By Eric Le Roy
“Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence….
(“A Prayer For My Daughter” – W.B. Yeats)
Content 16+ I remember one early winter evening in Moscow when I had gone looking for a bookshop in New Arbatskaya. It must have been earlier than I recall because the skies had not slackened away into their usual numb abstraction, prelude to the Russian nocturne. Or … Read the rest
The Past
by Eric Le Roy
‘The Past is another country. They do things differently there.”
H.P. Hartley. The Go Between
Content 18+ A once famous but now mostly forgotten American poet named Marianne Moore once defined poetry as “Putting real toads in imaginary gardens.” I have never heard it said better, and I think that she meant identifying and extracting something palpable from the mist of the human spirit, transferring … Read the rest
A Cup of Old Sherry
Content 18+
Having quit the village and moved back into Varna City, I can no longer take my dogs down into the nature-blessed but garbage-strewn fields. Nor can I invite them into the garden because now there is no garden. So when aging Casper has diarrhea sometimes in the middle of the night, I just have to get dressed and go out with him. We live in a big apartment, … Read the rest
The Road That Was Taken
Content 16+
Once when I was stuck in Palatka, Florida, a truly smelly north Florida backwater featuring an all-pervading, nostril-putrefying paper mill, I took an English class from one George Kennedy, who hailed from Chicago. He was Head of the Department at St. Johns Junior College back in the very early 1970’s.
George, unlike the other professors – even those from up north who seemed to fit in well with … Read the rest
Atlas Plugged (and rebooted)
Content 16+ It would be hard to exaggerate how much my life has changed since 2017. I used to live in Moscow and in my role as ESL (English as Second Language) tutor I would beat the streets in all directions — with long intervals aboard metro trains, buses, trams — often scouring broad and faceless oblong buildings or plunging into the shadows between … Read the rest
Crowds
Content 18+
by Eric Le Roy
We move among them much of our lives, especially people of the cities. At first, when young, we dive in, intrigued and enraptured by as yet unknown entities in which -- like vines of limitless fecundity -- we hope to entwine ourselves. (Some will be poisonous.) Surely, we imagine, as we head out of the station and enter the boundless flesh fabric of New … Read the rest
The Digital Zoo
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ (obscene language)
There are a number of things in the ‘developed’ nations that everybody hates but evidently are powerless to do anything about. They are: banks, insurance companies, and customer service.
‘Service’. What service?? We are plagued with euphemisms in our culture. You pay a fee to attend some buffet lunch function and they call it a ‘donation’. … Read the rest
