Ed Simon is the editor at Belt Magazine and a staff writer emeritus for The Millions. He has contributed to, among others, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney's, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost will be released by Ig Publishing in August of 2023. Email: edsimon310 [at] gmail.com
Website: https://edsimon.org/
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William Hogarth’s formal, yet warm, portrait The Graham Children…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon As an émigré from the dusty, sun-scorched Carthaginian provinces, there are innumerable sites and experiences in Milan that could have impressed themselves upon the young Augustine – the regal marble columned facade of the Colone di San Lorenzo or the handsome red-brick of the Basilica of San Simpliciano – yet in Confessions,…
by Ed Simon I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the…
by Ed Simon “Men intoxicated are sometimes stunned into sobriety.” —Lord Mansfield (1769) Today marks eight years since I had my last drink. Or maybe yesterday marks that anniversary; I’m not sure. It was that kind of last drink. The kind of last drink that ends with the memory of concrete coming up to meet…
by Ed Simon I am condemned to be free. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness Well, I wish I could be like a bird in the sky, how sweet it would be if I found I could fly, Oh, I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea, and then I’d sing ’cause I’d…
by Ed Simon What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397) Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922) Twenty-six years…