Where is a middle ground in a polarization of the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair? How do ‘we’ feel about our consumption of breaking news about war?    “‘Surgeries have had to stop,’ said the hospital’s director, Dr. Mohamed Abu Salmiya. ‘Kidney dialysis has stopped and the neonatal unit is in a very dire situation. A baby has died because of lack of oxygen and electricity and heat.’ …The hospital has more than three dozen premature babies in incubators, Medhat Abbas, the director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said in a text message on Saturday”–Raja Abdulrahim, Ameera Harouda and Alan Yuhas, “ Plight of Gaza’s Main Hospital Worsens as Israeli Defense Force Close In ” 12 Nov. 2023 New York Times.    In reality, as opposed to the social construction of discourses, war is not a topic of conversation among soldiers alone (take Brian de Palma’s Redacted for example of a fictional retelling of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as point of view shifts to interpr...

  I am flying. Tomorrow I visit the gates of Bangor Naval Trident Submarine base, the largest collection of usable deployed U.S. nuclear weapons, and challenged by Archbishop Etienne of Seattle in his Oct. 7 pastoral letter, "because the Puget Sound could be on the front lines of a nuclear war." The existential threat emphasized here is followed by his appeal to Catholics to renew their study to Catholic teaching, and cites Pope Francis's 2019 address at Hiroshima decrying the possession of Nuclear weapons. At the gates of savage dreams, where social death not triumph beckons, what if all the unmade roads, trains planes, if at the threshold of nuclear tolerance, all the civic unrest, the living dead, arose to alarm? "the loss that makes the world" –Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism Ornate or basic, thresholds do, architecturally speaking, what acts of recognition, ceremonies of acceptance, ritualize. The opening to a space is marked by the style in which the...

 Some years ago  I attended a Boston Book Festival event, the refulgent Colum McCann, effervescent on his collection of short stories, 13 ways of seeing. At the open mic I asked him, “What does it feel like to write a two-page sentence?” He said, “Like music,” and elaborated a comparison to a composer feeling the notes, before he said, he had actually written a forty-page sentence in his book Dancer . Oh, the hypnotic prose of his character Victor gyrating his hips as he walked—the physicality translated on the page—movement, the synthesis of transgressive theme and plot working out that sentence, drawing me as a reader from the street, through the club scene of Studio 54, Victor selling coke, charming, dazzling, life of the party—ever competitive with Rudy, the Dancer, trying in a bath scene—and dueling cock-sucking—a body whose dance would live on, but whose meaning would lay still, lonely, except for the compassion of a masseuse’s hands.  This morning I took up the que...