Nonfiction

24 may dear brenda, i have three mfa letters to write; lately i have been obliging all my students to write on the same schedule, which means i have one week of very hard work, followed by, or interspersed with, three weeks of anxious leisure, in which i wonder what i ought to do with…

One way to look at it is this: the spiritual history of European communism is divided evenly into two parts by the name of Moses Hess. And the essay Uber das Geldwesen (On the Essential Nature of Money) is nothing less than the watershed which divides it. Ernst Bloch has famously distinguished two currents in…

I could remember a big black car bumping my dog Skippy's head on the highway when I was seven years old. Skippy didn't die, but he went insane. I remember hearing dogs howl in the Sacramento Delta migrant camp where I grew up, accurately signaling someone's death the day after. When I was ten, I…

i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…

I have a photograph of my father wearing a black tuxedo and holding a suckling pig under his arm. He's on stage. Two dark-eyed beauties in low-cut party dresses are standing next to him and giggling. He's laughing too. The pig has its mouth open, but it doesn't look like it's laughing. It's New Year's…

Yesterday at the supermarket I overheard a man and a woman discussing narrative poetry. She said: "Perhaps all so-called narrative poems are merely ironic, their events only pointing out how impoverished we are, how, like hopeless utopians, we live for the end. They show that our lives are invalidated by our needs, especially the need…

Every evening dries on a roof of tar, and the screens twang under the weight of bugs in a place not yet given to me. Metaphor doesn't mediate our understanding of the world; we take what comes. Cars in the late night and screams from children are linked to appetite, and make me fear for…

Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…

In 1862, Flaubert recalls for the Goncourts the beginnings of his liaison with Louise: “He told us the story of his coupling with Colet, initiated in a drive home in a carriage, painting himself as playing the role of someone disgusted with life, of the dark, handsome stranger, of the suicidal romantic, which so amused…