All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

“The Embrace,” Gustav Klimt

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“You’ll live forever in your own private library.”

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive.  But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories.  A room like the stacks in this library.  And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards.  We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.  In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore



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Photo credit: Haruki Murakami nappa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Happy Fourth of July, folks!

Be safe.  Handle fireworks safely.  Don’t drink and drive.  Resist the temptation of demagogues.  Reject authoritarian populism.



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Cover to “Young Avengers” #10, Jim Cheung, John Dell & Justin Ponsor, 2006

Marvel Comics.

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(Because Nolan is serious about Nolan.)

That look you give her when she tells you that she hasn’t seen “The Prestige.”



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“Interior of a Cloister,” Louis Jacques Mandé-Daguerre, 19th Century

Oil on canvas.

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“In darkest night …”

Oh! I saw my first fireflies of the year last night. 🙂 ❤ South of the city. They’ve been my favorite harbinger of summer since I was just about 18 and they would silently glitter en masse around Lake of the Woods in Orange County, VA. They were like a broad blanket of blinking emerald stars that caressed the darkened treeline.

Fireflies are the Green Lantern Corps of the insect universe, people. Respect them.



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“Pine Forest,” Ivan Shishkin, 1866

Oil on canvas.

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I call this omelette “The Fantastic Four.”

Because it’s fantastic, and because it’s got four cheeses: Swiss, muenster, mozzarella and mild cheddar.  (Diet be damned.)  Yet it’s still not as cheesy as the 2005 movie with Ioan Gruffudd.  (Sorry.)

Is it good?  It is worthy of the Baxter Building dining room.  The only thing missing here is a cameo by Stan Lee in your goddam kitchen.

BY the way, I am indeed employing the British spelling of “omelette” here, because the American “omelet” will always look wrong to me.  And if it’s one thing that I know, it’s omelettes.



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Illustration by Arthur Rackham for “Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” 1935

George G. Harrap & Co, Ltd, London.

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