• 10 Reasons Not to Become a Translator

    You don’t know any language well enough, not even your own. You hate reading. You like food, basic shelter, security, and you regularly waste your money on such extravagances. Get over yourself, princess. You find working with people to unnecessarily… more ›

  • Rocks in Your Head

    Timothy Morton is an English scholar at Rice University. He is also a “speculative realist.” That’s fancy theoretical talk for “bullshit artist.” He would have you believe–and I chose this word carefully–that there’s a new way to see the world.… more ›

  • MH17

    I’ve been dreading this day for a year now: the first anniversary of when flight MH17 was shot down by thugs in eastern Ukraine with a Buk on loan from the Russian military. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A… more ›

  • Angela Davis

    When ostensibly asked if she supported violence while she was in jail, Angela Davis not only explained violence, but she related its origin: the violent state. Any violence perpetrated by the revolution, by the liberation of the oppressed, would merely… more ›

  • Frankie Says See This Film

    Third film viewed at the fourth annual Oak Cliff Film Festival was dir. Brendan Toller’s Danny Says–a documentary about journalist-cum-punk prophet Danny Fields, who is credited with introducing Jim Morrison to Nico, with almost ruining the careers of the Beatles,… more ›

  • Station to Station (or How Not to Make a Film)

    Another film I saw at the fourth annual Oak Cliff Film Festival was dir. Doug Aitken’s Station to Station. Billed as 61 one-minute films, this quasi-documentary of a 24-day, 4000-mile, celebrity/artist-laden train journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific gives… more ›

  • Tangerine Dreaming

    “I won’t be fooled by a cheap cinematic trick.” – Missing Persons The fourth annual Oak Cliff Film Festival opened last night with a showing of dir. Sean Baker’s Tangerine at the historic Texas Theatre. Baker’s practice is to find a location… more ›

  • New Publication

    Black Sun Lit published my essay about and translation of Edmond Jabès on Paul Celan. They are an exquisite literary journal who publishes extraordinary translations and works of literature, so I am especially proud that my essay has found a home with… more ›

  • Toward a General Hermeneutics

    In the early nineteenth century Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher rejected the specialized hermeneutics of medieval philosophy (that is, theological, juridical, and literary hermeneutics) and in their place proposed a general theory of interpretation established not upon genre-based dissimilitude but rather… more ›

  • Memory of the Word

    According to the myth of the origin of written language as told by Socrates in the Phaedrus, Theuth declares that written language, the materiality of the word, will make the Egyptians wiser by improving their memory. But Thamus instead insists that… more ›