The human thirst for
admiration is a thirst
both deep and fatal

Of course, admiration is Gatorade for the Ego, no?

The Buddha talked about eight worldly concerns:

· the hope for gain and the fear of loss;

· the hope for pleasure and the fear of pain;

· the…

Tone is an elusive fictional element, a little hard to pin down and keep still long enough to examine. But, thankfully, some writers and teachers of the craft have pondered it and shared their thoughts.

Writer and teacher Madison Smartt Bell is one of them, “Tone. What the story sounds…

Like a glider
circling
A crane comes in
for a landing

He’s a lovely sight. Spiraling closer and closer to the earth, and then, wings outstretched — though moving a little, adjusting angles and altitude — his spidery legs and tentative feet reach for the planet.

I’ve seen this lonely…

Tinkering with the Infinite
— dull finite tools
my clumsy fingers

Wrestling with Infinity, trying to pin it down as a concept, using dull, finite thoughts. This is a tough, if not outright impossible proposition.

The Buddhist canon, at least the part that I have read (and continue to read…

A good novelist can speak with a few different voices, in several tongues as it were. But it takes a brilliant novelist to speak with a dozen or more very distinct voices. Siri Hustvedt is such a novelist.

This amazing novel starts out with this amazing proclamation:

“All intellectual and…