Herman Melville Meets Donald Trump
I spent a day reading Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson’s mid-century meditation on Melville, Moby-Dick, and the American idea. Halfway…
Politics
Signs and Portents
Toward the end of my usual walk in Venice, I was confronted by a graffitied warning, on Hampton Drive: GET…
Still Life with Pedal Car
Five weeks ago, a carefully arranged still life appeared on a nearby street. It consisted of a bike frame, a…
On Drought and Salt
Tonight, thankfully, it’s raining. About time. L.A. supposedly saw off a brutal drought a year ago. Then came last year’s…
Flotsam
A dead fish, washed up on a beach, is unremarkable. A hundred are ominous. So with shopping carts and their…
Ai Weiwei Sojourns in Venice
Last year, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, popped up in posters and graffiti throughout New York. Now he’s…
Boxes both Little and Big
It wasn’t an earthquake that left the wreckage on the left. It was a demolition crew. This former home, in…
What Was Eclipsed?
A theme emerged from the week’s coverage of the eclipse: that on the morning of August 21, as darkness swept across…
Today We Got Death Threats
My daughter called me, frantic, this afternoon. Someone had left a message on the landline answering machine, directed at my…
Memory, from Yugoslavia to Charlottesville
Over the past week, I’ve been reading Serbian writer Nina Zivancevic’s Inside & Outside of Byzantium, a 1994 collection that…
Left Write & Centaur 