The New Republic

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We speak of rebellion when the kid is a hellion and the folks are as mild as a spoon. Likewise Republicans born of freethinking lesbians seem like reactors, turncoats on how they were raised. Let me offer another concatenation of this explanation. Think of your mother as one discreet corner of a person with a multiple mental disorder. You're one of the others. One that split off. READ MORE >>

         In line at the drinking fountain desert bus stop years of complete blackness you bring back with you, circa, 1968, that took me through several states, some of which I would have to ask kind strangers to name so I would know where I was. But that's no big deal. No one would medicate us in those days, so we medicated ourselves, and          back to the woman standing in line at the only drinking fountain at the desert bus stop of veritable vultures, crying and talking READ MORE >>

Turning so effortlessly you wouldn’t call it that, what they do, sliding easily over, a kind of effortless oscillation, on their sides, most of them, floating together in their troop, perhaps twenty-five of them just off the pier, though you couldn’t count them, the sea-lions: they curve around one another, two break away, one joins, the group drifts with the tide. Whose flipper or tail raised to the sun, READ MORE >>

In following the waterway across the hill, York gum saplings holding out against the erosive sidewash induced by downpours, you come across the leg of a sheep, flesh eaten away, bones held together by sinews that have dried and tightened—the leg is seized in the moment of “fall to your knees...” It points neither up nor down the hill, nor divinely the length of the waterway. A sheep death under the old regime, a time when sheep kept the grass down and died to rot where they fell. Dismembered by foxes; READ MORE >>

As all the survivors of the ark burst ashore in a happy pandemonium chattering, roaring, howling for prey lowing to be fruitful and multiply while above their heads the rainbow hinted that there would be no end again--the end came for the fish without cares who lived off the catastrophe like slippery swindlers: now on the face of the stiffening earth the writhing fins were stranded and with gaping mouths they drowned in the air. Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier READ MORE >>

All the rivers run into the sea and the sea is not full because all the rivers return to the rivers. Believe me. This is the secret of pride and the fall. This is the secret of the system of yearning.   READ MORE >>

Hatred’s homicidal. Hitler knows. He makes what most men mean by hate a tepid sentiment, though at the time, no one seemed inclined to notice, and I wondered, When will my Hungarians awaken? I waited for the Jews to rouse themselves. But only slowly were they moved to anger; even then most merely said, “depose the madman.” Moderation’s suicide. A whimper while the butcher spreads fresh paper. Even in translation in the Times, he aims READ MORE >>

The pigeons here purr. They don't coo--coo like an infant coos, or cries, before it learns its words, or its way in the world--a string of whys and whos: the inquisitive mind, so often confused--which is what I was, by the birds' odd sounds--sorrowful, echoing off the rocks behind my room. But actually, it makes sense, considering how close they roost to that woman's house--the great artist's muse, the weeping woman, her portraits rendered so vividly by the one who loved and abused her. The other morning, I came home and found READ MORE >>