Articles are what strike our fancy. They may be news stories, they may be personal anecdotes, they may be fiction, they may be a blend of fact and fiction, who knows. As a writer, i've long reserved the right to create of whole cloth. If you feel the need to determine which are real and which are not, that is entirely your choice.
For me, I would accept them for what they are - notes passed from the other side of the desk, words in the ether as a signal flashing from one building to another as we send back and forth our mirrored signals - a language codified, rare, and understood by those who truly have a desire to understand the hieroglyphics of what is often a complicated life.
If you are looking for something in particular, use the Search box on the Welcome page and type in a key word - for there is no order to these articles - as it should be. comme il faut.
s.r.p.
april | may
2008
Entries by sadi ranson-polizzotti (285)
a word | midsummer, august 8. 08
sadi ranson-polizzotti
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It is officially Midsummer, which means that I am becoming officially depressed. Or perhaps I will. I can't say yet. It's something I am fighting as I learn that summer does not have to be the "end" of something but that rather, it can be a beginning. Any ending is also likewise a beginning.
this... and my absence...
shine bright at Grand Central
Michael has a stand of high chairs with foot-rests all built upon a sturdy oak wooden frame with arm-rests. He is a shoe-shine guy. He is standing under the shelter of the overhang of Grand Central Station on 42nd and Lex. where in front of his shoe-shine booth. This makes sense for it provides shelter for anyone who wants to get their shoes shined even while it's raining out, so the weather has no affect on Michael's business.
a word | quit having fun
I am told that a person feeling absolute joy - a person in an ecstatic state - is difficult to live with. That states of heightened euphoria can be alienating for the person who lives with you or who spends a great deal of time with you
Memento Maurice | by Mark Polizzotti
Although I spent relatively little time in the company of the French novelist Maurice Roche (1925-1997) – an aggregate of months over a period of a dozen years or so – our friendship was among the most decisive in my life. This memoir was written in part for a festschrift in his honor shortly before his death, then added to sometime after it as further bits and pieces of our past intersections resurfaced. One cannot encapsulate an important relationship in a few scattered fragments, nor perhaps even convey it. In place of that, I remember.
a word | all that is tacit (spring, 2008)
Function: verb Inflected Form(s): un·der·stood /-'stud/; -stand·ing Etymology: Middle English, from Old English understandan, from under + standan to stand transitive verb 1 a : to grasp the meaning of <understand Russian> b : to grasp the reasonableness of understand><I thought we understood each other: i was certain we understood...>
42 seconds underground | the photography of lewis carroll
Lewis Carroll, Photographer The Princeton University Library Albums by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling ( Princeton University Press
Dreaming in Pictures: the Photography of Lewis Carroll By Douglas R. Nickel Yale University Press,
When his mother's brother, Skeffington Lutwidge, first introduced Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (more popularly known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, originally Alice's Adventures Underground to photography in 1856, it was considered no more than "a fashionable pastime that allowed gentlemen to demonstrate their interest in technology, chemistry, and optics, as well as to reveal their artistic tendencies." (11, Princeton ).
hay or hey | life in the city
It's still too cold for me to wear one of my wife-of-a-chicken-farmer dresses. That is lost on you, no doubt, for what does the wife of a chicken farmer wear? Probably nothing at all like I imagine myself to be should I run away and start a chicken farm with the man that I love yet I tell myself one day, one day, I will do this. We will simply take off and go to somewhere in Sicily and start a small no-kill chicken farm where the chickens can run around free-range and we will simply sell the eggs and live a poor but sated life.
a word | i walk these broad avenues
Someone sent me the card below and it immediately struck me. "It's weird how you go from being strangers to being friends to being more than friends to practically being strangers again...and it all happens so fast." That's right, I thought. You are the best of friends, then perhaps lovers (or not lovers, but in love in some way, joyous, kindred, symbiotic - all of those important words that so apply when you are spinning in the moment, to suddenly having the proverbial carpet pulled out from under you.
bitch
seventeen signs and that's all you need to know
So you are sure of how you feel, are you? Do you know when you are in-love? What if I were to point out seventeen signs that tell you all you need to know about a person - how you feel, would that help? Surely others have made lists, but here is a list with additions and edits that I am quite certain holds true for any and everyone
too many roads bypass my way...| brucie dreams
I was just listening to the song “Cars n’ Girls” by a group called Prefab Sprout (if you don't know them, they are worth looking up and are an Irish band and well worth the time). The song is their response to Bruce Springsteen and before I can say anything, that is, if it remains that I have anything to say, let me quote from some of the song for you here and remember, the song is intended for Bruce Springsteen, whom I also happen to like, but Paddy-boy’s point is well-taken here (*note that Paddy is the lead-singer for the group);
the devil in the kleig light
As a sometime professor of book editing and writing a very fine graduate program in publishing, I should be so lucky, as I am, to have such thoughtful students who are interested in interning, actively seeking work, volunteering, etc. once the class is over and it is my promise to them, just as someone once gave me a leg up, to help them out as best I can through recommendations, by sending them to publishers and agents that I know well and that perhaps will take my recommendation about this or that student under advisement. This is the hope.
the moment of truth | money, honey
How we wait for it… have waited.
Some clever producer has tapped into our desire to hear the public’s desire for the absolute, unbridled truth with a capital T. Not some watered-down friendly version that may not hurt us, but all of the shitty little things that people do to each other and think (for none of us is completely immune, though some lead a double life more than others), The Moment of Truth, a new television program, meets the supply and demand theory.
losing steven: lost without steven t. florio
It is a lonely feeling to lose anyone - lovers, friends, family and in any way, however you lose someone is a death. To lose a mentor tho, how does one begin to express what this feels like?
Were it not for Steven T. Florio I would not be in book publishing or publishing in any way. I always knew I would be a writer, but I never for a minute believed I could succeed as a publisher, as an editor, editorial director, acquisitions editor, etc - the myriad jobs I have held so far in my career - and I never thought that I would see to publish my work with some fair measure of success that could please Steven, for it was Steven who first got me interested, or rather, it was Steven who noticed my interest.
asa nisi masa
We are not so unlike the bedtime playing children of Fellini’s 8.5 and their bed-time game of Asa Nisi Masa – creating their Animas –Jungian symbols. Their thin legs playing, casting shadows on the wall as they play in bed, and like us, they are coy, bashful, too human, simple games, all innocence, still packed with meaning and non-meaning – at least, not any Freudian meaning. Jung knew what he was talking about.
these broad avenues - song of songs
He told me as we were driving along the shoreline on the way to look at a big old house and the sky was grey, "Life can be viewed as tragic or comic," and i didn't believe him then. It sounded cold-hearted and dismissive. I didn't believe him because from the depths of my grief - a very real grief, i could see no comedy or nothing comic in the situation and could not imagine any day when i would. That day would never come. Never.
the queen on film | lady di and her death
The film The Queen, takes its first steps tentatively with the Royal Affirmation of Tony Blair, wonderfully played by Micahel Sheen, and the intial reports of Lady Diana’s death (live and real reports are used of the time, as are original photographs and news footage, which make the opening of this film heart-breakingly, breath-takingly honest.)
americanism; the good, the bad, the ugly by gaither stewart
(Rome) It is a paradox that the Americanism of which Americans are so proud is the source of the pandemic anti-Americanism throughout the world. Precisely the same Americanism of which Americans boast generates a worldwide antipathy toward them. And today, not just toward the US government, but in many places—to begin with in Iraq, as testified by blog writers from there—that antipathy, that hate, is directed against Americans in general.
write what you see | write now | sotto voce
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