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Literary Arts
Minnesota Malaise Meets New York Neurosis
The ellipsis, in grammatical terms, is what English teachers would call an “unsaid thought.” For therapists, the ellipsis is their bread and butter. Once the patient fills in the ellipsis, the job is theoretically done. The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt creates a panorama of characters that suffer from ellipsis override. More
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Literary Arts
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. More
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Literary Arts
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. More
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Literary Arts
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. More
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Literary Arts
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. More
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Literary Arts
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. More
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Literary Arts
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.” More
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Literary Arts
Long Live the Gadfly!
The Gadfly, as described by Plato in reference to Socrates ’critical stance toward the Athenian political scene, represents, perhaps, the earliest articulated example of a Muckraker. Though the term "muckraker" didn’t come into the language until American writer Upton Sinclair burst on the scene with his industry-busting The Jungle in 1906, a long tradition of Gadflies -- both before and after Sinclair -- have combined the illuminating light of the whistleblower with the prose of good letters. More
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Literary Arts
"It’s So You" at Black Oak Books
Adolescence reviles containment. Put more precisely, uniforms are anathema to every teenager. Fashion is, after all, self-expression -- and no demographic rejects limits on its self-expression more arduously than youth. San Francisco poet and activist Michelle Tea recalls with unrepentant vigor her own version of the classic struggle against the schoolyard powers in the introduction to It’s So You, the Seal Press anthology she edited. More
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Literary Arts
Political Poetry at the Sacrifice of Art
Sam Hamill’s newest book, Measured By Stone, comes to us from a press devoted to political creative writing. Curbstone Press describes itself as “a publishing house dedicated to multicultural literature that reflects a commitment to social awareness and change,” a place that publishes “creative writers whose work promotes human rights and intercultural understanding.” It should not be surprising, therefore, that Hamill’s book brims with barely contained -- sometimes outright angry -- political lyrics. More
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