Albert Cohen died in 1981, hailed in France as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His passing barely registered in the English-speaking world; not even the New York Times ran an obituary, and it is unlikely to correct this particular mistake in its “Overlooked” feature. Cohen was the author of a fictional…
2014 On September 4, 2014, the top brass of the Hellenic Coast Guard held a rare press conference at their Piraeus headquarters. Commodore Yiannis Karageorgopoulos presented a series of slides showing the Aegean and Ionian seas, plus a portion of the east Mediterranean south of Crete, which comprise the Coast Guard’s vast jurisdiction. Against this…
The temple is a latch on the skull where four bones fuse: the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid. In anatomy courses at art academies students study the latch and its quadruple planes with the help of diagrams and gypsum reproductions. Students draw and redraw these models, accustoming themselves to the relations of the shapes which…
The mind operates by means of emphasis, especially the mind in the grip of fear or anger. When it brings order to the welter of experience, the mind sometimes exceeds the requirements of coherence and proceeds to exercises in simplification. Out of our many identities, we select one; out of our many loves, we select…
I have been a college teacher for some of the happiest years of my life. When I tell people what I do for a living, what I really do, I say I teach people to think for themselves. It’s still a wonderful way to make a living, but over time I have begun wondering whether…
In 2014 I was hired, for two consecutive spring semesters, to teach writing and literature at one of the officially happiest colleges in America. The place was located in a beatific, temperate environment, with mountain views and imposing, elegant architecture; extraordinary foliage and trees burst from the very pavement, flowers were everywhere. There were outdoor…
I am standing on the quay in the Polish city of Szczecin. The north wind from the Baltic Sea brings a thick gray drizzle that envelops the buildings and the port cranes, creating a sense of stagnant timelessness. A tugboat on the Oder River, almost hidden by the curtain of rain and turned into a…
The bars long since closed when the shouting begins down the street Open the fucking door and all my old selves leap to their feet sick with adrenaline rushing to the point of convergence where things go bad. With repetitive force the voice assumes a switched-on hydraulic quality a monotony allowing…
They appear out of nowhere as if they know where all the doors are between our dimension and where they are called by their true name, are not the last survivors of their evolutionary niche. Familiarity does not diminish their curiosity, and even the great plain aligned to the grid of monoculture is not monotony,…
I signed the papers, and the world created out of all I have destroyed honestly doesn’t look much different. A grainy whitish wind blows in from Little Poland, and a human form in heavy gear screams unanswerable questions into traffic. Questions, while inadequate to truth, are faithful to sorrow, so fair enough. Inside…
I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow, not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward the poor outcome of a structure neither representational nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, to animate what’s…
Each old thing in its new place must prove its worth yet again. Dust is disturbed, having made itself at home among what former tenants have found wanting. A friend brings a gift to brighten my room then leaves a cruel word to move in with me. Good and bad don’t always line…
