December 2010

District 9, TriStar Pictures, 2009 From Killing the Buddha: This version of District 9 was really strange. Scenes were missing. The dialogue was muted out on occasion. Characters vanished from the plot, never to be heard from again. In some cases they vanished into (literal) thin air. I know the...

Vertumnus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1590-1591 From The Smart Set: We fill absences. This is what we do. Nature has her way of filling up absence with stars, atoms, frogs, dirt, human beings. Human beings, though, have their own curious way of filling absence. When we lived in caves, we filled...

Life After People, History From 3 Quarks Daily: The year is 3010 and an interesting new species has evolved: a muscular, knuckle-walking primate with sparse body hair and a strikingly human face. It appears to be deformed, with extra non-functional limbs in various anatomical positions–like something out of a...

Señor Codo From Poetry: A rotary phone and an antique cash register rest on the counter behind the bar. The faded handwritten labels on the jukebox look as though they’ve been around since the days when the men and women who came here sported fedoras and white gloves. Behind...

by Russell Bennetts David Mikics is a professor at the University of Houston and writes on Renaissance literature,  twentieth century poetry and fiction, continental philosophy, and literary theory. His published works are on ideas which range from pathos and subjectivity in Spenser and Milton to individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche. His current book,...

In Search of Lost Paris | by  Luc Sante

The New York Review of Books

It was often called the “soul” of Paris as well as its “stomach,” and it was destroyed impersonally...

From The New Yorker: Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.” Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them,...

Adrián Sánchez Galque, Mulatos de Esmeraldas, 1599    by Tace M. Hedrick Afro-latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, by Kathryn Joy McKnight, Leo Garofalo, (eds), Indianapolis: Hackett, 377 pp. Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Agustín Laó-Montes, (eds), Lanham: Lexington Books, 420...

From Brick: Sylvia Beach said that she had three loves: Shakespeare and Company, James Joyce, and Adrienne Monnier. For mysterious reasons—perhaps because she wrote in French, perhaps because in the age of high modernism she preserved the habits and demeanour of the nineteenth century—Monnier was passed over for the...

From The New Statesman: As the rain sheeted down, time washed away. I looked down from the rooftop in Saigon where, more than a generation ago, in the wake of the longest war of modern times, I had watched silent, sullen streets awash. The foreigners were gone, at last....

From Washington Monthly: The furniture is, in reality, all very cheap, Yang confides. He bought it from a relative who is in the furniture resale business. Though it may seem a tad gaudy to Western sensibilities, it feels very comfortable to him in its excess. When I and another...