Editors notoriously complain about how much bad fiction and poetry they’re forced to read, poor dears, but I think the case can be made that a large amount of surprisingly good stories and poems are submitted to publishers. Poor work is readily assignable to the round file, but good work raises the question of how [...]
Read More...The actress Natalie Portman takes a memorable walk at the end of the 2004 Mike Nichols’ movie Closer. She’s mowing them down on the streets of New York. Men are twisting themselves into pretzels to take a gander, and she’s giving them zilch, except that breathtaking walk.It reminded me that there’s a moment when a [...]
Read More...Have you ever noticed how things disappear right under our noses, and it isn’t always executive function disorder or Alzheimer’s; sometimes we get stuck in a time warp. Like whatever happened to doffing one’s cap, or fedora, or beret? Some of us still remember how men used three fingers to lift their fedoras up in [...]
Read More...North Korea is apparently making and floating some hair-raisingly good counterfeits of U.S. money, according to Stephen Mihm in the July 23 New York Times Magazine. Federal agents in October 2004 found $100 bills worth more than $300,000 in a container ship in the port of Newark.The story reminded me of something my mother told [...]
Read More...The Israelis want our smart bombs (now there’s a contradiction for you), and the usual response to outrages against humanity is a combination of bullets and baloney, but at writersalliance.net the world’s creators of beauty are gathering to tell the story of Darfur where genocide disgraces the human race. The editors of this website request [...]
Read More...Amari Hamadene is an Algerian poet and publisher whose soaring vision is that technological advance has put in our hands for the first time in human history a means to speak with each other over the din of ideology. The splendid idea that gave birth to the United Nations has been resurrected in cyberspace, and [...]
Read More...… where ignorant armies party by night. Well, that’s not exactly what the poet Matthew Arnold wrote, but it pretty well expresses how I’ve always viewed parties. Here’s what he really said: “Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, [...]
Read More...What do Osama bin Laden, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush and their Neocon Oil Extortion Company have in common? A propensity for putting their feet in a quagmire, it would seem. Osama, lamenting the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the murderous Jordanian thug he fatuously calls an emir, has [...]
Read More...Remember the funhouses where we used to laugh at ourselves? We’d look into those convex and concave mirrors and make faces to see how downright silly we are and then we’d go home to the serious business of being ourselves, forgetting how much of ourselves we’d left behind. Well, what if we’re locked up in [...]
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