by Richard Subber | Aug 16, 2020 | Human Nature, Tidbits
resist the temptation…
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) offers much to like to so many people. I think his poetry is under-appreciated…and try reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” when you’re home alone some evening, and it’s nasty outside, and you would really prefer to feel pleasant inside, except you’re reading the masterpiece…
I confess, I only like the first half of Poe’s snippet about folly, you see, melancholy ain’t my thing…”dipped in folly” suggests the exotic and self-indulgent excess of youth, mostly not fatal because it’s usually hauled along by optimism and rescued once in a while by love, for which we may be endlessly thankful…
If you’re not personally in the youth category any more, be prepared to supply the love.
Let’s just keep pushing melancholy into the next county somewhere…
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
well, it’s all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 29, 2020 | American history, History, Tidbits
“The Six Grandfathers”
It’s generally believed that Mt. Rushmore was an unremarkable pile of rock before the famous sculptures of presidents were done.
Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, did the work starting in 1927, and it was completed in 1941. The Borglums and their crews blasted more than 400,000 tons of stone off the face of the mountain in the Black Hills in Keystone, SD.
Here’s the unfamiliar back story: It wasn’t always called Mt. Rushmore (The granite bluff was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy New York lawyer, in 1885).
The Lakota Sioux name for the mountain had been “The Six Grandfathers” (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe).
It’s too bad the federal government didn’t authorize carving their likenesses into the face of the bluff.
N.B. The image is of Mt. Rushmore in 1905.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…sensual drama, it’s eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Nov 20, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
The language is Dickens, the humanity is Melville…
“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”
A short story by Herman Melville (1819-1891)
First published 1853 in Putnam’s Magazine, and later in Melville’s The Piazza Tales in 1856
If you can read “Bartleby” without suspecting, nay, without more or less believing that it was written by Dickens, you can take pride in your mental discipline whilst reading. I wanted to read it again, and I confess that I briefly searched for “Bartleby” in my rumpled collection of Dickens, which of course does not include The Piazza Tales.
None of Melville’s notorious South Sea elements here. This is straightforward, 19th century prose set in 19th century Wall Street with shabby, luridly eccentric antebellum characters including the narrator and his bedeviled scrivener (copyist), Bartleby.
The circumstances of this desiccated short story are curious, even eccentric, incredulous. The withered and aloof Bartleby is presented, examined,and disdained, until his very dispirited isolation makes him the object of the narrator’s genuine but increasingly troubled caretaking.
Bartleby’s enervating and apparently desperate ennui keeps him always a step removed from the narrator’s efforts to create a little humanity in his life.
The scrivener is lonely beyond understanding. He bears almost in silence the emotional poverty that ultimately kills him.
The reader understands that Bartleby longed, in vain, to be able to repel the Reaper with his simple and inscrutable refrain: “I would prefer not to.”
Despite all temptation, I will prefer not to re-read Melville’s tale on a dreary afternoon.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Book review: To Serve Them All My Days
by R. F. Delderfield
A beloved teacher,
of course you know this story…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 30, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Tidbits
Think about your own well-being…
Here’s one for your reading list
Tribe: On Homecoming
and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
In his Introduction, Junger says:
“Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word ‘tribe’ is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with…
Tribe is about why [treating someone like a member of your tribe] is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.”
It doesn’t take him too long to get right to the point, quoting from a 2012 journal article:
“The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment…that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
Here’s the thing: if you read that last sentence without saying some of the words right out loud, maybe twice, with feeling and with some awareness of despair, well, maybe you should grab the CliffsNotes version and save yourself some time.
Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2016, xvi-xvii, 23.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
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Book review: Lord of the Flies
It was never more relevant…
by William Golding
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 26, 2019 | Tidbits
it’s just a movie, but…
Movie review:
Same Time, Next Year
starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn
Universal Studios, 1978
Love is grand, of course.
Well, almost all the time.
“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” was the way Stephen Stills wrote the song in 1970.
This is an unmysterious film. George (Alda) and Doris (Burstyn) are attractive, clean-cut, smart, sentimental, successful grown-ups who love their spouses and their kids. While each is traveling alone, they meet accidentally, they unintentionally experience a one-night stand, and they decide to get together once a year for idyllic adultery, for the next 26 years.
Hey, it can happen, right?
The script includes some adult situations (like Doris having a baby in their room at the inn) and a couple almost self-conscious blippable dalliances with the F-bomb—all quite thrilling on-screen non-PC moments in 1978.
Same Time, Next Year is a see-through movie. Mostly, the script is predictable and heartwarming. The set is minimalist—almost all of the action occurs in the room at the inn. The gritty plot highlights are all too imaginable.
I like Same Time, Next Year, but I say that with reservation. I’m not a big fan of adultery, no matter how all-American it seems when George and Doris do it.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
click here
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Book review: Shawshank Redemption
A world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
click here
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many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 1, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
a miss on tactics,
a miss on strategy…
Book review:
Moral Tribes:
Emotion, Reason,
and the Gap
Between Us and Them
by Joshua Greene
New York, Penguin Press, 2013
422 pages
“This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up.” Greene’s sincere aim is a bit too breezy for me.
Reluctantly, I admit I don’t have time to read a book like Moral Tribes right now. I feel like I’m too busy sticking fingers into the terrifying political dike that is threatening to collapse in America, indeed, in the world.
I’m interested in learning more about Greene’s approach in Moral Tribes: “understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems that our brains were designed to solve and the distinctively modern problems we face today.”
I don’t have enough time or energy to indulge Greene’s apparently sincere efforts to develop “a practical philosophy that can help us solve our biggest problems.”
America’s problems—Americans’ problems—are all too clear and at least one part of the fix is all too clear: there are lots of folks who can live with and live for the hatred they feel, and they’re voting; there are lots of folks who are afraid of some of the kinds of people who are getting elected and exercising political power to the detriment of most Americans, and too many of these fearful folks aren’t voting.
I think a dominating element of a practical philosophy for America right now is “Get out the vote!”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
A poem about the right thing
…and the lesser incarnation…
“Vanity”
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many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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