For moral and philosophical absolutes sounded a bit like my beloved orchids - numinous, hard to find, known only to a chosen few.
[...] Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me - in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats - 'hold reality and justice in a single vision'. [...]
[...] I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature and Revolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest in orchids.
At fifteen I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school (bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capital…
[...] Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United States. They see our country as embodying everything that is wrong with the rich post-Enlightenment West. They see ours as what Foucault called a 'disciplinary society', dominated by an odious ethos of '…
