Shelf Life Shelf Life
Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse; Joshua Cohen's Four New Messages
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Aaron Thier
Last Picture Shows: Film and Obsolescence Last Picture Shows: Film and Obsolescence
Until the final reel of celluloid is shot and projected, will every film’s primary subject be film itself?
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Akiva Gottlieb
Rat Bastard: On Bruce Conner Rat Bastard: On Bruce Conner
The shadows were the elective habitat of the artist Bruce Conner, who thought true knowledge was shrouded in secrecy.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Superfund Superfund
If this was all the access you had to sky, looking down through boardwalk boards into a tributary glinting, if this was all the time your calling or had been all this time, and you found it, foundv yourself arrested above an opening, if purgatory were as real as bridges, where would your religion build, in the soft parabola of carriage and suds, or in the hip points your heaviness keeps in counsel with the planks. The mill of spiderlight and curtainwork in one run over the impress of cofferdam in the other. This river in the days left to live, in the leftover days reclamation balances, trains its instrument on a prospect, romantic and pushy plainly. The joinery of the boards is thoughtful, or the prison wish is a watchwork through and through: to guess at the rare punt of a single stick’s bark odyssey, or to separate from the rummage each drifted glyph of superscript and gloss the passage. Drawn through the bothway of the ribs: A breath, and then another. No prior experience knock wood. Not purgatory, but overage.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Brian Blanchfield
The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle
How Charles de Gaulle’s story became a collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in.
Sep 12, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
A Form of Order: On Paul Taylor A Form of Order: On Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor Dance Company has sustained a signature style, and without having left modern dance behind.
Sep 12, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Marina Harss
The Plague Years The Plague Years
David France’s How to Survive a Plague, Heidi Ewing and Rache Grady’s Detropia, Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage.
Sep 12, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Convention Bounce Convention Bounce
From Charlotte, Obama had hoped for a bounce. It came in a way unforeseen: When William J. Clinton had spoken his piece, He’d furnished a strong trampoline.
Sep 12, 2012 / Column / Calvin Trillin
The Poetry of America’s Best and the Brightest The Poetry of America’s Best and the Brightest
The students at Bunker Hill Community College may have difficult lives. But the best are as bright as any Ivy Leaguer.
Sep 5, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Wick Sloane
What Remains: On the European Union What Remains: On the European Union
How the twentieth century’s confidence in social solidarity, human dignity and a better future died a slow, quiet death.
Sep 5, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Mark Mazower