Author: Rufus F.
Happy Trails, Trigger!
Trigger warning! The New York Times reports about American undergrads pushing to have professors issue “trigger warnings” for great books that might be psychologically upsetting to students who have experienced trauma. Professors, a bit...
Book Notes: Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
Are stalkers just better suited to a decontextualized online culture than the rest of us?
Yes, we Canon!
Aesthetic tastes are subjective? Aesthetic tastes are objective? Okay, but what are we really doing?
In the Library Garden, Sunday Afternoon
The Pew Research Center tells us that reports of the death of the library have been greatly exaggerated.
“Hang him on my wall”: Why Museum Failures Concern Me
New Dealer offered an explanation of why we all should care if cultural institutions go under. Now, Rufus explains why he cares.
I’d like to be a Gallery: The Corcoran Falls Apart
For years now, the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. has found bold and innovative ways to shoot itself in the foot. Now, it’s over.
The film is a saddening bore
Cinematic shorthand tends to make use of emblematic actions to visually represent certain eras: the 40s USO dance, 50s drag race, 60s protest, etc. These, usually collective, activities come to be how we visualize...
Soul Love
Falling in love with someone is the most common thing in the world, yet it feels miraculous- like the eruption of the divine into everyday life. When people have religious experiences, does it feel...
The Apartment
Each year, New Year’s Eve brings to mind The Apartment, a film whose climax takes place on that evening. When you watch it next, note Shirley MacLaine’s great bit of acting as everyone at...
Wait, it’s 2014!
Now, let us never speak of 2013 again. Clearly, the 13th year of a millennium is like the 13th floor of a building- leave it blank in the history books. The number of friends...
Defining Cultural Decline
Rufus takes a stab at explaining why he finds the local culture where he lives to be pathological but not in decline.
A Trip Down la Strada…
Rufus shares an article his great-grandfather wrote during a road trip through Fascist Italy with Ernest Hemingway in 1929.
Award this!
I’m not the only one who Sinclair Lewis leaves a bit cold. Here’s a rant by Ernest Hemingway from a letter to my great-grandfather*:
Whither Babbitt?
If the American middle class vanishes, will the American bourgeois mindset be lost forever?
Cultural Institutions in Flux
Quite often cultural institutions choose to enter a state of flux and can’t get out.
