Imagined Conversations (5.19.14)
A: I apologize if this seems blunt, but what I must say is too important to dress up in flowery language.
B: Certainly—
A: —Give me a fucking website.
B: I—I…
A: It’s time.
Life Sentences: The ABCs of “I Can’t Even”
In a world more and more filled with breaking stories, shocking video, and viral outrage, it is becoming necessary to can’t even. In this way “I can’t even” is a philosophical expression: the economy of attention, emotion, and time has overloaded, and I assert my right to can’t.
The Banality of Evil: Rosemary’s Baby, the Miniseries
Now, our devils eat beating hearts, and our love interests have well-defined cheekbones.
Three Vistas
A democratic vista is prose that is pliant to poetry. When prose is pliant to poetry, it means that prose bends to the authority of poetry without giving up its own self-concept…
Review: On Adam Begley’s “Updike”
The secret to John Updike’s long tenure as America’s preeminent man of letters can be found in the essays from Self-Consciousness, his 1989 memoir-of-sorts. The book is fairly representative: it’s an unabashed hymn to Updikehood, a finely recorded bout of nostalgia, a cheerful philosophical riff, and a masterwork of English prose…
Life Sentences: The Unbearable Ironies of Alanis Morissette
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in writing this Alanis has a much deeper, more radical, and philosophical concept of irony. It seems to me that Ms. Morissette is remarkably well versed in the theories of irony from Erasmus to Paul de Man.
Imagined Conversations (4.28.14)
A: It’s just that yesterday she had a small crisis. She is recovering from an operation. She doesn’t feel well.
B: Unforgivable behavior… I just assumed it would be all roses. She signed a letter of resignation?
KarstFrom the Print
After the trucks depart, Clint faxes me: How long have you been peeking in our windows? I heard you weeping in the landscaping. You woke her up…
Debate: Are We Producing Too Much Shakespeare?
Are we producing too much Shakespeare? Two Reader editors take sides.
The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry
Why is poetry these days so hard to remember?