Tag: sunday whatever

All Stories, sunday whatever

Sunday Whatever -Kris – An Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

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Kris by Dale Williams Barrigar

In 2006 and 2009, at the ages of 70 and 73, Kris Kristofferson released two classic American folk albums that remain virtually invisible to the population at large, the mainstream media, and the general American culture, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who’s THERE but largely un-talked of, or Herman Melville, who half-invisibly spent the last decades of his life haunting the New York streets as a striking, but “unknown,” individual who looked half like a bearded mystic in a rumpled suit, half wandering minstrel just in from the sea. How strange it is to think that he was also probably passing bearded, informally dressed Walt Whitman on the street many times during those days, as writer Harold Bloom has pointed out. One wonders if they nodded to each other.

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Sunday Whatever – Seven Dogs or A Dog is My Walden – An essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

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                             For Extremely Intelligent Children at Any Age

“Everything is poetic that confesses.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“Delia, oh Delia / I can’t believe / you wanted all them
 rounders / never had time for me. / All the friends
                              I ever had / are gone.” – Dylan, “Delia,” World Gone Wrong                            

“Let us go then, you and I…” – T.S. Eliot

An old Zen saying rightly opines, “Do not seek comfort from others. Light the lantern within yourself.”

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Sunday Whatever: The Poisonous Fog of War by Michael Bloor

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It’s been said that Britain is a country overburdened by history. I’m not very sure what ‘overburdened’ means in that context. But my guess is that, for my generation born seventy-odd years ago, it refers to the enduring damage wreaked by The First World War.

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Sunday Whatever:  Eliot Behind the Mask – An Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

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 “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” – The First Letter of John

T.S. Eliot was not who we think of him as.

Far from dying his hair green, instead he sometimes wore green face powder (very faintly) to dinner parties in order to shock, discomfit, and confound his cultured, highfalutin, aristocratic hosts and their hoity-toity guests.

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Sunday Whatever: Eleonora and Poe by Dale Williams Barrigar

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“ERNEST. From the soul?

GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest          criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

“Under the preservation of a specific form, my soul is safe.”
Raymond Llull

Edgar Allan Poe was the kind of individual who could fall in love with a woman after seeing her for a mere few moments, or less, on the street. Dante had this feeling when he first saw Beatrice, and her later early demise compelled him to take twelve years out to compose the greatest single literary work of the Western World, a poem that still helps to define what the afterlife is (in our imaginations) eight centuries after he finished it. (And he died almost immediately after finishing it.) 

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Sunday Whatever: Fame; or The Queen of Crucifixion by Dale Williams Barrigar

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Prologue

Hello. The target audience for this humanly-written, essayistic mind, heart and soul exploration is: poets; creative writers; writers; artists and “creatives” of all stripes; spiritual people; people interested in history, and the future; anyone interested in any or all of the above.

If you can’t jive with that, this writing isn’t for you.

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Sunday Whatever – “M” T-shirts No Longer Fit Me to a T by Elliot Wilner

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Two of the drawers in my bedroom dresser are packed full with colorful T-shirts,  about fifty T-shirts in total, and I cherish them all.  Each shirt tells a story: the date and the distance of a particular road race – an 8k, a 10k or a 10 miler – that I had once run, together with the names and logos of the race sponsors.  Of the fifty shirts, about forty have found eternal repose in my dresser drawers, never removed from the drawer, never worn.  Those are the ones labeled with a “M.”  The other ten, those labeled with an “L,” I do wear on occasion.     

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Sunday Whatever – The Shoes Made of Soil by Georgia Xanthopoulou

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This was one of those pieces that we knew we should publish but it crossed a couple of genres. Fiction, essay and translation. So where better than a special Sunday spot. Ladies and Gents – we give you :-

The Shoes Made of Soil by Georgia Xanthopoulou

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Sunday Whatever – House Rent Boogie – An essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

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Like all great story-telling, John Lee Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie” can make you feel much better about yourself, if you’re willing to meet Hooker half way. In a country filled more and more with what Noam Chomsky calls the “precariat,” or economically disadvantaged folks who live paycheck to paycheck, dwelling to dwelling, meal to meal, buzz to buzz, never knowing, as Henry Miller put it, when the chair will be yanked out from under their rear ends, and they will be tossed out into the street again, Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie,” also known as “House Rent Blues,” can offer solace and encouragement to many of us. This kind of story-telling shows what story-telling is really for, which is helping the human species to make its way in this world while we struggle to survive our allotment of days here on the rapidly warming earth.

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Sunday Whatever: Roughing It by Dale Williams Barrigar

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Roughing It Dale Williams Barrigar

From the ages of twelve until sixteen, I was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River.

I first got truly intoxicated via alcohol on the banks of the river. (Alcohol would later become a major passion, until I had to give it up.)

I first tasted cigarettes on the banks of the river. (Same.)

I first tasted the sacred ganja (weed), too, on the banks of the Mississippi River. (Also a major passion, not given up so far as of this writing, except in the smoking form; medical edibles are stronger and more long-lasting anyway…)

I first held the hand of a girl on the banks of the river.

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