July 2017
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July 2017 Highlights
Ed Simon: Poetry Without Poets
Despite its aesthetic proficiencies or deficiencies, A.I.-Wordsworth’s poem is not necessarily without meaning, even if it’s a message without a messenger.
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Andre Gerard: A Meredithian Reading of To the Lighthouse
George Meredith as caricatured by Max Beerbohm in Vanity Fair, September 1896 by Andre Gerard I hope that, like me, you enjoy reading other people’s letters, as this essay depends heavily on personal correspondence. By means of letters I want to make a case that the conception of Mr....
Read More‘Humans survive through an intricate logic of interdependence’
Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought and rising seawater...
Read MorePrimo Levi on Translating and Being Translated
Genesis tells us that the first men had only one language: this made them so ambitious and powerful they began building a tower high into the sky.
Read MoreBefore and After Fossil Fuels
Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.
Read MoreMost checkers games end in a draw…
At the highest levels, checkers is a game of mental attrition. Most games are draws. In serious matches, players don’t begin with the standard initial starting position.
Read MoreLife slips away in the reworking of one’s writings…
by Michael Wood But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. —T. W. Adorno Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a...
Read MoreA compelling impression of untethered bodies floating across vast distances…
The same year that the US nominated its first female presidential candidate, the Met presented, an opera composed by a woman...
Read MoreThat Time the Way That It Is and Was
So far this makes it sound as if philosophers are a bunch of science fiction spoil sports. Not so! Although philosophers typically agree that we cannot change the past, most think it possible to causally affect the past.
Read MoreKeith Doubt at Bosnia’s March of Peace
Marš Mira is a commemorative march, like others elsewhere throughout the world, that retraces the long, treacherous route that survivors of the Srebrenica genocide followed to escape the Serbian army.
Read MoreSex became inextricable from Diane Arbus’s photography…
Arbus was clear about what she wanted and why. The trouble is there’s still such scant understanding, let alone appreciation, for what it means to be a woman and wired the way she was.
Read MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreI 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 MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreI 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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