“A scaffold without a show, a sermon without words. Here absence hangs heavier than any corpse.” - Me The trouble with gibbets is that they're both too much and not enough. Too much when they hold their grisly trophies aloft for the crows; not enough when they stand bare against the horizon, gaunt as a … Continue reading Winter’s Gibbet: A Scaffold Without a Show
Category: history
The Privy as Polis: Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax
It’s one of the odder ironies of English letters that Sir John Harington, courtier, poet, and godson to Elizabeth I, is remembered not for his verse but for his privy. Not his own privy parts, mind you, but the contraption he nicknamed the ‘Ajax’ - a flushing water-closet that, in its mechanical elegance, promised to … Continue reading The Privy as Polis: Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax
The Draggle-Tail: A Word in Mud and Memory
In truth, the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination knocked the breath out of me. Over these last twenty four hours I found little appetite to write, or even to stir myself to much at all. I let the hours pass in quiet, trying to steady the heart and unclench the mind. When grief or anxiety … Continue reading The Draggle-Tail: A Word in Mud and Memory
The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
Some songs drift like smoke and some songs weigh like stone. Judee Sill’s The Kiss is the latter: not a melody you whistle while waiting for a bus, but a requiem whispered in the confessional, heavy with sorrow, radiant with a kind of bruised grace. Judee Sill herself was a paradox incarnate. Born in 1944, … Continue reading The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
The Ship of Theseus: A Nation Adrift on Rotten Planks
Plutarch’s riddle is older than our language but no less urgent for its age. If every plank of Theseus’ ship were replaced, was it still the same vessel? The Athenians insisted that it was - because their pride needed it to be so. Hobbes, less sentimental, pressed the matter: what if the discarded planks were … Continue reading The Ship of Theseus: A Nation Adrift on Rotten Planks
Wording 