Essai
Prefaces: Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Reflections on the Prefaces: And a growing Reading Guide for Arendt’s enormous history of 20th century totalitarianism, and what we might need to know from it.
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Reflections and a growing Reading Guide for Arendt’s enormous history of 20th century totalitarianism, and what we might need to know from it.
Five Year Anniversary: Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ Reading & Music
Sample some early Waywords sounds from five years ago: a bit of Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ produced for the Waywords&Meansigns project.
Sharp Sticks: On Plot Twists and Ironic Power
Why some of those shocking stories just . . . stay with us.
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Reflections and a growing Reading Guide for Arendt’s enormous history of 20th century totalitarianism, and what we might need to know from it.
Five Year Anniversary: Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ Reading & Music
Sample some early Waywords sounds from five years ago: a bit of Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ produced for the Waywords&Meansigns project.
Sharp Sticks: On Plot Twists and Ironic Power
Why some of those shocking stories just . . . stay with us.
Unwoven Audiobook Available!
At last, the professional audiobook version is complete, with original music by Randon Myles and read by the author! Get it now from wherever you find your listens.
The Sestina and Me
I reflect on the completion of my wintry fingertrap sestina, “Whirling Still.”
Nuts & Bolts & Fingertrap Sestinas
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.
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 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!”
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.
