After reading Luke’s retelling of the story of Actæon, I sought another, more ancient source than Bullfinch: the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Even Ovid draws attention to the ambiguity that surrounds this episode, as if it is a tabloid-reported story discussed… Continue Reading
I hate talking when I leave a movie. My friends know this, and for the most part, they let me be. When the lights come back on, I don’t want to tell anyone if I liked it, or how good… Continue Reading
Leigh’s essay on the nostalgia industry can’t help but take us on some nostalgia trips of our own. The grammar of the piece subordinates “nostalgia” (for Leigh, the cynical effort to turn childhood icons into formulae for commercial success) to… Continue Reading
“I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else,” a character says in the closing lines of Todd Hayne’s pitch-perfect Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There.“ I don’t
Even if we couldn’t name five horror movies, let alone one horror novel, we still know horror when we see it: its tropes are alleys in our cultural city, and in the course of our travels, we pass themwhetheror
In the medieval French epic La Chanson de Roland, Charlemagne’s Christian Franks battle Marsile’s pagan Saracens in Spain. The latter have feigned defeat to trick the invaders into leaving; the formermustnow
Where does the mind go when we take a walk? Does it extend to touch the land, or play off corners of a new room? Do my thoughts intersect in the space between me and a car moving toward us,… Continue Reading
If the ultimate homecoming of death happens when you’re far from home—on vacation, or on business, or while in some distant and dissociated emotional state—your whole life must suddenly become fraught
About halfway through Katherine’s essay, she relates the story of the madwoman who maltreats her boys, locking away the sugar, feeding them raw food until they are sick, denying them access to medical care. The
This year a man who has carried on multiple affairs, divorced two wives, and requested one open marriage was endorsed to run for president by a southern state where all the “family values” stuff, the so-called “social
To ask how we read is to enter a heavily contested warzone. If you dare to peer through the heavy smoke thrown up by all the busted ordnances, you can make out a bunch of half-animate bodies. Few have been… Continue Reading
The archive is a ziggurat, always growing upwards, always closer to heaven. On top will sit the glassy-eyed medium through which the totality speaks, liberated from personality. It is erected everywhere, and every place becomes no place beneath its shadow…. Continue Reading
Who is François Mauriac? Google knows: French novelist of the last century’s first half, long-beaked Nobel laureate in a taupe bowler hat. So does Wikipedia, one click away: leftist firebrand, Catholic penitent, biographer
For a generation that prides itself on self-awareness and being hip to the complexity of cultural referents, we allow blind spots for the most intimate topics. Despite the ubiquitous personal technology, who has
I woke up the other morning with a girl’s face clouding my vision. Thoughts of her saturated my first waking moments. With every bite of cereal, her presence made itself known to my still hazy consciousness. She is