Author: Andrew Taggart

• February 7, 2011

  On forgiveness

  The way of resentment His mother’s voice, the sound of it, he could hardly bear without holding a cup of chamomile tea in both his hands. His mother seemed unconcerned with much save the coupons she had clipped out of the Sunday paper. Some she would use to reline the pantry wall with green beans…
• February 6, 2011

  Not a madman but Gilbert and Sullivan

  It’s warm in bed, and the floorboards are cold. The radiator is clicking in the darkness. Morning is here but in name only or, rather, only if one follows clock time. But should one? No, that question’s too far along and–too intellectual, too third-personal. Come back to me, this place, this moment of hesitation. Don’t…
• February 5, 2011

  On Bloomberg’s self-love and our narrow political imagination

  Update: A revised version of the essay is available here at Counterpunch. * * * Mayor Bloomberg is featured on the cover of the Feb. 7 New Yorker. Entitled “Bloom in Love,” the watercolor depicts our vain mayor smitten with his image. It is Valentine’s Day (or perhaps, it’s implied, every day for Bloomberg is…
• February 4, 2011

  On O’Keefe’s unknown infinity and Pascal’s eternal silence

  Georgia O’Keefe has ventured out of doors and there finds the “sun under the clouds.” But not some dull thing this, not ennui loitering behind the shed. No, for O’Keefe, this is a painter’s sun. She recalls later, “[T]he color effect was very strange–standing high on a pale green hill where I could look all…
• February 3, 2011

  Rita Koganzen heaps scorn on “emerging adulthood”

  In her polemic entitled “Slacking as Self-Discovery,” Rita Koganzen calls into question the view that “emerging adulthood” is a vital exploratory period in the life of twenty somethings. I think Koganzen’s article is smart, albeit one-sided. Smart: Like Michael Sandel, she argues that the conception of the “voluntarist self”–a self unencumbered by external influences and concerned…