Essai
Composing a New Poetic Form
Tensions, resistance, doubling-down, or just an itch to try and invent something? Either way, hybrid poetic forms are the real tradition of writing verse.
Day 3: (re)Writing the Masters
In the film, much of this layered social critique by Wilde is instead laid at the feet of a cat. . . .
Day 2: Price or Poe?
On their own, as a film, the changes made almost betray the claustrophobic prose of Poe’s story.
Day 1: Which Mary Shelley?
This is it, then. Branagh may believe he is channeling Shelley, but his own dithyrambic ego prevents us from seeing her.
Day 3: (re)Writing the Masters
In the film, much of this layered social critique by Wilde is instead laid at the feet of a cat. . . .
Day 2: Price or Poe?
On their own, as a film, the changes made almost betray the claustrophobic prose of Poe’s story.
Day 1: Which Mary Shelley?
This is it, then. Branagh may believe he is channeling Shelley, but his own dithyrambic ego prevents us from seeing her.
Day 0: Films to Books and . . .
If I had to guess, it’s that many missed a key idea of translation to a different medium: transformation. Creating story for a poem, podcast, movie, painting, symphony, short story, campfire talk, or novel are each significantly different acts,
Daemon Maps: Suspicion of Metaphor
“All I need to know is if that low pressure system might create a tornado; stop telling me about the number of grandmothers per hectare!”
Daemon Maps – Repair Guy
Did they, in some coffee klatch somewhere, meet before marking this pathway to savings, to make a small quiet bet against themselves? Their kitchens were not my kitchens, their maps were not my reality, and they’d be damned if some commenters bombed their social media accounts.
Daemon Maps – An Introduction
We’ll call our exploration one of Daemon Maps, where any superior or superior inspiration guiding or discoverable by us (be it intentional, by D(d)esign, or by Law of Physics) is not necessarily ultimate, but graspable within our single local lifetimes.
Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey
“One issue with the defense of Twain’s original text is the claim that such an historical center exists and that such grounds are worth preserving.”
#bookfetish
After all, why would I risk staining that beauty with a coffee ring? Why place stress upon that carefully sewn binding? If I wanted to actually read the book, well, I have a chewed and annotation-scarred used paperback of it.
Lessons from Emilio
In the image, he is on the Inca Trail, alone, a floppy hat and sunglasses, his hands resting on the top of his walking stick as he waits for me to reach him. I am wheezing from altitude dizziness as we ascend.
Nazgul
After all, I was maybe 15 years old, skinny and pale as pasta, my “Lord of Chaos” badge hanging crookedly from a fading Dragonslayer t-shirt. And there was Gandalf, a 280 pound beer-stinking sasquatch of a man …
The Challenge of Finding Wisdom
I have seen years and scores of students succumb to the allure of Beavis and Butthead and Seattle grunge, Instagram and “What Does the Fox Say?”, never suspecting that Descartes’ dualism or Conrad’s “The horror” could be significant moments for true reflection.
Essai –
After Michel deMontaigne, to essai is to engage in a prose act of skepticism, an exploration of a topic as perceived or understood by the writer. You might think of it as a “testing,” an experiment in idea-making. Alas, our education system long ago turned this critical verb into a static noun scored by rubrics in red ink for purposes political and often crippling.
