Jay Wrote

Censorship - Time, Place and Manner    The topics of censorship, oppression and youth mental health occupy my mind quite a lot  these days. • Jeez, just grow up!    • Toughen them up - they don’t have a clue about stress. Or oppression. • If you are shielded from dis-ease in your encounters, you’ll miss a lot of good in the world. • Someone else’s deeply held myth should not be allowed to censor me or anyone else. • Both my children are getting treatment for anxiety-related troubles. • Why would you say something to deliberately hurt someone? • How can you, sitting in your position of privilege have anything legitimate or helpful to say  about this issue the victims of historic violence? • What is the purpose of art?   • Isn’t some art beyond acceptable? To you?  To everyone? BREAST     My mother grew up in the rock-ribbed conservative farm country of northern Vermont. It was  the Depression and her land-rich, cash-strapped, dirt po...

My Brother Knows Nabokov * When with close listening we draw meaning from disarticulation his constricted life expands and rolls along in curves and cuts   as alluvial streams trace through the silting out  of memories and plans, of Bond movies watched on DVD,  the nightly news of ’76, his two flights west and Alice Cooper lyrics.  Broken twigs and latticed leaves tumble loose  pressured by his very certain reveries of hard-edged, dark, unbounded efficacy.  Today:   His guilty premonition  of the oil train explosion,   a smoldering conspiracy,   just across the border. This tragedy rises, not  from a loss of meaning, but in the raging  floods of consequence. *Vladimir Nabokov wrote about parents caring for their schizophrenic son and “Referential mania” where he      “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and  existence…. Clouds in the sta...