Weekly Hubris

Elizabeth Boleman-Herring: In the last century, Andy Warhol said that the era had finally arrived when, thanks to our ravenous and restless communications media, everyone would be “famous” for 15 minutes. In our post-post-Warholian world, that window has, perhaps, telescoped (for most) to the length and breadth of a tweet.
With the publication of Volume VII of Anaïs Nin’s Diary, I came into my own 15 minutes. Anaïs (pronounced Anna-eés, if you please), with her customary generosity, had pulled me, and the title of my still unpublished novel, The Furrawn, into the limelight. And she did so three years after her death of cancer in January, 1977.
Friends and former university classmates and colleagues phoned and wrote to me from—all over the world. “Good grief, Bebe,” said one: “You’ve got almost as many references in the index as Henry Miller.”
Another friend, who knew about Nin’s and my difficulties, said, “It was her way of saying how sorry she was.”

Read Boleman-Herring's essay, "Anais & The Furrawn," on "Hubris," here: https://weeklyhubris.com/anais-nin-the-furrawn/

Rev. Robin White: The ditch along the road in front of the house had been “landscaped” with gorgeous river rock. Those rocks, however, had become inundated with w**ds over the years since the initial landscaper has done his work, and, since I don’t use chemical w**d killers, I needed to find a creative way to approach the 3-foot-wide and 80-foot-long ditch of stone now knee-deep in tenacious and thorny w**ds.

Early in the spring of this year, I began digging out and moving, by hand and by barrow, those mud-covered, w**d-entangled stones—some as large as boulders; others as small as quarter-sized pebbles.

Our curving concrete driveway had never afforded vehicles a straight shot to the street. Because of its slight bend, visitors and delivery vans, more often than not, ended up driving across the lawn, which, in early spring, became mud—deeply-rutted mud.

As a solution to the w**dy ditch and the muddy ruts, I began creating a two-foot wide, 35-foot-long babbling brook (minus the babble) along one side of our primary, paved driveway.

Read White's latest essay here, on "Hubris": https://weeklyhubris.com/up-a-new-crick/

“One of the commands I give myself daily is the short Latin phrase, ‘Amor fati.’ This phrase means ‘Love of one’s fate.’ It’s an order from me to me. If you like, it can be an order from you to yourself. The calendar on my telephone reminds me twice each day: Amor fati. The reminder comes each morning and each afternoon. Amor fati describes an attitude of accepting and even embracing everything that happens in life. It demands that one must embrace suffering and loss, along with favorable events. Amor fati indicates that we cannot erase our past. Rather, we must accept the good and the bad. We must have the strength to handle the mistakes we make, along with our acts rooted in wisdom.”—Dr. Guy McPherson

Amor Fati & Memento Mori – Hubris Hubris Amor Fati & Memento Mori August 1, 2024 / “One of the commands I give myself daily is the short Latin phrase, ‘Amor fati.’ This phrase means ‘Love of one’s fate.’ It’s an order from me to me. If you like, it can be an order from you to yourself. The calendar on my telephone remi...

What, Pray, Is the Heart? – Hubris Hubris What, Pray, Is the Heart? August 1, 2024 / “In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer did not really have a word for the human body. Not as a whole, only as an assembly of various limbs—and especially the ones that are routinely wounded in war. The ‘chest’ was one of those limbs, and abou...

Elizabeth Boleman-Herring: Sometime in the 1980s, abandoning any sense of decorum (and I don’t retain much), and yet true to the brashness of my American upbringing, I drove down to The Mani to try to meet Patrick Leigh Fermor, the Ur Scribe of my little philhellenic universe. Only twice in my life have I reached out, so impetuously, to a mentor. I wrote to Anaïs Nin (who kindly wrote back, and wrote back) but I simply showed up at Leigh Fermor’s door.
His formidable housekeeper—an imposing Maniate woman whom I later learned was the aunt of my equally formidable young attorney in Athens, Epamenondas Lekeas—was sharpening a knife on a large, spinning whetstone just at the gate. Like something out of The Sun Also Rises, this unsmiling woman blocked my access and, still sharpening her knife, told me that Mr. Leigh Fermor did not receive the uninvited. (“Well, then he shouldn’t go and write such blisteringly seductive prose!” I felt like telling her.) Instead, I asked if she would hand-deliver a note to her master. I would write one and then leave.
So, I stood by my car and, on the cooling hood, wrote the sort of letter one just doesn’t write to one’s very-British-mentor-of-another-generation-and-social-class-entirely. How could I not? Our time together, vertical on this parched or green little planet is so fleeting. Write all the letters of unabashed admiration and love you can, is what I say.
It was a long letter, on lined legal paper and, while I wrote, the knife-sharpener observed me closely. She had seen my type before, I was sure, and come to her conclusions. I handed her the missive, not getting too close to her, and then she made that sweeping little Greek hand movement which means, “I’m going, but you stay here; right here.” I did. She was gone a good while but, when she returned, she opened the door wide to me and, smiling mysteriously, ushered me into the dark palace of a man I had been reading all my life—dictionary and atlas and ancient and modern histories at the ready—but never dared hope to meet.

