The plan, such as it is, for the future of this device.
A confessional concerning my nature and motivations, please excuse the deplorable self indulgence inherent herein.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
— Francis Bacon, Of Studies.
An appreciation of several dead prophets and their living communicants.
One of my favorite forms of literature.
The second part of a series tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest prepared foods.
Villon was a villain.
The first part of a series tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest prepared foods.
The problems with a short fable about an island.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, like Hieronymus Bosch, was several centuries ahead of his time.
The first version of this article was published June 22nd, 2003. This update includes information recently gleaned at an exhibition of Arcimboldo’s work at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, France.
An essay on the nature of the novel as defined by three great twentieth-century novelists born between 1929 and 1936.
My beer Shangri-La is situated at 167 Chrystie Street, New York, New York, and is called New Beer Distributors.
Tell ’em Jack sent you.
The birth of the anti-hero.
A small loss in the grand scheme.
A gurney ride into darkest night.
He’s got Freedom of Choice.
Words fail me.
A pangram contains every letter of the alphabet. The word comes from the Greek words pan (all) and gramma (letter).
The games despots play.
A rose by any other name.
How do we write for the ages as they leave us behind?
All words are equal, but some are more equal than others.
This essay was originally published March 24th, 2004. I have re-worked it because it is one of the most popular landing pages on this site.
Continuity within the human condition.
A short and somewhat formal description of the Radar Networks Triple Store, which is the system that handles the semantic metadata for this website.
A “trust horizon”-based routing scheme for use in peer to peer overlay networks.
I attended my first Pho List gathering last evening. Lawyers argued music technology policy late into the evening over sake and snacks. I listened with some interest and, in classic esprit d’escalier, here are my rebuttals to the various suggestions put forth.
Certain words and expressions have what seems the best possible emotional and semantic content — the perfect prosody. Unfortunately, I am in love with many that aren’t native to my native English.
Two great tastes, [...]
Group theory applied to groups of persons.
A proposed solution to some of the problems that plague our email infrastructure.
Some ghosts still live.
Under the sea he lies dead and dreaming.
An awkward wobble, arms akimbo.
Nor yesterday, either.
Morality, economics and prison sex.
Watch where you walk.
Patch work: spit and baling wire.
I was, for one day, the Devil.
A musicological analysis of why I’ll never be a famous rock guitar hero.
We made some noise, would you like some?
On the dangers of inadequate preparation.
A wake-up call.
Of mice and men.
Tuesday night at my local.
Stop me before I read again.
A bit of whining about the housing market.
We both tried, but it didn’t work out.
In which the author learns yet another valuable life lesson.
Someone turned out the lights. All of them.
Accèpimus panem, fructum terrae.
Our New Year celebrations started at lunch. We had French galettes with melted gruyere and shredded turkey, a small salad and a bottle of red wine (sadly, there was no cidre to be had). The galettes were accomplished thusly.
Some homes resist improvement.
I didn’t order this, but I’ll take it anyway.
A conversation.
The beginnings of an article for Modern Gypsy magazine.
On the importance of communication.
Loose connections sometimes persist beyond reasonable boundaries.
The first in a series of letters to a son I don’t have. He is, perhaps cruelly, named for the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.
It wasn’t really voodoo, it was Santeria.
A brief biographical summary in which I confess my love for machines.
My first brush with true love.
The morbid practice of re-living tragedy and the answer to half of the email I’ve received this week.
A man can be the country from whence he comes.
A drunken crossing between countries and languages.
Smuggling food into prison.
Three men making noise.
The diary of a former rock star.
A gastronomic adventure.
A short dialogue on the afterlife, interlinked with the recent readings on the web that inspired it.
An unusual museum in Rome.
A quotation that could serve as a workable position statement for the author.
Mining for narrative gold in AOL’s dung-heap.
Rhetorical Device’s crack team of fact checkers debunk a statement made by Bush at the last debate.
Some old wisdom for the new empire.
I found these on the wall.
The things people say.
The Six Mistakes of Man.
