In different ways, the books under review offer alternative perspectives on what is arguably the most polarizing of film genres. All three are by established film historians who have written extensively on specific eras and themes. Yet of the three texts only Hollywood Musicals You Missed opens up fresh lines of inquiry.
What does it mean to be great, after all? In taking Bill’s measure, I think about Freedom and Fate, the poles around which all human lives orbit. Most of us keep them in a poor balance, misusing, abusing, and wasting our Freedom, cursing and railing against our Fate. Bill kept such an equipoise of these Lords of our Life, an easy meshing of the exuberance of Freedom and the acceptance of Fate.
Trees have felt significant, relational, to poets and priests and philosophers for centuries. The symmetry of this partnership is surprising, when you think how lopsided the scales are: Trees shade and shelter and furnish and feed us, and we … clear-cut them. Or hug them and get mocked. Or alter the environment, and watch them charred by wildfires or pulled up by their roots.
Nineteen seventy-two saw the publication of the autobiographical novel We Can’t Breathe. For several years, aided by several writing grants, Ronald Fair traveled abroad, pursuing a writing life of great ambition. In the early seventies critic Shane Stevens called him “one of the two best black writers in the country.” Yet this promise somehow never came to full fruition.
Washington University students contemplate activism, the forces of the pandemic, and their futures as they return to school and working life.
The arrival of the pandemic-era summer was a freewheeling mental battle between appreciation of health and stability, and an almost selfish disdain for a locked-in, isolated life that I had never imagined I would have to experience.
It is no secret in developmental psychology that young people in particular tend to be extraordinarily resilient. The pandemic continues to be an excruciating test, but one that we are well-equipped to pass. We will continue to protest while hunting for jobs in a decimated economy, and we will continue showing up to class, innovating, and adapting to a world we have very little control over.
For me, coronavirus has, at once, been a complicating and simplifying factor. The pandemic certainly complicated some aspects of my life. It has complicated relationships: I said goodbye to people for spring break not knowing that I might not see them for over a year, if not longer.
The rest of the semester, though emotionally extremely trying at every step, ended successfully. However, the long and hard path I planned for my summer made the incessant grind of my final semester at Washington University look small.
I leave it to social historians to draw comparisons with other identity movements, but it can be hard to bridge the gap between accepting fatness in others and accepting it in yourself—and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.