Archive for 2019
Poems, unique among all literature, were for many centuries specifically meant to be learned by heart. They were meant to be memorized and then recited aloud. This is called the oral tradition of poetry, which in essence means holding literature in the mind and heart to then recite it. Thus we find in the oral […]
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South of the border among the pluripresence of jellied heat, east of the setting sun, inNogales, Mexico, where this sort of thing can occur,you glimpse, twenty-five meters off the shoulder of the road, a Mexican woman who’s walkingalone: black-haired, slender, tall, her long arms sheathed in toffee-colored skin, her wet eyes friendly yet faintly mocking. She […]
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Oscar Fingal Wilde, the last of the great and hopelessly flamboyant, whose full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, is perhaps because of his flamboyance and his fame frequently misrepresented and misconceived. He died 119 years ago this month. I offer here three of the most famous fabulations about Oscar: 3. Oscar only liked […]
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The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) did not invent the Petrarchan sonnet, which is also known as the Italian sonnet. It was first used by Dante (1265-1321) and then later by many of Dante’s contemporaries. Petrarch’s excellence with the form, however, especially when celebrating his beloved Laura, made the Italian sonnet more widely known, so that even […]
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This recent tweet captures the half-assed distinction Marx tried to make between so-called bourgeois property and personal property: On the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — when the totalitarian socialist government of China quashed, with extreme force, a political uprising by the people of China who rebelled at last against the obliteration of […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011