Hello and welcome to the 4th anniversary issue of The Brasilia Review. Yeah, y’know, it’s including excerpts now. Check ’em out. I’m into Nietzsche’s prose style. It’s really like no other. The content of his ideas has insight. I’m talking abstract qualifications. Only at first is it hard to read him divorced from his reputation. Then the prose sucks me in. I have to read his clauses over and over before I grasp the meaning. I put aside the 19th century allusions and stay in the prose. I’ve been doing this when bored in malls on a smart phone.
Here, the reported conversation of the personal meeting between Samuel “man of letters” Johnson and upperclastic George “King” the Third of Great Britain, &c, and the effect the reportage had on an envious guest. James Boswell always wrote of Johnson with charity and admiration, so while it’s true Johnson was against the colonists, we do not know his reasoning beyond that.
Voltaire wrote seriously on Shakespeare and praised him without laying wreaths at this feet. But he saw Shakespeare on a continuum, not a peak. Voltaire saw yes Voltaire there. Really for his and Johnson’s time, he was right.
I present five contemporary writers with pride and admiration. Charley Foster and Matthew James Friday have been regulars of latté, Darren C. Demaree and Darya Tsymbalyuk are welcome newcomers to our dotcom opposite, and Ian C. Smith has returned wearing what he likes best.
Check out cover artist Guy Benjamin Brookshire’s stunning podcast, The Republic of Sin.
–ed.
Fiction
A Red Cloud by Darya Tsymbalyuk
“It is trembling, it can’t find peace”
Non-Fiction
Johnson Meets the King; On the American Revolution by James Boswell
“Johnson answered, that he thought more than he read”
Ascetic Ideals and Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
“when you think you are paying academics a compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds”
On Shakespeare by Voltaire
“the ill-success of Shakspeare’s imitators produces no other effect, than to make him be considered as inimitable”
Poetry
Warm #133 by Darren C. Demaree
“Roll on the lawns”
The Monkey Jive by Charley Foster
“what I’m seeing from normies”
Schöne Name; The Music Played by Matthew James Friday
“It arrives with a resurrected sky”
Interloper by Ian C. Smith
“I walked in coal smoke waft twice a week”