Note: Imagine Tom Waits commenting on the photoshoot... They roll the lights in like rolling thunder — a couple of cheap halos and a broomstick moon.The director, he’s wearing a shabby fedora full of old applause, squints through the viewfinder like a man checking the bottom of his glass.Those little white flowers — holy little … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Close-Up on a Broomstick Moon” – Ready for my close-up, Mr. Deville, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey reads like a compact moral theatre; to show how and why, it helps to point to the places in the text where Salinger stages his claims. Below I rewrite the earlier analysis with concrete textual anchors — scenes, moments, and exchanges from the novellas — so the arguments rest … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Revisionist Poetry – “Tiny Divas of the Silver Screen” – Ready for my close-up, Mr. Deville, v.3
They arrive in white, tiny and relentless,little actresses in a noir of green and shadow.The lens inhales them; a hush spreads like powder.Petals fan themselves, breath silk, and murmur—not sirens, but lullabies of hush and light—inviting a fingertip that will never quite arrive.Close: a pollen comet, a vein that writes a map,a throat of silk … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Tiny Divas of the Silver Screen” – Ready for my close-up, Mr. Deville, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Fractured Innocence and the Sacred in the Ordinary Nine Stories (1953) occupies a strange, shimmering space between postwar disillusionment and spiritual yearning. Across these nine short stories, Salinger stages encounters between damaged adults and children who appear, at first glance, untouched by corruption. Yet innocence here is never merely sentimental; it is fragile, unstable, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Revisionist Poetry – “Petite Divas” – Ready for my close-up, Mr. Deville, v.2
In the lens they rehearse: tiny white divasframed in halogen and shallow focus.Leaves fall to black; bokeh eats the background.Each petal takes its cue, a practiced tilt,each stamen a pin-light on a tiny stage.They lean toward the aperture and hold —silk that almost asks to be touched.Up close, veins become cartography,pollen like dropped sequins on … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Petite Divas” – Ready for my close-up, Mr. Deville, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Four Agreements presents itself as a compact work of spiritual instruction, grounded in what Ruiz frames as “Toltec wisdom,” yet written in the idiom of contemporary self-help literature. Its enduring popularity lies not in philosophical complexity, but in rhetorical clarity: the book distills ethical life into four memorable imperatives. These imperatives operate less as … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Revisionist Poetry – Becoming Liminal – Clay Experiments, v.4
I knead until the room thins — the lamp a small moon,my breath and the wheel keeping secret time.Hands learn the clay’s grammar: press, fold, pull —a slow conversation that erases the name of the day. I am neither in nor out; I live in the seam,the narrow seam where thinking loosens its teeth.My fingers … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Becoming Liminal – Clay Experiments, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben
Wohlleben’s The Secret Network of Nature is at once a gardener’s field guide to wonder and a polemic about the fragile engineering that sustains life on Earth. The author, already known for his knack at turning ecological detail into intimate storytelling, invites readers to look beneath the familiar surfaces of forests, fields, and shorelines and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben
Revisionist Poetry – Clay Experiments, v.3
Under a single bulb the studio breathes —clay cool as river-mud, the smell of earth and salt.My fingers sink and pull and fold; the wheel answers,a low, slow song that keeps time with the heart. I coax a mouth from the belly of the lump,pull a shoulder, cup a hollow for rain.The clay sings back … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Clay Experiments, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Written by Shirley Jackson, this novel is less a sequence of jump-scares than a sustained experiment in atmosphere, point of view, and the politics of domestic fear. Jackson's masterpiece refuses the tidy mechanics of conventional Gothic; instead it anatomizes the uneasy overlap between mind, architecture, and social expectation. The result is a book that reads … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The New Renaissance Mindset 