Arts & Culture

Lettuce and Kings: The Power Struggle Between Horus and Set

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When you think about food and sex, it may seem bit a bizarre to link these two together but their end goal is the same: satiation. Pleasure. There is an urge that needs to be met and through with either one–or more–of our orifices, we are able to become full. As experimentation on my part, I will be starting a blog series on food and sexuality in literature beginning in chronological order (as best as I can). So without further ado, let’s go back thousands upon thousands of years ago to the great civilization of ancient Egypt.

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Reality Bites: How Reality [Television] Scares Us More Than The Art We Make About It

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This past semester, I asked the undergraduates in my creative writing class to name the materials they felt were absolutely central to the class and the readings they felt had not earned their place on the syllabus. Overwhelmingly, my students cited a particular prose poem for the second category. While they could not find anything stylistically, technically or pedagogically wrong with it–in fact, most enjoyed the poem–they found the subject matter too trite for a college class. The poem was Kate Durbin’s “The Hills, 5,” the subject: reality television.

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Berlin, or Being in the Belly

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The Hamburger Bahnhof is not a train station now, and never was in Hamburg. It’s a museum of contemporary art in Berlin. It’s also a good metaphor—in name and in content—for this city where nothing is quite as advertised. Though a very fine layer of general German Ordnung covers everything here, it gives way easily to a jumble of rules without regulation, a mass of juxtaposed and unlikely objects of which I am also, and only, one.

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A Brief History of Sorrows

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On March 5, 2013, in a sparse room of MoMA PS1, atop a perpetually foggy stage and standing before a packed crowd of predominantly white hipster 20-and-30-somethings, The National played their song “Sorrow” 105 consecutive times in a performance lasting over six straight hours. This was not their idea, but rather was conceived by artist Ragnar Kjartansson as a “durational performance” entitled A Lot of Sorrow, which continued his exploration of repetitive performance as creating a “sculptural presence within sound.” Played without irony, the indie-pop song’s repetition pinged from sad to comical over the hours, maddening to hypnotizing.

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Invitation to Cross-Pollinate

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Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is sometimes described as a work of “verbal cubism.” Wrote Marcel Proust in a letter: “For several years, Beethoven’s late quartets and Franck’s music have been my primary spiritual nourishment.” You probably know that Karl Ove Knausgård wrote a music column when he was sixteen (covered: Simple Minds, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Eric Clapton). And you?

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From the Desk of a Librarian: A Writer’s Guide to Research

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I love research. There, I said it. I can never take it back now because the Internet is forever, like memories of a bad boyfriend or your grandmother’s recipe for banana bread. As someone who works in both the English and Library worlds, I have a strong interest in making sure people understand their rights to access information, where information is located, and how to acquire the information they want. As much as I love classic literature and the old-fashioned ideal of a tortured, talented writer sitting alone in a garrett surrounded by piles of typed or handwritten sheets, I’m glad my days of romanticizing that lifestyle are over. For as much as I love solitary afternoons staring into the pine trees, I don’t know if I could ever fully give up the amazing amount of access to information we have these days.

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Memory in Antonya Nelson’s Short Stories

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In Antonya Nelson’s short stories, I find the way time is handled to be intricately connected with how convincing the particular world is that she has created. While I liked many of the stories in her latest collections, Funny Once (2014) and Nothing Right (2009), there are some I enjoyed more than others. This is, perhaps, to be expected, but what stands out to me about the stories I liked best seems to have to do with memory and how it is recreated.

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MFA Worlds

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The production of what we call art is only a small part of what it means to participate in an art world. There is a core activity, of course: we write, we paint, we make photographs, we dance. But most of our time is spent in associated activities, the most important of which is what Becker refers to as mobilizing resources: supplies, monetary support, distribution, the before/during/after of art-making. Some arts require larger, more visible resources than others. The Metropolitan Opera feels like a far cry from the coffee house poetry reading, but the difference is only one of scale. There is no artistic pursuit that can succeed without mobilizing whatever resources are necessary for that world to exist.

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Sentimental Value, Pt. 2

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As I’ve written before, my grandmother’s apartment holds a particular place in my head. I keep revisiting the floor plan, and the room that glows brightest in my memory is the kitchen. The kitchen, I think, is the quintessential center for grandmothers, mothers, and female authority in general. And while my grandmother was not maternal, not soft, rarely kind, she haunts the kitchen, vapors of past dinners clinging to her permed hair and her stained apron.

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Mind the Gap: Tranströmer’s Borderlands

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A month ago, the world lost Tomas Tranströmer, the Nobel Laureate who also had a career as a psychologist working with youth and drug addicts. A number of his poems seem to arise from this work, from his concern for those living on the outskirts of society. By and large, these are not poems explicitly about people on the fringes, but rather poems that trouble the very idea of a civilization possessing outskirts. Why are some people forced to the edge and some comfortable in the center? Who draws the lines, and where? And, centrally for Tranströmer: what is possible in the middle spaces?

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