John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat is often mistaken for a light comic novel, but its apparent ease hides a more delicate design: it is a fable about friendship, poverty, appetite, and the human need to belong without being possessed. Read closely, it becomes clear that the author is doing something more than telling amusing stories about … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
Revisionist Poetry – “At Eye Level with the Sky” – Greying Wisps, v.2
I stand rooted here,a small upright witnessset beneath the turning heights. Clouds drift overhead,soft as torn wool,grey combed through white,their slow shapes changingagainst the blue. From this far edge of thingsthe world grows quiet.Its grinding noisefalls awaylike dust settling in still water. The clouds pass onwithout effort,without complaint,crossing the open field of my sightas if … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “At Eye Level with the Sky” – Greying Wisps, v.2
T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden by Carol Stangler
Carol Stangler’s The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden is, at heart, a book about persuasion: it asks the reader to see bamboo not as a decorative novelty, but as a living medium with history, utility, and aesthetic dignity. The revised and updated 2009 edition presents itself … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden by Carol Stangler
Revisionist Poetry – “The Grit-Singers (A Blues for the Mineral Dark)” – Ghostly Stones, v.5
The stones—They don’t just stand, they heave.Tired gods with marble jaws and spines of jagged grit,twitching in that yellow fever-light,that rot-light of afternoon and ash.See the names?Carved like hexes into the skin—that pale, dying, limestone skin.The rain has licked the letters loose.The sun has kissed the marrow to ruin.They’re keeping watch.Yeah, they’re watching the quiet … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Grit-Singers (A Blues for the Mineral Dark)” – Ghostly Stones, v.5
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Make It in Clay – A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics by Charlotte Speight & John Toki
Make It in Clay: A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics reads less like a glossy craft manual than like an apprenticeship compressed into a book. First published in 1997 and revised in 2001, it appears as a spiral-bound, 224-page guide by Charlotte F. Speight and John Toki, aimed at a “simple, beginning studio situation.” That phrase … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Make It in Clay – A Beginner’s Guide to Ceramics by Charlotte Speight & John Toki
Revisionist Poetry – “The Dead Still Sing in Granite” – Ghostly Stones, v.4 (Revised while listening to The Doors)
The stones rise up like tired gods,marble jaws, granite spines,standing crooked in the fever-lightof afternoon and ash.Names are carved like spellsinto their pale and dying skin,names the rain has worried loose,names the sun has kissed to ruin. They keep their vigil over the buried ones,the sleepers under six feet of silence,the vanished kings, the broken … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Dead Still Sing in Granite” – Ghostly Stones, v.4 (Revised while listening to The Doors)
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Reclaiming Style – Using Salvaged Materials to Create an Elegant Home by Maria Speake & Adam Hills
Reclaiming Style is less a conventional interiors manual than a persuasive meditation on what a home can mean when it is built from memory, repair, and intelligent reuse. The book promises to take readers “behind the scenes,” and that phrase is exact: its drama lies not only in the finished rooms, but in the scavenging, … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Reclaiming Style – Using Salvaged Materials to Create an Elegant Home by Maria Speake & Adam Hills
“Doppelgangers & Drama” – Poetcore Shakespeare: The Bard for Gen Z
(T.A.E.’s LitBites) – A modern retelling of The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Okay, listen — imagine a city where everyone suddenly thinks you’re someone else, and none of the rules about “personal space” apply. That’s the vibe. Two families. Two sets of twins. One city. Total chaos. Years ago, a man named Egeon got … Continue reading “Doppelgangers & Drama” – Poetcore Shakespeare: The Bard for Gen Z
Revisionist Poetry – “Where the Quiet Keeps” – Ghostly Stones, v.3
Marble and granite rise from the earthlike old thoughts that refuse to vanish,leaning into the weather,holding their names against rain,against sun,against the long dull hand of neglect. Time has not shattered them all at once.It has only softened them:the corners rounded,the lettering thin,the bright intention dulled to gray.Still, they standabove the bones they mark,above the … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Where the Quiet Keeps” – Ghostly Stones, v.3
T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren is not merely an art collection—it is a philosophical atmosphere rendered in pigment, a meditation on fragility, wonder, and the strange dignity of awkwardness. To approach this book as a conventional monograph would be to miss its essential gesture; the artist is less … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
The New Renaissance Mindset 