There must be escalators somewhere, because, honestly, what on earth could not be seen as practical? Mathematically scarred bits of solidity rise like a heartbeat into view, then vanish into their own mechanics. These devices are doing a great service to people desirous of movement, a feeling one often has at bluest noon when day pinions the idea of space to space itself. Of course, by this I do not mean that light holds things together, practically. Rather, that it distracts us from our coming apart.
The last time I was smitten with genius, it made this point so well that when it sent the botched Rube Goldberg machine of my heart down to the parking garage via the elevator and left me there, I spent an hour waiting for my hazard lights to sync up with my pulse. They never did. I’m not making local news. I’m not coming home to you. I’m not thinking ’bout the party store in Northbrook. I’m not cut out to be cruel but I keep on being cruel. Who’d have thought the fall from grace would be monastic? How sad and desultory, these things that keep us up to scrutinize the Wi-Fi router’s cobalt and clandestine Morse against the other wall.
is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. His research encompasses European and American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Critical Theory, Marxism, continental philosophy (esp. German idealism and its afterlives), and historical poetics. Articles of his have appeared in New German Critique, Poetics Today, and TheWallace Stevens Journal. He is editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Marxist Literary Theory (under contract, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of the volumes The Frankfurt School and Poetics (under contract, Routledge) and Hildegarde Flanner: On the Life and Work of an American Master (under contract, The Unsung Masters Series). His work has received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Leo Baeck Institute, the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, and he has held visiting scholarships with New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. His poetry and translations have appeared in such venues as The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Oxford Poetry, and The Southern Review. He holds an M.F.A. from NYU and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver, where he served as Poetry and Translations Editor for Denver Quarterly. He lives in New York City.
