I’m happy to share here that The Roanoke Times published “Friends, Americans, Countrymen — Lend Me Your Fears.” If you follow this blog, you’ll recall that this was my satirical piece aimed at Donald Trump (riffing on Marc Antony’s speech in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar).
You can read it online right here.
Paramount Pictures.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
— from William Shakespeare’s Henry V
Photo credit: I, Jonathan Zander / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
DC Comics.
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”
— from James Baldwin’s “The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman” in Esquire, April 1960
Have you heard my joke about Oedipus?
He didn’t have a girlfriend, exactly.
But he had a significant mother.
HBO. “Character poster” portraying Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe.
“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Fun fact — “alien DNA ” and “demon sperm” were both plot devices on “The X-Files” (1993-2018). The former was part of a background story arc throughout most of the show’s seasons; the latter was the subject of a Season 6 episode entitled “Terms of Endearment.” (Aside from being a great episode, it’s notable because it stars horror icon Bruce Campbell.)
Stella Immanuel may be an irresponsible quack, but she really knows her sci-fi television.
“I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
— James Baldwin
Photo credit: By Allan warren – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22305867
