Re-activating my "Writers' Friendship / Writers' Enmity" series. For those new to this website or unfamiliar with the series, here's brief summary: Over a period of years I invited as many as 28 writers to contribute short essays on their experiences with writers' friendship. These appeared in Joan Houlihan's online publication, "Perihelion." The series began with an invitation I sent out to friends, colleagues and others saying, "How about a short... Read Full Story
Thanks for visiting. Yes, Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia is still happening. More to come, more in the works, including a book (now in progress). However, I'm posting these days to Red Room Writers, my "other" blog. Please drop by, comments welcome...http://www.redroom.com/author/robert-sward Read Full Story
Thanks for checking in... for latest, please visit:http://www.redroom.com/author/robert-swardand, also,http://writerfriendships.webdelsol.comWorking simultaneously on 3 blogs (how did that happen?), I'm focusing more now on the Red Room Writers' Community and, in addition, "Writers' Friendship / Writers' Enmity." What's that all about? See Introduction, which follows:"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride,emulation, avarice, ma... Read Full Story
Poet Peter Klappert's Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, Six Gallery Press,Pittsburgh, PA, 2008.---My friend Peter Klappert sends a copy of his new book plus Ruth Kempher's Always the Beautiful Answer: A Prose Poem Primer (the anthology was first published in 1999 and is now back in print). RK begins with a definition...PROSE, n. 1. Speech or writing without metrical structure: distinguished from verse. 2. Commonplace or tedious discourse.POEM, n. 1. A Composition in verse, cha... Read Full Story
“It takes several lives to make one person.” I believe that and that we are also, all of us, phoenixes rising, or so it seems, from the ashes of our old selves. The rise and fall of the phoenix. Phoenix. Pheonix. Phoenix.“The soul is a vast domain," wrote Arthur Schnitzler. "So many contradictions find room in us… We try our best to maintain order in ourselves, but this order is really just synthetic. Our natural condition is chaos.”I think of that as I come across reviews of an ear... Read Full Story
Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2006... In his Nobel Lecture, Pamuk provides a fairly comprehensive reply to the question, "Why do you write?" "Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can't do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only b... Read Full Story
Medical ClinicProcedure is for "US BREAST UNILAT... lump or mass in breast. Clinical data:lump at 9 o'clock about 8 mm-1 cm size, cystic..." "...at 9 o'clock"? Can't help thinking of World War II movies, gunnery specialists, air force pilots and sailors locating the enemy's position. So there's the waiting, then these two procedures, imaging of where I'd have breasts if I had breasts. Thinking of re-reading Philip Roth's novel, "Breast.&quo... Read Full Story
Mammogram - "Men have breast tissue, too." August 7, 2008 "Men have breast tissue, too," said my doctor, a woman. And I got this little cyst or lump or something. So there I am today in Radiology, the only man in the waiting room. I don't know if the thing is benign or not, but the muzak they're playing is positively toxic. Hell, for me, would be an eternity of canned music. One tinny, one cloned musical cyst after another. Suspiciously benign music... Read Full Story
In an emergency:[Karl Menninger] often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them." * * *This blog is something of a ... Read Full Story
