Cemetery Math [Free Verse]

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i walk through the graveyard,
   subtracting birth from death dates
      to determine age at death.

there’s a correlation between 
   speed of calculation &
      the degree of tragedy.

the faster i can determine an age,
   the more disconcerting the death:
      like the girl — 1990 to 2008.

the 89 year old man who survived WWII
   service in the Burmese jungle
      doesn’t raise as many questions.

Shape Shift [Haiku]

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in waning sunlight,
 the shapes of shadows shift
  as boats drift.

Lake Waves [Haiku]

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lake waves break ashore
 unpredictably, catching
  hapless strollers.

DAILY PHOTO: Chicago by Night

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PROMPT: Possessions

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Daily writing prompt
What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
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Probably go to the cemetery to read gravestones. I have a reading addiction that would be itching with no books or e-reader. Of course, I would soon be arrested for sitting on graves in the nude. After being booked for public indecency, they would give me food and lodging… problem solved.

BOOKS: Wonderful Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

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Wonderful, Wonderful TimesWonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

If I said this book was A Clockwork Orange meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream it would be in some ways deceptive but in other ways, accurate. The book has none of the otherworldliness of those other stories and, instead, is set in a realistic 1950’s Vienna. Furthermore, those comparisons might confuse readers into not realizing this book is unambiguously a tragedy.

The book is set around four kids (Rainer, Anna, Hans, and Sophie) who like to beat up and rob adults, usually using a kind of catfishing scheme where they trick a middle-aged man into thinking he is about to have a getting lucky with Lolita moment before the other three gang up on the man in a moment of shock and awe. Here lies the “Clockwork Orange” comparison: youths enamored of violence as a means to combat the boredom and meaninglessness of their lives — possibly while passing on the abuse they receive in their own lives.

The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” part comes in with the book’s love geometry. Like that Shakespearean play, there are two boys and two girls and both boys are in love with the same girl (Sophie,) leaving the other girl (Anna) in a sad unrequited territory.

The book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and not only because it deals heavily in sex and violence. There are a couple factors that make the book feel strange. First of all, it is written in present tense. Secondly, it spends a lot of time in the minds of the characters and relatively little time with the action. Thirdly, the pacing of the conclusion and resolution of the book is abrupt and might feel forced — like the author was 245 pages in when the publisher told her that she had 250 pages, maximum, and that she’d better be wrapping it up. I didn’t find any of these factors to be problematic, but I can see how they would rub some readers the wrong way.

If the premise intrigues, you should definitely read this book – particularly if the previous paragraph’s warning didn’t turn you off.

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DAILY PHOTO: Scenes from Kandy

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PROMPT: Changed Mind

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?
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Oh so many things. My epistemological stance is that one should be ready to drop any belief like a hot rock in the face of better information or better means to understanding.

One of the most fundamental changes is that I used to take for granted that there was a god. Now I’m agnostic about whether there is one, and am virtually certain that – in the unlikely event there is a god – it (she? they? he?) bears no resemblance to any of the tribally derived deities of the various world religions.

I used to think introversion was something that could be, and should be, overcome. Now, I believe the healthy approach is in accepting it and managing one’s life so that it’s not a problem. Truth be told, in my youth, I had a lot of grandiose ideas about what was possible with regards to the mind, ideas which I have jettisoned in favor of one’s that better match the empirical evidence.

BOOKS: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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The Picture of Dorian GrayThe Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This is a book about what happens when you hollow out a person of all the complexity of the human condition and idealize them. At the beginning of the story, Dorian Gray is young, attractive, and preternaturally likable in a naïvely innocent kind of way. Almost to the novel’s end, through the magic of a wish made upon a portrait, Gray is still young and beautiful, though that naive innocence cracks under the strain of the impossible bifurcation of man and his soul. The artist, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry (a man who will become a mutual friend of Gray and Hallward) cannot see Gray as a fully formed human being, but rather see him as an emblem of youth and beauty. But this unnatural ideal cannot hold, and a string of tragic deaths will be left in its wake.

The book is full of clever witticisms, albeit often of a nihilistic nature. These are almost all spoken by Lord Henry, who is the Polonius of the story – but a hipper kind of Polonius than Hamlet‘s. That said, it’s telling that toward the end of the book Gray does some of this epigrammatic philosophizing. (e.g. Such as when Gray tells Hallward, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him…”) One might dismiss this as Gray parroting Lord Henry, but I think that life has defrocked him of his naïveté, and he begins to think in ways that were impossible in his [true] youth.

This is a must-read. It’s interesting, thought-provoking, and well worth the time.

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Firewalker Limerick

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There once was a wild-eyed firewalker
 whose show turned out to be a shocker.
   His feet were unharmed,
   but clothes not as charmed.
  they burst aflame & he became a firesquawker.