June 2016

When the first number of Lysistrata appeared, I confess that I was deeply disappointed. It was so well printed, on such good paper. It looked established, prosperous.

The latest of his novels to belatedly see the light of day in English is his 1975 work Villa Triste, published by the Other Press, in a translation by John Cullen. Unusually for Modiano, it takes place entirely outside his usual Parisian hinterland.

“One rainy day in the spring of 1960, the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan arrived at my door,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “A Communal Poetry.”

We are left with the word vaudeville and little more than that. Vaudeville. We are left with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, and what survives in early Hollywood.

June itself, not the girl but the month, has something about it of the unattainable, the unfulfilled promise. That is, paradoxically, because June, at least in the cities where I have spent my life, is the only reliably spring-like month.

The terms ‘precarity’ and its derivation, ‘precariat’/precariato gained notoriety after the 2001 Euro May Day parade when a network of casual workers, students, migrants, feminists, LGBT activists

The death of champion boxer Muhammad Ali is an occasion to remember one of the strangest moments in popular culture, when Ali collaborated with legendary poet Marianne Moore on a work of verse.

Hamilton treats the classic so-called paradox of tragedy­ -- why do we enjoy representations of horrible things?­­ -- by suggesting, following Nietzsche, that we may resonate to the glories of poetic language and take comfort in "an illusion about the nature and value of suffering" as somehow ennobling or...

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1490-1510 by Ed Simon For its name literally meaning “No Place,” echoes of Utopia seem to be everywhere. Early autumn and a week before the pope’s visit and I am at the corner of 53rd and 5th, halfway between St. Patrick’s Cathedral...

‘The Future is Here – it is just not evenly distributed’ was the catch phrase for the Sydney Biennale, which closed this month. But the experience on offer forecasted an uneven future for a widely distributed art product.

I navigate an illness that makes me a protagonist of clichés. Sometimes, the thought of release is a dream of falling through clouds. My friend excitedly speaks about watching the northern lights from the cockpit of a plane — the whole kaleidoscopic spectacle, every inch of that cursive diffusion.

Things are looking good for Movimento Cinque Stelle, Italy’s leading anti-establishment party. (In Italy, being anti-establishment is a competition.)

The medieval poem “Pearl” was written by someone whose identity we do not know, and is set mostly within a dream.

The impetus was an account I read as a teenager in John Zerzan’s essay The Case Against Art that describes a couple having sex in a museum in front of a camera that projected them onto a television.

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and amateur futurologue, has recently taken to the idea that we may all be living in a simulation akin to Second Life. He has been influenced in his thinking by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.