Truth

“Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”

—Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas (1899)

Truth, I'd say, is more like a foxed mirror

In a dusty, cluttered attic corner

Of an imagined ancestral homeland—

A beaten country that lost its Great War.

Or like a painting of a nonentity called “Me”

Who slinks around a corner in the Goodwill store,

And then (hopefully?) is spotted no more.

Its kindling might get clearer by and by,

It is the flames one cannot falsify.

Telling is—inevitably, I guess!—to lie.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Cardboard Critters

Now you can buy reviews of your book!

How about a West Coast Blast for $1475?

https://citybookreview.com/product/west-coast-blast-expedited-reviews

No, it wasn't always thus:

Once writers caught, or missed, the bus.

But AI cannot lie, or, telling truth from fuss,

Distinguish who's dead from what's alive,

The whine that's not from those who dine.

Books for review should get in line.

It's surely time for me to go—

Those cardboard critters will do fine!

Their Booker Prizes will arrive

As fast as DeepSqueak makes it so—

And if they picked the Premium package

A Nobel's perhaps slipped in their baggage.

When Mr. Belvedere rings the bell

Let's just hope he's not from hell!

Backward into the Future

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. . . . the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)