Is it possible to be a historian of your own life? To see yourself as a figure in the crowd, as a member of a generation who shared the same slice of time? We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see…
In February 2017, Steve Bannon, then senior counselor and chief strategist to President Donald Trump, pledged to a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC; initiates pronounce it “See-Pack”) that the Trump administration would bring about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s choice of the word “deconstruction” raises some possibility that he had…
1 In the middle of August in 1818, some three thousand five hundred Methodists descended on a farm in Washington County, Maryland, for days of prayer and fellowship. Their lush surroundings seemed to quiver in the swelter of a mid-Atlantic summer, to which the believers added the fever of faith. Men and women, white and…
Here goes; and there it went. It might stay gone. What next? Play faster with the quick and dead, with the tightened fist play looser: amplify the beggar in the chooser. Cursed are we who lop the tops off trees to find heat’s name is written in the wood; cursed are we who know…
Genesis, behold your progeny: inventor, behold your inventory: protagonist, behold your agony: window, the wind is in your eye: Capuchin, here’s your cappuccino: tragedy, I’ve got your goat: and here I come O deathless mortgage, O unmanageable manifesto. Ready or not.
Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second chance could actually be happy?” – Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh But then amid the helplessness of Lives and corrugated sewage,…
To me moans came for food, my roars poured forth like drink. – John Berryman, “Job” “So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate and fix me at my birth and make my due my expiration date? Why was I lapped in aprons, and…
Once, there were neither bottled-up fields nor bluebottled breeze; nor trill of pollen, tree nor hill to die on was there there (there, there): not yet our unseated adjustment of dust; no striking star, nor stroke of sun; nor did the moon light, like the grey, scaled nodule nodding off the dead end of a…
1 If nationalism sounds like a dirty word, then Ukrainian nationalism has sounded even worse. In the imaginations of many, it is associated with extreme xenophobic violence. Even those who sympathize with Ukraine are not free from this image. Michael Ignatieff, for example, an eminent Western liberal intellectual, wrote shortly after visiting independent Ukraine: “I…
For Carlos Pagni 1 Too many electoral results are described as earthquakes when in reality they are little more than mild tremors, but the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei’s victory in the second and deciding round of Argentina’s presidential election over Sergio Massa, the sitting minister of the economy in the former Peronist government, who in…
A number of years ago — sometime in the decade between the financial crash and the advent of Covid — I found myself at the hotel bar of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference (in Vancouver? Boston? Chicago?) arguing with a professor about modernism. Or rather, about modernism as a field of current scholarship in…
In the summer after the fall of Afghanistan, I received an invitation to speak at CIA headquarters. I used to work as a paramilitary officer at the Agency and a former colleague of mine attended the discussion. Afterward we went back to his office to catch up over a drink. The two of us had…
