Sometimes We Live No Particular Way But Our Own: The Grateful Dead and Epicureanism
If the Grateful Dead will always be stuck somewhere between band and cult, Epicureanism itself has been stuck between cult and philosophy since it was founded around 300 BCE.
Writing Decline: Detroit City in Print
Four books attempt to describe the Detroit of past and present: two good, one bad, one of such inconsequence its inclusion here is only justified as an act of collation.
Anderson’s movies promote a particular fallacy: they encourage us to accept the symbol for the reality.
Khaled al-Khamissi on TAXI, the maqama, and Prime Minister Johnny Walker
TAXI isn’t a collection of short stories, or a novel, or a piece of journalism, it is a maqama, an old style of Arabic literature. Each chapter is one facet of the greater picture: the street in Cairo in that particular moment.
We Built This City: DETROPIA and CRUEL OPTIMISM
Detropia registers a mood of attenuated uncertainty, the precarious present understood not as a single melodramatic catastrophe but as “a thick moment of ongoingness.”
Day 3 of our Book Club on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines
Day 2 of our Book Club on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines.
Day 1 of our book club on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines
Nothing shakes the branch of mortality like an abandoned amusement park.
Searching for Zion, Searching for Home
In both the house of fiction and in all houses and homes, one still hears the deep stirring of the unhomely, of the destabilizing voices that rupture an unjust country.