• Eulogy for Lou Reed

    I didn’t know Lou Reed. No, I never met the man. Yet I am certain, because of the authenticity I perceived in his songs, that I nevertheless knew him, albeit through his work. And we should ask: isn’t that indeed… more ›

  • Naïveté: The Theater of Outrage

    German Chancellor Merkel is naive if she believes that the US is not spying on her. And she is naive if she believes that we Americans don’t already assume that Germany, too, is spying on the US. There seems to… more ›

  • … death is both the trace we dread and the loss of all trace.  – Edmond Jabès more ›

  • In the Trees

    Here’s a photo of me with my head literally in the trees. The clouds would’ve been too easy, too cliched. I don’t know how writers do it. No, not writing. Writing, for me, is the sometimes overwhelmingly easy thing. But… more ›

  • An Excerpt from the Utterly Brilliant Book I’m Writing on Autographesis, the As If, and Blanchovian Phenomenology

    For art to be truly free to achieve its goal of total freedom and to escape the normative exigencies that have shackled it throughout much of history (that is, for example, art represents nature or art expresses an emotion), art… more ›

  • El sexo de los ángeles

    I’m always up for a good ménage à trois film, but, to be blunt, there hasn’t been one until now. Last night I watched Spanish director Xavier Villaverde’s El sexo de los ángeles [The Angels’ Sex–please notice that a proper translation… more ›

  • Oblivion Oblivion Oblivion

    This spring I read the collection of short stories entitled The Cannibal Night by Mexican author Luis Jorge Boone, expertly translated by George Henson. These stories reminded me about what was best about magical realism, although I might rather classify… more ›

  • Omit Thy Fog Riot

    When writing about Surrealism and automatism, what better way to conduct research than to do a little automatic writing and some exquisite corpse exercises? I mean, anybody can read an article and summarize it. more ›

  • #Cities

    When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I wrote a series of extremely short narratives that I called “shorter stories.” Now it seems everyone, including Lydia Davis, is famous for doing something similar. Alberto Chimal wrote a series… more ›

  • Phenomenon Worth Considering (And Guilty as Charged)

    It is a phenomenon worth considering, this new generation of nihilist mystics living on Veterans’ Administration checks, Fulbright Fellowships, gifts from casual acquaintances, and occasional scraps from home. Reblogged from davidcorvine.tumblr.com; quoted from Paul Bowles’s Travels: Collected Writings 1950-93. more ›