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Articles in featured writers

Prometheus, Franz Kafka
January 22, 2010 – 9:11 pm | No Comment
Prometheus, Franz Kafka

There are four legends concerning Prometheus.
According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was permanently renewed.
According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself [...]

Toenails, Jorge Luis Borges
November 25, 2009 – 5:01 pm | One Comment
Toenails, Jorge Luis Borges

Soft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them, but my toes refuse to pay attention. Nothing interests them but emitting toenails, horny plates, semi-transparent and elastic, to defend themselves–from whom? Stupid and mistrustful as they alone can be, they never for a moment stop readying that tenuous armament. They reject the [...]

Philip Larkin, High Windows
March 29, 2009 – 9:02 am | No Comment
Philip Larkin, High Windows

High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, [...]

XYLOMANCY, Scott Zieher
March 12, 2009 – 9:38 am | No Comment
XYLOMANCY, Scott Zieher

Oh didn’t we dance a puzzle
Round the tree when we
Danced the way we did
In early April when all is
Vernal and we needed twigs to
Invoke the gods that hovered
Near a healthy sprig
About a foot or so longer
Than needed to produce an
Invocation that requires wood
Or a cross of sticks so brittle
Not sought by dancing
Under the tree that [...]

Hell, a prose poem by Peter Johnson
November 7, 2008 – 5:32 am | No Comment
Hell, a prose poem by Peter Johnson

© 1997 by Peter Johnson.
from Pretty Happy! White Pine Press, New York, 1997.
Hell
“If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.” – Thomas Merton
It’s probably like the excitement of your first cigarette, but it lasts forever, that dizzying nausea — the Unknown: with imitation human heads on their [...]

Dream Song #14 by John Berryman
March 6, 2008 – 9:59 pm | No Comment
Dream Song #14 by John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After
all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we
ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother
told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess
you’re bored means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner
resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore
me, literature [...]

Franz Kafka, Before The Law
February 12, 2008 – 8:05 pm | No Comment
Franz Kafka, Before The Law

BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says [...]

Samuel Beckett, from Company
February 4, 2008 – 8:41 pm | No Comment
Samuel Beckett, from <u>Company</u>

BUY THE BOOK
A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.
To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said [...]

E. M. Cioran: Why Write
January 23, 2008 – 4:43 pm | No Comment
E. M. Cioran: Why Write

“The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech….”
- E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, tr. Richard Howard. © Arcade Publishing, 1998.

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”
January 13, 2008 – 2:51 pm | No Comment

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of [...]