Exposure to more ads means more reading and seeing and hearing the empty rhetoric of essentialist perlocution: paltered clichés, tropes, maxims, lies, and nonsense. One result, in Barthes’ view, is a cheapening of the greater language.
I remember all my efforts to prepare to move forward, but I forget the jerky reverse, stop-and-go motion that made that eventual forward movement possible.
The artist Rammellzee used the term ‘lightdwellers’ to reference a generic societal elite. Decades later, ‘the lofts’ can do a similar job for a certain kind of New Yorker. Ditto for ‘condos.’
On Jungian shadows, Elena Ferrante, THE BABADOOK, and the sinister side of motherhood.
Men of Myth: On Bruce Springsteen & Bob Dylan’s ‘Basement Tapes’
Whereas early blues and country artists were subsumed under the mythology of their genre, rock was about individual stardom from the outset. Where do Dylan & Springsteen stand in relation to their progenitors?
Under the Skin: David Cronenberg’s CONSUMED
Though Cronenberg is undeniably preoccupied with decaying and deformed flesh, he also evinces a gleefulness in probing physical transformations, and how they both impact and reflect upon the psyche.
The Post-Apocalyptic Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised
If it’s true that the world’s poorest will disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, we are engaging in a kind of philosophical counterrevolution, undoing the modern idea that the masses matter at all.
On POETS IN THEIR YOUTH, a newly republished memoir by Eileen Simpson, John Berryman’s wife.
The Personal and the Believable
Fanny Howe and Shabazz Palaces are strange bedfellows, but this summer their shared orientation helped renew my belief in the world.
Alena Graedon’s THE WORD EXCHANGE and Ben Marcus’ THE FLAME ALPHABET explore the traumatic capacities of language by imagining it is a virus.