torpedo the ark

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ... [1]     It's disconcerting enough when Phoevos the cat sits and stares at me, particulary if ...

Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)  Top row: Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and...

A gargoyle checking footnotes     A critic writes: One of the most irritating things about your blog is the use of endnotes.        One migh...

Giovanni Lanfranco:   Giovane nudo sul letto con un gatto (c. 1620-22) Oil on canvas (112 x160 cm)   I often ask myself who I am at that mom...

The Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA 2010)     I.    Readers may recall the big hoo-ha created by physicists Sokal and Bricmont back in the...

I. In an early school report, one of my teachers noted: "Stephen's work suffers due to his insistence on playing the c...

Anglo-Aussie artist David Bromley, who is best known for his images of youngsters that nostalgically recreate a memory (or fantasy) ...

Home is made for comin' from, for dreams of going to Which with any luck will never come true. I. Confessions of an Oikophobe ...

(Penguin, 2018) According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a cou...

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy   dir. Christopher Miles (1970) An angry email arrives in my inbox (not f...

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - ce...

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical intere...

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934) Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for...

The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feastin...

Having just finished reading the Derrida biography written by Benoît Peeters (trans. Andrew Brown), I was reminded once more of the tim...

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ...  It's not s...