“I defend [democracy],” Flaubert sighed. “But I have no faith in it.”
“Give them liberty, but not power.”
What? The mob tried to overturn a fair and fair election not just once, and then he whined about his loss for 4 years, but white people elected and re-lynched a second time.
10.10.2025 07:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Culture, History, Politics, Society & Sports
(1/1)
Roll tanks on Fed Data
Roll tanks on Red States' opoid crisis
Flaubert was too smart to believe in Democracy.
10.10.2025 07:09 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
2/2
From «Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries»
Reading Notes
What? You thought POTUS 45/47 was gonna goon tell you what direction to march from?
Ukranian Writers Joseph Brodsky Recommended to Me
I expect ZERO volunteers, here in San Diego, as there are volunteers on the Russian front.
10.10.2025 06:26 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Culture, History, Politics, Society & Sports
(2/2)
Warrior Ethos
“Anyone,” says Aristotle, “can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.”
10.10.2025 05:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
(1/1)
Play Hurt
Play Hard
POTUS 45/47 isn't ALWAYS wrong
Aristotle is almost always right:
10.10.2025 05:27 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A well known translator from an even better known publisher remarked, "it took you 40 hours to do THAT?!"
He was the one who asked ME to review his translation from French into English.
What? He didn't think I'd spot-check his shoddy work?
Politely correct his typos?
For fucking free?
10.10.2025 03:48 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Work at some liberal, left-wing, non-profit dominated by women (or have attended junior high school.
Then you'll truly know Authoritarian Rule.
Relational aggression, manipulative, spreading rumors, exclusion, social bullying, social status, toxic and hierarchical social environment.
Familiar?
10.10.2025 02:07 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
What? 37 million Blue Sky users gonna not "like" you to death?
Or pretend that some kinda bullshit "non-like" on BS amounts to some kinda meaningful fucking change, amounts to anything other than soft-power?
09.10.2025 23:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Culture, History, Politics, Society & Sports
Am a literary journalist.
Listen carefully to USA right-wing talk radio.
Listen carefully to USA left-wing NPR.
Am equally horrified.
Am impressed by how smug Americans are, on either side of the aisle.
DEI=Degradation of Excellence in Institutions.
09.10.2025 19:38 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I'm the greatest, like Cassius Clay.
I'm the prettiest, I saved the world.
I got rich in the process.
Now, put me in the ring with a motherfucker can actually fight?
Get back to you when my jaw's relocated.
Fuck's matter with you people?
Get back to you when I win the Literature Nobel Prize.
09.10.2025 19:24 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
37 million bullshit motherfuckers tweeting on Blue Sky about POTUS 45/47?
37 million bullshit motherfuckers can't see through the bullshit of the US literary-industrial complex?
Am black. Not easily bullshitted.
Not everything 2025 pupeteers say is wrong.
Henry Louis Gates needs a reality check.
09.10.2025 19:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear.
James Wood is a bullshit motherfucker.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a bullshit motherfucker.
Bullshit motherfuckers who genuflect before PBS ought to protest conformist content.
Democrats (am a registered independent) can do better than bullshit govt. shutdowns.
09.10.2025 17:40 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Kudos to LK.
Here's what I mean about James Wood.
Read "Reality Examined to the Point of Madness" from «Serious Noticing» (2019).
Wood never has anything interesting to say about writers you've read seriously.
Why do people kiss the ring, apart from the fact we live in the Age of Authority?
09.10.2025 16:44 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
From «Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries»
Reading Notes
Greatest Writers Who Never Won the Nobel Prize
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_P...
There are serious readers and writers
And then there are tourists
Doesn't really matter if this or that Japanese or Hungarian-with-one-gold-tooth wins in 2025.
09.10.2025 00:11 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Culture, History, Politics, Society & Sports
2025 October 8
San Diego County
Officers, Gentlewomen and Service Personnel of the United States Marines and Navy, please lead by example.
I'll be only too happy to march forward.
Food pantry volunteer in North Park San Diego during a govt. shutdown?
08.10.2025 23:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
«Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries»
Culture, History, Politics, Society & Sports
Stockholm, 2025
Norman Mailer, drunk, ears akimbo, told me the Pulitzer Prize takes dead-aim at mediocrity, and rarely misses.
Doesn't matter who gets the Nobel Prize.
Non-laureates is a much better reading list.
08.10.2025 23:42 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
(PDF) James Wood's «Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019».
PDF | Special mention for Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2020, «Best American Essays 2021» | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
«Mrs. Dalloway @ 100»
«The Waves« may be greater and «To the Lighthouse» more perfect, but «Mrs.Dalloway» — a masterpiece of “sympathetic insanity,” that first classic of her middle period—is the novel that reveals how Virginia Woolf became Virginia Woolf.
08.10.2025 21:30 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
from «Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries» (Work in Progress)
Circumstances|Events|Situations|War
Marina Tsvetaeva's Words Joseph Brodsky Chain-Smoked
At a Montague Street café in Brooklyn Heights, c. 1995
To honor Ukranian writers everywhere
Who died for fallen soldiers everywhere
In Memoriam
08.10.2025 17:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
From «Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries»
Reading Notes
“When one is King, what more is there to want? To be God.”
«Quand on est roi, que peut-il manquer ? -- d’être Dieu.»
-- Stendhal
#writers #BookSky
05.10.2025 18:56 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
«Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries»
Character Sketches - Gore Vidal
Met him at a book signing in Rockefeller Center, c. 1990.
He signed my copy of «Nausea».
And died (2012), here in Southern California, insisting this wasn't REALLY part of the United States.
www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/1...
03.10.2025 04:59 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It's perfectly reasonable that venues SHOULD charge, just to keep Submittable up and running.
Frequent submitters complain they never get responses or even rejections, much less acceptances.
My personal solution to the problem was simply to stop submitting to publications that charge.
A gamble.
02.10.2025 22:40 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Old Brooks the Crook in Shawshank🥲
01.10.2025 20:24 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Declan O'Driscoll on 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel' by John Betjeman.
Reading Jail, UK.
No heat? No toilet, only a "slop bucket"? No A/C, that's for sure.
Am guessing it was NOT Club Fed.
Same-sex marriage in the U.S. could very possibly be next on the hit list.
01.10.2025 09:19 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Learned my lesson!
Be on intimate terms with an artist's WORK; don't always try to befriend them.
Past a certain age and for good reason, a serious artist learns to make her/himself scarce.
Retreats into his/her work. Holds family/true friends close.
Hobnobs with colleagues/acquaintances rarely.
01.10.2025 09:11 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Writing Projects - Articles, Essays, Interviews & Reviews
kevinabrown.com/essays/
"Broad Noon Daylight: Sterling A. Brown," Ch. 22, from «Countée Cullen's Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History», pp. 100-138.
www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevi...
#poetry #poets #blues
01.10.2025 07:27 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
