Has This Happened To You? If you go to art museums and galleries you will probably recognize this. You leave the Met, say, and step back out into the world of Fifth Avenue and everything is changed. This happened to me most memorably leaving the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. His urban landscape was suddenly there, as if Gansevoort…
A neighbor recommended an Off-Broadway play: Douglas Lackey’s Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler. We saw it last Saturday. In one memorable scene, concentration camp prisoners are ordered to sing the Horst Wessel Nazi anthem”Die Fahne hoch,” ( “Raise the Flag”), in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Instead, Litten leads them in the defiant German folk song “Die Gedanken sind…
Encouraged by Elizabeth at The Skeptic’s Kaddish and #W3199 to engage in a little self-love, I wasted no time in penning a few brief and modest lines of self-praise. ~~~~~ It is a sonnet. But truly, it was hard to keep it so short. An epic saga would be more fitting, as there is just so very much for which…
Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth” is a poem for the weary. Not for the triumphant, nor for the newly inspired, but for those who have begun to fear that their effort may be pointless. Clough does not begin with triumph. He begins with correction: Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are…
Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935) delivers a compact, satisfying Hercule Poirot mystery with a mid-flight murder in an airliner en route from Paris to Croydon. With no passing tramp to blame and eleven passengers and crew sealed aloft, the crime unfolds in a true closed circle – the sort of setup that promises ingenuity, and the exercise of…
An iambic perambulation to secure essential supplies in adverse conditions spurred by Pounding the Pentameter and based on true facts! (See weather screenshots below.) A Winter Expedition Upon a bitter weekend’s iron freeze, We ventured forth where Broadway sidewalks run. The need for apples, yoghurt, toothpaste, cheese Compelled our steps beneath a leaden sun. The wind, a blade, sliced keenly…
When Herman Melville began writing poetry, even his wife treated it as faintly embarrassing: “Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.” – Elizabeth Melville in a letter to her mother in1859 regarding her husband’s shift from fiction to poetry. That mixture of shame and dismissal has a name:…
The Inventory of After The Britannica sits on the shelf, volume S gone, a gap where the history of salt once lived. The silent engine of the fridge buzzing in the kitchen at 4 a.m., a single spoon in the sink: a monument to a meal unshared. You look for a sign and get instead the clogged sink and the…
Politicians seem to have shrunk. My brother and I were chuntering about it recently: how the figures we grew up with appeared more substantial, some even approaching the once-serious idea of statesmanship – a word that now feels faintly antique. Of course, the world was different. Times change, and so do our perceptions. Still, one tangible difference was that many…
Read the guidelines for W3 #192 at the Skeptic’s Kaddish METAPHYSICAL POEM by Frank O’Hara When do you want to go I’m not sure I want to go there where do you want to go any place I think I’d fall apart any place else well I’ll go if you really want to I don’t particularly care but you’ll fall…
In 1903, when Josephine Herbst was six years old, her mother took her four daughters on a reduced-fare train ride to Portland, Oregon. We lived in Sioux City, Iowa, and we might have been dropped accidentally by some great auk on a transcontinental flight, so unreasonable it seemed that we were stranded in the middle of a country that offered…
This was the challenge of the W3 Prompt #191 today: Write a poem of 10 lines or fewer that places someone—or something—in a delightfully improbable location. Think sharks in a bathtub, a dragon in a bar, or any unexpected presence where it clearly doesn’t belong. Surprise us. Amuse us. Happy writing! You can read all about it here: https://skepticskaddish.com/2025/12/24/w3-prompt-191-weave-written-weekly/ My first thought went to putting…
Clifford Witting’s Measure for Murder (1941) belongs to that strand of Golden Age crime fiction whose pleasures lie as much in social observation as in puzzle-solving. One of the enduring appeals of the genre is the glimpse it can provide into an England now almost unrecognisable, yet still just within living memory. Here that includes the novelty of car ownership,…
The Sordid Boon Relentless doom-scroll gently civilizes Our minds, once prone to thought and other crimes. Authentic selves come in standard sizes – Pre-vetted truths, convenient for our times. Lived experience shall guide us like the Star, On this, good citizens, there’s no debate. We now identify: my pronouns are – And silence stamps the form: Approved. The State. Fluid,…
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille This is a very readable book, and what follows isn’t so much a review as a reflection prompted by it. The sordid shocking story it tells – of the Sullivanian therapy cult that operated in Manhattan from the 1950s until its collapse in 1991 –…