Regardless of what anybody thinks or says, the Bush administration continues to claim that the Iraq war is helping—not harming the fight against terrorism—and that anybody who criticizes the president’s policies is soft on terror. I consider myself dovish with regard to dealing with Muslims, but I am by no means soft on terror. We cannot permit Muslim extremists to dictate anything to the world-we must fight them to the death for freedom and democracy and law and order. But invading their lands, killing both their leaders and their civilians and imposing “democracy”—or anything else on them is not going to resolve the ongoing conflict. Continue reading ‘east 35th street newsletter by craig bayer’
Probably would have made it anyway
But you never know
If R. hadn’t given my sister a break
She might have been discouraged for life
It happens to people Continue reading ‘unemployed - a poem by craig bayer’
10
Aug
From the Hand of God to You: Everything You Thought You Knew But Did Not by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
What happens to this buried, unexpressed grief? In many cases it turns to anger, and ultimately to rage. Some of the angriest kids that are encountered in clinical practice are children whose grief was buried long ago in the inner recesses of their psyche. When the losses are compounded and buried so deep that the child can no longer acknowledge the sorrow, the result can be dehumanization of the losses. At this point the child can evolve into what is considered the ultimate menace or threat to society because the child not only loses his or her capacity to feel anything for his or her own losses, but can no longer feel for the pain of others. The child then becomes capable of committing a violent assault or even a homicide without any feeling of remorse whatsoever. - David Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP
Continue reading ‘From the Hand of God to You: Everything You Thought You Knew But Did Not by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’
It is officially Midsummer, which means that I am becoming officially depressed. Or perhaps I will. I can’t say yet. It’s something I am fighting as I learn that summer does not have to be the “end” of something but that rather, it can be a beginning. Continue reading ‘psyche | a midsummer night’s restlessness’
Michael has a stand of high chairs with foot-rests all built upon a sturdy oak wooden frame with arm-rests. He is a shoe-shine guy. He is standing under the shelter of the overhang of Grand Central Station on 42nd and Lex. where in front of his shoe-shine booth. This makes sense for it provides shelter for anyone who wants to get their shoes shined even while it’s raining out, so the weather has no affect on Michael’s business. Continue reading ’shine bright at Grand Central - by sadi ranson-polizzotti’
It’s hot. Very hot. Too hot to be walking the thirty or so blocks to SONY BMG where I have a meeting, and then the twenty or so blocks back and on another avenue where I am to meet a friend. It is the ultimate New York City summer day and I feel like I am about to pass out either from a general headiness from the many good things at present (professional, personal), the fact that I am fully in love and landed on that square without even trying or wanting, that I am giddy already and with reason, or perhaps it is just the oh-so-humid day, the sun beating down (beating down), and that no matter how I may try I am unable to stay hydrated enough. There simply is not enough San Pellegrino in the world, and maybe tap water is fine, but frankly, I need some salt and Pellegrino is slightly salty and replaces all that I am losing. Continue reading ‘hot child in the city - sadi ranson-polizzotti’
I wrote this letter to a friend just this morning - an email - and I realized that I had just said everything I want to say for this editorial, this Word, because it is the truth of the moment. It is, at least, how I feel. So I send it to you in it’s entirety, with all of the boring details and the other details that I think are perhaps, worth sharing. Continue reading ‘lettre pour un ami by sadi ranson-polizzotti’
I was just listening to the song “Cars n’ Girls” by a group called Prefab Sprout (if you don’t know them, they are worth looking up and are an Irish band and well worth the time). The song is their response to Bruce Springsteen and before I can say anything, that is, if it remains that I have anything to say, let me quote from some of the song for you here and remember, the song is intended for Bruce Springsteen, whom I also happen to like, but Paddy-boy’s point is well-taken here (*note that Paddy is the lead-singer for the group);
Continue reading ’some things hurt more, much more than cars n’ girls by sadi ranson’
23
Apr
bitch
Stranger than fiction, yet how much like it one’s life can be. A mirror image of a novel you once read (for in almost all novels, as any novelist will tell you, there is a seed of truth that sets the thing in motion). Think of those timeless great classics – classics precisely because they are timeless because the truth (the Truth in the Platonic sense) is a truth we all know sometimes too well. Continue reading ‘bitch’
04
Apr
view from the archive
It’s hard to capture the moment of any given moment in a single snapshot, and yet this shot, to me, captures everything about my most recent foray to NYC. It was subtle, full of life, soft, scented, productive, proud, energetic yet mild, and always but always with friends both old and new and discovering new things about myself and about them as well. One can hardly say that this was by any means a ‘wasted’ trip; besides which, no trip is wasted unless you make it so. Continue reading ‘view from the archive’
How we wait for it… have waited. Some clever producer has tapped into our desire to hear the public’s desire for the absolute, unbridled truth with a capital T. Not some watered-down friendly version that may not hurt us, but all of the shitty little things that people do to each other and think (for none of us is completely immune, though some lead a double life more than others), The Moment of Truth, a new television program, meets the supply and demand theory. There is a voyeuristic demand to peer into the lives’ of others (while not wishing them to know about our own) and most of all, to judge. Continue reading ‘the moment of truth | money, honey…’
