October 2020
‘Pigs were the consummate meat of the early Middle Ages’
Even the Christians who loved to eat pigs vilified them as greedy, dirty, destructive animals. This reputation was woven into the scriptures that early medieval readers studied and quoted and wove into their own stories and texts...
Read MoreMarian Janssen on John Berryman
Letters are always self-involved, but Berryman’s are often insufferably self-obsessed, even if they are meant to be letters of condolence...
Read MoreReparations as an Enduring Social Movement
Black folk took up reparations for slavery as an enduring social movement, bequeathed from generation to generation...
Read MoreMerovingians in the Mediterranean
When one thinks about the Merovingians—and, really, who doesn’t?—one seldom thinks of the Mediterranean. There is good reason for that...
Read MoreZigzag Waffle Rabbit
And so on, as before, in a roundabout way, using more words to say nothing than necessary...
Read MoreStuart Walton: Freud’s Life
The analytic approach to mental and emotional pathology has never quite shaken loose its origins in improvised postulation and ethereal supposition.
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Caroline Rothnie: Uncovering the Present
I’ve looked towards the apocalypse to hide from my duty to the present, to all of us here living our small lives...
Read MoreElisa Veini on Agnès Varda
“Aging for me is not a condition, but a subject,” said Agnès Varda in her Norton Lectures at Harvard University in February 2018, shortly before her 90th birthday...
Read MoreAnd Yet as Mortal
H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds has never lost its power to unsettle, but it has become peculiarly resonant with the arrival of Covid-19...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
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The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
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I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read More
The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read More
I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More