Posted on

Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words

In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.

Continue reading → Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words

Posted on

A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

Continue reading → A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

Posted on

Below the Mesh

The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.

Continue reading → Below the Mesh

Posted on

The Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over

Robert Hughes wanted it both ways. In the final moments of “The Shock of the New,” his landmark 1980 BBC series on modern art, he declared the avant-garde dead and then, in the same breath, described its beating heart. He told us that the radical project of art was finished, that the market had swallowed it whole, that the institutions had filed its teeth down to nothing. And then he said this: the task of art is “done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” That sentence is the avant-garde. Hughes described the thing he claimed to be burying.

Continue reading → The Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over

Posted on

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

Continue reading → The Claim I Filed in 2006