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…
As we know, a musical composition does not by nature have the presence of a picture, a sculpture, a novel, or a movie. It lays dormant in the score and needs to be made audible. It is the performer’s obligation to kiss it awake. “Bring the works to life without violating them,” was Edwin Fischer’s…
Iran today may be best known for two things: one of the most repressive regimes in the world and one of the most remarkable cinemas in the world. The coexistence of the two is a conundrum that perplexes many people. How does a country known for ferocious repression of dissent and artistic freedom produce some…
“Genius and evildoing are two things that do not combine,” Mozart remarks in Mozart and Salieri, Alexander Pushkin’s short play written in 1832. The Mozart of Pushkin’s play is an impure genius. He does not see perfection in himself or seek perfection in others. He has a natural humility and earthiness. On his way to…
Let me explain to you mortals what an instinct is: the end of explanation. Settlements are where your belongings are dropped. Like gravity, there’s nothing under there. None of you go around asking gravity why it exists. Life wants, like gravity wants. * “Unlike the rest of you, I refuse to be governed by…
In theory, anything can be depicted. And what is? What, on the walls and floors and ceilings of theory, is depicted and not? Not in the lover’s light of retribution. Not in the poets’ utilitarian light. In the fat-and-fire-in-a-cup light. Artificial, if that’s what that means: light from other than the foot-wide sun….
Here we are. The baby needs changing. It’s early in a midweek, late summer day. The cool skepticism that blankets us all before the dew drops, before the dawn god rises reluctant from her bed, is a memory now, a feeling faded into thought. Strange hours those, empty of opinion. Strange feeling—so total then,…
How long all this will go on, the circulating blood—hauling, having its way with us, around us, skin-deep presence and us oblivious, blood that stays where it should until it doesn’t— how long its warming, halting, stock-taking, unremitting run between some bloodlike-before and, after, what then,…
