At the end of February 1988, a Massachusetts man, a fisherman — who would not be identified — came upon a copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems” in an antiques barn in New Hampshire.
The good gardener’s relationship with the tomato (as with every fruit and vegetable) is an act of health: food-health, mental-health, physical health: gardening rearranges the emotions, it’s an epistemological revolution; the good gardener is a seer.
Violent language is the language of abstraction; it plagues those who refuse to examine their beliefs and thus never get to develop the words, vocabulary, idiom, to speak in sense-tences. The worst among them mouth a fascist babble.
In the old westerns, they used to shout: The cavalry’s coming! The cavalry’s coming! But the cavalry’s already here: in all those faces sweating behind a plastic shield to save the life of a soul who refused to wear a mask; in the kid who delivers pizza to the door; and in the guy at the Customer Service desk who still treats you like a person.
A few minutes into Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” even the casual viewer comes to see that the kids the director portrays — in his hometown of Rimini, Italy in the 1930s when he was a teen — were s
People of a certain age will recall with fondness that, when the extended family gathered on Halloween night for food, conversation, and games, some of the kids got carried away with laughter.