The Airship
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Calvino’s New York
Sometimes I worry that New York changes too quickly. I find myself clinging to things, silly things I wouldn’t have imagined, like the Kentile Floors sign or Joe’s Superette. “Brooklyn as brand has overtaken Brooklyn as place,” I remember reading…
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Getting a Bootleg Up
The idea of avoiding a hangover was noble and practical and, as an avid drinker, held my interest. He pointed to a passel of jars in the corner. “Now, see those over there, they’re not filtered yet and need another…
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Pulp Racism
For The Airship, Benjamin Welton looks at the legacy of anti-Asian bigotry in popular fiction over the last century, from Dr. Fu-Manchu to the racist work of Jack London.
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Batman Saves More than Gotham
What does it take to transcend your medium into the stuff of literary value? Batman. 1986, the year both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were first published, can be seen as a turning point for the comic book in…
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Classic Literature Or Social Construct?
Classic literature is neither timeless nor fundamental. Writing is bound by its place in history, both as we read it and as it was written, and the idea of a universal experience is simply another construct of the dominant culture,…
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Public and Private Literature
Like 50 Shades of Grey? Why not try The Lover by Marguerite Duras? Freddie Moore at The Airship offers some suggestions for books you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading to go along with your guilty pleasures.
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Writing Blind
Writing and revising can be challenging under the best of circumstances, but imaging being unable to see the words on the page. At The Airship Daily, Tammy Ruggles writes about her life as a visually impaired writer: Before the computer…
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Roald Dahl: Fighter Jet Pilot
Who would’ve thunk it? Though WWII explains the Oompa Loompas. All the same, it’s hard to imagine Dahl, Ian Fleming, and William Stephenson as contemporaries, yet the three were apparently acquainted by the war. It’s usually macho men like Ernest…
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Interview with Guy Who Robs Drug Dealers
Peter Madsen: So where does this start? Brian: It starts with my moving from Long Island to Orlando, Florida. I wasn’t getting along with my immediate family, so I moved in with my grandpa and I started going to college.…
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Delving Head-First into Wonder
Often times readers dismiss graphic novels as too unrealistic to posses literary merit. That would be a mistake, argues Stefan A. Slater at The Airship, because reality isn’t inherently part of good story telling. Plenty of other fictional forms flaunt…
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DFW and his Big Alanis Morissette Poster. (Also, Robots.)
We recently linked to a till-then undiscovered interview with David Foster Wallace. See here for something on the music he loved.
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Why is Your Keyboard Weird?
Key arrangement isn’t the only thing modern keyboards borrow from a bygone age. We get the term “shift key” from the way a Remington Model 2 Type-Writer physically shifted the printing bar between uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase and lowercase are…