August 2014
-
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.
Read More -
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.
Read More -
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.
Read More -
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.
Read More -
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.
Read More
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...
Read More
Like many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read More
A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read More
As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read More
Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read More
What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read More
Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read More
In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read More
Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read More
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...
Read More
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 More
A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read More
The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read More
As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read More
The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read More
If duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read More
Burton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read More
I’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read More
The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read More