Gamma Senmin, Soga Shōhaku (1730-1783). Freer Collection, Washington.
PATRICKLAWRENCE.US serves several purposes. As an archive of the columns, commentary, and essays, it makes this work available in one place for the first time. The site also introduces my books and provides readers or those with professional queries several ways to connect. You can help sustain the work via Patreon. This is also home to an occasional journal, Cú Chulainn.
“These are my footsteps.”
——Sam Francis
Featured.
Beyond a Failed Narrative - December 17, 2022 - Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially “chosen people” suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost...Recent work.
“Liberal delusions.” - April 22, 2025 - 20 January 2025. (Screenshot, PBS.) Two images, their truth. In reality, only the fragment carries the mark of authenticity. — Brecht. 22 APRIL—Peter Dimock, the avant-garde novelist (A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, George Anderson, Daybook from Sheep Meadow) and an old...
Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines - April 21, 2025 - This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here. POTSDAM—A single,...
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Late–Imperial Maladies - April 18, 2025 - The worst part of living this distance from reality — or maybe the best part — is the knowledge, even if it is only subliminal, that we cannot go on like this. I am sick of reading that the Israelis’ genocidal...Cú Chulainn.
Cú Chulainn stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
——Yeats, Cú Chulainn’s Fight with the Sea,
1892
