Essai
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.
To the Tower
I’ve always found power in creating story; it’s my way of creating the space I wish to inhabit.
Doing Battell
I suppose accepting the importance of internal conflict is difficult for any American boy. After all, I was taught to be strong. To write “reflectively” about “feelings” was, in 1978, a girlie thing to do.
Thumbing the Bird
Fortunately, as I have found in most places I’ve visited, people are forgiving. At least they were more forgiving than myself, who could not–for years–believe he had made such a mistake.
Pathos
I position my fourth finger on the high Eb just as my 3rd grade self learned from Ms. Schnute, my piano teacher from the 1970s. The damp dusts of her cramped basement studio pass through me; I hear her voice calling down from the kitchen where she does dishes: “Septuple! Septuple! Four and three!”
Savita
Savita must carefully unpack her single school uniform from her tattered backpack each morning at 5:00 am, one of the only places she may keep the cotton blouse, tie, and gray wool skirt clean after she has scrubbed it and aired it dry each night. She is any student…
Oak Leaves
Much could be read of this frustration, of how we never know where we will end, of whether our efforts are worthwhile or will be doomed to failure—that we can hope for little more than failed communication.
Ode to Victory
We can but imagine the troubled power you wield. De-sexualized virgin, you would never find liberation.
Teaching to the Un-Goal
This separation of the inward and outward, of the personal and objective, of inquiry and response, exists as a “space” in the thinking of philosophers and artists.
Those Who Know Not the Sea
Most of us understand the term “odyssey” to be a time of adventurous journey, patterned after the classical quest of the Odyssey, the epic by the Greek Homer. Such a definition is hardly revealing, however, and it potentially misses a level of significance for all of us.
Spells of Protection
We can read this deliberate ambiguity in a number of ways: the particular puzzled psychoses of repressed females, for instance, or the dysfunctional power relationships within families; the self-struggling identities of adolescent development or even the unreasonable demands of an outside world to extract simple clarity from complex humanity.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 5 – Aftermath
Like the characters themselves, viewers are left with a futility that either their hours were wasted or they must see the film as a “sunk cost” and thereby invest still more time in prequels and spin-offs.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 4 – Emergent Species
While it’s true that Snyder has been granted a larger, freer role in producing Army of the Dead than he has been allowed in previous films, we can’t forget that this very freedom is being marketed to us; Snyder is still caught up in this $90 million budget.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 3 – Practical Guide
I despair (only a bit) that, as much as I enjoy a good zombie film, Zack Snyder’s heist-zombie film with a big budget will eat itself as well.
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.
