Berfrois

June 2017

  • Eric D. Lehman: Sharing Stories at Kinlochard

    June 2017 Highlights

    Eric D. Lehman: Sharing Stories at Kinlochard

    We took a wrong turn in Aberfoyle. Instead of heading toward Loch Katrine, the home of Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, my wife Amy and I headed along a sketchy broken road to Loch Ard.

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Paul Johnathan on Édouard Louis

Paul Johnathan on Édouard Louis

Eddy is a deromanticised account on all fronts. Divided into two parts and structured as a collection of vignettes, the main frame of the text is a confident reconciliation of the author with his working class background

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Hannah Hughes: My Gray City

Hannah Hughes: My Gray City

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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Translators and Queers

Translators and Queers

It’s time for LGBTQ texts to be translated and for those translations to be analyzed, and it’s time for translators to consider what it might mean to translate LGBTQ texts and authors

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America’s id is racist…

America’s id is racist…

Cuck videos frequently have racial dynamics — white men eroticize their anxiety about black-male sexuality by creating humiliation fantasies that involve sexually superior black rivals.

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Sean Carroll: Is Inflationary Cosmology Science?

Sean Carroll: Is Inflationary Cosmology Science?

Inflationary cosmology is the clever idea that the early universe underwent a brief period of accelerated expansion at an enormously high energy density, before that energy converted in a flash into ordinary hot matter and radiation.

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Missing Nostalgia in Alexandria

Missing Nostalgia in Alexandria

Cavafy’s apartment, my first stop, has been converted into a museum and contains some of his furniture. His office of employment is part of the majestic Metropole Hotel on the Alexandrian waterfront, or corniche.

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The World Cash Money Reflected

The World Cash Money Reflected

Cash Money grew slowly before it grew quickly. They became fixtures in local clubs, hole-in-the-wall spots with noirish names like Rumors and Detour and Whispers and Ghost Town.

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Be Better Buzzfeeders

Be Better Buzzfeeders

Before the books arrived, Adam Gopnik, in an effort to be polite, almost contradicted the essential insight of his life.

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Elizabeth Currid-Halkett: Conspicuous Consumption Is Over

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett: Conspicuous Consumption Is Over

In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags.

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Lital Khaikin: To Justify Land

Lital Khaikin: To Justify Land

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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Thomas Hardy was both drawn to city life and repelled by it…

Thomas Hardy was both drawn to city life and repelled by it…

Ford makes the convincing claim that London turned Hardy into ‘a modern type’ (a tag the novelist bestowed on Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native); in city life

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OK Computer was profoundly prog rock…

OK Computer was profoundly prog rock…

In April, 1971, Rolling Stone reviewed the début album by a band with a name better suited to a law firm: Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

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‘Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter’

‘Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter’

As recently as late April, with the Labour Party in disarray and its leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn deemed unelectable, the polls were putting the Tories twenty points ahead and telling May that her coronation was inevitable.

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Justin E. H. Smith: The Search for Intelligent Life

Justin E. H. Smith: The Search for Intelligent Life

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth.

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Joseph Spece on Wonder Woman

Joseph Spece on Wonder Woman

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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Henry David Thoreau: Walking

Henry David Thoreau: Walking

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

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Claire Provost: A ‘spiritual war’ for the ‘traditional family.’

Claire Provost: A ‘spiritual war’ for the ‘traditional family.’

In a darkened hall at the Budapest Congress Centre, an image of the classic American TV show, The Brady Bunch, appears illuminated on a giant screen.

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