Photograph by Nick Dimmock A million followers is nothing. Voice is everything. by Michele Catalano It was April of 2009 when everything changed. I had been on twitter almost two years at that point, as @abigvictory, using it mainly as a platform for crude jokes and observations about sports. I was at the Verizon store.…
Read MoreMonsters University, Walt Disney Pictures, forthcoming 2013 by Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out […] it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by…
Read More‘Ernest Hemingway’, illustrated by Ralph Barton, from Vanity Fair, c.1927 by Gregory Jusdanis My adventure in Spanish started a couple of years ago with a promise I threw out to the audience at the Universidad de Cartagena. Feeling elated that so many students had come to my talk, I vowed — via the interpreter — that…
Read Moreby Joe Linker The new, old Rolling Stones film, “Charlie Is My Darling,” played at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre this past weekend, and we joined a mellow crowd of folks carrying beers and popcorn into the main auditorium, most of us probably able to claim that we had been raised on the Stones. The Rolling Stones…
Read MoreGalway bay. Photograph by Bhalash. by Patricia Palmer Anyone familiar with the story of language in Elizabethan Ireland can only feel impatience – if not despair – at the latter-day triumphalism of works like Melvyn Bragg’s best-selling The Adventure of English. I One late-September night, I was having a glass of wine with a friend…
Read MoreRichard Blanco reads “One Today” at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony, January 21, 2013. by Harris Feinsod In Gawker’s, wry estimation, most of the U.S. simply didn’t “get” Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem “One Today.” In the Washington Post’s absurd trollgazing account, Blanco’s poem merely signals the “death of poetry.” Perhaps this is because the Post imagines…
Read MoreTapping a Blast Furnace, Graham Sunderland, 1941-42 by Massimo Pigliucci A really fascinating and, as we shall see in a moment, somewhat nasty dispute has exploded in the philosophical public sphere, and I think it’s going to be interesting to see why – both sides have a very good point. In general, as is clear…
Read MoreFigure 1 Copyright © by Guerrilla Girls, courtesy www.guerrilla.girls.com by Rachel K. Brickner and Laurie Dalton Abstract This article describes a collaboration between a Gender and Development professor and the Director of the Acadia University Art Gallery in designing an activist visual art project based on an exhibit of the Guerrilla Girls. We argue that…
Read MoreAn Elephant, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1637 by James Warner Helprin’s latest novel, In Sunlight and in Shadow, can be read as an elegy for the American Century. Helprin’s emphasis on invidividual responsibility, as well as his backwards-lookingness, over-the-topness, and magical thinking, give us a window into the Republican Party he supports. Mark Helprin was born…
Read Moreby Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Naira Gelashvili is in her own right one of the leading Georgian writers and literary critics of last 40 years or so. Her writings have been very popular and controversial through the last 25 years when she came out as one of the leaders of Georgia’s Green movement and at the…
Read MorePortrait of a Scholar, Domenico Fetti, C17th by Alexander Key I’ve just finished a review of a recent monograph on a mediaeval Arabic scholar in which I noted a few translation and typographical errors, commended the philology involved, and gave a synopsis of the contents. So much, so unsurprising; this is the way my field…
Read MorePencil drawing of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm from 1843, from the Historisches Museum in Hanau via zeno.org – Source. by Jack Zipes Piece originally published at The Public Domain Review. The greatest irony of the numerous world-wide celebrations held this year to honor the 200th anniversary of the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen,…
Read MoreThe Simpsons, Fox Broadcasting Company by Richard Murphy I said I would make no predictions for 2013. A few hours in and the weight of evidence makes me change my mind. In 2013 we will see political prevarication in defence of the status quo come to the fore, and government become gridlocked by indecision as the might of…
Read MoreFrom Paradiso by Dante Alighieri. Illustration by Gustave Doré, 1868 by William Flesch When I was younger, in college and grad school, I’d read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their,…
Read MorePhotograph by Raphael Thelen by Sasha Ross Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, by Vijay Prashad, AK Press, 168 pp. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the…
Read Moreby Joe Linker Much of modern poetry is unintelligible or seems incoherent. That’s not modern poetry’s problem though. The problem with modern poetry is the absence of a general interest reader of poetry. Cautious readers avoid the crafted, arched bridges called poems precariously balanced over esoteric estuaries. But was there ever a general interest reader…
Read MoreArmageddon, Joseph Paul Pettit, 1852 From The End Times of Philosophy: The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own…
Read MorePhotograph by Tolga Musato by Gregory Jusdanis What was more dazzling, my view of the Bosphorus with the Aghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque or the conversation? In Istanbul last month I rediscovered what I treasure whenever I go abroad: the well-roundedness and cosmopolitanism of intellectuals in comparison with whom we here appear narrow and…
Read MoreJohann Schleyer on a harp given to him as a 50th birthday present by his colleagues at Sionsharfe, a magazine devoted mainly to Catholic poetry, which Schleyer edited and in which he first published on Volapük in 1879 by Arika Okrent Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. Johann Schleyer was a German priest whose…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta Desperate to eject some refugees it does not want, the Netherlands is refining the art of radical deprivation. No single step, no single decision, no single action in this process is horrible. Yet the cumulative effect is grotesque. Some months ago, a group of refugees from East Africa and the Middle East…
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