Read my essay on Leigh Fermor, on "Hubris," here: https://weeklyhubris.com/on-the-road-again/
(Photo of Leigh Fermor and Boleman-Herring, 1980s, by Emil Moriannides.)

Elizabeth Boleman-Herring: Jonathan Raban, another gifted traveler, has addressed himself to why travel books and travelers who write are of such abiding interest. He might have been speaking of Leigh Fermor: “He is a creature of accident and coincidence, committed by his journey to a life of chances muffed and chances seized. He is temperamentally volatile: a friendly hotelier or a break in the weather can make his spirits soar. This traveler-hero, or traveler-fool, has an important place in our contemporary mythology . . . . He confirms our apprehensions about the strangeness of the world, its unlimited capacity to present itself to us as a foreign land. Seductively, stylishly, he glamorizes what for most people is a source only of anxiety and discomfort—the mobile, glancing, dislocated quality of life in this century.”
All true. But polymath Leigh Fermor is no traveler-fool. What he knew at 19 of languages, history and the fine art of listening, his readers may never master.
You long to have accompanied him. Through the candle- and moon-lit streets of Esztergom, the stork-shadowed Hungarian foothills; across the Alfold astride Malek, “a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail”; into the fray of a bicycle-polo chukka with Count Jozsi; and out of time as we know it in the mesmerizing eddies of conversation about history, politics, antiquity, Transylvania.
You long to accompany him, and you do, wandering through a life, an era, a place that has ceased to exist. Snuffed out. The glasses touch, Angéla lifts her white arms, the storks take wing, and the scene darkens: “Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness.”
But Ishmael escapes with his knowledge.

Read my Aug/Sept essay in "Hubris" here: https://weeklyhubris.com/on-the-road-again/

“These impromptu portraits offer glimpses into the everyday activities of people of all ages, living in all the many cultures I have stepped into over the years. We are all unique and beautiful beings who embody and express the essence of our shared humanity, and my wish for the world is that we all embrace each other fully on all levels, appreciating how we make each other whole.”—Chiara-Sophia Coyle

Caption: Surviving the sand. Burning Man Festival. (Photo: Chiara-Sophia Coyle.) See the rest of Coyle's portfolio here: https://weeklyhubris.com/impromptu-portraits-shared-humanity/

Ted Jouflas: “I certainly don’t Google my name hoping to discover a buzz. That idea makes about as much sense to me as sitting down to a family dinner at 16 while peaking on a hit of Windowpane. This might be OK if you’re fairly immune to peer pressure, or if you simply must be certain that your sister really is a hybrid creature, part Bunny Rabbit, part Mariana Fruit Bat. Her sniffling nose twitching, eyes rolled back in her head as she hangs upside down from the dining room chandelier sucking the marrow from a chicken’s broken leg bone. Otherwise, just drop it and forget that I ever brought the idea up.”

Read Jouflas's latest essay, "The Less I Do, The Better I Get," on "Hubris," here: https://weeklyhubris.com/the-less-i-do-the-better-i-get/

Kathryn E. Livingston: “The summer we fell in love, which was the summer of ‘72, we were both home in Schenectady, New York on break from our respective colleges, Kirkland and the Manhattan School of Music. Mitch had strolled into a bar one night with a pal and I was sitting with my best friend, having a beer. Mitch (with whom I’d had a brief flirtation in high school) sat down next to me and asked if he could call me. I said OK, privately lamenting the fact that I hadn’t worn my contact lenses that night and looked like hell. I did have on a cute red bandana halter top and white painter pants, which were in vogue that summer. Probably a bit of cleavage showed.”

Read Livingston's latest "Hubris" essay here: https://weeklyhubris.com/looking-for-lattes/

The Poetry of John Pursley III – Hubris Hubris The Poetry of John Pursley III August 1, 2024 / “He went to the kitchen for water, for air, for the screws that tightened in his chest, & when he returned it was if she had diminished to a viceroy of herself, nothing he could do now, nothing to be said to set things right, nothing rational,...

