June 2020
Lilith: On Love, Living and Meritocracy

My father once said, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” It is taken from Love Story, a 1970 movie based on the novel of the same name...
Read MoreSusanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #6

In the current climate of #BlackLivesMatter and the Coronavirus, how to write about bread? Interviewed, on Thursday June 9th, Angela Davis said...
Read MoreAndy and Dom by Alexander McGregor

Prince Andrew and Dominic Cummings would likely not get along. Perhaps they might concord to share some garlic doughballs in Pizza Express...
Read MoreEd Simon: John Donne and Social Isolation

Late in 1623, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London fell ill with fever and had difficulty breathing. At 51 years of age, the poet and priest John Donne...
Read MoreWatching Mister Rogers by Eileen Hunt Botting

Mister Rogers typically kept his distance, but when he did break quarantine he would strike against racism and other prejudice...
Read MoreEli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic III

Constant specter of illness and death, increasing likelihood of unemployment, nail in the coffin of the post-World War II order.
Read MoreJustice for Floyd

Here we go again. Another black person killed by the US police. Another wave of multiracial resistance. Another cycle of race talk on the corporate media.
Read MoreMarian Janssen on Elizabeth Bishop

Thomas Travisano paints a structured, sensitive portrait of Bishop. He is at his best when explaining her work, which he immaculately interweaves with her life.
Read More“Insurrection” and Black Citizens

The very terminology—“black citizen”—was, of course, an oxymoron upon the birth of this very nation...
Read More“Excess Deaths” and British Political Culture

The Financial Times reported today that the UK has the worst death rate from Covid-19 ‘among countries that produce comparable data’...
Read MoreThe Long Civil Rights Movement

This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 is a compelling and exhaustive work that examines the long history of anti-black violence and racism in Kansas...
Read MoreEmile Bojesen and Ansgar Allen: Agamben and Techno-Fascism

Professors who switch to teaching online are the ‘perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime’. So says Giorgio Agamben...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
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