Sunday Morning! “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler
The second book in Butler’s Parables series shows how our stories can often blind us to reality, but also keep us alive.
Author: Rufus F.
Walking Around Thoughts: Little Library Freedom Ain’t Free
Lending libraries began among the lumières who could afford them. Thoughts on public bookcases, private vices, and their discontents.
Sunday Morning! Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower posits a future dystopia that’s located just right next door to us, and gives a few glimmers of hope that individuals might work together and make it slightly less horrible.
Sunday Morning! Twin Peaks: The Return
Like many classic myths, the epic third season of Twin Peaks seems to say, if the pain of loss never really goes away, neither does love.
Sunday Morning! “Twin Peaks: Season 2”
Twin Peaks: Season 2 went darker and weirder, and then the Lynchian heart went out of it. So, just watch the first ten episodes and skip to the end.
Sunday Morning! Twin Peaks Season 1
30 years later, I watched Twin Peaks Season 1 for the first time and found it quite different from what I’ve heard, sadder and more profound.
Sunday Morning! Lucia by Alex Pheby
It’s hard to know quite how to read Lucia, an imaginative and erudite depiction of a woman’s sexual abuse and torture that may or may not have happened.
Sunday Morning! Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
Naturally, Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison is an unfinished work. All things living are unfinished. But what’s there is so tremendous.
Sunday Morning! Revisiting François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René de Chateaubriand tried to find his way in the moments after the old world had ceased to be, and the new one had not yet come into being
Sunday Morning! Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash
Julie Dash’s luminous Daughters of the Dust plays like a series of rituals guiding its Gullah characters from the old life to the new..
Sunday Morning! Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
Wild Seed is often called a science-fiction novel, with the sciences being biology and genetics, and really eugenics, rather than space
Sunday Morning! The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
Richard Wright’s “lost” 1942 novel of guilt, exile, and spiritual initiation has been fortuitously pulled up from the memory hole. It’s no less urgent today.
Sunday Morning! Brown Dog by Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison’s classic character Brown Dog seems to have figured out life’s secret- we’re just here to play.
Sunday Morning! “La Strada” by Federico Fellini
Fellini’s heartbreaking archetypal story of how, in life, Experience comes to kick the snot out of Innocence.
Sunday Morning! Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock
In Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece the sense of vertigo is inspired by the infinite space between Self and Other.
Sunday Morning! Persona by Ingmar Bergman
Persona by Ingmar Bergman places two women in a cottage to find out what happens when we stop playing our roles and start becoming each other.
Sunday Morning! “A Little Devil in America” by Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib’s song of praise never elides Black pain or the reality of racism; but centers and is held aloft by Black miracles.
Sunday Morning! “Time Regained” by Marcel Proust
We’ve reached the final volume of “In Search of Lost Time” and, finally, our hero has realized the work of his life comes in those moments in which joy, unexpectedly, breaks through the crust of ordinary experience. Now, he can get to work.
A Few Notes on COVID and Cats
I would compare having COVID to wading into a bog where you can’t see what lurks beneath the water-imagine the trash compactor in Star Wars.
Sunday Morning! “The Fugitive” by Marcel Proust
There are many readers for whom “The Fugitive” is their favorite volume because it’s a psychologically rich depiction of heartbreak and its recovery, something to which we can all relate
