Remembering Norman Mailer
In his introduction to a 2003 collection of essays devoted to the late Norman Mailer, Harold Bloom deems the author “the most visible of contemporary novelists,” echoing an ambivalence shared by many literary critics since Mailer first burst onto the scene with the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948 (1). His visibility,…
Read MoreDesomond Macnamara – An Interview
Desmond MacNamara, a prized Logos contributor, died January 8 at the age of 89. Mac, as he was known to friends, was one of the most remarkable people that at least three Logos editors ever met. This profoundly Irish artist, a sparkling wit and inexhaustible raconteur, lived in London since 1951 with his charming English…
Read MoreConfessions of an Irish Werewolf
Chapter 1 The horse tram rattled and jerked to a stop as two passengers rushed from the curbside and mounted the steps on to the platform, the man helping the lady past a pile of fresh horse droppings and puddles in the more sunken parts of the cobbled road. The fare was a penny from…
Read MoreThinking About Fromm And Marxism
Erich Fromm’s work is unfortunately neglected in academia today, in no small part because his expansive humanism is out of joint with many forms of radical thought popular in those quarters. In addition, university psychology and psychiatry departments have almost completely excluded Freudians or psychoanalysts of any kind, which leaves no room for Fromm there either. …
Read MoreModes Of Authority And The Crisis Of Higher Education
Graduate students pondering a career in the Liberal Arts are often anxious to learn about the latest trends in the teaching profession, and seek advice from older, more experienced faculty about how to address or manage their first undergraduate courses. But if they are candid with the newer cohort, older faculty are often baffled or…
Read MoreTwo poems by James Scully
Two poems by James Scully — There Is No Truth to the Rumor Donatello’s Version THERE IS NO TRUTH TO THE RUMOR there is no truth to the rumor the Constitution’s a goddamned piece of paper it’s not vegetable, but animal dressed as parchment– invented in Pergamon in not yet Turkey 3rd century BCE when…
Read MoreAnimal Rights, Gene Technology, And Human Breeding: A Conversation With Peter Sloterdijk*
“I don’t believe in a God that created harelips” – Peter Sloterdijk The human genome has shown how close we are to animals. Could this not lead to greater kindness to animals? The deeper insight into the genetic similarity between animals and humans and between humans and plants leads us to a situation which many…
Read MoreDeconstructing the Lobby: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby, Farrar, Strauss ,and Giroux, 2007
Most people are local in their orientations. They spend their days focused on work, school, the kids and their friends. They go to the movies and out to dinner. Under normal circumstances the attention paid to what is happening on the other side of the proverbial hill goes little beyond an occasional tut-tut at the…
Read MoreAn Ex-maoist Looks At An Ex-trotskyist: on Irving Howe’s Leon Trotsky
A quarter of a century since he wrote it, Howe’s biography of Trotsky raises far more questions than it can directly answer. How could a devoted democratic socialist describe a founder of the Bolshevik Party and thus of the Soviet state as “one of titans of the century,” not least when the author also recognizes…
Read MoreMisleadership Triumphant
Review Essay Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper; Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency by Lou Dubose and Jack Bernstein Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew Cockburn. When George W. Bush became president, an Australian friend wrote to me, perplexed. She asked, “How…
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