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.
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.
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.
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.
Naturally, Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison is an unfinished work. All things living are unfinished. But what’s there is so tremendous.
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
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..
Wild Seed is often called a science-fiction novel, with the sciences being biology and genetics, and really eugenics, rather than space
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.
Fellini’s heartbreaking archetypal story of how, in life, Experience comes to kick the snot out of Innocence.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece the sense of vertigo is inspired by the infinite space between Self and Other.
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.
Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass Vol 2 is not a double-LP like Vol 1, and it has been pared down in scope, but it still slaps.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s song of praise never elides Black pain or the reality of racism; but centers and is held aloft by Black miracles.
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.
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
I’m feeling a bit under the weather this week, so I think I will let Ralph Fiennes and the BBC fill in for me with “How Proust Can Change Your Life”
The Prisoner by Marcel Proust’s depiction of doomed and obsessive sexual jealousy is not nearly as bleak as I remembered. It’s tragic, but it’s a light tragedy.
Proust is showing us the world that was in terminal decline by the first world war and asking the important question: What did we lose?
Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust: In which the love that dare not speak its name finally speaks- at great length.
Thanks to your generosity, we were able to upgrade our service plan. Hopefully this will help us address some of our performance issues.
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on The Piketon Massacre Tragedy, ContinuedWelcome back, Em. on Re-Open the Asylums: A New TakeNo one who has spent more than half an hour on the NYC subways would think regular riders could be s… on Re-Open the Asylums: A New TakeI've ridden the NYC subways for nearly as long as Jaybird has been alive -- a testament to his good…
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