(I'm not sure who would actually want to read most of these. It's just nice to have a backup for them somewhere. Do me a favor - unless one sounds fascinating to you, why don't you spend the time you would waste on reading these by emailing me instead. I like emails.)
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Satires
(And other derivative or derogatory stuff)
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A Requiem Mass for Twenty-First Century America
(A sarcastic, post-9/11, modern-day take on the Latin requiem mass.)
Dante's Infernal Punishments As They Apply to Musicians
(Hmm, I don't know if non-classical musicians will get some of the humor, but whatever. The name says it all.)
Modest Proportions - After Jonathan Swift's "a Modest Proposal"
(Applies the same bitter sarcasm of Jonathan Swift's essay - though not as well, of course - to the American dream of eating tons of fast food and still fitting into tight, expensive Gap jeans. May be considered highly offensive in content.)
An Angry God? - How to justify just about anything.
(Rips some of the Old Testament apart. There are some strange and bloody things in there that most people choose to ignore.)
George Machiavelli Bush (Inverting the Dubya)
(Written as W. Bush was preparing for war on Iraq. Compares his attempts to seize the reigns of government with the writings of Machiavelli. Difference is, Machiavelli wasn't quite entirely evil.)
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Personal / Autobiographical
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Five People and a Dog on the Rachel C
(Little autobiographical account of my family's month-long trip from Iowa to Maine on a boat we built ourselves.)
Clarinet and the Science of Creative Intelligence
(SCI is a philosophy based in ancient Hindu thought. It is a science of consciousness, in which the parts of knowledge are always connected to the whole. Here I illustrate some basic principles as they apply to my clarinet playing and my recovery from a musicians' injury.)
Independence
(Very short little manifesto about hands-on learning and the value of a homeschool education. Originally a school application essay.)
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Chunkier Essays
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Determinism and Free Will - A Dialectical Inquiry
(As the name indicates - run away! A confused and therefore very confusing attempt at solving what I think is one of the biggest philosophical paradoxes of all time - How can there be "free will" in a universe run by consistent natural laws? Maybe some day I'll write a less confusing/confused version.)
the Good Lives of Socrates and Qoheleth
(Socrates argued for truth - and died for it. Qoheleth wrote Ecclesiastes, which asks, essentially, what use is philosophy when we are all going to die anyway. But other than that, they were pretty similar.)
Romantic Poetry and the Golden Rule
(Appreciation of three great poets: Coleridge, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Shows how they all illustrate the Golden Rule.)
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Smaller Essays
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Nietzsche Is Dead Too
(Compares Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and C.S. Lewis. Apparently, you don't have to be an unemotional, egotistical atheist in order to think for yourself. Who'd have thought it?)
Beowulf: Heathen or Christian?
(Beowulf has an interesting slant since it is written about a hero from before Christian times but was written by a Christian, for Christians.)
Female Representation in the Fairy Tales
(Feminists take heart. The Brothers Grimm were harder on us males, apparently.)
Odyssey Response Paper: Morals in the ancient world
(The ancient Greeks had a pretty different idea of what a hero was. Morality kinda didn't figure into the picture back then.)
On Christine de Pizan's Tactics of Persuasion
(Christine de Pizan was a brilliant writer and one of the earliest feminists. Just appreciating some of her genius here. For more homage to her, see my "On the Need For a New City" once I post it in stories.)
On Principle
(Euripides' play Medea - yet another mark on my growing list of reasons to be suspicious of absolutes. Medea holds a double standard against herself and succeeds in making everyones' lives worse. The quote is from my favorite play. It's not at all like Medea. See it. Love it. You will.)
Who is afraid of Socrates?
(Why did Aristophanes rip on Socrates so much? What did the poor guy do to deserve mockery, hatred, and eventual execution? He told the truth.)
The Things We See - Wordsworth's poems in light of present-day America
(William Wordsworth describes a natural world of surpassing beauty - one which people see less of every year. What will this do to our culture?)
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All writing on this site is the original work of
Albert Andreas Stimson and may not be
duplicated without permission.