After Auschwitz, Poetry: Ewa Chrusciel’s Of Annunciations
Theodor Adorno warned against poetry after Auschwitz. To write it, he said, is “barbaric” because “critical intelligence … confines itself…
Posts Tagged 'Politics'
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…
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…
“Tolerance” is a Loaded Gun
C.W. is in town for a few days from Kosovo. He’s left the NGO he joined a few years ago:…
Robert Paul Wolff’s “Beyond Tolerance.”
I have a personal investment in tolerance: I belong to several groups and organizations which, in other parts of the…
John Palfrey, Biblio Tech
A former librarian at Harvard Law School under Dean Elena Kagan, John Palfrey was what librarians call a “feral” –…
Left Write & Centaur 