Despair of Wings
Why on earth doesn’t the poor man say the Soul and have done with it? …
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence
Why on earth doesn’t the poor man say the Soul and have done with it? …
In that tower built of skulls you will find my skull as well they cut my head off just to test the sharpness of a sword. When before the sword our beloved cause-and-effect relationship is ruined like a wild lover Do you know that I am with you PERHAT TURSUN, “ELEGY” June 1988 was an…
I was in grade school when the television show Roots, based on Alex Haley’s famous book, first aired. It was a big deal, at least among adults, and my parents insisted that my sister and I watch it. We dutifully sat down in the front the walnut-veneered TV cabinet as my father adjusted the rabbit…
I went to the demonstration against the closure of the Cines Ideal at the Plaza de Jacinto Benavente, and no sooner had it begun than I inopportunely broke wind; it’s been happening more and more these days. But no one around me noticed. I regretted going there, because the crowd was negligible and those who…
I Long before the protests that shook Belarus in the summer and fall of 2020, I was sitting in a restaurant of a Minsk hotel. It was a late afternoon after a day of intense meetings, and I had nothing more planned for the evening. Suddenly a singer came on stage and started a rather…
The deadly mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — exhorted and then cheered on by President Donald J. Trump, with accountability later stonewalled by the Republican Party — was unprecedented in our history, but then again it wasn’t. It is true that never before had a losing presidential candidate, after pounding…
1. The Empire of Flora A tossing garden in a rising wind, an air of expectation. And Claire tutoring me on the landscaping: pagoda plants, crotons, a kind of blue ginger; over there, African lilies, bellwethers of spring. When she points me to liriopes, I expect the terrace to be inhabited by a feminine miniature,…
These bareback races are medieval in the modern sense: a bribe, a ruse, the occasional fall, fracture, and a bullet —but also in the sense of a retrieval of standards and emblems, the use of symbol, allegory, amulet, the team colors you cannot refuse. Tomorrow the terracotta dust will plume for about two minutes taking…
1 A girl puked on the tour bus on the switchback up Vesuvius. Her mother looked the other way —out the window. Where else? Wildflowers, hardy and tender, seemed unaware of the perils of flourishing in cinder. We trudged, as through beach sand, and when we got back on, sand had been shoveled onto the…
Two sounds in the house lately: clanking barbells and electric guitar behind garage and bedroom doors. J.’s mesocosm failed; he flagrantly excused himself on the basis of gender, as the gathering of mud and spores, weeds and worms for “nurturing” is not the métier, apparently, of boys. Dear A., I myself was quite taken with…
A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a…
In 1925, student delegates from twenty colleges met at Wesleyan University to discuss a growing concern on America’s campuses: the poor quality of teaching. They decried dry-as-dust professors who filled up blackboards with irrelevant facts while students doodled, read novels, or dozed off. At larger schools, “section men” — soon to be known as teaching…