Thoughts in response to Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks: —Oliver Sacks is a regular New Yorker contributor, and though I was peripherally familiar with some of his work, I hadn’t been directly exposed to it until I read his essay “Altered States” in the August 27, 2012 issue of the New Yorker. In it, Sacks discusses […]
Thunderbird is Dorothea Lasky’s third book of poetry, but as a reader I am new to her. When a writer has built a manageable oeuvre I like to approach it as completely as possible, but I was not attracted to Lasky’s work by typical means. I enjoyed her poem “I Had a Man” in the […]
Quite often I cover shop. Lazily browsing through rows upon rows, books with great designs entice me to take them off the shelf, peer into the rooms so eloquently promised. Before even attempting a grasp of Harkaway’s worlds, the front door sucked me in. I had no idea what I was in for. Joshua Joseph […]
There are ways of writing history. School book classical with feigned objectivity purporting to be conclusive; or with a subjectivity, with personality; as if a person were actually behind the words, as if a soul were buried in the legends on display. George Dyson has a voice behind him. With Turing’s Cathedral it’s clear he […]
Charles Fourier (1772-1837) is a taxonomist, which in this case should absolutely be confused with taxidermist. In certain ways, The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy prove that he’s both. The book is an organized collection of all the different types of cuckolds and all the different types of bankruptcy. Cuckoldry comes first. Each cuckold is […]
