Automatic Ciphers
There's a way in which everything you see in a poem should be obvious when you see it, should be a duh!-moment.
View ArticleLiving, loving, and party-going in Shakespeare
Plays have to end, but no one so well as Shakespeare understood how to use them to offer the hospitality of time, the interim of friendship.
View ArticleGhostlier demarcations
A book that furnishes no quotations is no book—it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the...
View ArticlePreferences among preferences
We has them. I want a cheezburger, and I can has cheezburger, but I don't want to want one.
View ArticleEmotion and the evolution of intersubjectivity (Literary Need: V)
Some thoughts on the potential evolutionary genesis of intersubjectivity
View ArticleShakespearean slips
Though Shakespeare may not have invented parapraxes, he certainly exploited their psychological depths long before Freud.
View ArticleTaking in each other's laundry
On the mythological and biological necessity of work: "You can only survive if you work, since so much is working against you."
View ArticleFrost in translation
A note on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's decision to "translate" Shakespeare's plays for a contemporary audience.
View ArticleLiterary Need VI - a quick note on necessity
On how memory relies on rhythm to fill in blanks by giving a silent voice to the unthought.
View ArticleLove, MacGuffins, and death
Consider this: classic noir movies are about truth rather than erotic satisfaction. A MacGuffin pulls a narrative down a track criss-crossing the love story that will make the movie end happily. We...
View ArticleThe Mask of Trumpery
An updated version of Shelley's "The Mask of Anarchy" reflecting the 2016 election and its Republican presidential candidate.
View ArticleThe Construction of the Administrative State
Blanchot (commenting on Priam's supplication of Achilles) says the choice in Homer is violence or speech. In Vergil, in the modern state, our choice is only violence or the silence, whether of Dido or...
View ArticlePossible worlds within possible worlds
It is one thing to take inspiration from another's work for one's own creative writing, but it is entirely another to complete a work first conceived and named in another's fiction. What to make of...
View ArticleExit Monty Hall, through door number 3
On the power of probability to haunt the ontology of everyday things.
View ArticlePrivileging your checks
When playing chess, what do you mean when you say "check"? Per Wittgenstein, perhaps we communicate in ways that have surprisingly little to do with what we actually say.
View ArticlePomes Bitcoineach
Can poetry help us understand blockchain? Are Bitcoins a new genre of poetry?
View Article"Parentheses" (and quotations)
Geoffrey Nunberg (somewhere) makes the point that parentheses and quotations follow similar typographical, and, you could say syntactic rules: If you open a parentheses (with a lunula) you have to...
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