Features & Reviews
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STOP WRITING!
From The New York Times: In these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers. Read more…
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The Eyeball, a Blog Ostensibly About Film by Ryan Boudinot
Your Weekend Popcorn Recipe My brother-in-law Chad Johnson’s popcorn recipe is the best. I’ve enjoyed it at his and my sister-in-law’s place over the years while watching Pulp Fiction and during their rigorously opinionated James Bond sessions. I don’t know…
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How Western Pop Music is Being Used as ‘Touchless Torture’ by the American military
From Frieze Magazine: “As reported by the BBC, the Guardian, the Associated Press, Newsweek, The Nation, Mother Jones, SPIN and others (while mocked by right-wing columnists from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Sun), Western pop music has been…
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Stencil Nation
A subdivision of the spray-can Graffit isubversion is stenciling. Requiring less skill and less time, stencil artists simply put down a piece of paper with text or images carefully removed, and lay down a coat of paint. This offshoot of…
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Docu-fantasia
My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s ‘docu-fantasia’ film about Winnipeg, Manitoba, should be out on DVD soon. Apparently there’s a book in the works as well. If you don’t know Maddin’s work, it might be described as Canadian ice cream noir, blending…
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Brief Thoughts on Alvaro Mutis’s “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port Of Call”
There is a line of James Wright I have always loved: “Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness of the Midwest?” Re-reading one of the great modern sea stories, “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call,” by…
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One Crazy Motherfucker
I Have Fun Everywhere I Go Memoirs can be split into two rough camps: those that place their narrator front and center, and those focused on external events. The former narcissistically inflates its protagonist, even when describing misbehavior or abjection…
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Miranda July on Voting
This pre-election comment still pleases me: Here’s why you should vote: you are going to really love it, the whole strange procedure. You get to walk right into a building that you would never normally be allowed in, often an…
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Death of a Publishing House
Less than a year after Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt, the new entity – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – seems to be collapsing. Two weeks ago, it was announced – and then retracted, and then sorta-kinda reannounced – that HMH was freezing…
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New! Live! Cornelia Nixon reads fiction…
Got an hour to listen to an amazing short story? Watch this year’s Pulitzer Prize poet, and former U.S. Poet Laureate, introduce Cornelia Nixon, who reads her short story, “Beach Bunnies,” at UC Berkeley’s Story Hour, on November 6, 2008.