The Cosmology of Serialized Television
How does the most acclaimed show on television end up pulling a high school writing trick of injecting a few famous lines to anoint itself in seriousness and relevance?
Criticism
Review: László Krasznahorkai’s "Seiobo There Below"From the Print
Hell is oneself. Or, if you like, Hell is other people. Either way, Hell’s Modernist vanguard—let’s say Beckett, Sartre, and Eliot—moiled in darkness long enough to recover the bad news and bring it to daylight…
Editor’s Epilogue: Bend SinisterFrom the Print
“Gloomerang” is as playful a poem about despair as you are likely to read: compulsively playful, in a way that might be the cure and might be the cause. It takes its start from the crossing of Bumerang, German (or is it Australian?) for boomerang, and Kummer, for sorrow…
New Poetry Round-Up: Seshadri, Lauterbach, O’BrienFrom the Print
Ann Lauterbach is an experimental poet in the best sense of the word. Erudite yet curious, readable yet uncompromising, her poetry explores the foggy terrain between self-expression and social justice…
Whatever Happened to New York City Opera?
Despite the fairly well documented “missteps” the company has taken on its way from being the second major opera outfit in New York City to nonexistence, there persists a subtext of disbelief. Everyone is asking: How could this have happened? What could have been done to prevent it?
Self-Consuming Cinema: On "Last Year at Marienbad"
But rather than a work that is resistant to interpretation, “Marienbad” actively invites it: “Marienbad” leads the viewer through a number of interpretive stages, each one as unsatisfying as the last…
Review: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge”From the Print
Unlike his peers, Mr. Pynchon never started from a set conception of the world, but from the detritus of pop culture, science, and art. He did not plot so much as pattern his novels, setting up complementary and clashing resonances and dichotomies in such a way as to refuse any reductive analysis of the narrative…
“A Question of Silence”: Why We Don't Read Or Write About EducationFrom the Print
If in recent years one type of writing has managed to at least hint at the genuine problem in education, it is the adolescent fantasy novel. […] The structuring desire of every novel of this sort is the same: a well-resourced school that offers a meaningful education. The anxiety that eventually takes over the story is also the same: that the school will turn out to be just as authoritarian, just as banal and arbitrary as its real-life counterparts.
“To Get Our Message Before the Public, We’ve Had To Kill People”
During his trial, Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and his fears of technological oppression were deemed “non-bizarre delusions.” Accordingly, Kaczynski’s views received little serious consideration in major media outlets. In recent years, however, his ideas have seen something of a reevaluation.
Review: Jean-Paul Sartre in "We Have Only This Life to Live"
Thus the essays in this collection give us a sense of Sartre in full: the man of letters, the philosopher, the Marxist ideologue, and even the friend…
The Book of Twenty Million Pages: Leopardi and the "Zibaldone"
Written between the years 1817 and 1832, the Zibaldone, or “hodgepodge,” is a monstrous diary, the diary of a polyglot genius whose Italian is interlarded with Greek, Latin, Spanish and French…
Review: Giorgio Vasta’s "Time on My Hands"From the Print
The novel wouldn’t strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief quite as much if the narrator were just a few years older—a short Publishers Weekly review even made the mistake of calling it a “portrait of teenage rebellion”…
The Language of Displacement
Rick’s sadness belongs to Hollywood, where war is an occasion for great love and the heroism of self-sacrifice. The narrator of Seghers’ novel, by contrast, is overcome with a kind of misery that the French call a ‘cafard,’ a Godless emptiness…
Review: On Tao Lin’s "Taipei"From the Print
As an edifice built to stupefy and alienate the reader, Taipei is something to behold. It is like a hall of mirrors where the visitor’s reflection eliminates any trace of her original affect, where a smile is thrown back as an anesthetized mouth…
In Search of the Unica
For a significant-if-actually-miniscule fragment of the population (and I’m speaking of myself) personal identity is staked on a series of affinities…