What few sex scenes still exist in the comic book convention that currently constitutes mainstream American movies, are rife with ludicrous conventions. When it does it’s as if a group of people had been dosed with a lysergic aphrodisiac in the midst of a pie fight. It’s not original on my part to say that
Pilot Episode: On the Greatness of Kaley Cuoco
There is something of the noughties TMZ celebrity about her — her perpetual tan and her dry-shampoo-bolstered blowout, her tireless dedication to the life of the good-time girl. The next morning, she wakes up with a sore head, throws open the hotel room curtains, and then notices a splash of errant blood, red as a
Continue reading Pilot Episode: On the Greatness of Kaley Cuoco
The Great White Reunion: On Duncan Bell’s “Dreamworlds of Race”
Perhaps the most important contribution of Dreamworlds of Race is its conceptualization of the Anglo-Saxon race as a “biocultural assemblage, a hybrid compound of ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ claims about human evolutionary history, individual and collective character, comportment, mental capacity, and physiognomy,” all adumbrated by whiteness. Born in Scotland, he migrated to the United States when
Continue reading The Great White Reunion: On Duncan Bell’s “Dreamworlds of Race”
Reading for Unreadability: Racializing Asians During the Long Cold War
Thus, in Ono, Xiang does not see a case study in how guilt somehow defines Japaneseness, but an Ishiguro protagonist who strives toward distinctiveness but fails, revealing the “perceptual illusion” of race and character. If glossing Taipei, Xiang would perhaps read Paul’s loneliness, his realization that “technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate
Continue reading Reading for Unreadability: Racializing Asians During the Long Cold War
New: Samira Azzam Collection Forthcoming from ALQ Books
As scholar Joseph Farag writes in “Samira Azzam’s ‘Man and His Alarm Clock,’” it was in Beirut that Azzam would “emerge as one of the first and pre-eminent Palestinian literary voices in the wake of the Nakba of 1948.” Azzam was also an acclaimed translator, bringing English-language classics into Arabic. Scholar Joseph
Continue reading New: Samira Azzam Collection Forthcoming from ALQ Books
What If We Saved Ourselves?
Everything the white gaze does to our writing, it does to us as well. Well, so is the infamous waiter program, finally retired. “I had to constantly justify why the lives of people of color were subjects for literature.” The premise here is that only white lives matter enough to make for literature. Most of
The Disappointed
Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. What did it really mean? At a remove from all the glitter and glamour, he took in the reality of lumpen Los Angeles: the loony health cults, the slack boredom and free-floating credulity and mounting resentments of sunstruck transplanted
Endless Constellations: On “Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979”
Working with only portions of letters — an E’s central tier or the new-moon portion of a semicolon, her use of fractured text rarely converges to create meaning. Katalin Ladik, “Wildflowers” (1978) In the 20th century, it became widely possible for ordinary people to make language without sound, to speak without the mouth. Grouped as
Continue reading Endless Constellations: On “Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979”
New Fiction in Translation: ‘Naked Robot’
The three of us didn’t exchange a single word. I can steal some clothes and disguise myself as human. My master ordered us to get into the van, and we did. But over time, the situation changed. This was the horrifying name they had given the junkyard where they dumped old, malfunctioning robots, so that they
This Unhallowed Ground
The reason for visiting was deeper than just checking off a box on a hobbyist’s bucket list: it was an opportunity to engage in what I hoped could be a meaningful way with a segment of the recent American experience that is all but inaccessible when it is increasingly needed and to hear from locals
Letters to the Editor: Clifford Thompson Responds to Joel Rhone
His book What It is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues was published in 2019. He is the author of “Bringing it Back to Baldwin: Myth, Memoir, and America’s Racial Reckoning,” recently featured in The Drift magazine. I won’t say anything further about this fact. My idea is that the country needs that approach very
Continue reading Letters to the Editor: Clifford Thompson Responds to Joel Rhone
Free Speech and the Question of Race
On an individual level, Nossel recommends a variety of steps users can take to be responsible online citizens, including following reliable news reports on platform’s products, operations, and terms of service; expressing oneself publicly and within ones circle of influence on issues that matter; asking questions about how the platforms work; voicing outrage when user
Crisis as Freedom: Muhammad Iqbal and Walter Benjamin
Iqbal does something similar in his discussion of divine knowledge and time. To ask these questions is to defy the circumstances that brought us economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, and a resurgence of right-wing fascism, all exacerbated by the global pandemic. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.”
Continue reading Crisis as Freedom: Muhammad Iqbal and Walter Benjamin
Sunday Submissions: Lunch Ticket’s Literary Translation Contest, the ‘Gabo Prize’
Sunday Submissions: Lunch Ticket’s Literary Translation Contest, the ‘Gabo Prize’ The submissions window for Lunch Ticket’s literary translation contest, the Gabo Prize, is open through January 31: The write: “The winner, selected by a guest judge, will receive $200, and the winning piece will be published alongside two semi-finalists in the upcoming issue of
Continue reading Sunday Submissions: Lunch Ticket’s Literary Translation Contest, the ‘Gabo Prize’
Unknown Cities: On Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Three Rings”
“[A]s in some version of Zeno’s paradox,” Mendelsohn explains, “no amount of writing can deliver us.” At a crucial moment in his analysis of The Rings of Saturn, Mendelsohn connects Sebald’s novel to Penelope’s efforts to hold off the suitors in Book Two of the Odyssey: Because weaving often features in Greek literature as a
Continue reading Unknown Cities: On Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Three Rings”
The Death of the Future: On Nnedi Okorafor’s “Remote Control”
The seed that was her gift turns out to make her destroy everything she loved. Through unexplained means, the seed conveys fatal power to the young girl. JANUARY 23, 2021 “IT IS ME,” she called. Magic and science jostle with one another; Africa is explored in an American idiom; technology and culture feature in a
Continue reading The Death of the Future: On Nnedi Okorafor’s “Remote Control”
Gritty and Glittery
Then again, that’s not Riedel’s beat. Under his leadership, the group worked to “brand” Broadway as an essential New York City destination. Have increasingly long-running shows stifled the creativity of new theater artists? Still, looking out at the Broadway landscape Disney helped create, no honest theater person can dismiss it outright. His was a dependably
Saturday Events: ‘A Poem in Arabic, Not an Arabic Poem’
We will continue this feature as long as there are so many events accessible online; please send your recommendations to info@arablit.org. Thanks to Daniel Behar for passing this on. Saturday Events: ‘A Poem in Arabic, Not an Arabic Poem’ Dartmouth College’s open Middle Eastern literature lecture series starts on Wednesday, January 27, with a talk
Continue reading Saturday Events: ‘A Poem in Arabic, Not an Arabic Poem’
The Anatomy of the LSD Romance in the 1970s: On Errol Morris’s “My Psychedelic Love Story”
Errol Morris’s new film, My Psychedelic Love Story, boldly chronicles Harcourt-Smith’s troubled childhood and her intensely fraught romance with psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary in the true decade of excess: the 1970s. This is the point in the film where she shows her grit and determination. As Leary is put on trial and
A Premature Eulogy for Privacy
boyd contends that kids sometimes disclose lots of information for purposes of obfuscation: to make it hard for prying eyes to differentiate signal from noise. While DeBrabander is right that many accounts of privacy at least implicitly overestimate how much autonomy individuals can possess, Cohen’s analysis clarifies why he fails to appreciate the personal, interpersonal,