Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan

Tonight on Eric’s Insomniac Theater: “The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957)!

Hey kids — don’t go running through any radioactive mists!  That’s the message of 1957’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”  Okay … it’s actually a little more complicated than that.   Grant Williams’ titular doomed protagonist was exposed first to insecticides, and then to the mist a couple of weeks later — so it was sort of a one-two toxic punch.  (I am linking here, by the way, to the Video Detective channel on Youtube for the trailer below.)

This movie rocked my world when I was a first- or second-grader.  It was the sort of thing that aired periodically on weekend television in the early 1980’s.  I’ll never forget the awe I felt … along with confusion at the abstract closing narration.  What did all that mean?  What happens to him next?

I was surprised to learn tonight that this was adapted from a Richard Matheson novel.  (He also wrote this screenplay adaptation.)

It’s … actually pretty good!  It holds up surprisingly well over time.  And the simple special effects are nonetheless effective.  (I’ll bet the props and sets people had a lot of fun designing giant objects to make Williams appear progressively smaller by comparison.)

Fun stuff.



IncredibleShrinkingMan-poster

The Piker Press publishes “An Altogether Different Slumber”

I am so happy today to see The Piker Press publish my short poem, “An Altogether Different Slumber.”  You can read it online right here.

Thanks, as always, to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice through this wonderful literary magazine!



“Nothing,” by Eric Robert Nolan

Empty are her open palms. Oblivion
rises in her irises.
All her inaudible words
are whispers now in storms of empty space.
Her recollection
is a chaos of absences.

Even her hair is empty sky, black and shining both, unreachable beside me, the unattainable stars, cascading night.

(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2023



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Photo credit: Sarah Marie Jones, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons, “Female nude portrait (cropped” [Further cropped by Eric Robert Nolan with creator’s permission via Wikimedia Commons]

Newsday prints my letter about Tucker Carlson’s January 6th misinformation.

I’m honored today to see that Newsday published my letter to the editor about Tucker Carlson’s recent misinformation about the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol.  It’s the very last letter in today’s Letters page; you can find it right here.

Newsday is America’s ninth-largest newspaper, and the third-largest in New York State.   Its Sunday circulation is just under a half million people.



Sprechen sie Fox?

If you shot 41,000 hours of video of Germany invading Poland in 1939, you could select out clips of German soldiers walking along without firing their weapons.

You could claim they entered the country as peaceful tourists — and that the nefarious forces of the oppressive Polish government had orchestrated a lie.

There’s a catch, though. The only people who would believe you would be those who already sympathized with the Nazis.



Physician, heal thyself.

“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and the violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”

— internal message to officers from the U.S. Capitol Police about Tucker Carlson’s attempt to whitewash the January 6th insurrection

But this hardly matters.  The people who are likely to believe Tucker Carlson will simply believe whatever they want anyway.  They just want their self-vindicating fantasy articulated by a speaker they “trust.”

Recall, please, that this is the same crowd that regularly excoriates the rest of us for being taken in by “fake news.”