An op-ed in the Times today rehashed the argument that what motivates Trump voters is status. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage). The idea: not material conditions, but the transformation of mainstream values (viz. gay marriage, black president) has left middle-class white voters feeling de-valued and vulnerable.

Yikes. Going way back now to 2010, when I was still doing hacky, overwrought music journalism stuff. This is a sort of ‘consideration’ of a musician I knew in college, an acquaintance, whose music I fell instantly in love with. He spurned even indie success, despite an offer from a…

Again many years ago, probably 2013, I managed to successfully pitch a Believer editor a snake-oil story about a guy named Bob Weisz, a friend, who I described as a Wavy Gravy-like figure in the post-Katrina New Orleans film scene. The editor, wisely, wanted an interview with him. Despite many…

Yet another review pulled from the vaults, unpublished — no memory of if or to whom I submitted it. Who cares about DFW anymore. Well, lots of people. Why not, he’s a good writer. Here were my thoughts on Max’s biography, back when it came out. D.T. Max’s Every Love…

Yet another abandoned review from years ago, this one commissioned by a classy erotic periodical. It’s about the 1968 film of that name, which didn’t find a wide audience for thirty years. It’s a wild, cool movie. I get all bogged down in stuff and I see why it ended…

A few years ago I wrote the catalog essay for a public art installation for The Art Guys — amusing Texas artists, whose worked I like, and who reached out to me to write something. It has since been taken off the internet, so I thought I’d repost. Here it…

This is an insane paper I wrote on Hamlet and mice for an advanced philosophy class during my PhD. Its thesis, as I recall, is roughly: mice are a manifestation of human madness. I was living in a one bedroom apartment amidst tribes of mice, cockroaches and eventually bedbugs, and…

Several years ago, when it was relevant, I wrote a review of Chris Andrew’s Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. It languished, partly in editorial transitions at the journal in question, and never came to publication. I have no interest in pursuing it anywhere else. So here it is: A…

This review of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (edited by Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes and David Wood) has been sitting on my desk for over a year — the call for new revisions ignored, the editor having by now most likely long forgotten about it. I don’t feel like trying…