Every Good Morning

  The name of Pierre Damas Bel has all but vanished from the news. Our degraded era’s 24-hour multiple screen scrolling and stimulation has seen to that, and the hourly cruelty and encompassing ugliness of this Administration has eroded our ability to keep track of its victims. He was 20 years old when he stepped in front of a tractor trailer on Interstate 70. Do you remember 20? Even if […]

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Called upon to choose, I would argue that the 5 great American novels of the late 20th Century are Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973), Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987), Libra by Don Delillo (1988), and American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). There may be better American novels out there that were published between 1945 and 2000. One cannot read everything, but I’ll rest with these books as the ones that tell […]

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St. Peter’s Basilica Martini’s The Annunciation* Sunday Mass Lear’s Prayer Skeleton Growl and Smile *The painting entitled The Annunciation with Saint Margaret and Saint Ansanus now housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence*King *Lear, III, iv, 23-36: KENT  Good my lord, enter here. LEAR  Prithee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in.— In, boy; go first.—You houseless poverty— Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. Fool exits. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp. Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may’st shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

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