Baron Wormser: The Good Life
It’s plain that the world as we know it is literally choking on its machine- and money-driven complexity.
Molly Fisk: Death, Herself
UNDRESS, SHE SAID by Doug Anderson, Four Way Books, Tribeca 2022, 102 pages, $17.95 . . You might think, opening Doug Anderson’s fourth poetry collection Undress, She Said, that a man … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise
One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.
Chris Wright: The Inspiring Outrage of Norman Finkelstein
Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.
Raphael Falco: How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time
Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.
Rachel Hadas: Ancient Greece had extreme polarization and civil strife too – how Thucydides can help us understand Jan. 6 and its aftermath
The insights and objectivity of a historian who lived nearly 2,500 years ago can bolster our understanding of the country’s current plight.
Baron Wormser: Doing Great
If a book can be both good-natured and lacerating, Voltaire’s is that book.
Michael Simms: GUSHER by Christopher Soden
Learning to be oneself and to love oneself is the central narrative in Gusher, a remarkable book about a gay man growing up in Dallas, Texas in the 1980s.
Matthew J. Parker: The Howling Resurrection of Ninemile
Until very recently, the score stood at Cows, 99,200,000, Wolves 0…. It took a lot of money to kill every last wolf out of the West. We behaved badly doing it: setting them on fire, feeding them ground up glass, et cetera.
Baron Wormser: Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays
One sentence speaks for all his direct, well-wrought sentences: “We are inside the largest militarist society the world has ever known, and we are at war always.”
Joan E. Bauer: They Left Chicago Behind
Saul Bellow called Chicago: a prairie city with a waterfront
& the trees he remembers, elms & cottonwoods.
Thomas Bulfinch: Simonides
On one occasion, when the poet was residing at the court of Scopas, king of Thessaly, the prince desired Simonides to prepare a poem in celebration of his exploits, to be recited at a banquet.
The Ancient Icelandic Saga Voluspo: “The Wise-Woman’s Prophecy”
Fast move the sons | of Mim, and fate
Is heard in the note | of the Gjallarhorn;
Loud blows Heimdall, | the horn is aloft,
In fear quake all | who on Hel-roads are
Baron Wormser: Lives of the Heroes
When I was a boy, around the ages of nine and ten, I read dozens of biographies. I can still see the books.
Vox Populi 