Poetry

 Original

 


Translations 





Popular posts from this blog

Suck a Donkey: the libel of Don Quixote

Image
Mladen Dolar, one of the Slovenian philosophers I enjoy reading from time to time, published a short work called  Rumors  (2025), navigating from the destructive nature of libel to the liberating function of gossip. Among the authors sampled to explicate his theory are Shakespeare and Cervantes, who some say were the same person(s). Dolar, however, never touches on this rumor, nor the one about William Shakespeare being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The latter is in fact no longer a full-fledged rumor, and has emerged into the realm of truth through the work of the late Alexander Waugh and the De Vere Society, United Kingdom, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, United States. I recently used their work to help riddle the gist of David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), a 1000+ page cryptology game inspired by Charlton Ogburn’s tome  The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality  (1984). Curious if Wallace picked up on the “Wil...
Read more

Infinite (De)coding, or “His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.”

Image
  At a high school reunion in what I will call the Year of the iPhone 16, a classmate recommended I read David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), which I promptly dismissed as pretentious. I majored in literature and have read some whopper works of fiction, including James Joyce’s  Ulysses  and Leo Tolstoy’s  War and Peace , but  Infinite Jest  is just the type of book I tend to eschew for its popularity among men who showboat really long books in the same way they measure the length of their Johnsons (a metaphor the character Rod “the God” Tine, Sr. would appreciate). Perhaps Wallace was hip to that metaphor, as well, and meant to have much of the book go over the unsuspecting knob’s head, cony-catching some numbskulls with his southpaws, Hal et al (See footnote 268 and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQThnv8c2uI ). I myself would not have understood the extent of his project, namely the conundrum of anonymity (disguised with Alcoholi...
Read more

Gone like a shooting star

Image
Got up this morning, Sunday, Nov. 18 at 3:45 because I heard something about a meteor shower around 4 due to passing comet debris. I looked out the window to see if the sky was clear but couldn’t really tell with orange halogens shining up and down the street. So I put on my shoes and jacket. As soon as I walked out the door I saw my first shooting star. Not bad, I thought. It was a beautiful night. The early morning air was warm, a memory of the 70-degree temperatures of yesterday. To see as much of the heavens as possible, I laid on the lawn where usually there is a half foot of snow by now. Ducks quacked and geese honked on North Lake. Semi tires screamed on I-94. I started counting. Two. Three. Waited. Four. Waited. Five six. Soon I was up to 25, then 50, 75 and 100. Wow, I thought, 100 shooting stars way surpasses the most I’ve seen in one sitting, and was tempted to call it quits with that perfect number. Besides I was starting to shiver. But they continued to ...
Read more