August 2014
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August 2014 Highlights
Henry Giardina on Bob Hope
All mythical creatures need an origin story. The Bob Hope character springs into being, Athena-like, from out of the head of Preston Sturges in 1939. The film is Never Say Die.
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August 2014 Highlights
John Crutchfield: Chords
But music, even bad music, is a symptom of hope, is it not? Naturally one would prefer the music to be good, but any kind of music is better than despair. The semi-conscious busker crumpled full-fathom-five over his abused guitar, hat out flat on the pavement in front of him, mangy dog asleep to one side, half-eaten bag of Oreos to the other, and brightly-dressed tourists streaming past like tropical fish up above: at least he is creating something rather than, say, selling weapons to Somali warlords; at least.
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August 2014 Highlights
Tyranny Is a Growth Industry by Vladimir Savich and Zachary Bos
Tyranny is a growth industry. Each day brings exciting new developments. These events imprint themselves upon the world in the form of newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, dictionaries. In order to keep pace, language is constantly changing, evolving fresh forms to cover new forms of political degeneracy, stretching to describe new varieties of corruption and war-mongering. Nazi, genocide, Auschwitz, Gulag, Communism, class struggle: each word brought into being to describe actions previously thought unimaginable or impossible.
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August 2014 Highlights
Mattilda B. Sycamore: Yearning From Spurning
One problem with gentrification is that it always gets worse. But then I go into a Hooters, and it’s a vintage clothing store. A friend of mine is trying on breasts. This is why I like dreaming.
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August 2014 Highlights
Alexander McGregor: Trauma
Following World War II, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”: to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno wasn’t speaking literally. It is perhaps more helpful to understand Adorno’s comment, itself poetical, as a final rejection of Romanticism.
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Your real Italian garden brings in a new element…
There are also modern gardens in Italy, and in such I have spent many pleasant hours. But that has been part of my life of reality, which concerns only my friends and myself. The gardens I would speak about are those in which I have lived the life of...
Read MoreBobbi Lurie’s Struggle
Turning to me, Duchamp said, "if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral." I did not know what to say. “If each second is a work of art, why the preference...
Read MoreIn the Night by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi
On a chilly Thursday evening, I headed from my parking spot outside the Kaufleuten Saal, where Joyce once put on plays as co-founder of The English Players theater group, and up Augustinergasse, which winds around a small square before opening up to the building at number 9: the Haus...
Read MoreGassy
On Boxing Day of 1799 the twenty-year-old chemist Humphry Davy – later to become Sir Humphry, inventor of the miners’ lamp, President of the Royal Society and domineering genius of British science – stripped to the waist, placed a thermometer under his armpit and stepped into a sealed box...
Read MoreNicholas Rombes on Tommy Ramone
Tommy Ramone the avant-gardist. Buried in a few obituaries and reminiscences about Tommy Ramone were mentions of the sharp, avant-garde angle of vision that characterized the early Ramones. Maybe now — as the last Ramone has died — it’s time to re-think the Ramones as essentially an avant-garde outfit...
Read MoreMaking Out With a Goddess by j/j hastain
When the moment for a meal finally manifests, its metabolism ravenously ricochets, physically increasing the size of the python’s heart in just a short three-day period. Enzyme-gush protects the heart from injury, and this occurs just after the python has engorged. The body is a green area constantly being...
Read MorePrisoner, Discoverer, Founder, Liberator
The four small stones we dredged up from the river and placed in my knapsack began to weigh me down with African history. I had gone with Shola, a friend, and Johnson, a colleague, to the ancient Yoruba sanctuary of Osun. Located in the remnants of high primary forest in...
Read MoreGod Gone Astray
by Justin E. H. Smith There is an observation sometimes made in connection with the history of philosophical reflection on the nature of human distinctness, that language has moved in, in the past few centuries, to fill a role that had previously been taken up by belief in a...
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A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
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As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
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Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
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What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
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Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
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In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
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Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
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To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
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Now it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
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The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
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The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
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As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
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Elle called Silverman’s image of her wearing a shirt with several naked Lena Dunhams a “beautiful tribute.” Dunham, the article tells us, “seemed to...
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A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
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I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
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It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
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From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
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That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
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On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
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In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
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