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Warhol, Warhol, Warhol
I always hear myself saying, “She’s a beauty!” or “He’s a beauty!” or “What a beauty!” but I never know what I’m talking about. Andy Warhol You either know too much about Andy Warhol or too little. You know him either as the whimsical exemplar of Pop art or as the deeply conflicted conceptual…
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Demon’s Wail
Psychoanalysis takes as its starting point the discourse of the subject, of the analysand in front of the analyst, regardless of the reality this discourse conjures up. One need only remember Freud’s embryonic first postulations following his revision of seduction theory to see that the only reality that mattered was the one independently lived by…
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Putin’s Folly
On February 24, the world changed. Images and stories of the war in Ukraine have bombarded us. Pro-Ukraine approval has united the polarized American electorate in ways that seemed impossible. And as Americans start going back to restaurants, weddings, and bar mitzvahs, seemingly believing that America is recuperating from the indelible losses suffered during the…
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Art Drive
You’ll often hear that creative writing or any creative process is riddled with unpleasantness. There’s second-guessing, doubt, and hesitation at almost every step. You don’t even have to search long on Twitter to find the testimonies of authors or poets who speak rather candidly of the fact that writing is a pain in the butt,…
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Booz’s Sheaf
My dear, my dearest, how many pebbles is it since I have had the apprentice to sugar you? Alas, my dear, answers the other, I myself have been extremely unvitreous, my three littlest oil-cakes, etc. Jacques Lacan, quoting Jean Tardieu, Seminar III, 257-81 In my previous blog post, I talked about one of philosophy’s greatest metaphors, Hegel’s “the…
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Spirit is a Bone
But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a7-10, tr. by S.H. Butcher. One of the things I have been most perplexed by is the…
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Shape of a Nation
I found myself one night researching North Korea. A quick search on Google conjures up images which are eerie: cut-outs of smiling, pudgy figureheads rolling by on 1970s Lincoln Continentals; throngs aligned with a compulsive’s precision along the streets where they wave the bouquets of pink genetically-modified flowers they named after their leaders; the demilitarized…
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Hemingway
Writing is tough business. It is tough to get things down on paper. It is tough to cut them out. It is tough to get them out there to be read. As Hemingway wrote, “A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever, but [writing] is very difficult to do and…
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UFOthers II
A rhomboid, a flattened oval, a jellyfish, a Tic Tac, a half-moon, a triangle, a sphere, a wedge, the saucer. These are what eyewitnesses in the new Netflix special Top Secret UFO Projects Declassified have said they’ve seen in the skies and which they believe to be UFOs or, as the government officially calls them,…
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Depth
As I left LaGuardia in my friend’s car and the famous Manhattan skyline came into view, I was reminded that the difference in effect between seeing an object in pictures or in film and seeing it in person is owed to something very obvious: depth perception. One can always conceptualize the idea that a place…
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Ruminations 