William I. Lengeman III - Freelance Writer

Essay - Standing on the Corner Studying Rules of Verse

Standing on the Corner Studying Rules of Verse: A Visit With Sweet Jane on the Occasion of Her 37th Birthday
by William I. Lengeman III
Crawdaddy!

So I thought I would explain to you how to make a career out of three chords. -Lou Reed

Like many people who came of age in the ‘70s, my first exposure to Lou Reed's music was by way of the perversions and doo-da-dooing colored girls that populated the sleazy world of “Walk on the Wild Side.” I was 10-years-old when the song first hit the airwaves and was more concerned with the likes of the Partridge Family than with the harder stuff. At the time, Lou Reed didn't make much of an impression.

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Essay - Watching Big Brother

Watching Big Brother
by William I. Lengeman III
(previously unpublished)

George Orwell may still be vindicated, but let's hope that he's not. Those of us who remember 1984 may recall that the year came and went and things didn't much resemble the fictional world of Orwell's seminal novel of a nightmarish totalitarian future.

Essay - Beam Him Up, Scotty!

Beam Him Up, Scotty!
Cosmos Online

I can't shake the feeling that Shatner has let the team down. That's team as in humankind, and Shatner - well, you know who he is.

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Essay - The Child Prodigy In Few Of Us

The Child Prodigy In Few Of Us
Christian Science Monitor

Nowadays it's probably not acceptable to imply that children be seen and not heard. Nor would it be considered proper to suggest that child prodigies be given neither consideration. Maybe I'm alone in feeling this way, though some five centuries ago Erasmus remarked that "everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders."

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Essay - In Praise Of Peanut Butter

In Praise Of Peanut Butter
Saveur

If intimate familiarity with a foodstuff qualifies one to expound on its merits, then I’m surely the world’s leading authority on peanut butter. I’d guess that I eat my body weight of it, roughly 150 jars’ worth, every year. The 18th-century French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once famously wrote, ''Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.'' If that’s true, then I’m probably a large bipedal lump of aromatic, light brown goo.

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Essay - The Agony and Ecstasy of Tea

The Agony and Ecstasy of Tea
The Gilded Fork

People who tend to wax a bit on the overly lyrical side about the pleasures of drinking tea sometimes talk about “the agony of the leaves.” This refers to those moments just after you've poured boiling water on your tea leaves (can't do this one with tea bags, friends) and they've begun to unfurl and contort in what some have supposed to be like the contortions of one in great pain. Well, maybe so and maybe not.

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Essay - Confessions of a Reluctant Yerba Mate Drinker

Confessions of a Reluctant Yerba Mate Drinker
Epicurean.com

My first encounter with yerba mate was a less than auspicious one. In fact, if you'd told me then that one day I'd be drinking copious amounts of the stuff I surely would have scoffed.

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Essay - The Myth of Progress

The Myth of Progress
Humanist

"Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the veriform appendix, and God." --H. L. Mencken

Throughout much of 1995 we were bombarded with a hailstorm of news reports clueing us in to what a wonderful thing progress is. High technology, most notably in the form of the Internet, is poised to usher us into a brave new twenty-first-century world of wondrous global interconnectedness. Or at least that's the impression given by all of the breathless accounts touting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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Essay - Have Rocket, Will Travel

Have Rocket, Will Travel: SF Cinema, Stooges Style
by William I. Lengeman III
Internet Review of Science Fiction

The year 1959 more or less marked the end of not one, but two eras, and the beginning of another. The Fifties were a fruitful decade for the genre of science fiction film. Among the high points were The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, and big-budget adaptations of Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth) and H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds), to name just a few of the more notable cinematic works of SF that graced the decade.

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Essay - Plumbing The Depths of Science Fiction TV

Plumbing The Depths of Science Fiction TV: The Time Tunnel
by William I. Lengeman III
Internet Review of Science Fiction

Taking potshots at a science fiction television show that first aired almost four decades ago is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Taken as a whole, science fiction television has never measured up to the average standard of science fiction cinema which, in turn, has never quite measured up to the average standard set by science fiction literature. Of course, the key word here is “average” and yes, there are certainly exceptions aplenty to this rule, so please hold your cards and letters.

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