Limousine, Midnight Blue

Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film is a sequence of fifty 14-line poems. It uses that famous and appalling film of President Kennedy’s death as a prism through which to view America and the world.  Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim’s experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history.  Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year.

Plato's Symposium - Eros and the Human Predicament

This book is part of the venerable Twayne’s Masterwork’s Studies Series, a set of texts written for the undergraduate reader. Footnotes and a Supplementary Bibliography refer the reader to plenty of important good books, ancient and modern. The Chronology mixes literary dates with political and military-historical ones, since this seemed the best way to convey a unified, ongoing complex of events. Translations are my own, deliberately left as literal as possible so as not to obscure any available nuances of the Greek. This book’s purpose is to acquaint readers with the major issues of Plato’s Symposium, so as to equip them in their own efforts to experience insight into this text and its subject, which is love.

Ancient Greek is a mighty intellectual resource and a profound life experience, and students of all disciplines – especially English, comparative literature, religious studies, sociology, linguistics, and history – should be encouraged to add it to their repertoires. Two important contributors to Ancient Greek literacy at the moment are the Latin-Greek Institute in New York City, which was founded in 1972 by Floyd Morgan and Rita Fleisher, and which has been the model for many fine imitations throughout the country; and the Perseus Project, Tufts University’s Internet database of Greek and Roman literature, edited by Gregory Crane. The author is grateful to the Latin-Greek Institute, especially to Hardy Hansen, David Sider, and the late and wonderful Jack Collins, for their outstanding instruction.