who’s the handset of them all?
collective smiles dip and curve
for celestial daddy, see eee ohhhh
At the end of the seventeenth century a new literary genre or subgenre emerged in England, one that might be characterized as the nocturnal picaresque.
Read MoreA room with graffitied walls. Inside this room the dogs bark. A room cluttered with porcelain figurines. A room decorated with binary numbers.
Read MoreWe pulled off the main road and began to climb to the remote village in western Macedonia where I had been born.
Read MoreJohn woke at a quarter to seven that morning, a full hour after his wife had clipped on her earrings and transferred the day’s fares from the bottom of an otherwise empty jewelry box to the handbag she had outgrown two jobs ago and a half-hour before his mother had a hot breakfast ready for his daughter.
Read MoreDid your insomnia begin then, I asked him as I looked down to make a mental note of the elapsed time on my phone’s voice recorder – 163 minutes – as we strolled through the sunlight in Mitte onto Alexanderstraße
Read MoreSo with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood.
Read MorePromising herself that she would not evade the flickering cursor for more than a few moments, Anne O’Hanlon could not resist Googling her own name. As ever, the first result was her Wikipedia entry.
Read MoreThe pleasure of watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, much like the pleasure of reading Pynchon’s novels, is, however, to be found elsewhere, and those who insist on having tidiness of structure and an ending that unites the various elements of the story into some satisfying whole are likely to find Inherent Vice frustrating.
Read MoreVertigo has been scrutinized under the rubric of scopophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, the sadistic male gaze, objectification of the female body, “a dream substrate of waking life,” Pygmalion fantasies, the “symptomology of trauma,” the “phenomenology of falling,” “death-drive pulsations,” the “psychoanalytic object-relations theory,” and the triple threat of the imaginary Real, the symbolic Real, and the “Real Real.”
Read MoreI’ve never been much of one for walking tours, but my mother is, and last summer she guided my boyfriend through one in Zurich…
Read MoreMy mother and I smoked cigarettes, drank wine, ate, walked around, went to galleries, museums, and movies; shopped, all the while covering a tireless range of subjects, as we always have. Minus the wine and cigarettes, my days with her were a lot like my childhood.
Read MoreThe different tools used to capture the frame and the wild variety in terms of image quality, which is the way films are remembered anyway, not always as pristine HD, but sometimes smudged and tangled up with our variances of mood. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes wrote that “the text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective baffles.”
Read MoreTo read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself.
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith Herb and Harry were the names of our two steers, the one a Hereford, the other a Holstein. They did not do much but stand, bovine and stoic, from one day to the next. They sculpted strange rolling shapes into the salt lick with their fat blue tongues, and delighted,…
Read MoreFrom The London Review of Books: We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an immense amount we don’t know. Has she ever taken psychedelic drugs? Has she had therapy? (Reichian, Jungian, marriage?) What music makes her cry? Is…
Read MoreFrom Chapter 3: The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces…
Read MoreI, myself, was barely six months old when Twin/Tone put out The Mats’ Let It Be.
Read MoreYe green-rob’d Dryads,oft’ at dusky Eve
By wondering Shepherds seen, to Forests brown,
