Essays
For Nietzsche, life’s ultimate question was: ‘Does it dance?’
Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit,…
Kafka’s Bestiary; or, Regarding a Remark of Adorno’s Never Said
“Auschwitz begins when one looks at a slaughterhouse and says, ‘they’re only animals’.” This quote is attributed to Theodor W. Adorno. Except he never said it. Despite this, at least…
The Jokes Always Saved Us: Humor in the Time of Stalin
Jokes never mean only one thing, and the hidden story of political humour under Stalin is far more nuanced than a simple struggle between repression and resistance.
Travels with My Daughter: the Himalayas
In October ’72 my ten-year-old daughter, Veronica, and I attempted to fly from Kathmandu to Lukla for the Khumbu trek to Thangyboche monastery, which lies at over 12,600 ft., across…
Subject to Change: On Not Having, or Being, it All
The word queer has gone through many transformations since it emerged in the 16th century. Originally, it meant “strange,” or “peculiar”: associated meanings included a feeling of unwellness or something…
A View From the Mountain
Peer into any of a hundred human hearts;you are sure to find, spun whole, thosemoments buried in the new growth of timepassing; the far-into-the-night-early-dawnexchanges, falling-outs and reconciliations,the wrestle with words…
Change the world, not yourself, or how Arendt called out Thoreau
Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience inspired some of the world’s greatest political thinkers. Not Hannah Arendt.
“The rope that keeps me from floundering”: On Michel Leiris
First exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, Olympia by Édouard Manet, was immediately greeted with shock and outrage. The response was so virulent that, as contemporary journalist Antonin Proust later…
The Scandalous Confessions of a Lesbian Formalist Poet
I am saying that you must be a poet, because you are asking so many questions.