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“We have come to give you metaphors for poetry,” said Yeats’s ghost
“From that moment the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” (Seamus...
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Tony Hoagland is Terry Zwigoff’s Enid Coleslaw
For a little while—and probably not for too much longer—I’ve been staying again in Hyde Park, where I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and last week I was lucky enough to hear Claudia...
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Ron Silliman and the Amina hoax
Poet-theorist-blogger Ron Silliman hasn’t weighed in yet on the Amina Arraf hoax, where a white heterosexual male from the United States pretended to be a lesbian Arab woman from Syria. Or has he?...
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Coined sovereignty, brought justice, promised joy
“Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this...
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Open secrets and bad feelings: Armistice Day, three days late, from the pansy...
♦♦♦ ♦♦♦ Here are two tweets: the first by an online spokesperson for an organization whose avatar shows a world of secrets brightly oozing into view (or maybe it’s the organization’s worldly...
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A map of the country
“So we heard the proposition last night, ‘We need to dismantle the United States.’ This sounds kind of preposterous and silly to most people but the question is, ‘Why? Why does it sound so absurd to...
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There never was a time
“But perhaps it is a misnomer to label this a progressive or liberal movement at all.”—Stephan Jenkins, lead singer of Third Eye Blind, in the Huffington Post I really enjoyed The New Inquiry‘s recent...
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Homonationalism’s Christmas effects
[Transcript: Rick Perry strolls down a green forest path, to loud faux-Copland music, and says: "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian. But you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know...
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Worlds and their subjects supposed to feel, or not
This post isn’t really about Christopher Hitchens either, or not entirely. On the recent wave of encomia to Hitchens and their necessary erasures—and the felt need to dissent from a kind of miniature...
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After Space Invaders
Like many others, I was both taken aback and intrigued by Mark O’Connell’s essay on Invasion of the Space Invaders, Martin Amis’s disavowed 1982 guide to early arcade games. But I seem to be drawn to...
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Ghosts are real: Nevada
I’m a little hesitant to write too much about Imogen Binnie’s debut novel Nevada, published this month by the wonderful transgender-focused Topside Press—partly because the experience of reading an...
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The watch: some notes on recent film
“Don’t use movie stills to illustrate your review,” suggested Jamelle Bouie, before anything else, in a piece for Slate in September titled “A Few Helpful Rules for Reviewing Books About Slavery.” He...
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“Turn the camera”: On fascism, racism, and Donald Trump
I have a long story about my decision to interrupt a Donald Trump rally and its aftermath. The story touches on upsetting subjects and contains details of emotional distress I’ve experienced in the...
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Two kinds of evidence
Because The X-Files is returning this month and I’m not sure how I feel about that, I’ve been remembering how, last September, just after Kim Davis had been imprisoned in Kentucky for refusing to issue...
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Therese, Arthur, Curt, Carol, Brian, Tommy and Shannon
The first heavy news I got late on January 10th was that Todd Haynes’s Carol hadn’t won any Golden Globes. I felt this from the start as a frivolous sorrow, because I hadn’t expected to feel anything...
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Summer, flags, unsettling John Brown
“A great unrest was on the land. It was not merely moral leadership from above—it was the push of mental and physical pain from beneath;—not simply the cry of the Abolitionist but the upstretching of...
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For the sake of clarity
At the start of my last post from July, I mentioned an old video I had recorded discussing Slavoj Žižek and Chelsea Manning, and I alluded to Žižek’s history of transmisogyny and echoed others in...
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Freedom ’90, ’98, ’16
David Letterman is having a bad night, as a joke but also for real. Meryl Streep has been forced to cancel and he’s built his monologue around her absence. After the commercial break, he can’t let it...
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