There was a pounding in my dream. Could it be the surging chant of the Crystals’ killer line, “And then he kissed me”? It seemed to me I was about to have the wild gaze and wilder hair of Natalie Wood or Harpo Marx descend on me. But as I awoke I realized that the…
“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard famously proclaimed. He was right about purity but wrong to aspire to it. It is a common mistake, made all the more familiar to ordinary people because it is a quality that heroes and fanatics, the characters who spice religious liturgies, history books, novels, poetry, and…
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. DEREK MAHON In foreign policy, the remedial efforts of the new administration, the post-Caligula administration may come down to this: the position of the United States in the…
I Duly acknowledging that the plural of anecdote is not data, I begin with some stories drawn from the recent history of liberal democracy. • In November 2010, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution removed an edited version of footage used in David Wojnarowicz’s short silent film A Fire in My Belly from “Hide/Seek: Difference…
The major political phenomenon of the past decade has been a popular revolt against the economic arrangements that took form at the end of the twentieth century. The revolt is global. It takes both left- and right-wing forms, and often presents itself as overtly anti-immigrant or otherwise ethnonationalist, but the undercurrent of deep economic dissatisfaction…
Interpretation? Some musicians have little patience for this word, while on the other side there is a recent surge of musicologists who strive to do it justice by elucidating its essence, its development, and its historical peculiarities. After a lengthy period of purely structural reasoning about musical works, topics such as psychology, character, and atmosphere…
I Overnight mass conversions to the cause of African American rights are a rare phenomenon in America, and, even so, a recurrent phenomenon, and ultimately a world-changing phenomenon. The classic instance took place in 1854 in Boston. An escaped slave from Virginia named Anthony Burns was arrested and held by United States marshals, who prepared…
It is a warm winter mid-afternoon. We must understand what happened is happening. The colossus stands before us with its signature pre-emptivity. It glints. It illustrates. At my feet the shadow of the winter-dead bushes wave their windburnt stalks. Their leaves cast gem-cut ex- foliations on the patio-stone—bushfulls of shadow blossoming—& different-sized heads—& in them…
amputation. Above the knee. You r so cold. Winter light moves up your neck to yr lips. For the duration of this song to u mother the cold light moves from yr lips to yr new permanently shut eyes. You can’t rave any more, slapping fury over the countdown of minutes, u can’t force yr…
When the mighty men came back from faraway places, they were strangers in their own homes. They were catered to and kept in the dark. At some point the fathers had to be brought in, implicated if you will, in the deeds of their sons and their daughters, but until that day dawned, until a…
Earl Warren’s retirement in June 1969 ended his run as Chief Justice of the most progressive Supreme Court in American history. Richard Nixon appointed Warren Burger to replace Warren, and Republican presidents selected the next five Justices over the seventeen years that Burger presided as Chief Justice. And yet the Burger Court, while tacking a…
In the summer of 2020, otherwise a time of maximum disunity in the United States amid intersectional upris-ings, rioting, and widespread institutional deliquescence, a rock-like national consensus emerged from the political waves: Americans from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to Donald Trump, who vehemently disagreed on everything else, fully agreed that it was urgent to…
