September 2018
The Politics of Latinx Recognition

In March of this year, 18-year-old South Floridian Emma Gonzalez announced that she was “Cuban and bisexual” in the midst of her battle...
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: Notes on Hands

I am haunted by an image I first saw many years ago of a ‘cortical homunculus’: a figure of a sort of man, whose bodily parts are variously shrunken...
Read MoreSetsuko Adachi: Flower Fires

The audience sat in front of a screen heard ssssssssssssssssss in the darkness. Light flashed. A train appeared on the screen. The train was coming, increasing in size.
Read MoreMust-Read Most-Unread

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a modernist novel decidedly unconcerned with modern questions. It seems impossible to describe the book in terms of plot or structure. Even the basic operations of character and perspective are not straightforward.
Read MoreLoneliness has a history…

‘God, but life is loneliness,’ declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says ...
Read More‘Trees, a field, and sky’

A couple of years ago I was living in Knebel, down by Mols. My window had a view of trees, a field, and sky. I carried on long conversations with that view
Read MoreReflections of a DFW Guy

It is not the fashion in literary assessment to admit that we might have thought differently about a book if we’d read it at another time — older or younger, maybe next week instead of last week.
Read MoreIdol Landlords

Hindu gods are in a litigious mood these days. Following the struggle by Ram Lalla—the Hindu deity’s infant form—to lay claim to the 2.77 acres of land where the Babri Masjid once stood
Read MoreRemembering Uri Avnery

In some ways, Avnery – as the name he chose implies – is emblematic of the Zionist story. At the age of 15, as an admirer of the revisionist Zionist leader Jabotinsky...
Read MoreErica X Eisen: Paint It Black

Possibly because the current global political landscape resembles less a plausible point on the universe’s long arc towards justice than the dread outcome of a Koch brothers blood-pact with the Lord of the Flies...
Read MoreTinkering with Media and Fiction

According to George Slusser, science fiction is "the sole literary form that examines the ways in which science penetrates, alters, and transforms the themes, forms, and worldview of fiction"...
Read MoreFoucault, the Drowned and the Saved

Foucault would have wanted 'very important people of the world' to refer to the refugees, not himself...
Read MoreEd Simon: Last Five Observations about the Moment

Panther Hollow hasn’t seen any panthers since the 19th Century. As Oakland increasingly became a cultural waystation ...
Read MoreLabour and Anti-Semitism

It is surreal for the Labour Party to be tearing itself apart over quasi-theological questions about which clauses from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism it will adopt and which it won’t.
Read MoreDavid Beer: Grasping at Upheaval

In their uncertain but foreboding style, the Jesus and Mary Chain once sang of how heaven is too close to hell. It’s not entirely clear what they were inferring, but it remains an intriguing image.
Read MoreAll Day Twitter

What is it about social media that’s so depressing? I’m asking for myself. And I mean beyond the obvious: that much of the imagery and information presented there accelerates suffering and despair...
Read MoreAuerbach’s Simplicity

"A good writer must write in such a way that one infers from the text what he intended to express. That is not easy.” So declared Erich Auerbach...
Read MoreSet the World on Fire

In 1937, the black nationalist activist Celia Jane Allen packed her bags and headed from Chicago to Mississippi. Working for the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), she traveled against the tide of the Great Migration with the specific aim of promoting black emigration to West Africa...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo 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 MoreNow 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....
Read MoreThe 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 MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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