January 2016

Peter Caputo’s oneiric imagination divines prose poems capable of warding off the curse of having gazed upon too many shattered mirrors, broken lines.

A School for Fools is a Soviet underground classic of the 1970s, circulating only in samizdat, or self-published literature.

You might think that loneliness is a contingent state: people feel lonely for a time or lonely in a place, and some people are constitutionally lonely, but most people are not lonely all the time and human life is not necessarily lonely.

I have a childhood friend who is just a tiny bit younger than me but always so much younger, her skin never showing her age, her cheek marked with a birthmark so Hawthornian it seemed impossible ever to finish looking at her.

Again a little further away, in the small, unincorporated community of Joshua Tree, Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum is another alternative desert site. This one was born, however, not so much out of a pseudo-spiritual longing, but from the desire of an artist for an environment to realise his vision.

Social media’s advent was supposed to do away with central broadcast towers, but it hasn’t really turned out that way. Instead mass media companies distribute their products through the platforms and consumers’ role is to boost the signal for them.

Monfort’s project of the “new fiction state” of Balkanland reminded me of the Scientology initiative to found a state in the Balkans under the name of Bulgravia in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Obama begins with a strikingly suggestive insight into Eliot’s literary and religious tradition and his special relation to it: Eliot is one of a line of Protestant visionary and apocalyptic writers from Thomas Münzer (or Müntzer) in the sixteenth century to Yeats in the twentieth.

The Confusion of Tongues, Gustave Doré, 1865 by M. Munro I. Dichtung und Wahrheit Strictly speaking, does not thought—or the act of thinking—always have the capacity for operating like a foreign language? —Rey Chow Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Wittgenstein’s imperative translates, “very roughly,” “Philosophy ought really to...