Astounded to hear on You Tube the anxious tightness of R’s reading of his own poem. To me it’s a thing of levity and passion and joy. R reads it like a death sentence.

How fortunate our language and literature ! At the fountainhead of the English novel (pace Samuel R. and Daniel D.) stands one who craftily extols integrity above artifice and status.

Reading poet, Latin translator and former civil servant Mike Juster’s Sleaze and Slander. Here’s an unconditional skewering: “On the Man Who Found Treasure When He Meant to Hang Himself” (from the Latin of Ausonius  310-395AD). A man who had knotted a noose saw gold and cut himself loose. The owner discovered the knot and hoisted himself on […]

Coming from a Lithuanian background, Amazon reviewer Donna Cekauskas brings to Tietam Cane a unique perspective that is painfully familiar with the encroachment of one culture on another, an event which in the USA unfolded so subtly  over the century following the Civil War. In Ms. Cekauskas’ homeland the battle is still being fought against […]

In honor of the Bard’s last view of the light four hundred years ago (April 23, 1616) this song from The Twelfth Night: When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.

A phrase book for Beginning Catfish. Rosetta Stone is green with envy. It’s for my upcoming novel: Mr. Hooks, A Catfish Redemption. Be sure to click on the image to pick up the subtle undertones of this difficult, but rewarding language.

April, poetry month. In case you think poetry can’t rock boats… The Stalin Epigram Osip Mandelstam, 1891 – 1938 Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his […]