Blog Stats
- 2,840,770 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Joshx45 on Feminism for Beginners
- Roger lynn mason on Blogging UFOs: What Do You Make of Professor Robert Jacobs’s Bizarre UFO Testimony?
- geoenergymath on On the Far Right, Ann Coulter and Mitt Romney Are Not Conservative Enough!
- John Mack on Would Friedrich Nietzsche have admired Ayn Rand?
- Can We Learn From History? – Critical News Autoblog on Howard Nemerov and Learning from History
- Mathilde on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Manly Man Joe on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Robert Stewart on David Berlinski defends God’s role in the Holocaust: “God did not protect his chosen people…[but] did…smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”
- David on Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Philosophers on Evolutionary Psychology - Assignment Ninjas on Feminism for Beginners
Top Posts
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Walt Whitman: "To be indeed a God!"
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein for Beginners
- Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: A German Jewish Girl Who Was Part of the Kindertransport (1939)
- Lord Byron's pro-war poem?
- Lee Smolin's Time Reborn: Physics, Evolution, Atheism, and Buddhism
- Charles Darwin's Thinking Path
-
Recent Posts
Recent Haiku Tweets
- @abrahampiper Yahweh as a frustrated deity, much to be pitied! Abraham Piper's insight here, if thought about as a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 6 months ago
- RT @tbonier: More than 80M votes cast and we're not done yet. Thoughts: - It's too late for an "October surprise" to have a significant imp… 11 months ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: 1. Want to thank @DanielNewman for using his HUGE platform for this work. I want to clarify what this is. In the voter… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Tell me again about how old and feeble Joe Biden is??? twitter.com/ProjectLincoln… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Remember when you had a chance to choose country over party and you chose party @SenatorCollins? Well, @ProjectLincol… 1 year ago
Tag Archives: creative writing
One Shall Be Taken
Two horses–look again– Winged, like cherubim– Watering at a marble trough, Ivy in riot about them. Reality? Silence, bones Saline, a coffin–not a trough– And a tale in the main that Had been uneven, rough, harsh. I’d have done it differently. This … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cemeteries, creative writing, death, literature, poem, poetry, rapture, writing
1 Comment
Embrace Chance?
In a collection of art essays by Roger Kimball titled Art’s Prospect (Ivan R. Dee 2003) is an essay on a Matisse exhibit in which Kimball writes the following (151): [Matisse] arrived [in Morocco in 1912] in the rainy season, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Alan Ginsberg, art, chance, contingency, creative writing, existentialism, Freud, literature, Matisse, Neal Cassady
Leave a comment
A Creation Story
__________ It seems to have started as an argument. Nothing became something, rapidly expanding to a whole laundry list of things. Separation and settlement followed. Over time things cooled. Mother got her planets, Father took to the stars. As in any divorce, vast … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged creation, creative writing, evolution, Genesis, life, literature, origins, poem
Leave a comment
Bringing Darwin Into Your Fiction: A Few Things Creative Writers Might Consider
A key element in Charles Darwin’s thought is that survival and the opportunity to reproduce attends the fittest and the sexiest. Think about this Darwinian insight in relation to your writing: what would a Darwinian reading of your story notice? … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged biology, creative writing, Darwin, evolution, fiction, literature, philosophy, psychology, science, writing
Leave a comment
Dance With Me (In The Interpretation Of Lines From Yeats)
When reading something, guessing about an author’s exact state of mind is sometimes tricky, but it’s still fun to play. Take for instance William Butler Yeats’s poem, “Among School Children.” The Yale literary critic Paul de Man once noted that … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, Buddhism, creative writing, critical thinking, interpretation, philosophy, poetry, reading, the self, Yeats
4 Comments
One of Ayn Rand’s Questions: What’s the Relationship of Art to Concepts?
Two novels-of-ideas by Ayn Rand (1905-1982)–The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)–and the individualist and pro-capitalist positions that she laid out over the course of her lifetime under a philosophical system she created and designated “objectivism,” have had an outsized … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, atlas shrugged, Ayn Rand, creative writing, literature, objectivism, philosophy, psychology, worldview
3 Comments
A Quote for Writers: Jodi Picoult on Writer’s Block
The author of Lone Wolf doesn’t believe in writer’s block: I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about it—when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, creative writing, life, literature, quote, writer's block, writing
Leave a comment
What the Lightning Said: My Definition of Art
Art, by my definition, is a report of what the lightning said. It’s bound up with the ontological mystery (the mystery of being itself); an artist’s attempt to represent to others an experience of that mystery (what it feels like … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, creative writing, definition, giorgione, God, lightning, mark twain, meaning, religion, stephen greenblatt, the ontological mystery, William Blake, writing
Leave a comment
Advice for Dying Fathers (Contra Dylan Thomas)
_____ Leaves cling, do not go gently, but go just The same. The signal is yellow; the alive Are always downcast before being cast down. Look! The green team winning all summer Is starting to lose badly, going bald in The stunning … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aging, autumn, creative writing, death, Dylan Thomas, English, fathers, life, literature, poems, poetry, Santi Tafarella
3 Comments
Why Read Literature or Watch Good Films? Martha Nussbaum on the Role of the Imagination in the Cultivation of Empathy
Here’s a great quote from Martha Nussbaum’s new book, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford 2010, xvii): That ‘terrified’ gay teenager needs, and deserves, equal respect, and a sphere of liberty equal to that enjoyed by … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, creative writing, democracy, education, ethics, film, literature, martha nussbaum, morality, poetry, teachers
4 Comments
Christopher Hitchens, Henry David Thoreau, and Peitho
Christopher Hitchens was recently interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, and offered an interesting tidbit on a rhetorical strategy that tends to work for him: [W]hen I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Christopher Hitchens, creative writing, Henry David Thoreau, peitho, persuasion, Politics, rhetoric, writing
2 Comments
Rod Serling is the Devil!
Not literally, of course. But it occurred to me this morning that Rod Serling’s appeal as a guide to his Twilight Zone episodes is this: he functions as a sublimated devil, the camara darting him into visual consciousness out of nowhere. Serling is a Virgil, but not … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged creative writing, fantasy, imagination, life, rod serling, Satan, science fiction, the devil, the twilight zone, vain imaginings, writing
Leave a comment
Entering the Twilight Zone via Solitude and Day Dreaming, and Maybe Meeting the Devil (or Rod Serling)
Last week, I wrote a meditative piece on the role that solitude plays in the life of the mind, and how I felt it to be akin to entering Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (see here). I suggested that if you expose … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apostle Paul, creative writing, creativity, imagination, rod serling, Satan, solitude, St. Paul, the devil, the twilight zone, thoreau, walden
3 Comments
“The Prophet”: a poem by Santi Tafarella
Beauty is the first ugliness in line, making those behind blind. The candle’s orange tongue, declaring for God, assures darkness is elsewhere. Your truth is a mask for an undisclosed motive.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, creative writing, isaiah, jeremiah, Jesus, literature, Mohammad, Nietzsche, philosophy, poems, poetry, writing
4 Comments
