After living abroad for three decades, novelist Henry James returned to the United States in 1904 and 1905 to to be “a restless analyst” of all he saw in an ascendant America, which had changed greatly since he had left for Paris and London. The nonfiction book that came of the trip […]
The documentary Joel Meyerowitz: The Pulse of the Street (2016), directed by Philippe Jamet, is available on the streaming platform The Darkroom Rumour. As I suggested in a previous post, Darkroom Rumour has aggregated 100 films on photography, with categories ranging from major figures in the art to “emerging,” reportage, architectural, […]
Few processes are more tedious to observe yet more consequential in outcome than lawsuits. If you work in higher education, the pillars of which the Trump administration has threatened to topple by way of grant and funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), two […]
The Darkroom Rumour is a streaming platform that “aims to be a sanctuary for all photography lovers.” The site says it is the “brainchild” of director Thomas Goupille, “working with…a film historian, a producer, a web professional, graphic designers and teachers” to aggregate documentaries and ancillary materials about well-known photographers. I […]
T.S. Eliot is literary modernism’s most famous poet. So we can all be forgiven for thinking him merely ironic when he opened his most famous poem by intoning that, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire… ” By the time Eliot gets past winter, […]
PBS posted the 2024 documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse on their site this week as an American Masters episode. It is available until May 14. If you have never seen something on Spiegelman or his most famous creation, Maus, it is an excellent introduction. Maus was the first (in 1992) […]
Maybe it sat on the sill of your mother’s kitchen window near the sink. Or perhaps it lodged in an old tin coffee can on your back porch. Wherever it resided, this pale-colored solid, speckled with bits of meat floating below a film of watered residue, was the leftover that would […]
I would call it a modest proposal, but Swift did not really mean his to be taken straight. I do think Harvard University, preeminent symbol of American education, intellect, striving, and continuity, should be prepared to go out of business. So should Columbia University, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, […]
Anyone fortunate enough to have an education in classical rhetoric knows by heart the four forms of discourse: argumentation, exposition, description, and narration. Aristotle taught us not only that language was the chief tool of persuasion, but also how to persuade. Centuries later, writers and novelists such as Jane Austen and […]
April 5 is a date to conjure with for fans of R.E.M., the post-punk pioneers from Athens, Georgia (fronted by Michael Stipe, a military child who attended high school in Collinsville, Illinois, and moved to the University of Georgia from Granite City, of all places). On that date in 1980, the […]