Author Archive
Long, long ago, on a hushed and snowy Monday night in December of 2019, a friend at my bar told me, apropos of nothing but my handwriting, that the hashtags #handwriting and #allthedifference were currently trending on something he called TikTok, which I’d never heard of. Three hours later, however, I’d downloaded the app. Some […]
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What is prosody? Prosody studies the music of language. Prosody studies sounds moving through time. Prosody is separate from semantics. It’s distinct from the meaning of the words that the sounds compose. Prosody isn’t the sound of language organized in lines, as is now sometimes supposed. The reason this definitional fallacy is important to […]
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You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star. Just another nobody boy, half-black, half-white, raised in a nowhere town, in a fractured home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly […]
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The sonnet as a poetic form is surprisingly slippery to define. Any human unlucky enough to have witnessed my interminable sonnet-definition revisions can, I think at bare minimum, attest to this. Normally, of course, the sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in some alternating fashion. This is all well — right up […]
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Somebody just told me about this recent episode of America’s Got Talent, which I don’t watch. I do, however, have very good reason to think that Dusty May, my character from Gap-Toothed Girl, who inspires me so much, also inspired Ms. Ashlee Montague, as I also have very good reason to think that Dusty May […]
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“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject matter isn’t the only component of art, nor is it the most complicated, but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the artist presents. It […]
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Fundamentally, all art consist of two and only two components, and those two components are subject matter and style. Subject matter is The What. Style is The How. Style is the way in which an artist presents her or his subject. It is execution. The following, for example, is Matthew James Taylor’s depiction of the […]
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Dr. James Thorp is among the most well-respected obstetricians in the world. If you think a genocide has not been set into motion, I ask you to watch the following video. Take 3 minutes of your time and listen to what the good doctor is seeing in his private practice. The life of your children, […]
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These are real messages. The number listed is fake. I know because I still work part-time for a private detective. These sorts of death threats have, for over a decade, become somewhat commonplace for me — beginning in earnest in late 2017. (And you should see those photos. They remind you of Saint Paul […]
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This is my beautiful hometown of Ouray (pronounced: YOO-ray), which is famous year-in-year-out for the unmatched splendor of its 4th of July celebration: The village of Ouray, where I was born and raised, is named after a Ute Indian: Chief Ouray. Chief Ouray’s mother was a Ute Indian – an Uncompahgre Ute Indian – and […]
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DEAD COW FARM An ancient saga tells us how In the beginning the First Cow (For nothing living yet had birth But Elemental Cow on earth) Began to lick cold stones and mud: Under her warm tongue flesh and blood Blossomed, a miracle to believe: And so was Adam born, and Eve. Here now is […]
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The concept of justice is inseparable from the concept of rights. The words are deeply interwoven and interconnected — linguistically, legally, lexically, historically, epistemologically. The word “justice” derives from the Latin word jūstitia, which means “rightness” or “righteous.” Jūstitia in turn derives from an even deeper antecedent — and with it the idea of rights: both terms were built upon a now little-known […]
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Have no doubt whatsoever that what Barack Obama said publicly on April 21, 2022 — and what he chuckled over while saying it — was an explicit admission of the most appalling war crime in human history. I’m fully aware that for my pointing this out and for my unwavering commitment to bringing this horrific […]
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“A government drone appears, saying: ‘Please comply with COVID rules. **Control your soul’s desire for freedom**. Do not open window to sing.’ ➡️Yes, the drone actually said that [in the following clip from Singapore]:” Michael P. Senger is an attorney and writer I deeply admire. His book Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the […]
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Human happiness is lightness and joy. It is the light and joyful glow over the fact of being alive — of living life with energy and with zeal and enthusiasm: a buoyancy of spirit and benevolent sense of delight over the anticipation of what life, in all its strange and magical wonder, has in store. But […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011