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.
Our uncertainty about any ending is all the more reason why we should look at the recent past with holstered hubris, not revolutionary fervor.
Until the news of his death arrives, Art Garfunkel lives in the specific limbo of the used-to-be-famous. He does not currently record, perform, act, or write. But he is very much alive on the internet.