Category: literature

• Omit Thy Fog Riot

  Jul 18

  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… more ›

• #Cities

  Jul 16

  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… more ›

• Thursday Evening

  Jun 14

  Sitting here on a Thursday evening listening to PJ Harvey play on Apple TV while Stephen bakes a cheesecake from scratch for Shayne’s birthday, which we will celebrate tomorrow when… more ›

• Early-Bird Gothic

  Mar 28

  wczesno-ptasi gotykuWho dare writes such a magical phrase?!?! And it confounds me why those other translators have rendered this line into barely suitable English: “early ornithogothic.” What a disservice to… more ›

• Books Read in 2012

  Dec 31

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• Four in the Morning

  Feb 1

  Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923 – February 1, 2012). Rest in peace. more ›

• Prostrate Before Saint Genet

  Sep 19

  I spent the day focused on work and research, and yet this day has felt like debauched decadence: I began this morning reading a chapter in the Irigaray text, and then… more ›

• The Ruination and Salvation of Life/Writing, Part III

  Jul 15

  Maurice Blanchot’s own biography—the writing of his life—attests to the experience of life as, through, and by way of writing. We know almost nothing about the man, even when we… more ›

• The Ruination and Salvation of Life/Writing, Part II

  Jul 11

  Because writing, for Blanchot, exposes all of us (authors, readers, translators, interpreters) to the impersonal anonymity of (and in) language, our task of assigning “reality” to our experience is problematized… more ›

• The Ruination and Salvation of Life/Writing, Part I

  Jul 9

  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… more ›