People often said that he finished sentences for me. Well, he did. He was between me and the world. He not only answered the telephone; he finished my sentences.
Read MoreBuddhist monks follow a lot of rules – 253 in one tradition, 200 in another. As the story goes, all of these rules were made by the Buddha himself…
Read MoreI am haunted by an image I first saw many years ago of a ‘cortical homunculus’: a figure of a sort of man, whose bodily parts are variously shrunken…
Read MoreThe audience sat in front of a screen heard ssssssssssssssssss in the darkness. Light flashed. A train appeared on the screen. The train was coming, increasing in size.
Read MorePossibly because the current global political landscape resembles less a plausible point on the universe’s long arc towards justice than the dread outcome of a Koch brothers blood-pact with the Lord of the Flies…
Read MoreFoucault would have wanted ‘very important people of the world’ to refer to the refugees, not himself…
Read MorePanther Hollow hasn’t seen any panthers since the 19th Century. As Oakland increasingly became a cultural waystation …
Read More“A good writer must write in such a way that one infers from the text what he intended to express. That is not easy.” So declared Erich Auerbach…
Read MoreAlthough millennials are most often compared to baby boomers, the generation with which they’re locked in economic and Oedipal struggle…
Read MoreI was carrying a copy of the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar’s Hashpatal Thhekey Lekha Kobitaguchho (Poems Written from Hospital) with me…
Read MoreIt is a time of great unrest in Europe. A large portion of the population is connected by a loose confederation, which threatens to fall apart at any moment. This unstable situation is made worse by false news flooding the continent…
Read MoreGrowing up poor and bored, their childhood was pitiable but also strangely enviable. The anecdotes they recounted to us seemed to be not that bad at all…
Read Moreby D.H. Lawrence Post-mortem effects? But what of Walt Whitman? The ‘good grey poet’. Was he a ghost, with all his physicality? The good grey poet. Post-mortem effects. Ghosts. A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes. DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS…
Read MoreElaine Mokhtefi and her husband had lived on the Upper West Side in New York City for twenty years. When he died in 2015, she brought him a bench in the park on Riverside Drive, where he liked to sit, gazing at the river through a mass of trees.
Read MoreThroughout the developed world, many of the dead find no release from their previous social obligations and work lives…
Read MoreIn conversations with students feeling overwhelmed by their studies, I sometimes use the phrase, ‘remember that studying is part of life, not the other way around.’
Read MoreWe met by accident, the poet and I. There were just the two of us on the trail that evening – him, heading uphill with measured steps, and me tumbling downhill
Read MoreSome time back I took a group of students to the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée at the Jardin des Plantes. This is the famous collection of skeletons laid out according to one version of the order of nature by Georges Cuvier at the turn of the 19th Century.
Read MoreLife experienced narratively, which is to say the only way actual life can be experienced, continually deletes the immediacy of the transitory, but in depicting the specifically of the second within the crystalline moment artists reendow the present with meaning.
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