The eccentric (Sneller)

In the days before all the paths were made straight and all the rough edges smoothed off as affronts to group life, there was a chance for the unusual, the odd, or the eccentric to exist without anyone's feeling obliged to do something about it. The right of a man or woman to be different was unchallenged. The community thought, in fact, that those who broke the regular pattern of life improved things so far as food for thought and talk was concerned.

Anne Gertrude Sneller, A Vanished World

The gestures (Wharton)

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Mushroom pasta with truffle oil

New poems

+10

On beauty

Beauty is the delusion
that lets us go on.

The most self-damning thing (Jillette)

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.

Penn Jillette

Cricket (Basho)

how pitiful
under the armored helmet
a cricket

Matsuo Basho

On art

A key function (though not, to be sure, the only function) of art is to provide distance between what is experienced and the one experiencing it.

Storytelling (Whedon)

The main function of the human brain, the primary instinct, is storytelling. Memory is storytelling.

Joss Whedon

The Broad River Review

Received my copy of Volume 47 of The Broad River Review containing my poem "Idioverse." Looks great!

New poems

+10

11th Annual Independence Day Poem

          Fireworks

the noise
of the ideas

flares and
sparks

a cacophony
of change

but time quiets
all

quiets all