learned a great deal from neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio’s 1999 book about consciousness, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, I decided to read another of his books.
By Moristotle
[Originally published on October 25, 2010, not one word different, but a better photo of Mr. Russell has been substituted.]
My wife didn’t laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s 1909 essay, “Pragmatism,” but I did, and I hope you might too:
A novella with some real characters
By Roger Owens
Lester knew they couldn’t stay in any of the white hotels or cabins, but the bad part was, they couldn’t stay at any of the black places either. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He was a white man, he could tell any nigger what to do, but if he stayed in a black establishment he knew damn well they would both wake up dead. And there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t call the sheriff, he’d be put in jail his ownself for causing a ruckus, and if there wasn’t a charge on the books for living in sin with a black woman, they would just make one up. Prob’ly get hisself hung before it was over. They had come across south Florida on Alligator Alley, and they had sure seen some. Fat black monsters that lay across the miserable excuse for a road and sometimes wouldn’t move for all the arm-waving and horn-blowing a man could do. God, he hated Florida.
By Moristotle
[Originally published on October 22, 2008, not a word different, but with an image added and a bracketed phrase revealed at the end.]
Richard Dawkins, in the penultimate chapter of his 1996 book, Climbing Mount Improbable, addresses the general question about how and to what extent life may have arisen in the universe.
[Text-only version]
By Geoffrey Dean
[Editor’s Note: The photo version will be published as soon as we have overcome a thorny technical glitch.]
On the St. Croix River bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin, Stillwater is a charming town with an old-time feel within easy driving range of the Twin Cities. As we discovered through the many historical markers along MN 95 between Stillwater and Scandia, this area is important as the cradle of Minnesota’s statehood and the home of its earliest European settlers (ca. 1838-1859).
Edited by Moristotle
[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]
Harvey Weinstein’s being thrown out of the Motion Picture Academy is like they’re overdoing it because nothing was done about Donald Trump. At least Weinstein was good at his job. “Right and Left React to Harvey Weinstein Reports” [Anna Dubenko, NY Times, October 13]. Excerpt:
A novella with some real characters
By Roger Owens
Porcelain Jones was still terrified. Something had to go wrong. Everything in her nineteen years always had gone wrong, and there was no reason to think now would be any different. Her father had died, her stepdaddy lost his job like every other black man when all the white boys came home from the war, and took to drinking and beating her mother and everyone else near him. And worse. He’d tried to come to her bed more than once, but he’d always been so drunk she’d been able to fight him off. She worked a little at Mrs. Jeffries’ dance hall to make enough money to get out of the house, but she had known that sometime she would have to sell herself to live. There was no work anywhere. The service jobs that had sustained her family for generations were going to white women who were out of work for the same reason black men’s jobs were going to white men. The white men were back.
By Moristotle
[Originally published on October 15, 2009, not a word different.]
Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.
By Eric Meub
[Originally published on April 9, 2016]
We had then (still) tomorrow, Saarinen,
a Trans-World tapered, curled, stiletto heeled,
and Kahn. We thought we’d live without a Penn
Station (what a leveled playing field).
Edited by Moristotle
[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]
Trump’s lack of self-awareness is, as ever, awe-inspiring. I hope he will soon be examined by a team of psychiatrists and their consensus report made public: “Trump rips the NFL for disrespecting the flag. Then he jokes about a military flag ceremony” [Patrick Martin, Washington Post, October 12]. Excerpt:
And what about everyone else?
By Moristotle
Yesterday morning I messaged a beloved cousin, “I hope you and all yours are well.” Even before I pressed Send, my “inner voice” spoke up to remind me that it represents my universally compassionate self, which avoids stepping on a bug or a little frog, which is sobered into silence whenever I eat the flesh of an animal that did not hope to be slaughtered to become food, which had been stirred the day before when I witnessed from a few feet away a frail-looking bird hovering on a branch of our persimmon tree, the mild wind ruffling its feathers.
By Moristotle
[Originally published on October 11, 2008, not a word different, but with images added.]
“Are you sorry?” I asked the young head cashier at a local home improvement store. She had just straightened out my $25 discount coupon on a purchase of over $300 for building and gardening materials. I was getting set to build a raised planting area my wife wanted in the back yard.
Reflections over the kitchen sink
By Moristotle
Spellbound at its revelations, my wife and I have been watching Ken Burns’s Vietnam War. Watching it is tearing at my heart, and hers too, I think. The war’s stupidity, our leaders’ pathological need to “save face,” the hundreds of thousands of deaths, square miles of beautiful land burned and bombed, the angst of soldiers, their families, their fellow citizens torn asunder by opposed stances on the war….
A novella with some real characters
By Roger Owens
[Editor’s Note: On Saturday, this book finally became available in paperback. The long delay since its availability as a Kindle eBook owes to two things: (1) Hurricane Irma, which swept along the west coast of the author’s state, prompting him to evacuate, and (2) the ineptitude of the book’s cover designer ( m e ), who hadn’t noticed that some of the text originally extended into the area that gets trimmed off after each book is printed and bound.]
