Haze drifts over the grassy curves of the Long Meadow at Prospect Park. I used to write a lot about Long Island and Queens , but it s taken me a long time to write about Brooklyn. I ve been living here eight years now, in the neighborhood variously known as Prospect Read the rest The post Battlefield Ghosts in Prospect Park appeared first on Literary Kicks .
Sometimes a picture can help me understand what I feel. It s nice when this happens in an art museum. It s also nice when it happens after I take a break from a frustrating moment at work to send Gemini some wacky image prompt, and joyously find a masterpiece in response. Read the rest The post Philosophy Weekend: A Picture Of Our Ethical Crisis appeared first on Literary Kicks .
I always used to wonder what it would feel like to live through the sudden collapse of a peaceful and integrated society. We like to scare ourselves with this question when we read books or watch movies about military invasions or hostile occupations or war crimes: what if we ourselves Read the rest The post Models of Meaning For An Exploding World appeared first on Literary Kicks .
I was walking in Prospect Park, thinking heavy thoughts about the world, when my mind suddenly generated a new thought: I had a new all-time favorite author. And this favorite author was the great Irish/British novelist Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999. It s a funny thing to be hit with Read the rest The post Ringing the Bell: Iris Murdoch and the Ethics of Attention appeared first on Literary Kicks…
It is happening again. A distressed old man on a mysterious stage speaks these words slowly and painfully in the climactic episodes of David Lynch s brilliant Twin Peaks . Genocide is happening again in more than one region of planet earth today. We talk about Israel s violence in Palestine on the Read the rest The post Speechless About Gaza appeared first on Literary Kicks .
Dear reader: I wrote this for World BEYOND War , where I m director of technology. While this isn t about me, it feels like one of the most personal things I ve ever written, because I had to dig deep and work hard to try to explain my most elusive beliefs about Read the rest The post A Relational Model for World Peace appeared first on Literary Kicks .
I threw the I Ching for America the other day. This is a good spiritual practice when you come to a moment in your life when things are changing fast and you want to get a grip on what’s happening. My own version of this ancient Chinese tradition is quite Read the rest The post A Taste For Change appeared first on Literary Kicks .
Out demons out! I don t know why it s feels so cathartic to me every time I listen to the recording on the 1968 Fugs album Tenderness Junction of a historic event a year before, the exorcism and attempted levitation of the Pentagon in USA s capital city by a determined group Read the rest The post A Levitation With Ed Sanders (on the World Beyond War Podcast) appeared first on Literary Kicks .
A new episode of Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera just dropped! It s about Die Zauberflote by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, and this one was a long time coming. I ve rarely struggled so hard to produce a single podcast episode, or a single blog post. It was a struggle Read the rest The post About A Flute: An Enlightenment Opera appeared first on Literary Kicks .
I started publishing my memoir here on Litkicks 15 years ago. I wrote one new chapter a week for 53 weeks, covering the years 1993 to 2003 when I was a first-generation website developer participating in an amazing worldwide software revolution from inside the skyscrapers of Manhattan and my home Read the rest The post A Coder s Long Quest: My Washington DC Years appeared first on Literary Kicks .