drmstream[writing]

Last night I made a start at writ­ing this down, then fal­tered when I saw how late it was, real­ized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and ques­tioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to any­where. This morn­ing I got out […]

The set­ting is so casual; it’s as if the extras were told to take a break, and some lay back to nap before the film­ing started back up again. The com­po­si­tion is ele­gant and clas­sic. The effect mutes the meta­phys­i­cal truth of the photo: This pic­ture chron­i­cles death. The fine line of the per­spec­tive draws our […]

My rea­son for lay­ing beside you and smelling like beer When you fin­ish read­ing this I want you to be able to paint The sky I saw when I walked out To the garbage bin at dusk. Look up past the spring buds Blur­ring the kinky ends of the ginko To the rib­bon of sky, upended by […]

I don’t get much traf­fic in this cor­ner of the web. Google sends me a hand­ful of vis­i­tors a day, and I some­times feel guilty that my mus­ings are prof­fered as the answer to a spe­cific ques­tion. A cou­ple of posts reg­u­larly deliver vis­i­tors: my thoughts on Joyce’s last para­graph from The Dead, a poem […]

The cap­tion reads: “Food will win the war — You came here seek­ing free­dom, now you must help to pre­serve it — Wheat is needed for the allies — waste noth­ing.” I imag­ine some­one in a cen­tral office in Wash­ing­ton look­ing at sta­tis­tics for immi­gra­tion in 1916, while pogroms raged across Europe, say­ing, “We won’t be […]

  The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the […]

A Japan­ese poet once wrote that there is no util­ity in metaphor, that in the mod­ern world the only valu­able expres­sion is of words that are spe­cific to one thing. This is lan­guage as the table of exis­ten­tial ele­ments: when used pre­cisely, words make an objec­tive real­ity that we can use to breach the gaps between […]

When my great-great-great grand­fa­ther William Can­dlish was born in Vir­ginia in 1804, there were 1 bil­lion peo­ple in the world. It had taken thou­sands of years for the world to reach that mile­stone of human sat­u­ra­tion. When my father was born in the 1930’s, the num­ber of peo­ple in the world had just passed the 2 […]

Some­times you type the begin­ning of a query into Google search and as the sug­gested terms appear under the box you get pulled into the zeit­geist like Alice fell into the look­ing glass. I was look­ing for a global demo­graphic info bit and typed “per­cent­age of” into Google. The fol­low­ing list appeared as sug­ges­tions: Per­cent­age of […]