Not Reading and Tan Lin’s HEATH COURSE PAK
Tan Lin has chosen to write a book for, and about, the very attention span that doesn’t want to read it: that unique awareness, the distracted mind.
Tough Guys Don’t Storyboard: The Films of Norman Mailer
Mailer wanted movies to feel more real, to partake more of actual human feeling and experience, to tap into the kind of humor people indulge in when they’re all alone but have never dreamed of seeing expressed by actors in a big film.
Jennifer Egan and the New Heroism
Jennifer Egan’s recent sci-fi excursions expose her not as a writer resigned to the waning importance of literature, but as a literary “luddite” willing to take things to the next level, to begin a sabotage.
High Comedy and Melodrama: Henry James on Screen
It’s James’s special gift to draw us so far inside this world that the smallest hint of a hidden truth, catching the silvery glint of an unexpected phrase or an unorthodox encounter, can strike us with the power of an earthquake.
A Stately, Plump Bronze Medalist: Oliver St. John Gogarty and the Olympic Art Competitions
Oliver St. John Gogarty, the real Buck Mulligan, received a bronze medal in “mixed literature.” Surprised? An Olympic medal for literature?
The Woman at the Table: Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron is clearly someone who grew up in love with the snappy patter and verbal gymnastics of classic screwball romances, but she made only a halfhearted attempt to achieve those same heights in her own movies.
Inalienable Resurrection: Tan Lin’s The Patio and the Index
If we can find birds on the pages of books, and gods within concrete, it does not seem fantastic to encounter our parents inside of their pots and patios.
Fantasies of Contact: Erica Baum, Susan Howe, and the Poetics of Paper
The most enduringly interesting meditations on paper are always more than acts of mourning or expressions of nostalgia.
The Terrible Affliction of Beauty
“You wish to speak about beauty and the modern world,” Mishima would say while lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. “I wrote about this back in ’59…Surely, Professor Scruton, you’ve read my book?”
The scent of madness is in the air.