I became introduced to conspiracy theories in 1980 while visiting Detroit to join protests against the Republican National Convention. The People’s Counter-Convention was mainly a flop, with only a couple hundred people participating. The highlight of the Counter-Convention was a Punk Rock Against Racism concert that shut down early because…

Everything is connected, yet everything remains a mystery because consciousness is incapable of understanding itself. So in almost anything we want to talk about (understand) that has to do with the mind, we must use metaphors. I am fascinated by primitive art, specifically the earliest known examples of human-created two-dimensional…

Machine Translation as Art — I learned about the book Paranoia by Roberto Piva and Wesley Duke Lee from The Photobook: A History Volume III by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. If you’re interested in photobooks, this three-volume set is a kind of bible, or holy grail, or both. …

A haibun is a short piece of prose accompanied by a haiku, sometimes more than one. The haiku is not meant to be a literal extension or addition to the story. Rather it is to present a different point of view that may, or may not, be related. At the…

In Which a Stranger Asks Me 12 Questions — I saw the 12 questions below posted to Twitter. I have long intended to interview myself. Maybe all writers do. Maybe all people do? All solipsists, at any rate. But what to ask? That would be the hard part, of course. If I could think of the perfect questions to…