Berfrois

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Thanks, Berfrois...

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Ed Simon: Last Five Observations about the Moment

Ed 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 ...

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Sumana Roy: On Greatness and Uselessness

Sumana Roy: On Greatness and Uselessness

I was carrying a copy of the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar’s Hashpatal Thhekey Lekha Kobitaguchho (Poems Written from Hospital) with me...

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The Unfinished Glass of Water by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

The Unfinished Glass of Water by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

Growing up poor and bored, their childhood was pitiable but also strangely enviable. The anecdotes they recounted to us seemed to be not that bad at all...

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D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman

D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman

by D.H. Lawrence Post-mortem effects? But what of Walt Whitman? The ‘good grey poet’. Was he a ghost, with all his physicality? The good grey poet. Post-mortem effects. Ghosts. A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes....

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Try Clavics

Try Clavics

In the beginning, there is polyphony, false starts, botched experiments, and mixed motives. Usually.

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Douglas Penick: The Worldly Gods Return

Douglas Penick: The Worldly Gods Return

Throughout the developed world, many of the dead find no release from their previous social obligations and work lives...

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The Critical Horizon of Barbara K. Lewalski

The Critical Horizon of Barbara K. Lewalski

Three years ago I spent an afternoon with Barbara in her home on University Avenue in Providence, talking a little about the past but mostly about the future, especially politics.

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Before the Tempest Hurl’d

Before the Tempest Hurl’d

Hunt started his working life as a surgeon’s apprentice before making a living, at different times, as a chemist and druggist, a statistician with the geological survey, and a professor at the School of Mines in London.

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‘I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there’

‘I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there’

I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake.

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Ed Simon: First Five Observations about the Moment

Ed Simon: First Five Observations about the Moment

Life experienced narratively, which is to say the only way actual life can be experienced, continually deletes the immediacy of the transitory, but in depicting the specifically of the second within the crystalline moment artists reendow the present with meaning.

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D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow-white...

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