Barry Graham's Blog, page 27

Off the top of my head, here are some recommendations for seasonal reading:

Of Darkness and Light, by me. It’s been making people sleep with the light on since 1989.

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson. A classic, far ahead of its time. Here’s an essay I wrote about it.Also, I wrote The Host, a Thomas Carnacki story set in modern Scotland.

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley. Another classic, but not at all ahead of its time. The racism, classism and general Little Englandism of...

nevver:

Vanishing Point, Benjamin Plouffe

Since the death of Muhammad Ali, I’ve rewatched every documentary that he’s in that I could find on Amazon Video. My favorite is Champions Forever, which is beautiful, moving and surprising—especially when George Foreman admits he was afraid of both Joe Frazier and Ken Norton when he fought them.

The sight of the Harvest Moon (also known as the Hunter’s Moon) tonight brings to mind this poem, which I wrote more than a decade ago while viewing the same moon on the edge of woods in East Tennessee. It’s in my book Traffic and Murder.

THE KILLING SONG

—for Lonna Kelley

Some prefer the story

And some prefer the facts

Some prefer the law-book

And some the bloody axe

Some folks purr like kittens

And some folks howl like dogs

And some folks hum a happy tune

While slaughtering...

“They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.”

- Kawabata,

Bob Dylan is one of the poets who saved my life. Now he’s the ninth U.S. writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I’m one of those who regard Hillary Clinton with“visceral disgust,” as my friend M.V. Moorhead puts it in this powerful, important column. Unlike Moorhead, I’m not a“moderate liberal,” or a liberal of any kind; I’m a socialist, and there is barely a single policy of Clinton’s that I agree with. And, while I disagree with Moorhead on several points, especially his blaming Ralph Nader for the presidency of George W. Bush (I gave Moorhead a hard time when he voted for Gore), I find his overall a...

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own b...

versobooks:

“Islands in the stream, that is what we are…”