| Literary Arts Articles |
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Joe likes Nancy For Joe Brainard love hit like a freight train the first time he spied Nancy: “The first time I saw Nancy she was eating a chicken salad sandwich at Joe’s, just around the corner from my father’s hardware store. I didn’t know what to do, she was just so beautiful. So I just stood there, looking. Bright red lips. White oval face. (Soft) big black eyes.” To be clear, Brainard’s talking here about the cartoon character Nancy and the year is 1963. |
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Do You Know Where Your Kids Are? Were bookstores more like record shops with their endless streams of subcategories (metal, thrash, emo-metal, hair metal), then within the field of “fiction” and “literary fiction” you would find plastic dividers for “southern gothic novel” populated by modern day Faulkners such as Christopher Rice and then we would have “chicklit southern gothic (without vampires)” and there we would find Joshilyn Jackson’s work. Her third novel is entitled The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. |
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Verbatim Theater James Baldwin believed fervently in the salvific power of literature -- and in the power of a writer to affect change. “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” There were limitations to that power, he believed, but had no other course than to address whatever corrupted principalities permeated the day. |
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Falling In and Out, Together Often times, young characters in novels are given one of two voices: the voice of a smart-mouthed comedian or the voice of a wise, pure and enlightened young adult. Either way, these characters usually serve to discredit or make a fool of bad acting grown-ups. Yannick Murphy’s characters in Here They Come thankfully do not fall in either of these traps. This is a tight, fast-moving story, almost wholly devoid of judgmental narration or overtly sensitive treatment of the behavior of children. |
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The Uses of Enchantment It’s late fall in the Boston suburb of West Salem. There’s snow and cloud cover and so it’s hard to say what time of day it is exactly. Two teams of girls playing field hockey shiver on their respective sidelines, waiting for school officials, as they inevitably will, to call the game and let them go home. Just before that happens, though, one of the girls slips off, allegedly to go to the bathroom. Instead she makes her way to the parking lot, where she taps her hockey stick on the glass window of a car idling there. |
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Pull the Trigger, Punch the Zoom As any documentarian knows, even the rawest material requires the director’s unique voice of organization. In a Michael Moore film, we expect to see his burly form stumbling somewhere. Barbara Kopple allows her subjects, striking labor forces, to speak for themselves with close-ups that linger for spates of time. Ross McElwee used the path of Sherman’s March to investigate his own personal longings and between interviews we hear him moaning off-camera, and witness him bleakly staring into mirrors. Ken Burns will, well, pan and diffuse a lot. There is no such thing as the ritual standard, yet all are “documentaries.” |
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