Wind, Mud and Naked Kings
Lecture on King Lear and Mercy Through Exposure A crown behaved, in every polity I had encountered with clean hands, […]
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Lectures
A series of literature lectures in a broad sweep, from Ireland to Poland and further into the world: epics and gospels, classics, modern novels, poems, plays. Close reading meets history and craft, tracing how sentences carry faith, desire, and power—book by book, voice by voice.
These lectures span the early 2000s to the present: I wrote and delivered them across that period, and I continue to add to the series today. Some are translations of earlier work written in Polish; others were composed in English, mainly from 2012 onward.
The Creditor’s Song
Lecture on Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches and the Moral Machinery of Prose A riddle for the gentlemen nearest the door,
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Ink Weighs the Soul
Lecture on Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and the struggle between record and mercy Which sovereign clenched that square: warm breath passing
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The Sun’s Chariot Over the Courtroom
Lecture on Euripides’ Medea as a Civic Autopsy of Oath, Exile, and Maternal Sovereignty If a bond held by oath
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A Mask Hung on a Nail
Lecture on Antigone and Conscience’s Cost. The iron peg had bitten into the lime-washed wall before any of us learned
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Tambourine at the Gallows
Lecture on Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus and Time’s Creditor You sat under a roof of tar and rain-dark timber, while
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Inherited Law of a Collective Apocalypse
Lecture on Émile Zola’s Germinal: Blood, Soil, and the Machinery of Despair. The first time I smelled coal as a
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Marble Under the Future
Lecture on Andrei Platonov and The Foundation Pit. I spoke of this book while standing where limestone holds its breath,
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Empire’s Baptism, Clerk’s Ruin
Listen to the lecture: Lecture on how meter turns terror into political obedience. The hymnbook lay on the piano’s closed
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The Human Comedy of Cairo
Listen to the Lecture: Lecture on Paris vs Cairo — the city as judge Fog came down on Tours with
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