Flexibility, the art of adapting, and the necessity of continuous creation: A Talk on Jazz
This music helps us to free ourselves from conformity, which is just a form of stagnation and snobbery, thus always guiding us toward the future.
Lore & Peace: What Tolstoy Can Teach Us About Bowe Bergdahl
Long before Bowe Bergdahl dreamed of military battle, Leo Tolstoy was writing about the seductive nature of war stories and their ability to lure young men to gruesome and early deaths.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Edu-hater
Why offer a set of reforms when your goal is to tear down the whole system of values upon which your current society is built?
On Roberto Arlt’s THE SEVEN MADMEN
Before you read it, you might see a quote from Roberto Bolaño on the back cover: Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. You can ignore the blurb; you can have an original relationship with the book. Maybe this is what you should do.
In the creative cities model, liberty precedes equality and fraternity. The latter two are said to follow close behind, but the logic of the lie has been exposed time and time again, city by city.
Critics have put forth a few names, but so far there is no Next Bolaño yet. Not in terms of global readership or consensus, at least. So how are anglophone readers to know what Latin American literature commands our attention?
The work of being in pain every day is a form of manual labor in which the hours are unpredictable. The manual labor of being in pain every day is precarious because it is not a job you are paid to do, but a job that you pay to do, with your attention.
If James Bond is a sharply-dressed state-sponsored killing machine, Jason Bourne is his moral opposite — the machine gone haywire, resisting its programming.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought? Is it what we have written? What part of the self browses the Internet? What is that self trying to get to?
Art & Algae: The Work of Anna Atkins
As we face an accelerating environmental crisis in this century, Atkins’ seaweed impressions remind us about extinctions past and present, those erasures and absences yet to come.