My blog is still taking a working vacation (meaning I'm so busy writing comments on student manuscripts that I don't have time to post right now). BUT check out the following upcoming event, organized by the Lambda Literary Foundation. BETTER READ THAN … [Read more...]

My father, who died last week, was a beekeeper. A real twentieth century do-it-yourselfer, he studied up on beekeeping and may have kept a hive or two as a young man, though not after I reached the age of memory. (I vaguely remember the punch line from a story my … [Read more...]

Baby Einsten, Etcetera Finally, and this is the second reason why phobia does not disappear but slides beneath language, the phobic object is a proto-writing and, conversely, any practice of speech, inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear….Not a … [Read more...]

July 9, 2006 It occurred to me today that perhaps there can be a Calvinist Darwinism. X apparently likes to believe that “it’s all in the genes”—is this necessarily so different from believing that God has set everything out beforehand? Ostensibly, at least the … [Read more...]

6/1/06 Spoke with J.—her feeling that death is all around. S.S. died. the place of poetry is the place of death— a thought in the BBG—something confused, but—don’t we feel guilty towards the dead—for suddenly “othering” them? We drive them out of our … [Read more...]

April 2, 2206 I went to the immigrants’ rights rally yesterday on the basis of an e-mail announcement from Brooklyn Parents for Peace. I expected something small—was amazed when the bus got to Boro Hall and I saw the streams of people heading through the … [Read more...]

January 22: “…a pattern called a war.”—Amy Lowell January 24: planetary drift. a photograph of people some in tank tops, running, fleeing down a narrow street past a corpse (Cité Soleil) “sorrows without end and they’re not yours” January 28: I have … [Read more...]

“One does not come down from a cross alive.”—Julio Cortázar A mother is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. In the New York Times on the day after Thanksgiving, this headline: “Grandmother Blows Self Up in Suicide Attack on Israeli … [Read more...]

"There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach," said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. "This is just a … [Read more...]

I just spent Saturday afternoon scooping fallen leaves into enormous brown paper bags. This is a new thing, a Sanitation Department experiment in selected areas of Brooklyn; as a promotional gimmick, this year the bags were available for free at the Botanic Garden. … [Read more...]