Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

Ischia is Burning book cover, topographic map design with crimson title and CLASSIFIED stamp

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102 Degrees in the Sun

Do you believe in Global Warming yet?  We here on the East Coast got that religion yesterday as thermometers slammed in at 102 degrees and we tried to drown our sorrows in bottles of water.  Today offers the same boiling forecast.

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Pricking the Heene Hoax

The Heene Balloon Boy Hoax has gone on long enough to demonstrate nobody really tells the truth any longer when pressed for a confession of fact; and the experience confirms the mainstream media will swallow any hollow story plowing fallow ground as long as it flies and implies some sort of innocent death.  

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What Have We Recovered?

Learning is about recovering.  We are flooded with information and we struggled to analyze the important bits and store them in memory. Then, when the most precious moment arrives, we recover those precocious stored bits to save us from ourselves.  On
the awful anniversary of 9/11, we now must begin to ask — “What have
we recovered?” — in the steaming, soulless pit that used to be the
World Trade Center.

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Scarification as Body Art

Would you purposefully burn or cut your skin to create “body art” out of the scar your self-mutilation leaves behind after your body heals?  This process of “scarification” is gaining momentum on college campuses and we are left to wonder why.  Do you find the scarred design on the breasts below appealing or appalling?  WARNING:  The third image in this article is brutal, bloody, and not safe for upset stomachs.  Continue reading at your own risk.

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The Integrity of the Provenance of Ideas: Archimedes and His Burning Mirror

In this fine illustration of Archimedes and his Burning Mirror by Giulio Parigi (1599), we have a perfect and clear example of how plagiarism operates — and no one escapes this theft of the provenance of ideas able-bodied and unscorched:  The sun is the original source, the mirror is the plagiarizer and the burning ship is the aftereffect of the illicit deed after a burning exposure.

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Loving Electricity as Jersey City Melts

Jersey City is melting!

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Please Burn an American Flag

Hillary Rodham Clinton has agreed to co-sponsor a bill by Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett that would make it illegal for anyone to intimidate any other person by burning the flag, to burn someone else’s flag or to desecrate the flag on federal property. At the same time, however, Clinton continues to oppose efforts to amend the Constitution to prohibit flag burning.

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Jersey City Burning

Yesterday, Jersey City was aglow in hellfire. Three separate fires were simultaneously burning on the morning of August 8. All 135 Jersey City firefighters on duty were working the fires and 70 firefighters from neighboring areas like North Hudson Fire and Rescue, Hoboken, Secaucus, Newark, Nutley and Harrison joined the fight. 14 firefighters were injured at the fire on our block alone.

Jersey City Fire Department

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