Shakespeare’s mothers are often nasty. Lady Capulet ignores, then disowns, poor Juliet. Lady Macbeth would kill her child to gain a throne. Though they grieve (Constance in King John), it is vicious grief (Queen Margaret in Richard III). Sometimes they are terrifying: Volumnia raised Coriolanus to be a tyrant; Tamora encourages her son to commit…
I am about to flip a coin. Can you predict whether it will be heads or tails? You might have gotten it right. (It was heads.) But if so, you were lucky. Whether it would come up heads or tails depends on an assortment of factors that you could not identify before I flipped the…
I With war raging in Ukraine indefinitely and instability flourishing in the Middle East and trade wars overwhelming our relations around the globe — and more generally with American leadership in the world deafeningly absent — the world appears to have been so completely transformed by Donald Trump’s foreign policy that precedents may seem irrelevant…
When, later, our adventure has bogged down, or umbrella’s to an end, and mountains & lakes if any are the friends — and that reminds me of a story — and so does ‘if’ — Einstein — who personal’ never caught my fancy — he took my umbrella once, — or I took his —…
Yes. That is so. I found she hated then (or even didn’t) her father who left when she was a toddle of three. She hated her mother (I couldn’t like her either) and felt only a fully justified contempt for her one brother. Which into waded: me. Ran on her a morning en route to…
Waiting. Just waiting, in wet heat. A little more whiskey please. Turn the fan up. The amenities. No food yet, thank you. I’ll feel better later. It’s too hot to read. I think: do I have everything I need, stomach & mouth? A little more whiskey, please. In this terrible state I hope I’m paying…
Grim Pilgrims gather: ‘Thanks.’ I give thanks too, as the last leaves fly, that he did not live on but yellow & skin-thin & grinning ceased. True that his harvest due only was beginning, that no sun distracted his widow in her calm dismay; but count up then his gain, — Paris unfallen, Hiroshima tall, …
I have not lived among famous people. My comrades were lovely men and women rarely celebrated or even mentioned in the mass or mainstream media. But I did meet briefly with people like those described below. If they were called back from the dead, they probably wouldn’t remember the meeting, but it is still vivid…
The preface to the first volume of Capital ends with a motto about intellectual autonomy, or rather, about intellectual autonomy and the attitude toward reception that serves it best. Altering a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Karl Marx pledges to live by the words: “Go on your own way, and let the people talk.” He…
Marx was a great ape: he could do Goethe, he could do the Bible, he could do capitalists as well as workers, he could certainly do Hegel — better, he thought, than the legions of Hegel’s other apes. In a sense, he was, at any one moment, Marx-Goethe or Marx-Hegel or Marx-Ricardo. It is true,…
Everybody knows I have them. My problems were bad then. I have value now. I actually love chugging green juice. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is the name of the holy game. They give me homework over there. They put ice in my hands. They take the sunglasses off my face. Yeah, I miss being a terror….
She was looking like trapped meat. I’m talking about the pretentious freak of nature stuck in her mother’s washing machine down the street. It was yesterday afternoon. I’d dropped by to return borrowed eggs. I heard screaming, begging, laughter. We used to play house. I was eleven. She was ten. I was a bank teller….
