Wright's Writing

[A book review published at Common Dreams.] As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!:...

On one side is the mediocrity of all functionaries. All bureaucrats. There’s no point in my writing about bureaucrats in the ordinary...

…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...

I was recently skimming old notes of mine and came across the following thoughts from a two-volume book on "humanism" I wanted to write...

Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless...

Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was...

[These notes, for what they're worth, are from, respectively, 2010 and 2018.] Reading Raymond Williams’ classic Marxism and Literature...

[From 2008. Copied here, somewhat irrelevantly, in recognition of the recent suicides that have been in the news.] Read an article in...

Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...

[Notes from 2008.] Reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. It’s wonderful to think that the publication (in...

[The following is a vignette I wrote years ago when studying for my Master's in philosophy. I was taking a class in contemporary...

The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...

[Old notes.] Reading Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Alex Thomson. I’m not very impressed with Adorno. Continental thinkers...

In the Piazza of San Marco in Florence is a church in which lies the dried-out corpse of Saint Antonino from the fifteenth century, his...

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...

[The following is an excerpt from this book.] In order to determine someone’s intellectual or artistic integrity and acuity, a simple...

The nation-state and capitalism were born as twins from the fertile, ancient womb of greed and power-hunger. They grew up together, were...

The following is a resolution proposed at a Chicago conference of the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils in 1930, in the context of...

The elite has the money, but the workers have the dignity. The elite consumes; the workers produce. Future ages always forget the past...