Five Final Poems
While We Are AwayThings in our homesKeep busyBy shushing one anotherAnd enforcing the silence.Come to ThinkThe fly sitting on my noseMust’ve come to listenTo the one buzzing all dayInside my empty...
View ArticleOn Anger
I think our vocabulary of anger—our whole interior landscape of outrage—is impoverished, principally because it was formed in an aristocratic warrior culture and has been so little reconstructed...
View ArticleOn Anger
Anger’s a slippery subject. A bit like one of those banned words we’re not supposed to say but about which our silence doesn’t seem to exonerate us. Anger’s inside us. Like a bacillus. Anger certainly...
View ArticleOn Anger
The medical term for an indigestible lump in the stomach is a bezoar. People swallow foreign bodies, like hair (a hairball is a cat bezoar), or quantities of fibrous food, like unripe persimmons,...
View ArticleWhat’s So Great About a String Quartet?
Emerson String Quartet:Farewell Performance,Alice Tully Hall, New York,October 21, 2023. Danish String Quartet,Richardson Auditorium, Princeton,November 2, 2023. Let me start by making a case for the...
View ArticleTable Talk
The medieval science of Angelology occupies itself with the nature, constitution, and organization of the supernal race of angels. What might a Scammerology discover about these invisible,...
View ArticleContents Under Pressure
Henry Taylor: B Side,at the Whitney Museum, New York,October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024. In 1946, intoxicated during his stay at a Los Angeles hotel, the saxophonist and jazz revolutionary Charlie...
View ArticleAlcatraz
How quickly one getsfrom A to Z, how swiftly one sayseverything there is to see: thesebars, for instance, and the flexiblefencing of sharks, and how impossiblyfar it is—this life from that. —Andrea...
View ArticleNovember
Where is my dear sixteen-year-old catI wish to carry upstairs in my armslooking up at me and thinkingbe careful, dear human Sixteen years. How many days sinceI found you as if an urchin in a snowstorm...
View ArticleKafka on the Tram
On once again re-reading the penultimate fragment of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten—the part where Herr Benja-menta and the narrator go off traveling together, dreaming of absolute freedom—I sense a...
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