“It’s gonna burn me just that way, finally telling about all this, about the hospital, and her, and the guys––and about McMurphy. I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible […]
“It is a strange feeling to revisit this revelation as a seventy-four-year-old. When one is a twenty-five-year-old, such concepts can be experienced only academically. Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself. It is a subject that has no […]
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the […]
“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a […]
“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lung the brain the heart. Forty […]
“One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it […]
Right so asking a guy like me to critique James Joyces Ulysses is like asking a blind man to critique a silent film Ive neither the know how nor the gumption to properly assess something I have little chance of understanding and would be skeptical of anyone who claimed to comprehend it comprehensively so rather […]
“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast […]
“Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 241 “Bottom line. […]