Yes, Always

Talking with the brilliant novelist, essayist and philosopher Mark de Silva ( @MarkdeSilva1 ) about his novel The Logos, about logos, about advertising, the metaphysics of writing fiction, the history of capitalism, and just about everything.Mark de Silva is the author of the novels Square Wave (2016) and The Logos (2022), as well as the essay collection Points of Attack (2020). He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD). He is a contributing editor at 3:AM...

Talking about fashion and philosophy with Gwenda-lin Grewal: Grewal's recently released book Fashion / Sense; ant death spirals; the quest for immortality; the Heraclitan church of athleisure; and much more...

Todays news: Sharon Stone's husband mauled by Komodo dragon; Florida man asphyxiates on regurgitated cockroaches after winning live cockroach-eating contest; tallest man in the world rescues dolphin; Michigan man pleads guilty to murdering and eating parts of Kevin Bacon; "Pedantic Literalist," by Marianne Moore; Prince Rupert's drops; Prince Rupert's dog believed to possess magical powers.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle. 1943.Translated by Andrew Hurley. Read by Benjamin Hale.

A Halloween episode: the Kraken, Michael Myers, the Terminator, killing mice, the banality of evil.

Don Juan, melancholy at the twilight of his life of pleasure, in a last quest to relive his memories imprisons himself in a nightmare.

Talking with Andrew Ricketts about basketball movies, William Melvin Kelley, James Joyce, Conan the Destroyer, black American slang, the roots of the word woke.

Raymond L. Ditmars, a friend of Marianne Moore, was the curator of the New York Zoological Garden for many years.  Moore said that she learned about the hopping desert rodent, the jerboa, from Ditmars' 1931 book, Strange Animals I have Known; in it, he writes, "There are remarkable forms of adaptation.  There are little rats called jerboas which run on long hind-legs as thin as a match.  The forelimbs are mere tiny hands.  They are fleet and coloured like the sand.  They have a long balancing tail, with decorative pad of black and white fur at the tip.  This tip is, in fact, more than decorative, as the pad is like a little snow-shoe to keep the end from sinking in the sand.  The tail is carried in upward curve when the creatures run.  When they stop it is rested on the ground so that the whole body is little tripod.  The feet have furry pads to prevent their becoming imbedded in the soft sand.  I kept one for several years, not giving it a drop of water.  It fed on dry corn and loved stems of dry grass.  The only moisture it had came from occasional bits of greens, of which it was not over fond."

Jorge Luis Borges first published the story El milagro secreto in the magazine Sur in February of 1943, in the middle of WWII.  It is about a Jewish Czech writer living in Prague during the beginning of the Nazi occupation in 1939.  I read it to my students the day after the 2016 presidential election, and I read it to my students again today (the day after the 2020 election).  It is one of my favorite stories about a writer.  Its hero, Jaroslav Hladik, in the midst of political catastrophe, races against his own death to finish his magnum opus.  Hladik's prayer to God reflects the most writerly anxiety there is: he needs more time.