TO BE TAKEN with a grain of salt.

I would like to take this opportunity to preface our stories with

 

the

FACT

of Duality:

​

the danger of all dialectic.

​

For Truth is the middle ground—

hard to pinpoint, harder still to communicate.

​

But inevitably we speak, we must speak to relate.

through trends, generalities, even stereotypes.

 

Of course painting with a heavy brush means

missing the finer details; but should we avoid tools altogether

lest our muscles atrophy and never get any work done?

​

What's important is to isolate extremes,

to point out the absurd and weigh the differences

so that each may arrive, in earnest, at

the issue centrally, as most suitable to their own. 

​

​

​

​

—Madison James, Army of One.

​

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* In All Things You I Deserve

--a tale of pirates, magicians, ninjas, and lumberjacks--

 

​

 

​

 

 

 

 

* Fiction, Fiction on the Wall

--who's the truest of them all?--

 

A Platonic dialogue, on the limitations of language and experience over reality

in the incongruity between Franky's physiological, social, mental, and physical states. 

 

The barrier of "causation," "butterfly effect," "entanglement," etc. lies at the end of all human knowledge, should be familiar to all serious artists of their respective fields, --whether described as the semiotic flows of

paradox and contradiction, self-identification of natural or mathematical languages, or narrative fiction in scientific theory.

 

This idea is not original, and is the basis for Platonic Ideas, but a particular source of inspiration was this

quote by Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil, --"one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts,

that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication -- not for explanation."

 

--as well as A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves (2013), by Robert Burton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Voyage of the Times New Roman

--the hunt for the thousand-year-old clam--

 

The second in the series of -meta adventures, starring Cole,

on the themes of cyclical time, maternal love, and clam chowder.

​

To clarify: all clams —are— hermaphradites. And the man George is not Washington, not really.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Man in the Woods

--a retelling of a "classic Aesop Fable--

 

Boy do we love Aesop, that hero of all our heroes --Plutarch, Dante, Emerson, --

whose pugface gave even Socrates' a run for his money, known to "derange holy-ecstasies."

 

And this is not a real Aesop fable, by the way:--

 

Cole is the turtle, who learns to unburden --in a Bhagavad Gita-sorta way-- from the weight of free-will, in acknowledging that

the "vast majority of physical and mental experiences being subconscious are no more experienced than is the rain by the earth,"

 

Maddie is the bird, who learns we "only find so much beauty as we carry;"

 

Franky is the fox, whose jokes and tricks in excess are frivolous at best --

and finds that there is an art of truth to all good satire, irony, and caricature,

 

and, lastly, -- Jeff, the dog, --to illustrate that, while artistic integrity can be compromised in the attempt to "make love

to the world," the poet is still best sustained, and sustaining, for those to whom he is most closely treasured and loved by. 

 

The man, of course, is Washington.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Beauty and the Beast

--A crime/supernatural detective story--

 

 

We've included a handful of Poe references—from The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, and the Tell-Tale Heart.

We might've included more, but Jeff is not a fan, presumably because Poe once called his favorite transcendentalists

from the 19th century, "Frogpodians."      ("Blasphemous!" —JT)

​

The Lovecraft reference is a nod to "Cthulhu," the broom-faced god.

 

His name is pronounced:

​

glue-glue

 

Did you know that the secret formula for making a Golem involves marking its forehead with the word, "Emet," which

means Truth, —and to destroy it, by obliterating the first letter, forming the word "Met," —which means death?

 

—The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Borges.