As the scope and intensity of the coronavirus pandemic became more terribly apparent, and as I like so many others hunkered down at home and tried to get my head around these new and frightening conditions, I first looked around for books and texts that spoke more directly to the situation. Like so many others, […]
I gaze at the vista outside my study window and absorb the splendor of spring. We have been sheltering in place for eight weeks now. I trace the lush horizon marked by swaying trees and the tender green of the leaves on that one tree that sheds its leaves every Fall. No sign here of […]
Last autumn, I ran a course at the University of Hong Kong on “The Ecological Imagination in Film and Literature”. On the first day, I looked around the spotless, climate-controlled classroom and asked, “How many living things are in here with us?” The class seemed puzzled. As smart graduate students, they knew the answer was […]
It’ll be quiet in town now; unnaturally quiet – as when you catch it at that early hour when the few people about are either straggling home from clubs or turning in for the first shift at work. But there are no clubgoers now, only our ‘key workers’ whose social status stands in inverse proportion […]
Covid-19 has emptied our streets and blighted the places where we come together in community, revealing that the cities we have built have made us willfully blind to a fundamental truth: all things living exist at the whim and will of an indifferent nature. As we strive to sustain our family lives and work to […]
In Camus’s The Plague (1947), two Frenchmen in the Algerian town of Oran “gazed down at what was a dramatic picture of their life in those days: plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulated mummer.” An actor has passed away mid-performance. As he plays the role of ill-fated Orpheus, plague overtakes him […]
When Freud first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor in 1909, he remarked to Jung, ‘They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.’ Freud felt certain the Americans would reject his theories. The double irony in his statement, however, is that though Americans at the turn of the century would resist his […]
Mexico City is no stranger to the Apocalypse. Carlos Monsiváis, one of its famous chroniclers, often used the term to depict the experience of living in this most surreal of world capitals. In the 1990s, Monsiváis coined the term “post-apocalyptic” to account for life in the megalopolis that emerged after decades of booming and chaotic […]
As the scope and intensity of the coronavirus pandemic became more terribly apparent, and as I like so many others hunkered down at home and tried to get my head around these new and frightening conditions, I first looked around for books and texts that spoke more directly to the situation. Like so many others, […]
I gaze at the vista outside my study window and absorb the splendor of spring. We have been sheltering in place for eight weeks now. I trace the lush horizon marked by swaying trees and the tender green of the leaves on that one tree that sheds its leaves every Fall. No sign here of […]
Last autumn, I ran a course at the University of Hong Kong on “The Ecological Imagination in Film and Literature”. On the first day, I looked around the spotless, climate-controlled classroom and asked, “How many living things are in here with us?” The class seemed puzzled. As smart graduate students, they knew the answer was […]
It’ll be quiet in town now; unnaturally quiet – as when you catch it at that early hour when the few people about are either straggling home from clubs or turning in for the first shift at work. But there are no clubgoers now, only our ‘key workers’ whose social status stands in inverse proportion […]
Covid-19 has emptied our streets and blighted the places where we come together in community, revealing that the cities we have built have made us willfully blind to a fundamental truth: all things living exist at the whim and will of an indifferent nature. As we strive to sustain our family lives and work to […]
In Camus’s The Plague (1947), two Frenchmen in the Algerian town of Oran “gazed down at what was a dramatic picture of their life in those days: plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulated mummer.” An actor has passed away mid-performance. As he plays the role of ill-fated Orpheus, plague overtakes him […]
When Freud first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor in 1909, he remarked to Jung, ‘They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.’ Freud felt certain the Americans would reject his theories. The double irony in his statement, however, is that though Americans at the turn of the century would resist his […]
Mexico City is no stranger to the Apocalypse. Carlos Monsiváis, one of its famous chroniclers, often used the term to depict the experience of living in this most surreal of world capitals. In the 1990s, Monsiváis coined the term “post-apocalyptic” to account for life in the megalopolis that emerged after decades of booming and chaotic […]
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