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
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
Shadows Gather
(The eye, altering, alters all) -- William Blake
Content 16+
One of my more engaging and creative young Chinese students (a girl of 13 years) recently started an essay with the following title: ‘Imagine that you are someone’s shadow for a day.’ In the first paragraph, she asks, “Can you choose whose shadow are you or would you just come into existence when someone is born or when the person … Read the rest
The Winters of My Summer Afternoons
Content 18+
I any of you ever wondered, Eric and I are not just bloggers, but writers, so the blog was always sort of a hobby. While my books were published mostly in Russian, Eric is obviously publishing in English, and there is his new book, The Winters of My Summer Afternoons, available on Amazon already!
And I quote here, as it would be hard to say it better:… Read the rest
Stuck on Earth
Content 18+ I went out on the balcony, and suddenly I saw that stars are visible here… for me, being born in a small town squeezed between the sandy desert and steppe vastness fuelled by oil underneath, the view of the night sky full of stars was something common and familiar. I used to dream of them, trying to guess if there is a life out there. Soon after my … Read the rest
That Raspberry Face
Content 18+ I can remember my undergraduate days more than a half century ago and sitting with friends until the wee hours having philosophical discussions about things like 'God'. The memory grows fuzzy, but it seems to me that we gave God at least a 50-50 chance of existing. Maybe, mixed in with the residue of an upbringing that took the reality of Heaven and Hell for granted, we were … Read the rest
