The Subjunctive Grammar of Hope
Not only may past and future be discovered within the present, but that our only access to future, or to past, is within the fleeting moment of the present.
The Future of the Humanities and the Specter of Antisemitism
According to the sages, God begins with one and not two, so that no one can say to another, “My side of the family is better than your side of the family”: there is only one side of the human family, with all the ethical obligations that come to bear in being part of the human family.
The Ancient and Future Art of Terraforming
Human art, human fiction, human invention, human technology, are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but are the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary process.
Please, Mr. Judge Man
In the townships, where there were few social activities besides drinking and sports, and until the early 1990s, gatherings of men were politically suspect. Belonging to an Isicathamiya group was one of the few ways to socialize after a long day of labor.
A Silent Fool
Lear cannot abide silence. He is unable to “hear” the truth of silent testimony about the way things are.
American Modernists Contemplating Asia
It was with the hope of looking for his own unique way to connect nature and abstraction that Isamu Noguchi went to the East – his other cultural source.
Philip Guston (Not) Now: The Impact Argument
Today’s art world is at a crossroads: if we are to accept the “impact” argument, and to prioritize the overprotecting of museum visitors over educating them, then we will be complicit in tearing down whole swaths of culture.
In Defense of Lecturing
Ginsburg credited this dexterity, and her understanding that language is more than a tool for communicating the semantic meaning, to the time she was an undergraduate at Cornell, where she attended the lectures by one of the greatest literary figures in the 20th century—Vladimir Nabokov.
Giving Up on Sergei Polunin
Everything about Polunin’s image was well directed towards young fans. His famous choreography to a popular song, his tattoos, his rebellious attitude, his focus on the young in every interview, his raw honesty, his extreme personal charm—all served to make him especially appealing to people like myself.
Looking For What Humans Leave Behind
Once you dig your nose into garbage a whole universe explodes: full of information, images, involuntary drawings and maps, to name a few.
Black Lives Matter: Wood Burn Series #1
I hope that my “BLACK LIVES MATTER” Wood Burn Series becomes a conversation starter and that through these burnings, which are symbolic of the problem, we can find a way to explore the dynamics that have made victims of the beautiful Black people wood burned here.
Reconciliation in Police-Black Relations: Straight-Talk Advice from Homer, Aeschylus and Mandela
The problem of police violence against Blacks is deeper and more complicated than the American people have so far been led to believe.
Grassy Knoll Covid Morning
We first have to recognize that the shadow is there and real. We have to step into it, explore it, figure out why it is there and what it is doing to us.
The Riddle of Why Literary Riddles Are Overlooked
William Langland included a riddle battle in the “Banquet of Conscience” section of Piers Plowman, a probable inspiration for Tolkien’s high-stakes riddle battle between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit.
The First Motto on United States Coins: “Liberty—Parent of Science and Industry”
Hamilton’s report of January 1791 proposed the silver dollar as the basic unit of money, the implementation of a decimal system, and placing the United States on a bimetallic standard using both gold and silver, with copper reserved for pennies and half-pennies.
Cabeza de Vaca Invents the Road Novel
From their arrival on the coast, the four surviving men of the Narváez expedition would venture deep into the North American continent itself, unequivocally the first non-Indians to do so, walking for the next eight years like the Israelites in the desert, until they’d once again reach New Spain’s capital in Mexico.
A Music of Hautboys: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Cavafy, Eliot
Plutarch’s “marvellous sweet harmony” (as North would have it) has travelled north, west and south again, over the centuries, and been transposed for ghostly oboe, then become “exquisite” music in Alexandria, “defunctive” music in Eliot’s Venice, and been heard throughout the Magna Grecia, from the Nile and then far beyond to the Avon and the Thames.
