There’s an old theory that says experience in general is structured like trauma. Or, to put it another way, that trauma is merely a special or egregious case of what we suffer every day simply by coming into contact with the world. Much of what happens to us cannot be fully processed right away. It…

Maybe it is OK to be a Nazi if you also happened to write at least one really amazing book. Granted, Mister Grass has written a lot of crap in the last few decades. I was recently trying to read My Century when a fit of boredom so immobilized me I had to watch several…

Given recent events in Cuba it seems appropriate to post this piece I wrote about a trip to Cuba four years ago. It was published originally in Radical Society. COMING FROM THE AIRPORT THE CITY creeps up slowly and then it’s street after street, twilight, a kind of beige everywhere, not quite enough light, figures…

I’ve never been to Beirut but I’ve always held a few romantic, probably somewhat naive, notions about it as the kind of cosmopolitan and complicated city toward which I’ve always been most attracted. The practice of labeling various cities around the world “The Paris of X” has always struck me as distasteful for all the…

The first part of this essay can be found here.Inevitably, the exaltation and dreams of unity that she harbored during the Sixties were to disappoint Sontag, as they did everyone else. She was going to have to come down from those heights and find her own version of Zagajewski’s soft landing. And that is another…

In an essay about the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, Sontag writes that as Zagajewski matured he managed to find “the right openness, the right calmness, the right inwardness (he says he can only write when he feels happy, peaceful.) Exaltation-—and who can gainsay this judgment from a member of the generation of ’68—is viewed with…

Cicero may very well have been the first genuine asshole. He wasn’t always appreciated as such. During more noble and naïve times, people seem to have accepted his rather moralistic tracts like ‘On Duties’ and ‘On Old Age’ as untainted wisdom handed down through the eons. This, supposedly, was a gentle man doing his best…

It’s been noticed by more than one person that Walter Benjamin had a melancholy streak. But Benjamin’s melancholy has often been misunderstood. as a form of nostalgia, a lament for things lost to the relentless march of history and time. It’s true, of course, that some melancholics are nostalgic. Nothing prevents the two moods from…

We should establish two things right off the bat. First, R. Kelly has been arrested and accused enough times for us all to accept the basic idea that he has deep, ingrained pedophilic tendencies. Second, there is no hard evidence, grainy internet film notwithstanding, that R. Kelly ever urinated on anyone. But this isn’t an…

Well, it’s President’s Day in these United States. And it just so happens that I’ve recently become fascinated with that group of early Americans and Founding Fathers whose names resonate as huge and historical but about whom I’ll confess I’ve never known all that much. I’ve started reading biographies, some studies by American historians and…

(On the occasion of a recent viewing of The Philadelphia Story) For Shuffy. In the early twelfth century a brilliant philosopher and logician named Abelard fell in love with a remarkable young woman named Heloise. Abelard tricked her uncle into thinking that he would be giving her academic tutoring and then the two fell into…

I’ve decided to become Polish. This will be slightly easier for me than for some because I happen to be almost completely Polish on my mother’s side. But only slightly easier. The Polishness of my Polishness never got going. The things that happen to national identities in the American experience happened to my Poles. The…

You forget how much the sky can be different until you come out West again. There is a simple explanation. It has to do with flatness, it has to do with vistas. Maybe the idea of the West as simple and honest comes partly from that. You can see where the clouds are and where…

There has long been a battle between time and history. Simply put, time likes to obliterate and history likes to stick around. In the long run, time always wins. But in the short run, history has been known to score a few points, though often by being so brutal and absurd that some have wondered…

Flying in at night affords a remarkable sight. You can’t imagine such a blanket of lights. And they end so abruptly at the ever widening borders of the city. Beyond them is nothing, just the blackness of the land at night, as if the entire cosmos were merely lights and void. It’s beautiful and big…

I heard Leonard Cohen’s music for the first time driving from Skagen down to Copenhagen some years ago. Skagen is at the top of the world, at least as far as mainland Europe is concerned. We walked along the beach on a grayish day. You can walk until the sand tapers into a point and…

It’s a rather long story as to why, but Stefany, my wife my love, and I have just spent roughly twelve hours riding back and forth on the 7 train in Queens, New York. For those who don’t know, the 7 train runs from Times Square in Manhattan out to Main Street in Flushing, Queens.…

I just started in on the third volume, Master of the Senate, of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. I read the other two over the last six months or so, between a number of other obligations. The problem is that once you really get going on them it’s hard to do anything else.…

It’s hot in New York. Deep summer. Dog days. Somehow it all makes me think of Roman poetry. The mood is languid and personal, stuff happens slowly, even the disasters. I’m thinking of my favorite poet, Catullus. I’m thinking of the way he captured the feel of a lazy Sunday of desperate but indifferent screwing…

Babel. Whenever I say the word it’s electric. My fingers tingle. Babel goes to the very heart of things. Babel is at the center of the human experience. As Aristotle once mentioned, perceptively, human beings are the social animal. Humans, therefore, go together with cities in a rather essential way. For cities are ‘socialness’ mapped…