December 2015

Franz Kafka was no stranger to fear and anxiety—his works radiate them. Yet his oeuvre is not simply a catalogue of the terrifying and traumatic situations that can befall humans.

What we need is techne to attempt to approach, but we never will reach, as it were, since becoming is infinite - or eternal if we want to drop that bomb.

The crime of Barruecos, Arturo Michelena, 1895 by Jessica Sequeira The days are at last softening into summer, and your mind does not allow you to read anything heavy. You flip through a book of photographs called Private diary of a nation, which shows page after page of objects and...

On October 16, 1650, the General Court of Boston summoned the town executioner. Like his name, the executioner’s thoughts as he made his way to the marketplace that afternoon, far from the gallows at Boston Common, remain lost to history.

Three factors hold the Facebook phenomenon together. It promises eternal youth. It offers a virtualised version of Christian faith. It allows us to enter the game of life without taking undue risk.

Copyright has been with us two hundred years and more, but the consequent attention to sales numbers has been recently and dramatically intensified by electronic media and the immediate feedback it offers.

Walter Benjamin’s Archive, which has just been published in paperback to mark the 75th anniversary of his untimely death, has left me thinking that Benjamin might just have been a blogger in the making.

Born in 1972 (or, as the back cover of his new book of poems puts it, “during the Nixon administration”), Michael Robbins experienced, growing up, a tremendous run of good luck.

Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power.

I have always been interested in what other foreigners write, imagine, or fantasize about Albania, to offset my own ramblings.

American Aristocracy, Triangle Film Corporation, 1916 by Heather Lang The other world is ours, yours and mine, this hazy kingdom of silent film and forgotten Polaroids. – Gregory Robinson The quiet associations between silent movies and prose poems within Gregory Robinson’s unique book, All Movies Love the Moon, are...

Berfrois, wanton, ye want: Your meddling, Berfrois, is mannerless;

Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us.

Jeff died on November 6, 1993, at the age of 39. On a strangely glistening night several weeks later, I went to his favorite restaurant, Chanterelle, for a private memorial service that somehow, in an unforced way, became a festive celebration of his life.