My Talk on the Centenary of the Grievous Event

I have come to my own conclusions about the meaning of the event, and using the narratory and rhetorical tricks of a writer and former teacher I may temporarily make you think you agree. But I stand here filled with distrust of stories in general, having waded through so many of them. It is a time of strong beliefs in shallow stories.

Ahmad Jamal Remembered

I was probably in my last year of high school when I bought an Ahmad Jamal album called Extensions. I bought it only because it was in a remainder bin and cost ninety-nine cents. The title seemed intriguing, and here was someone I thought that I ought to like or ought to learn to like since so many people around me did.

Of Modern Landscape

The great Victorian-era writer and art critic John Ruskin explores the change in mindset that marked contemporary painters apart from their classical, medieval forbears, and that would later give birth to modern painting. “It is evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits of mind which have caused them.”

Naming Names

Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.

How the English Major Became Minor

By lifting the literature of the academic elite above the literature of the masses, English departments imply that the masses are unimportant and further the belief that English is a field and degree of little consequence. The inclusion of commercial fiction in university and college English departments would help lessen the perception that English majors are unemployable, better prepare students to work in the commercial book market, and attract students deterred by current curricula.

Failing the Test of Purging Oneself

In the hogan I was miserable, not enlightened, felt funky and slimed. All the individual animal and species sins poured out of me, not as catharsis or healing, but as reminder and irritant, and I did not believe in sin. This was not my culture, my ceremony, my victory, my tribe. It was like being put to death slowly and humiliatingly for my presumption.

It’s Alive! Isn’t It?

Organized religions, at least the traditional monotheistic ones, are stingy in assigning a soul (only to humans) and defining its fate (blackened by sin). They bottle up the holy water, decree which acts are sins and which are virtues, box up God in a package of their own design. Why not let divinity spread out and envelop us, until we can see some faint glow of energy even in the inanimate?