Goines On: The morning after

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Goines’ first impulse upon waking from a sleep whose soundness was only interrupted a few times by a need to urinate is to check for news of last night’s “debate,” but he successfully resists until after he has prepared Mrs. Goines’ fruit and their coffee.
    The news is that “debate” definitely needs to be put in quotation marks.

Goines On: The debate

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Goines has been trying for several days to decide whether or not to watch tonight’s debate between President Trump and Joe Biden. A friend he has been discussing the pros and cons of it with thinks it’s a waste of time if you already know who you’re going to vote for, and Goines does know that – in fact, Goines has already voted, and so has Mrs. Goines. Anything is a waste of time, the friend summarizes, that makes no difference to the outcome.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Animating spirit, first cause

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 27, 2009.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

All Over the Place: Monotony

By Michael H. Brownstein

Day by day
only we can put out fire.

Clouds hunger for companionship,
a stain of precipitation.

Time slows to a penny,
a tone in the hand

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Acting Citizen: Science shows...

It could still get worse

By James Knudsen

Let me be the first to admit the obvious: 2020 is not over yet, it could still get worse. And lately, I’ve been learning a lot about the ways it could get worse. My wife, Andra, likes to fall asleep to something soothing, like scientific shows playing softly on the television. A recent favorite is, “How the Universe Works.” A better title would be, “How the Universe Will Eventually Conspire to Incinerate Planet Earth to a Cinder.” That’s usually what the scientists explain will happen should the topic of that evening’s episode happen. Actually, I misspoke, when the topic of that evening’s episode happens. Because given enough millions or billions of years, all of these things are going to happen. Things like...

Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [6]

Detail of “Island Woman”

Two Paintings
and a Bonus

By André Duvall

As you may have gathered from the Father’s Art posts so far, Dad favors working with oil paint. “Island Woman” is one of the few cases in which he uses some acrylic, in order to give a flat, two-dimensional look to the black portion of the painting. He also chose to use the rough side of the Masonite to give it more of a canvas look and texture. “Island Woman” is Dad’s second open-frame painting, inspired by the use of black in his first one, which will be featured in a future post.

Mary’s Voice: Posthumously Speaking 18

Detail: signature, year

On the occasion of her 95th birthday (tomorrow)

By Mary Alice Condley (1925-2007)

[Editor’s Note: I am grateful to Mary’s & my cousin Billy Charles Duvall, the son of our mother’s sister Florine, for his discovery of today’s painting, and to his son, André Duvall, for explaining its background in tomorrow’s installment of his Father’s Art column. Thank readers in advance for their 24 hours of patience!]

Goines On: Handiness

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On his morning walk, Goines encountered a neighbor’s pruned cypress tree lying across the sidewalk, entirely blocking it. With hardly a thought, he easily kneed it onto the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb.

Ten Years Ago Today: Sacrifice is for the little people

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 22, 2010.]

“Anger is sweeping America,” wrote Paul Krugman in “The Angry Rich” on September 19 in The New York Times. “I’m talking about the rich,” he said.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Things as they were

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 20, 2009.]

This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler’s review had reminded me [“Things as they are,” September 19, 2009]. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply “The Necessary Angel.” In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I’d written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously “the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school,” I’d say that I have found it – I mean more by the fact that I’ve kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?

All Over the Place: Endurance

By Michael H. Brownstein

She tells me she can no longer abide her Agent Orange pain

sleeting into her,

staining her skin into angry insect bites.

It’s like going to a party where you do not belong,

she explains, hands cracked,

and there are so many people you never wanted to know.

11 Years Ago Today: Things as they are

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 19, 2009.]

This week I was reminded by a review in a recent New York Times Book Review (August 23) that my freshman year in college I wrote a paper for Philosophy I on a book of essays titled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The review, “The Plain Sense of Things,” by Helen Vendler, was of a book of Selected Poems of Stevens, edited by John N. Serio.

Now available as a whole: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café

Click image to go to the novel

By Moristotle

We now fulfill our promise to publish the whole of Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café, which you can read in its entirety at your own pace in our Back Pages. The author plans to have it available by the end of the year in paperback and as an e-book, for sale on Amazon.

The Parting (a poem)

By Shirley Skufca Hickman

He hands me a form stating:

Permission to withdraw from English 1-A.

His hands are shaking,
and he tries to make a joke.
“I got caught in a draft.”

Dreams of day and night

Photo by Vic Midyett

By Moristotle

The first is a dream of night, real as real:
    Siegfried has returned from having left us,
    from being gone away,
    his nubby hair stiff in short sprigs
    because it is weeks past his last grooming.
    It feels so real on my imagined finger tips,
    stroking him as he sleeps on top of our covers,
    himself as real as a character in a drama,
    as real as the person he had been for us:
    daily, nightly, always, forever.