The University of Iowa is a prairie-bound theater of the entwined ideological wars on labor rights and academic freedom.
On the Student/Worker Distinction
Uncovering the Popular Midwestern Gothic
The American Midwest in idea and in fact is girded.
Hating Valerie Solanas (And Loving Violent Men)
When we talk about men the same way men have talked about women for centuries, it reads as grotesque and insanely violent, un-compassionate, and shocking, which was exactly Solanas’s point.
Coover, Vollmann, Wallace, and Gayl Jones — I believe these big, wide-ranging books are postmodernism’s best, for the Bullshitters engage more directly and profoundly than the Artistes with significant cultural subjects.
The figs you eat have the bodies of the dead who tried to enter those to whom they are the same rather than those to whom they are different—Leviticus tells us such things are an “abomination,” and this fruit is your caution as it is your knowledge.
In Southeast Asian film and culture, the pontianak has grown ubiquitous as an undead woman, cursed with immense beauty and monstrosity. This icon is at the center of Sharlene Teo’s Ponti, a novel that chronicles the lives of three misfit women.
For García Márquez, anecdotes always served as kernels of truth, experiences both whittled down to their most elemental and novelistic tales in need of being fleshed out.
The general proximity of Alex Israel’s SPF-18
The Bridge, The Pyramid and The Spire
Parable as architecture; construction as crime