Reading for Pleasure
I read somewhere recently (irresponsible, irresistible phrase!) that the proportion of us who read for pleasure is dropping, and has been for some time. The implication was that most of us, most of the...
Category: language
An Abecedarium
The current issue of Flusser Studies marks the twentieth year this small, online journal has been publishing research and commentary on the life and work of Vilém Flusser (1920 – 1991). I’ve been a...
Who Reads?
Apparently the US federal government is having difficulties recruiting agents to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). There are a number of reasons, but one important one is that applicants often cannot pass an “open...
The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Deaf Republic: Book Review
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, London: Faber and Faber, 2019. You might wonder, as I did, whether I was reading a fable, a myth, a folktale, a parable, or something else, something different. Of course...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...