Posts Tagged ‘Morgan Meis’
Dead People: Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)
June 27, 2016
For Gregory Wolfe The following is an excerpt from Meis’s new book Dead People, published June 24 by Zero Books. Leszek Kolakowski died July 17, 2009. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the twentieth century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best…
Read MoreOdd Northern Indiana
May 26, 2016
Route 41 takes you along the coast of Lake Michigan out of Chicago. If you are trying to stay close to the lake, then veer off Route 41 at Whiting and tack southeast onto Route 20. That’s where the landscape takes a turn toward oddness. You’re between Chicago, Illinois and Gary, Indiana. Those excited by…
Read MoreCanada: Detroit’s Southerly Neighbor
May 3, 2016
Detroit is the only major city in America, people will tell you (even if you haven’t asked), where you drive south to get to Canada. The southerly orientation of our otherwise-northern neighbor is due to an odd strip of Canada that squeezes in between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. That strip extends all the way…
Read MoreJames Tate: Finding the Ultimate in the Ordinary
April 6, 2016
The poet James Tate died last year. It happened in July. He was seventy-one years old. This, then, is the first Lent and Easter season we’ve been without him. Pity, that. Back some years ago, The Paris Review published a lovely conversation between Charles Simic and James Tate. Simic opens up the conversation by noting…
Read MoreDiego Rivera’s Detroit Industry
March 15, 2016
The Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) is obviously not a religious institution. But damn if its Rivera Court doesn’t feel like sacred space. The Rivera Court consists of wall murals, floor to ceiling, around an indoor courtyard. The murals were painted by Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the famous Mexican muralist. Rivera himself was not an especially…
Read MoreDetroit: The Reality of Death and the Reality of Life
February 25, 2016
At night, through the mottled glass of a door that leads out onto the roof of the building, a red light flashes on, then off, on, then off. It is like a scene from an early fifties’ noir movie. A seedy part of town. A motel. A neon sign flashing with an advertisement for “Girls,…
Read MoreCreating Sacred Literature
February 3, 2016
“We are just at the beginning,” Charles Taylor wrote in his lumpy but essential tome, A Secular Age, “of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.” If we are just at the beginning of a new age, it stands to reason that we are also at the ending of an…
Read MoreGeorge Scialabba and the Problem of Critical Distance
January 8, 2016
George Scialabba retired from his job this October. He had worked at Harvard University for thirty-five years. But not as a professor. Scialabba was a clerical worker and building manager. A piece in the Chronicle Review about Scialabba’s career as a writer and book critic described his day job as “low level.” Scialabba has, more…
Read MoreRepression, Oppression, Suppression: A Life of Domestic Routine
December 23, 2015
Somewhere in the middle of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the eponymous Jeanne eats a sandwich in her kitchen. We have, by that point in the film, seen quite a lot of Jeanne’s kitchen. We’ve watched Ms. Dielman cook in that kitchen, peel potatoes, wash dishes (shot from behind her back so…
Read MoreHenry David Thoreau: Hopelessly Discontent
November 3, 2015
The following is an indirect response to Kathryn Schulz’s article “Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau’s Moral Myopia,” from The New Yorker, October 19, 2015: “I have travelled,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “a good deal in Concord: and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing…
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