The commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7 has been an exhibition of hollow and disgraceful rhetoric, which probes neither the causes and circumstances of the murder of… Read More

 The Netanyahu government seems determined to make Israel a major power or destroy it. It is a crazy ambition. And a logical one. Every ethnostate goes irredentist - following a… Read More

 I’m a sentimental mook. When a writer dies, I often read something of theirs as a form of commemoration – a remembering together with the d… Read More

 The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonat… Read More

 Yesterday I was boiling water for oatmeal. As I poured a cup of oatmeal flakes into the bubbling pot, a voice from nowhere, a voice from my dead, appeared: it will stick to your… Read More

 Ah, the bits that are thrown away by writers in passing! Here I am, for some reason reading an essay collection by Mary McCarthy – yes, I’m… Read More

 Curious that not one "Western" government has condemned Israel's acts of terror - if only out of self interest. Moving into the world of exploding phones, computers, etc. is not… Read More

 Proust’s idea for a contre-Sainte Beuve criticism was part of a larger movement, within modernism, to escape from the criticism of the portrait, or the biogra… Read More

 “I was born for the muse, and they made me a manager.” I can imagine this complaint issuing from the mouth of some proto-beat in NYC in 195… Read More

  1.Adolf Loos, Sergei Eisenstein, Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokashka, and Bela Balazs, exemplary modernists all, all consulted Rafael Schermann, the clairvoyant graphologist. He was writt… Read More

 I got around to the highly ill-making article about Prospera in the August 27 NYT Magazine. I recommend reading it. And then reading the petition of the Progressive economists, here. P… Read More

  It all started when Andrée Maryse and her partner came back from her tour of the Orient. in 1929 Maryse, whose real name was Marthe Lebrun, formerly of the  Folies Berg… Read More

  The early twentieth century was the heyday of both colonialism and the anthropological obsession  with ritual, with observations of “native peoples” flooding into th… Read More

 There is a note in the OED appended to the etymology of “patriot” that sez: “Ancient Greek πατριώτης is used of barbarians… Read More

Cressida, I thought of you wasting away in Margaritaville as the hour came on to that gray and blue moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill. Do foxes not have holes? I at leas… Read More

 I am fascinated by a phenomenon that is a variant of the Freudian slip. Call it error infection. Anytime I truly get on my high horse and go on about an error someone has made –… Read More

1. In the preface to Urne Burial, which was published in 1658, Browne remarks largely on the “sad pitchers” lately disinterred in Norfolk. Presumably pitchers containing the as… Read More

 Claire poemsThe lyric "I"It must blur around the edges. Like Claire’s lipstickSo carefully and shamelessly appliedUntil worn by kisses and party martinis The lip, the girl&rsquo… Read More

In the Europe of the interwar period, there was a whole lotta interest in the telling of the tale – the system of the tongue and (as Walter Benjamin, in a brilliant illumination, rea… Read More

 1.In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway is talking about the fishermen in Paris, the ones on the banks and the bridges that fish in the Seine. They fascinate him even though, for his part, he… Read More

- Karen Chamisso“Where’s the soothsayer you praised so to the queen?”Holed up in the Chateau MarmontOur Cleo sprawls and bawls and dreams of shawlsAnd gazes at the latest s… Read More

One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and th… Read More

When Harding and Coolidge ran for President in 1920, under the slogan a “Fair deal”, their campaign printed an appeal to women. It makes interesting reading vis a vis the Republi… Read More

  “There is only one perfect place for a camera at any given moment” sez the rapist god come down from Mount Sinai (the mountain, all state of the art digital VFX was… Read More

 Virginia Woolf’s great great great grandfather, James Stephen, was confined to the Kings Bench prison, just another debtor out of luck, in 1769. Because the Stephan family was co… Read More

I’ve finished Gabriele Tergit’s unfortunately named Berlin novel, Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm. She looked back on it – after the flight from Berlin to Prague, just bef… Read More

Both of these are hard questions. They point to the fact that definition, by itself, has not been a great object in philosophy. Aristotle wrote of categories, Frege wrote of Sinn and Bedeutu… Read More

Besides the insanity of the reaction to a feast of Bacchus featured in the Olympic opening, it has made me think of how a city educates you.In American cities, the urbanscape educates you in… Read More

 There’s a complex, a Western man’s complex: it happens when Western M. touches the Soviet Union.In that moment, the Soviet Union becomes evil. And, on the rebound, the West… Read More

Elegy for the record: on the nature of things “Look”, he would say, drawing an imaginary line with his finger., “it’s like this. I start here with the intention of r… Read More

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy that has no common name or phrase. I call it dis-identification.  It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthe… Read More

What do you do?I’ve been asked that a lot in my life. As I child and teen, I was asked, what do you want to do? But that question dies on the tongue of the speaker after you reach a ce… Read More

When Whitman came to fight his great opposite and fate, These States, like some happier Ahab taking on the Whale, in Democratic Vistas, he issued a caution: “Bear in mind, too, that… Read More

“He was kind but he changed and I killed him,” reads the caption of the photo of a woman in an old tabloid. She was headed to the deathhouse, I suppose. The American p… Read More

 William Carlos Williams knew a few things about America. He knew the pure products of America went crazy, and he knew of the American lovemaking out there in the fields: succumbing wi… Read More

“The question of the qualification of the enemy is at the heart of the modern law of war. Without a doubt, since antiquity one has distinguished the private enemy (inimicus) from the p… Read More

The establishment press and commentators on France, both in the country and out, have a common judgement, best put by PhilippeMarlière on the ucleuropeblog: “All in all, this s… Read More

Pliny was right.The big story about AI (when it wasn't AI but some pattern recognition computing mechanism) sorting through elephant rumblings and finding that special phonic composites are… Read More

 Véronique Nahoum-Grappe is almost unknown in the anglosphere. More’s the pity. She is the daughter of Edgar Morin and the associate of Felix Guattari – she’s… Read More

 We beat the miserable bastards. France is not brown. Jamais. Call it: Jean Moulin's Revenge Read More

 Among the orignal founders of the Front National, currently going around under a ridiculous moniker,  Rassemblement national, was Pierre Bousquet. In 1945, as a Rottenfuehrer… Read More

 I'm not going to watch a debate between Trump and Biden. I'd rather spend an hour with someone racking their fingernails across a blackboard. But from what I have read, it is… Read More

When I was a high school boy, in the seventies, the term “nerd” had not gained the universal currency it now has. I was called a brain, or a bookworm, or an egghead – most… Read More

I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the synthetic synthesis. A synthetic synthe… Read More

 The neolib economist Oliver Blanchard tweeted a very funny comedy bit, in which he played the part of “social democrat”. And he wrote:“As a social democrat, I believe… Read More

1. “A letter was published in the Scots Magazine dated Renfrew, February 1, 1753, and signed " C. M."” proposed a machine that would employ some electrical conductor to create… Read More

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, were close to theirs: Orw… Read More

Nobody knows what to do with Bardella’s name.We all hate Macron. Last year’s protests against Macron stealing the living time of future generations – otherwise known as the… Read More

 I might be breathing the fumes. But for once, I think the Left is actually on the right track. Glucksmann joining the LFI and the other factions of the left for a united front is very… Read More

 The fascist tactic, classically, is the pounce. The fascist strategy is to see the fragility of the political establishment, which by its nature has nourished the most shortsighted and… Read More

 I've written this too often to write it freshly, but here it is: Macron came into office as a sort of idol of the French media and establishment - he was the perfect neoliberal. Neolib… Read More