A Q111 bus entering southbound service at Parsons Boulevard and 88th Avenue, one block south of Hillside Avenue, in Jamaica, Queens.
By Tdorante10 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
All posts by Eric Robert Nolan
Publication Notice: Dead Snakes features “blizzard.”
I’m honored once again to see my latest poem published by Dead Snakes! A big thanks to Editor Stephen Jarrell Williams for allowing me to share “blizzard.”
http://deadsnakes.blogspot.com/2016/02/eric-robert-nolan-poem.html
Car fire today on West 34th Street, Manhattan (Photos)
This happened just before 1 PM outside The Javits Center. The driver sprang out. True to form, the FDNY was there in minutes.
Watching them at work was educational. They do not simply hose a vehicle down and take lunch. They have to actually tear it open in places to hit its insides everywhere with water, to make sure there is nothing smoldering, I guess.
Also, there were two tremendous “POP”s as flames enveloped the vehicle. To a guy who’s seen a lot of war movies, it sounded like ammunition cooking off. A bystander helpfully informed the rest of us that this was the sound of the airbags exploding.
In some of these shots, you can see the Empire State Building in the background.
Hey — while we’re on the subject of public safety in Manhattan, the members of the United States Army guarding Penn Station were looking as tough and professional as always. I actually did feel safer traveling. If you know someone who serves in such a capacity in NYC or elsewhere, thank them for their service.
The The’s “Helpline Operator”
That headline isn’t a typo — the name of this group actually is “The The,” which made them incredibly hard to Google for me for a very long time. Turns out song titles help out a lot in online searches.
I used to opine that Depeche Mode was a sexier Pink Floyd with a faster beat. (Relax purists, I know that absolutely no one can truly compare to Pink Floyd.) I like to think of “The The” as though they were a low-tech garage-band equivalent of Depeche Mode — like maybe somebody crossbred Mode with Weezer, and threw some saxophone in.
Anyway, this 1993 album, “Dusk,” brings back college memories for me in the same way that “They Might Be Giants” or “Three Dog Night” probably does for my classmates.
That time “The Governor” performed William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”
“Now is the winter of our discontent … RICK.”
“The Walking Dead’s” David Morrissey actually is a damn fine actor.
At any rate, here’s a brain twister for you — David Morrissey looks a lot like … Morrissey, from The Smiths. Morrissey from The Smiths looks a lot like Quentin Tarantino. Yet David Morrissey and Quentin Tarantino look nothing alike.
You figure it out.
“blizzard,” by Eric Robert Nolan
blizzard.
the snow.
when winter’s slow kiss smothers,
i miss the quick lips of summer,
its tongue like an eager lover
in heat, naked, instant at my skin, burning at the porch door, some other
climate, some other
season, some other
childhood.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2016
I’ve been trying to keep my mother’s apartment as clean and as orderly as possible.
Everything is exactly where it should be, except for her.
“Stone and snow, silence and air.”
Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
The terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Tundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and snow, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.
Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.
All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of roads,
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.
— excerpt from W. H. Auden’s “Atlantis,” January 1941
Photo credit: Lis Burke [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
From the “Bulletin of the State Normal School,” Fredericksburg, Virginia, June, 1915
Mary Washington College, just under two years before America entered the First World War.
Is this Monroe Hall? The trees behind it appear lower, suggesting the slope down to Sunken Road.
It’s amazing. I lived on the campus for four years, but almost never stopped to ponder (or even bother to ask) how old those buildings really were. If this is Monroe, then those twin basement windows, far right, were where a good-natured “Macroeconomics 101” teacher gently advised me that I “could have done better in” his class in the Spring of 1990. It was the mildest of reproaches; I think he only meant that I was bright and should have studied harder than a “C” student.
U.S.S. Nautilus passing under the George Washington Bridge, May 1956 (Photo)
The U.S.S. Nautilus passing under the George Washington Bridge as part of an Armed Forces Week visit to New York Harbor. May 13, 1956.
Photo credit: By ArnoldReinhold [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 