It’s difficult to write about evolution. The first problem: What should be common knowledge is still taken as controversial by the (now) minority of those who reject the evidence of evolution. I watched the Evolution, Ecology and Behavior course in 2016, coincidentally the first year that a survey showed that the majority of the American …
Category Archives: Writing
Calculus
It’s the first semester of freshman year at Carnegie Mellon. I’m enrolled in Calculus for Science Majors. After the midterm, I skipped a couple of the weekly recitations. Then, when I finally did show up, I looked for my test in a pile of graded assignments. On one midterm, in the space marked, “Name _______”, …
The writer we deserve
Originally published March 2, 2016, Seattle Review of Books. It’s early in the year, time for taking on ambitious, resolution-worthy reading projects, and what better project than The Dying Grass, the latest novel from William T. Vollmann? Vollmann, our young nation’s own Tolstoy. Russia can keep Count Lev Nikolaevich and his high society, literary friends, …
The second-biggest schmuck in the world
Murray’s wife: “Murray, you’re a schmuck. You’re such a schmuck, you’re the second-biggest schmuck in the world.” “Oh yeah?” responds Murray. “Why aren’t I the biggest schmuck in the world?” “Because you’re such a schmuck!” I’ve discovered a pattern in my writing. The galgo, Cervantes’ invisible dog-narrator of Don Quixote. Barsabbas, the alternate juror of …
One month of blogging.
It’s the usual practice for bloggers and independent scholars to pick a favorite topic, whether it’s World War II history or butterflies or anime or prog rock, and circle around it for a lifetime. It’s a time-tested method for gaining expertise, creating blogs, and joining a community. My way is that of Odysseus resisting the …
The Trojan Women
Seattle’s poetry bookstore Open Books: A Poem Emporium has moved to Pioneer Square! And that’s where I met up with my friend Beverly Aarons, creator of Artists Up Close, for one of our expansive chats about writing, art, technology, and the world around us. Beverly knows that I’m a big fan of the talking-dog genre …
Lawmakers
Round him, as if to catch a haul of fish, I cast an impassable net—fatal wealth of robe—so that he should neither escape nor ward off doom. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1380. Robert Greene’s Laws of Power came out the same year I got an MBA. It was in the zeitgeist, and since then it’s become …
Tunics
“As there are no accounts of these events which are independent of Herodotus, a historical reconstruction, as opposed to a validation of all or part of Herodotus’ narrative, is impossible” Figueira, “Herodotus on the Early Hostilities between Aegina and Athens,” The American Journal of Philology 106.1, Spring 1985, 49). The famine in Epidaurus The Epidaurians’ …
Testocles
History has two Testocles. The rich kids from good Athenian families clamored to the fights at the Cynosarges gymnasium, the best fighters in town, always a good show. If you hung around long enough, you’d pummel and grapple and bleed and laugh with the rest. The good Athenian families were distressed to see their sons …
Sunday shoeshine boy
“I’d be in the gutter, and they’d stand on the sidewalk, and I’d kneel down, and for five cents, I shined their shoes.” Read LEON: A LIFE (Old Convincer Publishing, 2019).