July 16, 2019
On Writing as Wish Fulfillment
I was in elementary school when I first started “writing” stories—I would take the Hot Wheels toy cars I’d collected since I was a toddler, name them all after my […]
January 23, 2019
On Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”
For many writers, nothing is more exciting than seeing in some work of fiction, be it a short story or a novel or a play or even a movie, a […]
May 18, 2018
On Character Motivation
In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that […]
April 22, 2016
Clowns and Poetry (Part One)
Ann Arbor’s weather of late has been a bit berserk. It snowed two weeks ago; then it was eighty degrees. Today it’s gray and rainy, conditions that pass for spring-like […]
December 7, 2015
An Issue of Blood
This Thursday is Emily Dickinson’s 185th birthday; she was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she died in 1886. In 1885, she wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd, who […]
September 28, 2015
“What You Know, You Know”: Re-Reading Othello
As a man, Iago is a house of mirrors. At bottom, his desire, if it can be called that, is to be at the center, to be powerful even if […]
June 30, 2015
Midsummer, Memory
What do you remember from age four and a half? Anything? Most of my memories begin around age five—and even those are few and fleeting. My earliest memory is one […]
June 5, 2015
Anon It Moves: The Winter’s Tale
One of the cultural happenings out here in Portland that lately has my attention is the growth of the theatre company Anon It Moves. It was founded by Erica Terpening-Romeo […]
May 30, 2015
Poetry and Chess
I was perusing YouTube for new movie trailers, as I do sometimes in between cases at work. Confession: I never intend to go watch the flick unless it’s a new […]
May 19, 2015
Basic Instructions for Being Human
These days, I’m thinking much about my love for liberal education and the ways in which it continues to be relevant in the world of screens, as the virtual begins […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
April 29, 2015
Drunken Savages with Quill Pens
At one point in his Philosophical Letters on the English, in which he observed the culture and society of France’s rival across the Channel, Voltaire, that paragon of French neoclassical […]