Yesterday when I was playing tennis with my friend Eddie a large reptile wandered onto the court–a lizard about three feet long, splendid green belly, striped tail, spikes on its back, quite a specimen. After a while it made as if to leave, but it was too heavy to climb back up the wind covers […]

I pay close attention to the syntax and vocabulary of Trump’s tweets. People have been writing about his bizarre use of quotation marks, making the plausible suggestion that he uses them so as to hedge his prose, about which he feels insecure. This sounds right to me: he is clearly uncomfortable with the written word, […]

People say Trump is a narcissist. I don’t think so: I think Trump hates himself and with good reason. What he loves is his image–that garish, vulgar, money-saturated image. This is why he hates to be criticized and disrespected: it hurts his image. Once you grasp that everything he does is meant to promote his […]

I’m reading for the first time Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading about a man, Cincinnatus C., who is condemned to die by beheading. His crime is mysterious at first, though clearly diabolical in the eyes of his gaolers. Eventually we learn that he is guilty of “gnostical turpitude”–a crime so serious as to defy definition, though it […]