Robert DiNapoli is a poet, translator, essayist and erstwhile lecturer on English language and literature. His books include A Far Light: A Reading of Beowulf (2016), Engelboc (2019) and Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost (2021).
Satan’s prefiguring of today’s hard- Right ‘great replacement’ paranoia would be just a delicious irony were the latter not turning the heads of so many susceptible souls in our time.
In the end, the notion of solastalgia may prove more helpful looking forward, for it charts much of the difficult mental terrain that the world will have to traverse.
The stunnng tone deafness of US foreign policy pronouncements across the past few decades shows no sign of slowing its descent into further depths of denial and sheer unmeaning.
What caught me by surprise was how quickly I’d lost touch with all the nuances of whole-body presence that, once upon a time (was it really only twenty months ago?), we routinely read and responded to in any of scores of encounters on any given day…
When you realise that the very same itch to get to the bottom of things underlies the book of Revelation, The Wizard of Oz and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you can begin to perceive what a big, rough beast the apocalyptic genre really is.
…we have seen a collation of pro-gun, anti-abortion, lib-baiting, QAnon-addled, fact-free, anti-republican Republican banshees howling for the blood in the name of Donald J. Trump, America, and Jesus, in roughly that order.
As universities competed to attract student dollars, advertising, once unheard of, consumed progressively larger proportions of stressed budgets. It also adopted the play of illusion and conditioned reflex practised by its forerunners in more commercial quarters, trafficking in fatuous slogans like ‘Dream Large’, ‘I Believe’, and ‘Worldly’ (huh?).
All the received wisdoms and shibboleths of contemporary politics and economics, which have (among much else) lifted Donald Trump to his present bad eminence and left parliaments in many lands beset by extreme right-wing parties and ideologues, need reviewing in a fresh light.
Pestilence, plague, epidemic: outbreaks of contagious disease have punctuated human history for as long as humans have gathered in communities and told one another stories about how they got there. Given how much human labour has been devoted to the matter of simply not dying, spectacles of mass death arrest our attention. Whether its cause be natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes or storms, the human folly of war or the deeper shock of…
Robert Dinapoli reflects on the rapid spread of the coronavirus through a series of vignettes tracing his disrupted journey from upstate New York back to Melbourne.