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.

“‘Russia is running out of steam.’ Really?” - August 31, 2026 - The Ukraine war as seen from Kursk. Summer readings. The New York Times just ran a pair of especially preposterous pieces concerning the state of the war the West wages, via Ukraine, against the Russian Federation. It seems John Ratcliffe, the...
Patrick Lawrence: The US Seeing Itself & Others as They Are - August 27, 2026 - Imagine the consequences for the empire’s managers were Americans to understand others and have some grasp of how they look upon the world. The other night, I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the Anglo–American operation that...
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Canada & Creeping US Isolation - August 26, 2026 - The thing I loved first and most about those evidently vicious trade talks the Canadians recently attempted with the Americans is how they blew up in the Trump regime’s faces at five minutes to 12 (almost literally) last Friday night. ...

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...