By Eric Le Roy
First, I support no ideology under this shining sun. You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right, and vice versa. All my life, I have involved myself in civil discourse with all comers. Often it has seemed modestly productive, although rare is the occasion when I’ve noticed any radical shifts of opinion. Most people, including me, walk away with our convictions … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 21+ It is more than a little bit interesting how stating one’s political views can ruin a friendship. So wise, the old saying about two things to avoid at a party: religion and politics. Well, religion can be put on the back burner at most punch bowl bashes these days, but politics always seems to find a new life no matter what. Kind … Read the rest
Content 21+ (explicit content) Sometime back in the day, I heard of a book (cynically) entitled “How to Pick Up a Feminist”. I thought it was funny. I had just come back from Europe and enrolled at FSU for yet another attempt at finally finishing off my doctoral program, and I was doing creative writing for my degree. (The ‘dissertation’ turned out to be a body of my own poetry.) … Read the rest
