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The Last Memorizers

The examiner names two places. A square in Islington, a hospital across the river. The candidate sits across the desk in a Transport for London office on Baker Street and calls the run out loud: the streets in order, the exact curb where the passenger is set down. Each appearance gives him four of these calls in about twenty minutes. Marks come off for wrong street names and banned turns. Hesitation alone can sink an answer, because a route that cannot be recalled at traffic speed cannot be driven at traffic speed. This is the Knowledge of London, and it still begins and ends the same way, with a human being reciting a city from the skull.

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The Rain Gauge

I am standing at the kitchen sink at 6:40 in the morning, rinsing a coffee cup in the dark, and there it is, whole and settled, as if it had been waiting behind the faucet for years. Every day, I cry a little bit more. I am sixty-one years old, and I have lived long enough to know that a sentence like this one does not visit at random. It comes because it is true. It stays because tomorrow it will be truer still.

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The Lotus Tea

Catherine Liu took the stage in London on September 21 to talk about trauma. She was there for Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She apologized for the tangent, and her interviewer told her to keep going. “What a phenomenal tangent that was,” she said when she surfaced.

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Reviewing Chris Potter as He Sounds The Sirens

I just downloaded “The Sirens” from iTunes and Chris Potter filled my mind with grand spans of time and travel spilling out of my speakers and into my apartment in an all-new adaptation of the famous Homer classic.

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All Things Flow

As we are unendingly bent by time and oppressively compressed by spaces, we are bound to remember the comprehensive value of what Socrates found in Heracleitus’ claim that “All Things Flow.”  We are always in a state of change.  There is no past or future — there is only the “liquid now” that never remains the same from moment to moment. 

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