Jim Hanas is a Brooklyn-based writer of fiction and essays. His work has appeared in dozens of publications and anthologies, including Husserl Studies (half a lifetime ago, when he was a graduate student at the University of Memphis), Electric Literature, Fence, Joyland, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and in his 2010 short story collection Why They Cried (Joyland/ECW Press). His novel Lou Reed’s Nephew–based on the Substack serial of the same name–will be published in 2027 by Coffee House Press. Meanwhile, the series continues–alongside new essays and conceits–at loureedsnephew.com. Email: jimhanas [at] gmail [dot] com
Website: https://www.loureedsnephew.com/
by Jim Hanas I met Derrida in Memphis in 1993. We were standing by a pool and he was smoking a cigar. I’m sure I was smoking a cigarette. I was twenty-four. The encounter was brief, the pro forma handshake one could expect as a Ph.D. student at a state university that had lured such…
by Jim Hanas When I interviewed the author George Saunders years ago, he told me that his work was an attempt “to figure out a way that the spiritual would not be full of shit.” A tall order in an age of spiritual materialism—where evidence in favor of actually existing religious institutions is discouraging—but it…
by Jim Hanas Looking back I see that my undergraduate education—as seen through my three (one merely attempted) majors—was a tour through the grammatical persons. I started out majoring in political science (and studying Latin, to my lasting regret), because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Third-person plural. I quickly switched to psychology,…
by Jim Hanas Almost thirty years ago, in what would now be called a quarter-life crisis, I felt called to Greenville, Mississippi. It’s not too far from Memphis, beyond the casinos, which were new then and also called to me from time to time. I had been introduced to Walker Percy at the used bookstore…
by Jim Hanas There is a room at the Museum of Modern Art where you can stand with a Henry Darger at your right shoulder and look at Robert Rauschenberg’s Rebus on the perpendicular wall. It feels like an important position, this corner, where one can see—or imagine that one is seeing—naive immediacy and cultivated…
by Jim Hanas A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fourth might have been the trolley problem.) Philosophy might…
by Jim Hanas I remember the rush the first time I entered Manhattan via cab from one of the airports—I don’t remember which one—and felt the density and the pressure. I recognized the blue scaffolding of the city’s endless refurbishments, as seen on Law & Order, and felt that I was home. (I moved here…
by Jim Hanas As the Pew Research Center reported last week, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad. Pew floats a…
by Jim Hanas Any sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said, but even small advances–if well-placed–can seem miraculous. I remember the first time I took an Uber, after years of fumbling in the backs of yellow cabs with balled up bills and misplaced credit cards. The driver stopped at…