As strong a force as love is, it only got me through the first time I thought my husband was dying. It turned out the motivation that really stuck, what kept me going through the rigors of caregiving, was duty. I would have like to think it would have been love, but no: Outmoded, grim, sexist duty kept me trudging back and forth to the hospital, doing laundry, taking care of … [Read more...]
Is Southern Art a Thing?: Thoughts from a Technically Southern Arts Writer
When I woke up this morning in Nashville, I checked, as I routinely do, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Times. When I went to the coffee shop next to my apartment, I encountered more people from elsewhere than from here; my best friend is in graduate school in Minneapolis; my father is visiting his family in Chicago; my boyfriend is currently pacing around the living room … [Read more...]
Yankees in Fairyland: A Review of Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out is as much about the role of the athlete, particularly the baseball “star,” as it is about what makes a team function—and what threatens the unity of a team. The play confronts the disturbing truth that baseball has never been an equal opportunity employer. African-Americans were shut out from the big leagues for decades. Gay Americans … [Read more...]
Attempt to Hear All the Voices: On the Nature of Essay
An essay is an entity in itself that moves, explores, sometimes discovers and enlightens, explains, clarifies, and attempts to relate in some way to the world outside of it. An essay moves on its own and is sometimes moving its readers to do the same, or at least to think about its movement in a critical way. In her essay “Montaigne,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Movement and change … [Read more...]
The Consequences of Violence
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. —Oscar Wilde I’ve found it true in personal experience that being a target of life-threatening violence strips away everything that isn’t a core value or an innermost desire. Near the eastern Afghan village of Shkin in 2004, I huddled in a mud brick house with … [Read more...]
Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War…” as Objectivist Ars Poetica
This essay is dedicated to Charles Bernstein A poem I keep coming back to again and again is Charles Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War, I Was Going Home One Night,”1 first published in 1969. I first encountered the poem from hearing it in PoemTalk #562, and later had the opportunity to study Reznikoff in my poetics seminar. The reason that I find this poem so … [Read more...]
Cry, Exploration, Ceremony
Oppositional postmodernist literature is associated with the Beat movement and came about after the terrible, unforeseen destruction of World War II. While the modernists were positive about the human spirit and mankind’s ability to progress to an ever better future, postmodernists posited that there is creative power in negativity and opposition as well as destructive … [Read more...]
