Gamma Senmin, Soga Shōhaku (1730-1783). Freer Collection, Washington.

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.

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Epstein Follies - March 9, 2025 - There appears to be a good chance that Trump and his people have concluded that there is a fine line between attacking the Deep State and going along with it. Eleven days ago, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hyped her office’s imminent...
“‘An imagined reality.’” - March 6, 2025 - The scars of Zionism, Part 2. This is the second of two reports on the work of Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, who is an authority—and maybe the authority—on the West Bank environment and the environmental consequences of settler colonialism. Qumsiyeh is...
Patrick Lawrence: Speak, Claudia!  - March 1, 2025 - Watching that procession of hapless European supplicants passing through the Oval Office this week, my mind wandered briefly and came back with an imaginary scene I found pleasurable and instructive all at once: What if Claudia Sheinbaum went to see...

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

Journal Entry #53 - September 23, 2020 - Four elegies. FOR A LONG TIME we made a group I took to calling “the scrum.” We were like-minded souls, ever supportive of one another, ever encouraging. We were all writers. The scrum was a sort of anchor in my...
Journal Entry #52 - January 8, 2020 - Our fingers all in knots. NORFOLK, CONN., JAN. 7— Cú Chulainn did not anticipate writing this year-opening Journal entry as America provokes—and exacerbates at every turn—a frightening and wholly manufactured crisis with Iraq and the Islamic Republic. Not one week...