No one’s talking about the new tax law: Republicans hoped to make their $1.5 trillion overhaul the centerpiece of the 2018 midterm elections — but Americans, including President Trump, have lost interest. The Trump tax cuts’ unpopularity is a crisis for the GOP. Paul Ryan suggests trillion-dollar deficits were inevitable. On the deficit, GOP has been playing us all for suckers. The Gospel According to Paul: Chris Lehmann on how a cynical Randian hustler played a myopic D.C. press corps for suckers.
…Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions.
…Howe has long been interested in distilling signs and symbols, whether “art objects” or words themselves, into something more revelatory. Considering riddles, lost languages, doubled surfaces, spells, magical thinking, and other elusive forms of expression, Howe sounds the depths.
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