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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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.
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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A Watch on a Chain
Lecture on the collapse of counterfeit theology in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black A watch lay on the felt
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Egg and Bird, Ink and Fire
Listen to the Lecture Lecture on Erasmus’s Legacy and Luther’s Revolt Word moved before any of us learned to spell
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A Teacup on a Barricade
Lecture on the Masonry of Redemption in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables A cracked teacup sat on the lip of the
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A Crown of Salt and Iron
Lecture on how Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur turns vows that corrode into lived argument. A lamp hung low above
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God’s Thumb and the Desert Ledger
Lecture on the work, friendship, and the ethics of Suffering in Louis Sachar’s Holes The lakebed lay chalk-white under a
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