The most common disasters in the world.
Strange bedfellows.
The view from the train window.
With apologies to William Carlos Williams. And our grandchildren.
Waking up after far too long.
Answers.
A photograph of Mammon’s summer home.
Ce n’est pas une poésie politique.
An ode to feline beauty.
Money changes everything.
In the beginning the market was without currency and there were lambs and wheat and barley upon the scales.
This essays leans heavily on Fritz Heichelheim’s An ancient economic history; from the palaeolithic age to the migrations of the Germanic, Slavic and Arabic nations, Karl Polanyi’s The Livelihood of Man, Morris Silver’s Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East, and various articles by I. J. Gelb in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 4. See also parts one, two and three.
A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 3. See also parts one, two and four.
A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 2. See also parts one, three and four.
A humanistic exploration of our digital helpers. See also parts two, three and four.
Negotiating with the tribe of animals.
Long before he was Don Fernando.
Welcome, Don Fernando.
Farewell, Don Fernando.
The seasons change, and so do we.
Observing the sabbath. From afar.
Just keep looking, you’ll find it.
The cycle of life.
Ecclesiastical advice for the lost.
Fire and brimstone.
A page from Ezekiel’s diary.
This piece was jointly inspired by a short piece at Distorte called Apples are the Only Fruit and the remarkable photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
A tale of three strays.
Everything has a price.
The song of songs.
Silence can be a blessing.
A story written to a theme suggested by one of my confreres in the Januaryists. I was unable to perform as well as I would have liked, falling back on jokes, literary references and classical allusions because the topic was more than I could face head-on. (Also: short by 300 words).
Everything in its right place.
Love is a strange beast.
On the globalization of game play.
A small man tries to make a big world laugh.
The diary of Timothy Richards, a thirty-six year old teller at Sycamore Savings and Trust who traded a receding hairline for an advancing one.
A weekend in the life of a Bourgeois family.
A new folk tale about coping with change.
“Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.” — Melville
A pitch made to an American television network that, for legal reasons, must remain nameless, but which we will refer to as Marmot. The presentation should be read aloud with the unbridled enthusiasm of a Mexican wrestling commentator.
It’ll be easy, like a jog along the beach.
We play the games we know.
Get a move on.
Distance is relative.
When boy meets dog.
Strangers on a train.
An old acquaintance re-discovered.
A Lovecraftian horror novel in the round, co-written by my friends at Brokentype, FTrain and Logodrome. The other chapters are located, in order, here, here, here, and here.
A more talented writer than I has demanded homage in the form of a piece containing the words squab, origami, hemlock, Caracas, and spats.
A Lovecraftian horror novel in the round, written by my friends at Brokentype, FTrain, Logodrome, and myself. The succeeding chapters are located, in order, here, here, here, and here.
Another in the growing series of pieces written by reader request. In this case the words were: guerilla, maudlin, vulture, buxom, and rogue.
A night spent waiting in vain.
This story was written based on a reader request for a piece “about a person called Arun Sarin, a maelstrom, a cheese wheel, parking tickets, and death.”
The previous entry, God Only Knows, was written to a reader request. I requested reciprocity, stipulating that his story must contain references to Peru, elephants, skyscrapers, tea and prostitution.
God only knows what I’d be without you.
A morning in the life of Max.
A perfect match.
The diary of a satisfied consumer.
The end of a month of mayhem.
A wet dream from which I hope never to awake.
The reason why.
From an essay in the Irish language literary journal ClóIar-Chonnachta. Translated by Jack Rusher.
The irresistible pull of failure.
I read the label, but I probably shouldn’t have.
A story about choices.
Spam, spam, everywhere.
A brief dialogue on adversity.
A meditation on the power of absence.
The Nonist asked a question that reminded me of previous observations I'd made on the same topic. This is my reply, which turned out too long to post to his comment system. I will almost certainly break this into smaller essays later.
There’s no way to know, but there are many ways to believe.
Another manifesto.
A benighted meditation on the nature of art and science.