A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, randomness, consciousness, etc.
Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…
After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold—I finally began to read him…
I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...
Religion (at least certain versions of it) offers a clean slate: “all is forgiven.” Yet mere time offers something almost as powerful. We…
The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…
I wrote this for my friend Adrien Converse, the artist Lurm. In their livestream series “Live with Lurm,” Adrien reads pieces of writing for the very first time, then improvises music in response....
A diary or journal doesn’t just reveal a person’s inner life. It helps create it, by structuring and deepening one’s ongoing dialogue with…
Here’s one of the most wonderful passages in all of Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”:...
We can look around and observe that, for lack of a better term, lower beings (plants, animals) have varyingly complex conceptions of the…
I’ve come to think of almost everything as explainable by some sort of feedback loop. ...