Category: censored opinions
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Nine-Square Xylophone
Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you. — Shannon Love It was 5:30pm on the District Line at South Kensington station in London and thousands of tired bodies loaded themselves onto the Underground. Like tightly packed mackerel in a tin can, we could not wedge another body onto…
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Nature’s Lasting Lesson
The Intuition of Interconnection Nature replicates itself. Branching trees mirror tributaries in river networks, which reflect veering veins beneath our skin or forked lightning bolts under humid heat. The golden ratio measures the symmetry of pinecones, seashells, the human face, and hurricanes with the atmospheric force of circular replication. Our eyes, our most vulnerable portals,…
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John F. Kennedy’s Vision Revisited
Fifty-seven years ago, as a college freshmen, I was standing with friends outside my history class when we heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Little did I suspect how that historical event would dramatically change my life. A few years later I would spend a year being shot at in Vietnam. I would discover…
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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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Estimate of Mass of the Precursor Star to our Sun that went Supernova
Abstract It is well established that a precursor star to our sun went supernova producing the heavier elements we find in our solar system. In a series of short papers an update as to when this may have happened has resulted in an estimate of 5.3 Gyr ago. One of the techniques used to estimate…
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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…