“Ideas are like rabbits.”

“Ideas are like rabbits.”

…and good deeds, too…

 

 

“Ideas are like rabbits.

You get a couple and learn how to handle them,

and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

 

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (1902-1968)

American author: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath

 

Pour another half glass of wine, and enjoy that Steinbeck quip again.
Pour another half glass of wine, and you start to think that he could have said

“Good deeds are like rabbits.”

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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

Dirty Dancing (1987) (movie review)

Oh baby, baby, baby…

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 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”

*   *   *   *   *   *

“…the duly goggled…”…George Santayana

“…the duly goggled…”…George Santayana

the sane and the duly goggled

 

 

Book review:

Character and Opinion in the United States

 

by Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás

[George Santayana (1863-1952)]

Spanish philosopher, poet, novelist

Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956 (first published 1920)

 

Santayana wrote this book in 1920 after he had left the United States for good. He had taught in the philosophy department at Harvard from 1889 to 1912. He returned to Europe, taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally settled in Italy for the remainder of his life.

Much of the book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to British audiences after leaving America. In the Preface to Character and Opinion he says “Only an American—and I am not one except by long association—can speak for the heart of America. I try to understand it, as a family friend may who has a different temperament.”

Santayana took his own sweet time to take a look at the people around him in the United States, and to make his own unhurried assessment of their characters and of their manifestations of human nature.

For example, he gave respectful recognition to “…the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks…”—not otherwise explicitly defined—who, notwithstanding their possibly dubious claim to respect, may nevertheless be the beneficiaries of “heavenly influences.” You can make your own determination about the prospective positive impact of such influences. I think Santayana’s point was that we do not fully know the prior byways or the future trajectories of another person’s life.

Moreover, Santayana distinguishes the cripples/hunchbacks and their (presumptively enlightened) presumptive betters—“…the thick-skinned, the sane and the duly goggled…”

These goggled elites are admonished to be wary of their limitations in discerning the realities and the frequency and the potency of “heavenly influences.”

I guess I have, perhaps smugly, collaborated with Santayana in a more than marginally self-satisfied effort to say something like:

“Give the other fellow a break.”

Think about it for another minute.

Here endeth the lesson for today.

 

Source:

Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 46.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

Boz indeed! Sketches by Boz

Charles Dickens delivers,

in a fastidiously literary kind of way…

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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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”

*   *   *   *   *   *

Feeling lucky? get ready for it

Feeling lucky? get ready for it

there’s no mystery…

 

 

Prepare yourself to get lucky.

That’s how you make luck happen.

 

You probably know that lots of people have already said this, in slightly different ways.

You probably know this is what you need to do.

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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

Does the public want public interest news?

Is it news to you?

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 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”

*   *   *   *   *   *

“…my final future…”…   “now then…” my poem

“…my final future…”…   “now then…” my poem

I realize new truths…

 

 

now then…

 

The unknowable future

   has been around for a long time,

it is,

it will be,

the mystery is what, not if.

 

I realize new truths.

I’m closer to my future

   than I used to be,

I’m closer to my final future.

I think more about tomorrow,

I think more about today.

 

Sweet futures can become sweet nows,

the nows I can know.

I can choose my next now,

I do not know tomorrow’s future,

I will live it in good time.

 

May 11, 2024

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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

“Tear it up,” says Kurt Vonnegut

“Write a six line poem, about anything…

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 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”

 

Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.

*   *   *   *   *   *

“We almost always know…”

“We almost always know…”

don’t pretend this isn’t true…

 

 

“We almost always know what the right thing is.”

 

from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016

p. 156

don’t try to forget this

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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: Saint Joan

by George Bernard Shaw

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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 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”

*   *   *   *   *   *

“faintest breaths…”…“another thing,” my poem

“faintest breaths…”…“another thing,” my poem

what’s it all about?

 

 

another thing

 

j’ever notice

that they never look up

to look at the phone?

 

head tilted down,

the obvious sign,

body still,

thumbs awhirl,

faintest breaths…

 

how often have you seen

  someone pumping a fist

    and shouting “yeah!”

      after scrolling down

        one more time?

 

Try talking to that guy

  in the waiting room

    who hasn’t looked up

      from his phone

        since he sat down…

 

think about being him…

it won’t take long.

 

May 9, 2024

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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.

 

1491 by Charles Mann (book review)

…lost American legacies

click here

My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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”

 

Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.

*   *   *   *   *   *

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