“I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything,” says Luc Sante, introducing his blog, Pinakothek. “Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.” Sante proceeds to dazzle with a stream of images of odd, out-of-the-way, intensely interesting artifacts. Each artifact is bolstered by commentaries, discussions of meaning, zinging interpretative analysis, theoretical stories of origin (if we were theologians we might call such tales artifact ‘creation myths’) such as why Ayn Rand once had to hire detectives to flush out a band of anonymous poets and how bank safes are probably all empty of money but full of A-Rod rookie cards and somebody’s collection of Beanie Babies. (see also The Believer interview with Luc Sante)

The long short-story is not a particularly popular form, but Paul La Farge packs life into exactly that bag. It’s a bag Kafka and Chekov used with gusto–think of the Metamorphosis or The Duel. In Bleak College Days, La Farge too stakes out territory at the wind-buffeted border between the short story and the novel. Here’s a tale of a grimy college existence that starts out in trickery and ends in defeat and isolation, not to mention bewildered enlightenment of a melancholy variety. In fact, a seething hoard of platitudinous adjectives and witty phrases come to our minds when trying to describe this story, and so you’re better off just reading the thing for yourself, but here it goes: La Farge’s tale is–what shall we say?–meaty, carefully paced, dark and stormy, driving, sensuous (in a weird East Coast way), epic, burgeoning, hour-consuming, requiring a kind of thinking that’s the opposite of reading your email… Bleak College Days by Paul La Farge.

Ivan Brunetti’s excruciating but brilliant explanation of the state of his art-making (plus the story of what happened between him and the cartoon character Nancy). As far as the grand scheme of comics this is like a little note scribbled to no one in a phone booth, but it’s a gem; it’s Ivan Brunetti, candid and pure.

The Order of Myths is a film too nuanced to confront lynching directly, and too focused to make any easy statement about racism. …more

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“For me death is a hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased and forgotten,” says Borges in this 1984 interview conducted by Professor of Philosophy Tomas Abraham, translated here for the first time into English. “When I’m sad, I think,” Borges goes on, “what does it matter what happens to a twentieth-century South American writer, what do I have to do with all of this? You think it matters what happens to me now, if tomorrow I will have disappeared? I hope to be totally forgotten, I believe that this is death.” Forgotten? Not likely anytime soon, sir. The author on Conrad, free will, labyrinths, and his father’s lesson: “Reading has to be a happiness.” Read the interview here.

A Review of Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore

“The war is now a story. How will it get told?” - William T. Vollmann …more

“What I know is that we are conducting a war of liberation”

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Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World by Simon Garfield

Banana: The fate of the fruit that changed the world by Dan Koeppel

How William Shatner Changed the World by William Shatner

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On Voting, People Who Collect the Folk Art of People With Whom They Have No Cultural Connection, and the Red-faced Waitress Who Pulled The Plug …more

Kay Ryan’s tarot cards, the return of the rhyme, Mennonite matriarchs, Mao’s poems, Women’s Work, and Blago’s versification …more

Obama moonlights as a food critic on Chicago’s WTTW. He plugs the Dixie Kitchen for its Southern Sampler (perfect, he says, for the indecisive), …more

A Three Part Interview Roundtable
Part 3 – Rayek Rizek

Jesse Nathan and Rayek Rizek

Rayek Rizek came to Neve Shalom (a village on the green line madated 50 percent Israeli Jew and 50 percent Palestinian Arab) with his wife Dyana in May 1984 and has served as mayor twice. These days, Rizek runs a Café and a shop with his wife, located near the community’s guesthouse.

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A Three Part Interview Roundtable
Part 2 – Michal Zak (read part 1 here)

Michal Zak is a forty-nine year old Jewish resident of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a village with a population mandated at exactly 50% Palestinian Arab/Israeli Jew. She’s been living at Neve Shalom for twenty-two years. For twenty-one of those years she’s held a facilitator position at the School For Peace. …more

A Three Part Interview
Part 1 – Howard Shippin “I live as If the future is now”

Fifty-five families live in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam situated along Isreal’s infamous green line. The community keeps its population strictly split at 50-50—half Arab Palestinian, half Israeli Jew. The late Bruno Hussar, a Dominican monk, founded the village in the late 1960s, at first a few shacks on a hill, there are now 220 members. The community has an internationally renowned School For Peace, a bi-national primary school, a hotel, a spiritual center and several large meeting halls and administrative centers. The village’s sole purpose for existence, say many of its members, is simply to disprove the persistent modern myth that Arabs Palestinians and Israeli Jews cannot live together in harmony.

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