Blog

The Consolation of Philosophy

March 30, 2020 - By Gabriele Ferraris

I haven’t left my house since February, but now I’ll have to do it. I have to get to a bank machine. Yes, even in these dark times of COVID-19, we Italians still get fined by mail. I’ll pay up, but you should know that I happen to have a philosopher for a brother. Not some placid guy who takes life philosophically. A real philosopher, the kind that hold debates about world systems and publish philosophical tomes.

To be precise, in a book titled The Tunnel of Tickets, my brother the philosopher tells the story of a minor personal mishap. He tells it in order to explain a philosophical theory that I, the dimwit brother, can...

Corona Virus and the Animal Within Us

March 28, 2020 - By Om Prakash Dwivedi

Modern society, as Byung Chul Han, incisively points out, is a “burnout society,” for it is driven and governed by the unequal structures of capitalism and its deep desire to immunize itself from others—races, cultures, nations—thus making a palpable distinction between the self and the other, the known and the unknown, the native and the alien, so forth and so on.

We live in an age of achievement and progress; the lack of it, therefore, entails panic and depression. The present pandemic crisis of COVID-19 could be a direct result of man’s desire to walk away with deepened pockets. The thing about...

10 Questions for Keith Leonard

March 27, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

There must have been a world
before the slender architecture
in the palm flexed the pistons
in the wrist and the chisel
shaped the hips of this;
there must have been a single tree
plucked and carved hollow
which drew from some of us
a wilderness; [...]
—from "Guitar," Volume 61 Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I actually still have them. I found them a few years ago in my parents attic, and they are unspeakably awful. Here are some sample titles: “Need for Speed”, “Staring at the White Wall”. I read them to my high school students at the beginning of each poetry course I teach. We all agree that nothing they write could be as...

What Do We Have to Lose?

March 25, 2020 - By Valery Glod-Gransewicz

Painting: “I am Joy” by Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis. Part of the Peace Am I series.

Three days into my own family’s version of self-quarantining, I began seeing headlines claiming the drug hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) might lessen the effects and viral load of COVID-19. Plaquenil is the most commonly prescribed drug for Lupus patients. Lupus is a chronic, auto-immune disease with the potential to impact multiple organ systems. While I haven’t personally required Plaquenil to keep my own Lupus under control since 2008, I’m more...

(Not Quite)10 Questions for Laura Glen Louis

March 24, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

My brother, Victor, said that Mr. B was the only interesting teacher at our school, and that I might finally learn a thing or two. Because this brother never said anything more urgent to me than Get out of my room, I saw in his comments something akin to the hot and savory. For once Victor was right, but interesting didn't begin to portray the man. One needed a more complex word, something involute. Labyrinthine. One needed a ball of string and a torch.
—from "The Empirical Mr.B," Volume 61, Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

We asked Laura Glen Louis the same 10 Questions we ask our other contributors. She responded with following interview.

Why “The Empirical Mr. B”?
Each piece begins with a haunting. All...