Lana Turner Has Collapsed

William Heise | June 11, 2010

Okay, I missed a day. Sorry readers. But I have yesterday’s post today. I’ve been reading Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. Frank was a member of the New York School of poetry. After serving in WWII (the Big One), he availed himself of veteran’s assistance and went to Harvard. [...]

How I Learned to Love the Lyrics I Had Formerly Disdained

William Heise | February 22, 2010

The Music I Grew Up With The music of the 60s and 70s was new and exciting, both to me and to the world. The blues had broken of the backwaters and made it to the center of the world stage. I would listen to the rhythm of the music at punishing volumes, but as [...]

6 Personality Traits to Admire

William Heise | February 11, 2010

Found an article on the Web today entitled 6 Personality Traits to Admire. If you ask me, I have them all in abundance (especially #6), and if you ask them so does every human being on the planet. Maybe that’s why the author makes herself the judge, because people are not particularly good judges of [...]

Why I Write My Blog: A Response to Larry

William Heise | May 22, 2009

Larry, my only regular commenter on this blog, wrote the following comment on yesterday’s post: I remember the Secret Sharer in Mrs. Kelly’s class also, though I was not as enamored of her Jungian psycho-philosophy.  I would say that I distinctly remember her calling it a “night journey” rather than a “sea journey.”  Could be [...]

“The Secret Sharer”; or How I Got Started in My Life As An Intellectual

William Heise | May 20, 2009

Want to hear a funny story? My Life at 17 I got interested in my education at 17 years old. Before that, I had managed to drift through school without really studying very much. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in my education. I wasn’t interested in my formal education. It was that there are [...]

Art and Andy: Part I

William Heise | May 12, 2009

“Rose Marie” Here is Slim Whitman’s version of Rose Marie: And here is Andy Kaufman’s version of the same song. If you find this on YouTube, you’ll find that Andy Kaufman’s version of the song has 175,000 views versus 19,000 views for the Slim Whitman version. What’s the difference? Andy Kaufman’s version is a pitch-perfect [...]

Art and Andy: Part II

William Heise | May 12, 2009

[This essay is a continuation of a previous article.] The Legacy of the Sentiment Such an intellectual appreciation of art goes further back even than Duchamp. It has its modern roots in the rejection of science as a guide towards art. René Descartes had managed—for the first time, according to René Descartes—to found our human [...]

Yeat’s “Second Coming”

William Heise | April 24, 2009

Yeat’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

William Heise | April 24, 2009

More amazing technology. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping [...]

My Dinner with André

William Heise | April 22, 2009

What I Was Watching in 1983 I had dropped out of college in 1981, feeling that if I was not going to get a well-rounded education in college that I would pursue it outside. Two years later, I was still confident that my future would yield answers to questions that had been raised for me [...]