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Recent Articles

• The Perils of Political Ambivalence
  November 10, 2024
  America reels after Trump’s shocking election. What does it mean and what will the future bring?, people ask. Half the people say: “It’s the end of the world! This will be Hell on Earth!” And the other half say: “This is a glorious beginning. Soon we’ll have Heaven on Earth.” I don’t believe either one. What to do? [Read more]
• One Human Minute, or the Futuristic Essays of Stanislaw Lem
  November 7, 2024
  I enjoyed One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem, but not excessively.  It’s written in Polish, translated into English, with just a slightly halting gait as a result.  And although the book is chock full of intriguing ideas, so is it with $5 words and concepts, making it a bit of a slog at times.  That said, it’s a thought provoking little book and not unreadable. [Read more]
• DeLillo’s Great Jones Street Then and Now
  October 29, 2024
  When I opened up Great Jones Street, the 1973 novel by then barely known Don DeLillo, my first thought was, “This is going to be dated.” Naturally I was wrong.  Suffused with the gritty, absurdist ethos and aesthetics of punk rock combined with a noir-esque approach to dialogue and story development, DeLillo feels ahead of his time, not behind, and in a strange way, almost timeless.  The novel is the story of a rock star named Bucky Wunderlick, who one day walks out of his life as an international phenom and goes to live in a grubby apartment on Great Jones Street⁠1 in the East Village of New York City.  The reasons for this dereliction of duty are vague at first, but it seems to have something to do with fame. “Fame requires every kind of excess,”  Wunderlick tells us in the opening sentence.   [Read more]
• Unscheduled Bliss
  August 19, 2024
  I had just gotten dressed and was preparing to go downstairs for toast and coffee when the power went out.  [Read more]
• Memos to Self
  July 25, 2024
  Recently, I cleared out my pockets for pieces of paper scribbled on by me, and sorted through them with the intention of removing intellectual clutter from my life.  What was so important, I wondered, about these thoughts, that I wrote them down and carried them around, possibly for weeks, even after I could no longer remember what any of them were.  So I pulled them out and read them — a mixed bag of random pensées*, of no particular importance except perhaps to record what I was thinking about in the month of June 2024.   [Read more]