A World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction
By Culture Issue 109
It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.
Read MoreRecording Angels: New Fiction by Phil Klay and Christopher Beha
By Culture Issue 109
For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.
Read MoreUntranslatable Mother: Tarkovsky, Zurlini, and the Madonna del Parto
By Culture Issue 108
Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.
Read MoreWith My Body I Thee Worship
By Culture Issue 107
Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.
Read MoreAn Aesthetic of Lack, or Notes on Camps
By Culture Issue 107
Paschal could not leave his beloved mother’s head bare. How could he? For he knew that nature gapes with lack. He knew that we’re meant to be hooked up to something else, as if our skulls were plugs. Or to put it another way: he knew that all of us are amputees from moment we’re born.
Read MoreSummer of the Statue Storm
By Culture Issue 106
The monument is essentially didactic: look on my works, ye mighty. But the ruin, the legless trunk, is often the real lesson, on the passing of time and the erosion of reputation.
Read MoreA Place for All People
By Culture Issue 105
It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights, pacifism, and income equity.
Read MoreA Shocking December Red
By Culture Issue 105
I want to go back to Manderley and drag myself up the stairs at midnight. See myself. Pull my baby up through the water from the land of the dead.
Read MoreA Place for All People
By Culture Issue 105
It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights, pacifism, and income equity.
Read MoreGratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free
By Culture Issue 104
Music is what I call an anti-commodity—a thing that isn’t exhausted when used or given away but gets larger and more valuable, like the fish and loaves in the gospel. In that way, a song is like love or friendship or trust, those other anti-commodities that increase with the giving.
Read More