Dr. Guy McPherson is an internationally recognized speaker, award-winning scientist, and one of the world’s leading authorities on abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction. He is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for 20 years. His published works include 16 books and hundreds of scholarly articles. Dr. McPherson has been featured on television and radio and in several documentary films. He is a blogger and social critic who co-hosts his own radio show, “Nature Bats Last.” Dr. McPherson speaks to general audiences across the globe, and to scientists, students, educators, and not-for-profit and business leaders who seek their best available options when confronting Earth’s cataclysmic changes.
Read Dr. Guy McPherson, on Climate, on "Hubris" here: https://weeklyhubris.com/contributors/

Anita Sullivan: “In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer did not really have a word for the human body. Not as a whole, only as an assembly of various limbs—and especially the ones that are routinely wounded in war. The ‘chest’ was one of those limbs, and about as close as he came to talking about the heart. Just as today we don’t really utilize a “spiritual” or metaphorical vocabulary for the body the way we do for the heart and the brain, Homer felt no need for, nor had any verbal means to shift back and forth as fluidly as we do between ‘heartbroken,’ and ‘heart attack.’”
The September/October double-issue of "Hubris" is dedicated to longtime Contributor, poet/essayist Anita Sullivan. Read her Archived essay here: https://weeklyhubris.com/what-pray-is-the-heart/

About Us – Hubris About UsWeekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, Elizabeth Boleman-Herring (Photo by Doris Anthanassakis. Photo Augment: René Laanen.) The Publishing-Editor of Hubris (formerly Weekly Hubris) was once upon a time joined by a plethora of international commentators of various stripes, driven by diverse c...

Incompatible With Life: A Memoir of Grave Illness & Great Love – Hubris Hubris Incompatible With Life: A Memoir of Grave Illness & Great Love June 19, 2024 / “Months later, Dr. Naib would tell me about those first moments of our relationship from her perspective. She was sitting in her office when my file appeared in her queue. She read the referral from hepatology an...

Read the essays of climate scientist Dr. Guy McPherson on WeeklyHubris.com. McPherson is an internationally recognized speaker, award-winning scientist, and one of the world’s leading authorities on abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction. He is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for 20 years. His published works include 14 books and hundreds of scholarly articles. Dr. McPherson has been featured on television and radio and in several documentary films. He is a blogger and social critic who co-hosts his own radio show, “Nature Bats Last.” Dr. McPherson speaks to general audiences across the globe, and to scientists, students, educators, and not-for-profit and business leaders who seek their best available options when confronting Earth’s cataclysmic changes. Visit McPherson's Author Page at amazon.com.

Dr. Guy McPherson: “We want it all, and we want it for a very long time, and preferably forever, a concept that our deep-seated faith in technology, our fear of death, and our uniquely American vanity allows us to pursue. While seeking immortality, we want a big house with a well-trimmed lawn, new cars, plenty of grown-up toys, a prestigious job, frequent vacations to exotic (but safe, of course) locales, excellent restaurants along the way, and plenty of people at our disposal to care for the details, such as attending to the house and cars, planning the vacations, and serving the food at our favorite restaurants. Is that not what the pursuit of happiness, which is one of our inalienable rights, is all about?”
Read Dr. McPherson's essay at: https://weeklyhubris.com/the-american-dream-in-context/

The American Dream (in Context) “We want it all, and we want it for a very long time, and preferably forever, a concept that our deep-seated faith in technology, our fear of death, and our uniquely American vanity allows us to pursue. While seeking immortality, we want a big house with a well-trimmed lawn, new cars, plenty of gr...

Weekly Hubris updated their business hours.

Read Helen Noakes' latest column on WeeklyHubris.com: https://weeklyhubris.com/the-way-forward-2/
"I confess to having lived at the borderline of terror for the last four years—terror, confusion, and incredulity. My suspicion that I was not alone in occupying this bleak and ominous no-man’s-land was confirmed by the reaction to the Biden/Harris ticket emerging victorious in our election. I danced with the thousands who celebrated the end of a reign of terror, not in the streets, as much as I would have liked to, but in front of my television, cheering and weeping at the same time.
"In spite of my joy, there was a lingering tug of dread at what an unstable sociopath would do to lash out against the victors and, by extension, against the American people who braved every obstacle he and his henchmen deployed to keep them from exercising their constitutional right to vote."

“But such hasty assumptions would ruin an ancient double-monster analogy/of particularly delicate dreadfulness, the current manifestation of which/ we recognize to be—just lately—infiltrating this and/ other trainyards each night/but do not call out its common name while we endure through sleep.”—Anita Sullivan

Analogue: When Myth & Reality Really Do Conflate “But such hasty assumptions would ruin an ancient double-monster analogy/of particularly delicate dreadfulness, the current manifestation of which/ we recognize to be—just lately—infiltrating this and/ other trainyards each night/but do not call out its common name while we endure through slee...

About the artist featured on WeeklyHubris.com's December 2020 Home Page: British sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy OBE, who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings, lives and works in Scotland and is generally considered the founder of modern rock balancing. The materials used in Goldsworthy’s art often include brightly colored flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He says, “I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.” For his ephemeral works, the artist often uses only his bare hands, teeth, and found tools to prepare and arrange the materials. Goldsworthy is the subject of a 2001 documentary feature film titled Rivers and Tides, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. In 2018, Riedelsheimer released a second documentary on Goldsworthy, Leaning Into the Wind. Born in Cheshire, England in 1956, Goldsworthy grew up on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. From the age of 13 he worked on farms as a laborer, and has likened the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: “A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it.” (Distilled from Wikipedia.)