Just got a story I wrote in Budapest, “Gypsy Courtyard,'” published by The Furious Gazelle!

You can read it here.

(I do believe I looked something like this in my younger years…)

I just discovered The Fairy Tale Review, an annual literary journal dedicated to publishing new fairy tales. I’m so excited to know this exists! Ordered The Grey Issue and can’t wait to start reading!

http://fairytalereview.com/

“The Furies are really to be revered and not simply bought off; in fact, they cannot be bought off )not even by our tranquilizers and sleeping pills) but are to be placated only through being given their just and due respect.”

from Irrational Man by William Barrett

-He also suggests that in The Oresteia by Aeschylus the opposition between The Furies and Apollo represents the opposition between the old earth deities  and the new god, reason. Just ordered myself a nice hardcover copy for .$79 on Amazon… perhaps this play could be modernized to express our struggles with The Furies today, and our ill-advised attempt to buy them off with pharmaceuticals…

Apropos Heidegger:

Language not as independent words or sounds, but as our primordial attunement to one another, something we stand within.

From William Barrett’s Irrational Man

“And yet despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refrigerators American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. Its final “What for?” is not even asked, let alone answered.”

“To The Unknown God” by Friedrich Nietzsche

I must know thee, Unknown One

Thou who searchest out the depths of my soul

And blowest like a storm through my life

Thou art inconceivable and yet my kinsman!

I must know thee and even serve thee

“There is no such thing as complete unity in a person, and so no one is ever completely sincere or insincere.”

“In order to live at peace with ourselves, we almost always disguise our impotence and weakness as calculated actions and systems, and so we satisfy that part of us which is observing the other.”

Adolfe by Benjamin Contstant

Adolfe, by the way, is a fantastic but little known  French novel, one that seeks to plumb the depths of the human experience, and peal away the masks we inevitably wear in our dealings with one another. Even more importantly it strips away the deceptions with which we approach ourselves.

Our ultimate fate as human beings lies in posing the question of our own  meaning. As writers, artists, etc. this is the always uncharted terrain we must never shy away from.  But to do so we must go beyond the dogmatic safety of the Western sociopolitical world, beyond the comfort of our conventional good and evil, and striding past the petrified political dive down into living Avernus, naked, risking everything, first and foremost our own sanity.  Otherwise, there is no real risk, nothing of any real value will be accomplished, and the work of our generation will ultimately be forgotten, as it will have nothing but brittle, ephemeral concretism to offer the visceral uncertainty of the future.

Philosophy is only tolerable when it is wrapped up in madness. Then it can be called literature, drama…

“But no language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning…”

A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality