writing
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Why I did not grow more conservative with age
More on this after I finish organizing my thoughts. Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, & to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. — Toni Morrison Continue reading
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Equilibrium
After years of chemically-modulated equilibrium it’s strange to wander once again the chase light calliope streets and the beckoning, threatening alleys my mind maps onto the world. Yesterday was work and errands and writing and a fine poetry reading. Today is a tree under which I will sit and contemplate the war of the oaks… Continue reading
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Suttree
I was mumbling last month about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses. It’s as… Continue reading
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Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
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The Slow Noon Burn of June 16
Originally posted on June 20, 2009 on my Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans blog Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel… Continue reading
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Bike
I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you likeIt’s got a basket, a bell that ringsAnd things to make it look goodI’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it. “Bike” Pink Floyd I think I was cycling the other day. No, not around the park. Instead I started reading… Continue reading
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Well Bottom Blues
Not my current state of mind but a part of the blog title’s genesis. The well bottom is like the bottom of the sea. Things down here stay very still, keeping their original forms, as if under tremendous pressure, unchanged from day to day. A round slice of light floats high above me: the evening… Continue reading
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Midwest Memories
A small town in Northwest Minnesota. A grandparent in the graveyard the price of full admission. My friend who lived there 20 years reading at Mass while I stood in the back with my restless child and a woman asked who he was and the other answered, oh that’s Ted F. He’s new in town.… Continue reading
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How It All Went Wrong
Confessions of a Pill Eater Continue reading
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The Form of Space
I must have forgotten if I ever knew how much more quickly the moon speeds across the firmament in the opposite direction of the slower stars. I was struck by the beauty of the thin crescent Moon with Venus perched a hand span above it the other night, almost perfectly centered to the crescent. And… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 