Category: essay
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While Reading EA Abbott’s “Book on Solipsism”
I was born at a point in history when there was little left to say about the rain. The geometrical roots of my condition are detailed in that recombinant text that got me through so many awful nights, although in at least a few chapters the very idea of night is occluded by the blear…
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Anselm Kiefer’s “Oh Stalks, Your Stalks, Oh Stalks of the Night”
From the editors at The Showbear Family Circus: Since submitting this essay, writer Michelle Mitchell-Foust has passed away. We extend our deepest condolences to Michelle’s loved ones and dedicate our current issue to her memory. A brief excerpt from her obituary appears below. “Michelle was a life-long learner.” Musgrove Mortuaries & Cemeteries Philosopher Hélène Cixous…
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Homelessness in Santa Cruz, California and the Quest for Community
There is an entire school of thought dedicated to understanding the relationship between desire and disgust. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposes that desire has little to do with the material; instead, desire is created under the influence of social structures and strictures, an imagined version of reality.[1] Conversely, French philosopher Julia Kristeva studies disgust through…
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Pursuits of Wholeness
Ἔρως and Story in the Aristophanic Myth In his encomium on love in the Symposium, Plato’s Aristophanes proposes that, “for the whole’s desire and pursuit, certainly, ἔρως is the name” (193A).[1] The mythic speech containing this conclusion portrays ἔρως as the experience of and remedy for mortal incompleteness. Love is an impetus towards the original…
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Apple of Sodom
She had the typical Eastern European glower: a look of someone, as my wife often says, who ate something, which despised her in return. Or perhaps she didn’t, but the windmill of guilt churned inside her belly and spat up the same physiognomy I’ve seen elsewhere around Silesia—someone solving a differential equation, waiting in traffic,…
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High Standards
I want the best of life and I’ll not settle for less. I want to sleep on a bed that doesn’t give me back pain, wake up to a fridge with bacon in it. I’d like milk in my coffee. That will help me get to work, where what I’d most like is to toil…
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Ensouled Languages
The maternity nurses in the tiny German hill-town were exasperated. ‘The black one’s bawling again,’ my mother heard them whisper among themselves. I was a talkative child and before I could talk I cried. I cried till neighbors peeked in enquiring what the pandemonium was all about. My first five years, the formative years, were…
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Cookie Monster
One of my first teaching assignments was in a middle school on the east side of Milwaukee, a place known to its natives as a bastion of quaint and kitschy restaurants and shops. To this day, some of my favorite places to visit and imbibe sundry types of brewed drinks are in that part of…
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Boumediene v. Bush: Unanswered Issues and Current Moral Codification
In Boumediene v. Bush, the U.S Supreme Court was faced with a post-colonial issue regarding overseas authority and correlating precedents. Broadly, the question arose—for a third time since Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)—whether constitutional rights extend to non-sovereign territories under U.S control. More specifically, the case encompassed a question of whether…
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Modern Rhetorical Metacriticism
There are several methodologies available for use in the field of modern rhetorical criticism. Using each form and comparing their insights and conclusions against each other will garner an analysis on which is more applicable to the selected artifact chosen for study. This is a criticism on the utility and necessity of the critical styles…
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McCluhan and the Message of Mediums
When I was ten, they took me to my first art museum. By “they” I don’t mean the inevitable ethereal “they” like “they say cell phones cause cancer now.” I mean my teachers spent one of the many field trips sprinkled throughout my elementary school career driving us all to an art museum thirty minutes…
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Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King
16 April 1963 My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would…