September 2015

I once felt quite famous as a poet. Indeed, now that I think of it, 
I have felt famous twice. These two periods of really unsettling fame came back to me recently as I dealt with a young poet at the lending desk of the public library where I’ve...

What made C. P. Cavafy write some of the most original poetry in the world? I went to Athens in January 2015 to find out. Born in Alexandria on April 29, 1863, Cavafy died there, on the same day seventy years later.

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 historical context of national politics, a national politics that has had, by extension, influence on the rest of the world in terms of civil rights.

Cynicism includes all of the above-mentioned aspects. We see this by way of three great French writers, Charles Baudelaire, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Michel Houellebecq.

The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people will often trot these out when discussing the topic.

Wes Craven’s movies were about movies, even when they weren’t. And in this sense they helped bring cinema back to its self-reflective origins.

It can’t have been easy for Takolander to write the words “just a tourist really,” but she did it. Using a Finnish word, suo, immediately after this admission is an understandable coping mechanism, a reassertion of expertise that tells the English-speaking reader.

One of the inexhaustible sources of conversation among fans of hardcore punk is the attempt to identify the onset of a band’s (or scene’s, or label’s) irremediable decline. For example: When did Black Flag lapse into long-haired, noodling weirdness?

Cicero thought superior writers, or their souls, would survive death and enter an eternal realm "where eminent and excellent men find their true reward."

As Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign exploded throughout an otherwise decidedly damp July, it became clear that I had left two factors out of my back of the envelope political calculations.