Author: penwithlit
Freelance writer and radio presenter
This week Paul Dry Books made me a very happy man. My translation of Alexander Voloshin’s mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood, which will officially appear in April of next year, now has a cover, blurbs from four of my idols in disparate fields, and a foothold on Amazon. The people I approached to endorse, […]
From Mandelstam to Mr. Peanut: Another Hollywood Émigré Journey
John Dalton, born September 6, 1766, revolutionized science with atomic theory and the vocabulary it introduced. Terms like atomic weight, Dalton’s law, and Daltonism transformed English scientific discourse, embedding precision, clarity, and new concepts into chemistry, physics, and philosophy. His lexicon shaped both laboratories and cultural imagination.
Birth of John Dalton – Atomic Theory and the Evolution of Scientific English
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Towards Understanding Society
Perfectionism is the ultimate form of self-deception. Perfectionists tend to fluctuate between believing they’re perfect, resisting the notion that they caused any meaningful harm (even to themselves), and believing they can become perfect, minimizing past harm with the excuse that they’re engaged in meaningful self-work. On the surface, perfectionism is a way to avoid accountability. At […]
Perfectionism Is a Form of Self-Deception
Object relations theorists use the concept of internal objects to provide insights into human action, but what exactly are these internal objects? Where are they located and how are they able to play such a role in our lives? In his 1983 paper The Concept of Internal Object Relations, U.S. psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden, sketches the […]
Ogden and the Problem of Inner Objects
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The Duke and the Swan
Here’s a curious likeness that was probably observed soon after Mallarmé’s celebrated sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui . . .” was published, and repeatedly since then—as, latterly, by me. The poet knew his Shakespeare, whose pirate Lieutenant opens the fourth act of Henry VI part 2 with the structurally similar line […]
The Duke and the Swan
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