This is a small thing, but it happened in a time when we were content to hang on the marvel of moving photography. In 1946, without undue fuss or fraud, the medium could record actual things and say, look, this happened. That’s what we were up for then, the appearance of a changing now. Even…
The vastness and nuance and intelligent, rough beauty of John Dubrow’s paintings, the rhythmic turmoil which roils their cakes of paint, tempts one to conceive of them as natural wonders. How are such things made? These works sometimes put me in mind of the forces of nature that combine to create hurricanes and mountain ranges….
I. On the second night of Passover, in the year of our Lord 5784, a seder was held in the streets of Brooklyn, in Grand Army Plaza, a block away from the residence of Senator Chuck Schumer. The event was called the Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel. It was addressed by a…
Reflecting on Philip Roth in Harper’s not long ago, the journalist Hannah Gold observes that few of the novelists she read during her high school years “captured my imagination and became my companion throughout adulthood the way Roth did.” It is a moist confession familiar to writers who recall clinging to Little Women in faraway…
To run out of memory, in the language of computing, is to have too much of it and also not enough. Such is our current situation: we once again find ourselves in a crisis of memory, this time marked not by dearth but by surplus. Simply put, we are running out of space. There is…
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…
