Author: Thomas Fleming
Book Discussion: The Machine Stops
Recently, my wife asked me what would happen when the sins of modernity catch up with us, when our refusal to educate the new generation and our refusal to protect life and property from the ever-expanding criminal would combine with out ever-increasing dependency upon all things electronic to produce a complete collapse…
A Life in Shreds and Patches: Greatness Almost Thrust Upon Me, Part I
This is a slightly fictionalized piece of personal history. Some of the names have been changed to protect the sensitive, and the dialogue, while it represents the substance of what was said, has been sharpened by recollection.
Two Winter Poems
The first is by Robert Louis Stevenson…. The second is by Thomas Hardy There will be more.
“What A Country!”
This morning my wife asked me why Gavin Newsome has been behaving so foolishly in public. “That’s easy,” I told her, “He’s watching Donald Trump and picking up cues.”
Autodidact–Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, Hamlet
Hamlet is, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, a death-obsessed neurotic, and the similarities between the play and the film must have given Franco Zeferelli the brilliant (if zany) idea of casting Gibson, a morally unstable movie star of limited talent, as Hamlet.
Shall/Will and Should/Would
Nothing better indicates the mental confusion of postmodern Americans than their constant abuse of modal auxiliary verbs like shall and will, should and would, can and could. In introducing the Italian conditional, I included the following preface which may help some to understand how future and conditional are formed in English.
Crocodile Tears
Reading stories on the teapot tempest over the sinking of ship and the subsequent attack on the survivors made me think, for just one second, that the Mainstream Media were finally going to tell the truth about Israel’s illegal and savage attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.
