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Morgan Meis

Morgan has a Ph.D. in philosophy. He was supposed to specialize in the Greeks and Romans but managed to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin. Also, he is the founder of an arts collective in NYC called Flux Factory. Also, he writes regularly for various magazines. Also, he teaches art and philosophy at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Also, he wins things. Email: morganmeis [at] gmail.com

The Undergraduate Atheists, Unamuno, and Johnson

Posted on Monday, Jan 13, 2014 1:45AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis Golberg and Meis David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as…

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Wolf Road

Posted on Monday, Dec 3, 2012 12:45AMSunday, January 20, 2019 by Morgan Meis

by Morgan Meis We were speaking of wolves. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe the thought of wolves comes naturally when you look out across the Hudson River and see the tree line of Shodack Island. There are no people on Shodack Island, no structures. On Shodack Island, the trees and the plants…

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Remembering the Foolish and Brilliant Christopher Hitchens

Posted on Monday, Dec 19, 2011 12:40AMSunday, January 20, 2019 by Morgan Meis

by Morgan Meis At the moment, I’m angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I’m frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction. The first time I met…

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A Tribute to European Trains Twenty or Thirty Years Old

Posted on Monday, Apr 20, 2009 12:15AMSunday, January 20, 2019 by Morgan Meis

by Morgan Meis A friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets…

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monday musing: a good book!

Posted on Monday, Oct 13, 2008 8:40AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

The great 20th century novelist William Gaddis once wrote, “That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” Gaddis was born in 1922. He was an unabashed theorist of decline. For him, the novelist’s task…

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down, i say, down with malcolm gladwell!

Posted on Monday, Jun 30, 2008 1:04PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I have been harboring a nagging suspicion about Malcolm Gladwell for some time now. There is a word that keeps knocking at the back of my mind. That word is ‘fraud’. I suspect, in short, that Malcolm Gladwell is a fraud. I finally picked up his book from a couple of years ago, Blink. He…

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Monday Musing: Péter Esterházy

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 8:34AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

The following is an introduction to Péter Esterházy I delivered at the New York Public Library two weeks ago for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if…

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little spring musing

Posted on Monday, Apr 28, 2008 12:36AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear And unapparelled in the woodland play. The swift hour and the brief prime of the…

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monday musing: black history month, nwa

Posted on Monday, Feb 25, 2008 1:17AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

It sounds like it might be a baritone sax. One note repeated over and over underneath the song. Low and nasty. The beat is driving and has a funky edge, set off by the little guitar riff looped over the top. The whole sound is there from the first note. No build. No games. Within…

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Monday Musing: No Country For Old Men, Or, The Whiskey Was Warm the night was not

Posted on Monday, Feb 4, 2008 12:17AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

He walked into the bar just after sundown. Steven Levine. His friends call him The Adorable Rabbi. Some prefer The Divine Levine. Cold outside. The kind of night you pull your coat up around your head and make like a turtle. The bartender took an immediate dislike to the Divine One. She stared at him…

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monday musing: schwärmerei

Posted on Monday, Dec 24, 2007 12:50AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

It’s already been a few years since the journal n+1 published its first issue. It included a section called The Intellectual Situation. There was something bold, intellectually exciting about a group of young thinkers uttering proclamations about “the intellectual situation.” It would have seemed to many that the one thing about the intellectual situation today…

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Monday Musing: neo neo

Posted on Monday, Oct 1, 2007 12:05AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

Everybody thinks that Neo Rauch is doing something special in his paintings but few know why. They can’t put their finger on it. They are, sometimes, even troubled by what they’re seeing. This is normal when it comes to Romantics. Romanticism bothers people. They don’t believe that the immediacy they are seeing is for real.…

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Fragments on Paterson

Posted on Monday, Sep 10, 2007 12:15PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I like to take the train from Penn Station out to Paterson. It stops in Secaucus Junction, a new and gleaming place that never seems to have anyone in it, just cavernous halls of light marble and a lonely bar tucked in one corner, the woodwork of which seems laughable and out of place and…

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monday musing: loving michnik

Posted on Monday, Jun 18, 2007 1:20AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I can’t pinpoint the specific day or time that I fell in love with Adam Michnik. Most likely it is something that crept up on me slowly. I liked him, I read him, I liked him, I read him some more, and then suddenly, I loved him. I finally came to see all of this…

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monday musing: the civilization behind wire

Posted on Monday, May 28, 2007 12:25AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

Sometime during the early part of the twentieth century the foundations were laid for a new civilization. Czeslaw Milosz once described it as being ‘behind wire’. That phrase has stuck with me. That it was a new civilization, a new way of looking at man, there is no doubt. Just what that means for us,…

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Monday Musing: The New Mannerists

Posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 12:26AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed ‘Lost in Translation’, Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They…

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monday musing: fragments from Curaçao

Posted on Monday, Mar 5, 2007 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I was sitting for maybe half an hour in the main room of the plantation house watching an old green and white painted door swing lazy in the gusts of ocean breeze. The door was too heavy to slam. It was creeping open slowly of its own weight and then another gust of wind would…

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monday musing: f— adam gopnik

Posted on Monday, Feb 12, 2007 12:19AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I wrote an essay a few years ago that contained, in the opening sentence, the phrase ‘fuck you, Roger Angell’. It wasn’t out of any deep animosity toward Roger Angell, simply a momentary rage brought on by his preface to E.B. White’s wonderful book, Here Is New York. Some of the things Mr. Angell says…

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monday musing: hurricane

Posted on Monday, Dec 11, 2006 6:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

Hurricanes are such powerful forces that we often anthropomorphize them, we think of them as being conscious beings. One sign of this is that we name them. We talk about where they ‘want’ to go and what their ‘intentions’ are. And perhaps nothing is more mysterious, tantalizing and intriguing than the ‘eye’ of the hurricane.…

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Monday Musing: Milosz v. Gombrowicz

Posted on Monday, Oct 30, 2006 1:18PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Morgan Meis

I’m tempted to make the rather bold assertion that the most interesting duo in Western literature of the 20th century is Czeslaw Milosz and Witold Gombrowicz. I say duo because you really have to take the two of them together. When Milosz zigs, Gombrowicz zags, when you’re feeling one way, Milosz expresses it for you,…

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