Sunday Morning! On Reading (and reading and reading) Thomas Wolfe
On a posthumous novel by the great writer (and overwriter) from North Carolina.
Author: Rufus F.
Sunday Morning! Stranger Things and Suspiria
While consuming all of this fiction, I’d like to sketch a few brief notes, particularly about story structure and the use of pastiche.
Sunday Morning! The Bughouse
On Daniel Swift’s journey into Saint Elizabeth’s mental hospital with Ezra Pound.
Sunday Morning! “The Faraway Nearby”
On Rebecca Solnit’s 2013 collection of interwoven, digressive, personal essays about the stories we tell to make our way through life with each other.
Sunday Morning! “Kaili Blues”
A few brief notes on a Dada memoir from a founder and Bi Gan’s stunning 2015 film on time, memory, and the illusory quality of past, present, and future.
Sunday Morning! “Constellation of Genius”
About an extremely readable day book for 1922, a year in which culture changed absolutely.
Sunday Morning! “Pasolini” by Enzo Siciliano
I read a biography of the great Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini that gets into the weeds of political and literary debates so deep as to lose sight of his art.
Sunday Morning! On Persona and Jennifer Packer
On a great contemporary artist, a Bergman classic, and the cruelty and care of depicting others.
Sunday Morning! “The Fable of the Bees” & Film Noir
A once-notorious Enlightenment satire and 1950s crime films agree on one point: we should stop flattering ourselves about our public demonstrations of virtue.
Sunday Morning! Rewatching Antonioni
He was considered a lion of European art house cinema. I consider Antonioni to be one of the great directors of emotional horror movies.
Sunday Morning! “What we Salvage” (2015)
Reading a novel set in my current city three decades ago made me wonder how important setting is for fiction. Let’s talk about it.
Hey, wanna read something?
Anybody want to read a manuscript-in-progress? Wait! Don’t run away just yet!
Criterion goes live
Yesterday, I talked up the films of the recently departed Agnès Varda. Today, the Criterion Channel went live and they’ve put up fourteen of her films, a few of which are among the best...
Sunday Morning! Agnès Varda (1928-2019)
You meet a lot of artists wandering down city streets. Not everyday do you meet one like the great French filmmaker Agnes Varda.
Sunday Morning! “Us” (2019)
Jordan Peele’s recent “Us” reminds me that all great horror movies work by a sort of irrational nightmare logic. Here there be spoilers.
Sunday Morning! “Killing Commendatore” by Haruki Murakami
On the most recent tour of Haruki Murakami’s imagination and an exploration of artistic creation itself.
Sunday Morning! “Wanda” and “The Last Jedi”
It’s pretty hard to think of two movies as different from one another as Wanda and The Last Jedi. I watched them both anyway.
