April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
February 8, 2014
An Alternate Second Half of the Aeneid
A story about Virgil on his deathbed, possibly apocryphal, tells how he ordered his literary executors to destroy the Aeneid because it was imperfect; that he preferred that the poem […]
January 29, 2014
“Who are the modern heirs of James Joyce?”
The New York Times Book Review has instituted a new feature recently, in which they pose a question to a pair of writer-critics. Generally the answers are constrained by the […]
January 19, 2014
Anne Sexton and Poetic Atavism
Rereading the Collected Poems of Anne Sexton, she seems to me to have become, over her career, the least “Confessional” of the poets given that label. Apparently she suffered […]
January 10, 2014
Illustration of the Greek Concept of Fate
During the sack of Troy, having danced with the others around the wooden Horse and now lying gored in Priam’s palace, Paris had a vision in which he relived his […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
December 28, 2013
Epic Fail
The most inflated reputation in literary history came about as the result of genuine literary merit crossed with a transnational empire and language. Many people would assume I speak of […]
December 17, 2013
In Praise of Agnosis
Entertain, for a moment, the possibility that reason evolved to facilitate the use of tools. If you take this point as a given—and I cannot “prove” to you that this […]
December 15, 2013
Do Animals Suffer?
Do animals experience pain? Do animals suffer? With human neuroscience still in its infancy as a discipline, animal neuroscience is even farther behind. I am usually reluctant to loudthink about either […]
December 14, 2013
The Brains of Animals
The radiologist in me had his interest piqued recently by a documentary that flashed an orca’s brain MRI (Blackfish). I started looking at every image and article Google Scholar could […]
December 13, 2013
To Review or not to Review
Should reviewers write negative reviews, or pass over books they don’t like in silence? Should they make a point only to write positive reviews? Should they review writers they know? […]
December 12, 2013
The Future of an Identity
Even the bitterest hater of religion would concede it is exceedingly unlikely to vanish–not least because antireligious ideologues end up behaving like a religious community, with group-forming behavior (and group […]