Edward Curtin “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Shakespeare, Macbeth People often laugh when I tell them that I go to sleep at 8:15 P.M. They laugh harder when I say …
Edward Curtin I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep. Someday I will die …
Edward Curtin “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus Really? Or was he joking? Whenever January rolls around and a new year begins with its implied ending, I think of my father and Albert Camus, both born in 1913. …
Edward Curtin My title comes from a song sung by soldiers as they marched to hell in the trenches of World War I and the same song my sisters and I sang in the car as our parents drove us to our summer vacation in paradise at Edgewater Farm. I think of this as we march to …
Edward Curtin Sixty years ago in the late fall and early winter, a seventeen-year-old blue-eyed Bronx boy went by himself to see an afternoon showing of West Side Story on Fordham Road in the north Bronx. He took the bus to the theater but walked the few miles home in a romantic daze, in love …
With singer-songwriter Bob Dylan turning 80 on May 24, it seemed like an appropriate time to reflect on the artist’s enduring relevance. Writing furiously at his typewriter, cigarette in his mouth and the legendary Joan Baez by his side or in the background, a prolific young Dylan tapped into the spirit of a burgeoning counter-culture with his folk-inspired work. Performed[Read More...]
Edward Curtin It’s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins. Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live it, even though most of us don’t tell it until later, if we can find our tongues. …
Edward Curtin Something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones? Bob Dylan, Ballad of A Thin Man It’s hard… Life today seems like a dream, doesn’t it? Surreal to the point where everything seems haunted and betwixt and between, or this against that, or that and this against …
John Steppling Some books demand slower reading than others. Ed Curtin’s new book is such a case. But then this assemblage of essays, many published elsewhere, is a corrective to the growing intoxication with technology, with the surveillance and the policing it is being used for, and to what Jonathan Crary wrote about in 24/7, …
Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums, staring into space or out of empty sockets like the dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on leashes in lockstep.
