The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

Consider, Boethius. He was a descendent of a noble Italian family, a beneficiary of a classical education, and in some ways the last of the Romans.

The poster for the 1936 Mexican film The Macabre Trunk shows a man in dark glasses and fedora, holding up a bloody hand in a menacing gesture, as a pulp dream of a blonde stretches out an arm to stop him.

Used cynically, the word “America” is conceptualised not as that undiscovered country yet to be born on maps yet printed, but rather it is to employ the word as simple superstitious talisman. They take the Lord’s name in vain.

On an Ash Wednesday in 1583 they sat in this dark-wood panelled dining room, tapestries keeping out the chill of late winter even as the cold couldn’t help but enter through the leaded window with its multicoloured glass diamonds.

His New Job, Charlie Chaplin, 1915 by Menachem Feuer He labored long hours, was the soul of honesty – he could not escape his honesty, it was bedrock; to cheat would cause an explosion in him, yet he trusted cheaters – coveted nobody’s nothing and always got poorer. The...

Prince was at the cusp of my unclenching. I’ll never be able to tell the story as long as people are still alive but I won’t tell a cover story either.

The phrase from soup to nuts actually comes from a Latin phrase “from the egg to the apples” (“ab ovo usque ad mala”).

Sometime in the summer of 1987 I walked out to our rural-route mailbox and found my membership card for the Young Socialist Alliance, accompanied by a typewritten letter filled with both practical information as well as elevated rhetoric about the youth being the future.

The terms ‘precarity’ and its derivation, ‘precariat’/precariato gained notoriety after the 2001 Euro May Day parade when a network of casual workers, students, migrants, feminists, LGBT activists

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1490-1510 by Ed Simon For its name literally meaning “No Place,” echoes of Utopia seem to be everywhere. Early autumn and a week before the pope’s visit and I am at the corner of 53rd and 5th, halfway between St. Patrick’s Cathedral...

Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinita, Henry Holiday, 1883 by Menachem Feuer Good on Paper, by Rachel Cantor New York: Melville House, 299 pp. I didn’t love those who could love me, I loved the candle….I here and I there, I companioned perhaps – now! – by the love of...

We are on the verge of becoming the best trained, and least educated, society since the Romans — and reducing the humanities to a type of soft science will only hasten this trend.

Foucault’s Last Decade is a study of Foucault’s work between 1974 and his death in 1984. In 1974, Foucault began writing the first volume of his History of Sexuality, developing work he had already begun to present in his Collège de France lecture courses.

“Either ethics makes no sense at all,” Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.”

Victor Hugo. Portrait by Edmond Bacot, 1862 From Verso Books: There are three kinds of conception of the novelistic. There is what we could call the official lineage, which the academy presents as the history of the French novel, proceeding by way of Stendhal and Flaubert. Here, the novel is...

by Joel Gn Note Book, by Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University Press, 360pp. Reading aphorisms can prove to be an arduous, if not dangerous undertaking. Enigmatic, indifferent and occasionally, a little too precarious, these vignettes adroitly traverse and inhabit a myriad of texts, people and places. We can never be...