newcritics

In the year of our Lord eighteen-hundred and six
we set sail from the cold quay of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
for the Grand City Hall in New York
The scene is a smoke filled room, men - old to my 3 year old eyes- stand around a pool table, whiskeys in hand, [...]

I’ve long held the theory that the great deposits of metals we mine to build our cities are actually found in places where massive cities of metal once stood, and that millions of years had returned them to where we find them now.
Not that I really believe this, but I’ve always found it to be [...]

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. vonnegut.com has a placeholder image of an empty birdcage with an open gate. I’d always felt that Death was a running theme in the man’s work, from the time I first cracked Slaughterhouse 5 in a high school lit class, to now, this moment when I first learned of his death.
Vonnegut [...]

Molly Ivins is dead.
Molly Ivins, the acerbic-witted thorn in the side of every dirty political pimp, playa and ho is dead.
Molly Ivins, the conscience of Texas politics, who followed the man she called “Shrub” from Austin to Washington, never letting him fart in a broom closet without calling him on it, is dead.
Molly Ivins, [...]

It is often asked “why do they hate us?” or “why do they hate freedom?” when speaking of the gut level antipathy that many downtrodden foreigners have toward America. Countries where Levis and rock and roll are prized above most things are just as likely to harbor radical militant hatred of America and Americans. Pick [...]

Technology marches on, Moore’s law becomes MoreMoreMore’s Law, and drooling consumers fight it out on Christmas Eve for the last latest and greatest mind-numbing electronic socially isolating plastic and silicon unvention.
These devices become smaller/faster/cheaper feature-packed future junk, and I ask myself why do we need this stuff?
I think of the iPhone as the guy next [...]