Matter Notes: A lawyer's private notes on a legal matter; considered inviolate and non-disclosable.
By metaphor and game, my occasional blog posts on the war on the humanities and other cultural atrocities;
with frequent diversions into creative matters.
In both cases, a form of work product. Scribere est agere.
Nobody. No one entered the MBD contest. But I did get a few complaints about the contest’s “real name rule.” Per my posting guidelines, I tolerate anonymous posts unless the poster is dissing another writer or dissing me. The “real name rule” for the contest was solely to discourage multiple entries by sock puppets, but […]
Do you know this fable? It’s attributed to Aesop. Here’s the Harvard Classics version: A Man and his son were once going with their Donkey to market. As they were walking along by its side a countryman passed them and said: “You fools, what is a Donkey for but to ride upon?” So the Man […]
What does it feel like to see the world as a materialist, to believe (sorry, to “know”) that you are always, at every second of your single random lucky dice existence, one breath away from nonexistence? Sometimes, in the spirit of play, I try this on for a day or two. I’m never able to move in, but I do enjoy an occasional visit. It sharpens things.
I have no idea if this still works, or why anyone would want to make use of it, but here it is. If you are really, truly lonely or bored, and just want someone, anyone to talk to you – and aren’t particular – this used to be foolproof. I know from personal experience that […]
I recently had what William Wordsworth called a “spot of time.” A moment when perception happens through some imaginative faculty you didn’t know you had. Something you have no name for turns and cracks and you suddenly, briefly “know” reality as if you’ve just made an exciting new friend. I know the phrase is from […]
Joan Acocella took up this question in The New Yorker several years ago. She doesn’t answer it. Nobody can. There are as many answers as blocked writers. Acocella provides a history of explanations for why writers sometimes, often, abandon writing for years. Or forever. Some of those explanations are: 1. the early Romantic notion, promulgated by […]