It is a lonely feeling to lose anyone - lovers, friends, family and in any way, however you lose someone is a death. To lose a mentor tho, how does one begin to express what this feels like?Were it not for Steven T. Florio I would not be in book publishing or publishing in any way. I always knew I would be a writer, but I never for a minute believed I could succeed as a publisher, as an editor, editorial director, acquisitions editor, etc - the myriad jobs I have held so far in my career - and I never thought that I would see to publish my work with some fair measure of success that could please Steven, for it was Steven who first got me interested, or rather, it was Steven who noticed my interest. Continue reading ‘losing Steven | on the loss of a mentor’
Grief is one of those emotions that one has an odd love affair with. Grief is painful, of course, but it can also do wonders for a person. A few years ago I went through a very rough break-up from a very long term relationship. I was young and had never gone through something of that caliber before. It stung in ways that I could never imagine. I cried until I was physically unable to cry anymore and instead of sleeping at night, I wrote. I wrote until my fingers ached and I couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember much from that time period in my life except that I wrote some of the best writing I will probably ever write. It was real and it was raw and it was full of emotion. Maybe it wasn’t the best writing to other people, but to me, it was the only way for me to cope with my loss and when I would re-read it later, in daylight, unable to remember writing as if under the influence, I couldn’t believe what I was writing. “I wrote this?” I would ask myself. I did and I liked it. I could never write anything during the day, that was the odd part of it. The only time I could let my fingers go and just write was at night. There aren’t a lot of things more peaceful or more beautiful than night in the desert. Most people go to the desert to get better, to find their mind – I went and lost mine. That break-up was only the prelude to a long list of grief that would follow in the next two years. Continue reading ‘Grief at 3AM by Jennifer Best’
By Adam Engel
2/26/08
Poor Bannanabelle. She wants so badly to save the environment – painlessly. But her best friends, the more politically savvy Kranti and Bunnista, the one-eyed lapin fugitive from a vivisection lab, keep shooting down her politically correct ideas. No, recycling and changing light bulbs won’t be enough, not like “that movie” suggested (whose producer won a Nobel Prize perhaps?). Solar energy requires copper mining, the burning of fossil fuel energy to create panels etc., and ethanol requires fossil fuels and poisonous fertilizer and pesticides for the growth and processing of corn. Planting a tree (for every thousand Big Lumber cuts down) won’t do it, nor will taking shorter showers, particularly since, according to Jensen and McMillan, 90 percent of all “fresh” water goes to industry, agriculture, and to water golf courses. Anyway, these are all “individual” solutions, as if only individuals, not a planet united against the corporate forces that caused these problems, could “solve” the immense complexity of the problem threatening all life on earth, Kranti points out. Certainly “new technology” – nano, nuclear, or otherwise – won’t “save us,” merely create, as all “new technologies” have, more filth, waste and misery for the benefit of whatever corporations control it. Continue reading ‘Necropolis Now: A Review of AS THE WORLD BURNS: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay in Denial, a graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan’
We are not so unlike the bedtime playing children of Fellini’s 8.5 and their bed-time game of Asa Nisi Masa – creating their Animas –Jungian symbols. Their thin legs playing, casting shadows on the wall as they play in bed, and like us, they are coy, bashful, too human, simple games, all innocence, still packed with meaning and non-meaning – at least, not any Freudian meaning. Jung knew what he was talking about. Continue reading ‘asa nisi masa | codified words by sadi ranson-polizzotti’
Near the end of his life, Henry Miller said that “it was woman, not man, who is the stronger sex, the superior one.” He has made it known in many of his books just how much he loved women. Criticized by feminists for his use of four letter words and sexually explicit writing, Miller has long been considered the bad boy, or enfant terrible, of American literature. Continue reading ‘Praise or Criticism: A Look Back at Henry Miller by Jennifer Best’
Now, I like Lori Gottlieb. She’s hot and she writes well and I like what she has to say most of the time, but telling women to settle? No, no, no! This is like telling women to give up their life dreams for a mundane, ordinary life of so-so sex and suburban painkillers. It’s like saying it’s not worth it. It’s asking for a failed marriage and prescription meds. Continue reading ‘The Case of the Desperate Housewives Syndrome: Settling for Mr. Half-Assed by Jennifer Best’
His body had been lost for one hundred and ninety-four years, since Napoleon’s Grande Armée occupied Moscow. And it’s still unknown when or where the monk Andrei Rublev was born. Until recently even the place the icon painter called the Orthodox Giotto was buried was unknown because the great fire during Napoleon’s brief occupation in 1812 destroyed the archives of the Andronikov Monastery where Rublev died in fifteenth century Moscow. Now diggings under the altar of the monastery’s cathedral have uncovered a tomb believed to be that of the first great name of Russian art. Continue reading ‘andrei rublev | the The Giotto of the East by Gaither Stewart’
The Suicide Girls make me laugh. I remember when they first showed up on the Interweb. Their mission was to create alternative soft-core porn with real women, “alterna-girls” they called it, and to stay away from mainstream ideals of what beauty is. Here’s their actual mission statement: Continue reading ’suicide girls | kill me now by jennifer best’
a word | this and my absence - by sadi ranson-polizzotti