Amerigun

by Joan Harvey The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. —Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence When a young gunman murdered ten people at a supermarket in Boulder, a place I’d been in the week before the shooting, I was reading the letters…

“The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness” By Mark Solms

by Joan Harvey For several years I enjoyed discussions about neuroscience with a friend (now deceased) who was a top rock climber. He and his buddies, when not performing solo climbs with torn shoulder muscles and sleeping on cliffside bivouacs, would listen to Sam Harris and talk neuroscience. We have conquered mountains, was their creed;…

Luca in Utah

by Joan Harvey The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca, 1945. Translated into English by Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Prague, Twisted Spoon Press, 2008) If it is true, as is claimed that after death man continues a phantom existence I’ll let you know. Ghérasim Luca, La Mort morte, 1941 Vive le vampire! James Joyce, Ulysses A book travels through…

Rest

by Joan Harvey Let’s face it, I’m tired. A phrase completely knotted up in the rather damaged circuitry that is my brain with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles who managed to out-Dietrich Dietrich while being her own amazing self (if you haven’t watched this in at least the past few days you probably should). But,…

Our Epidemic: Visibility, Invisibility, Blindness, and Race

by Joan Harvey I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people. —James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see…

Untimely

by Joan Harvey 1) invisibility I’ve been pondering how, in all the Covid-19 turmoil, so many who believe in an invisible God have become the last to give credence to actually existing but invisible substances. There is some irony in people risking their lives by crowding together to pray to something for which there is…

Day Tripping

by Joan Harvey It was inevitable. Michael Pollan’s justly lauded book, How to Change Your Mind, was going to lead straight, sensible, old people to doing drugs. “Today I am a middle-aged journalist working in London, the finance editor of The Economist, a wife, mother, and, to all appearances, a person totally devoid of countercultural…