Going home means anywhere but here, putting aside worn grays for the bright amber of a fall morning. No more counting days in the clack and steam of laundry. With the hush of brakes a Greyhound bus glides beneath the trees and past a shuttered smelter. Grisaille shadows. Chains of geese. A swath of sheepish…
after Guiraut Riquier It’s for the best that I stop singing. Songs should come from happiness, and lately I’ve felt less and less inspired, with my horizon shrinking. When I recall my darkest days and contemplate a world ablaze and dread extinctions of tomorrow, who could wonder at my sorrow? My fire dwindled long ago….
They slip away, those creatures who once caught my eye and ventured near, near enough to smell of snow as cold lingered in their fur and breath warmed my sleeping ear; who ate an apple from my hand and lounged in sunlight, unconstrained. Such old affections slip away, all but one, la douce dolor: she…
Thirty-five minutes into the movie The Piano Teacher, there occurs an indelible scene. In a dim bathroom cluttered with drugstore label sprays, lotions, and other feeble concoctions designed to fend off decay, a middle-aged woman in a silk robe briskly zips open her pocketbook and removes a folded slip of paper, which she unfolds to…
It is a dreary world, gentlemen. GOGOL The most consequential event of our time, I pray, will be the heroism of the Ukrainians. Here are men and women fighting and dying for liberal democracy. It was beginning to seem as if such a thing were no longer possible. Worse, no longer desirable. Here in the…
The king was pregnant. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness It turns out the supply-side cheerleader George Gilder was more correct than not when he forecast, in the poignantly titled Sexual Suicide in 1973, that women playing at being men would spell the collapse of Western civilization and probably the social order…
Science is a creative endeavor that requires the free and open exchange of ideas to thrive. Society has benefited immensely from scientific progress, and in order for science to continue to better the lives of individuals and nations scientific work must be evaluated on the basis of scientific merit alone. Over the past decade, however,…
I How do you read? In posing this question, I have in mind the Surrealists’ question of 1919: “Why do you write?” But this time around the question is about reading. Weren’t the Surrealists also great readers? In André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, didn’t he turn his readings of Lautréamont, Roussel, Arthur Cravan, Leonora…
I The South China Sea, fabled and contested, stretches from the Taiwan Strait south to the Java Sea and the Singapore Strait, where the Horsburgh lighthouse, an active relic of Asia’s violent encounter with Europe, now keeps watch over the world’s most crucial chokepoint. North of Singapore, the sea is bounded to the east by…
We arrived at our goal in the dark, via the Avus. The green eye of the Radio Tower winking, as we saw the city sprawled below us. The broad streets radiated inwards reaching towards a center, monsters’ fingers, from the days of silent film, closing round a throat. The journey passed by ditches, new building…
I picked roses on the Wannsee and don’t know who to give them to. Jakob van Hoddi We left the city on muddy paths along the riverbank. Bare trees dogged us unseen like shadows in the icy water, the grey cross hatching. We brushed past blackthorn, breaking off alder branches with our shoulders. We…
The cold glint of gold in the winter sun. The monuments no longer blaze like back in the day, the barrels of anti-aircraft guns, clumsy tanks. The old capital of terror turns over in its sleep, shifts from one side to the other: East-West. A great listening ear hovers in the air above the Tiergarten…
