0046 by Jeff Hess
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.
It belonged to an Armenian, and forever shall I see on the glass door next to the name of the restaurant, which was in small letters, the compulsory sign in large black letters: Religious Minority. All restaurants run by non-Muslims had to carry this sign on their doors so that good Muslims, who considered all non-Muslims dirty and did not eat from the same dishes, would be forewarned. p. 172
My Soundtrack: Power Doesn’t Run On Nothing by The Thermals on WOXY.
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1212 by Jeff Hess
Last week the Cleveland Heights, University Heights Library system re-opened the doors on the main libary on Lee Road. If any taxpayer needed to see the what their money well spent, this is it. I’ll be doing a photo tour over the next week or so. But here I’ll start with my corner view, with Phoenix coffee, from the quiet room on the second floor.
Posted in Culture, Life, The Universe & Everything | 2 Comments »
1030 by Jeff Hess
[Update — 0830, 13 September — The debate is raging over photoshopped or not photoshopped, but Reuters has still not pulled the picture.
What I do find disturbing is this post on dated 12 January of this year that uses the same picture and suggests that the picture is the work of a digital artist named Ray Caeser.
I have a problem with that for two reasons. First, posts can be dated anyway the poster wishes. Second, the works of the artist bear no resemblance to the photo. So I don’t know what’s going on there. ]
[Update — 1116 — Getty Images has similar, but not identical photographs attributed to Tim Sloan and taken on 10 September 2006. That tells me that the Ray Caeser link is hinky. I can’t wait to see how this one shakes out.]
I remember when people got arrested for wearing clothing mimicking the American flag. Now idiots put it on door mats and President George Bush thinks it’s OK to walk on it? And since when did it become acceptable for our President to sign autographs on an American flag? What was the President thinking? Where were the President’s handlers?
Posted in Impeach Bush | 12 Comments »
0052 by Jeff Hess
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.
I was reminded of a story I had heard and reheard about the Arab conquest of Persia, a conquest that brought Islam into Iran. By this account, when the Arabs attacked Iran, they won because the Persians themselves, perhaps tired of tyranny, had betrayed their king and opened the doors to their enemies.
But after the invasion, when their books were burned, their places of worship destroyed and their language overtaken, the Persians took revenge by re-creating their burned and plundered history through myth and language. Our great epic poets Ferdowsi and rewritten the confiscated myths of Persian kngs and heroes in a pure and sacred language.
My father, who all through my childhood would read me Ferdowsi and Rumi, sometimes used to say that our true home, our true history was in our poetry. They story came back to me then because, in a sense, we had done it again. This time we had opened our gates not to foreign invaders but to domestic ones, to those who had come to us in the name of our past but who had now distorted every inch of it and robbed us of our Ferdowsi and Hafez. p. 172
My Soundtrack: Enemies Like This by Radio 4 on WOXY.
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