At LA Weekly there is a Q & A with the literary critic James Wood, who is under fire at the moment and has been for some time now. I am not completely up-to-date on the polemics surrounding Wood but the interview/Q & A is interesting as an entry point into the debacle. Wood, in [...]
Also tagged Belletristic, Culture, Literature, Ménage a troisThere is a brief meditation on the “inherent superiority” of the printed word versus the so-called ‘online drivel’ that is the blogosphere over at the Edge of the American West. Scott Kaufman highlights a current issue of a historical journal, which is riddled with flaws that may or may not reduce the credibility of the [...]
Also tagged Literature, Media, Religion, ReviewsA while back Stuart and I agreed that celebrating Women’s History Month needn’t be a purely American thing, nor a thing reserved purely for historians, so I thought I would post a bit about some recent work I’ve been doing on American, transnational poet, Meena Alexander:
My interest in her work is quite recent, so I [...]
Picking up on the following remark from vol. 1 of this post, I want to focus on the role (or lack thereof) of African-Americans in the Beat movement:
Representations of the racial Other in the Beat ‘canon’ also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with [...]
After introducing 4 male authors, all white (although not all generically white-bread American), and approximately half of them more or less straight – it is high time to ask whether there were no women Beat writers, and no Beat writers of colour…
The immediate answer is that of course there were some, but none who have [...]
In Jack Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums the protagonist, alter-ego of Kerouac, named Ray Smith, encounters ‘the number one Dharma Bum of them all’, Japhy Ryder, who instantly decides that Ray is a great Buddhist sage, possibly a reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Great Compassion Bodhisattva (more likely, though, a reincarnation of Goat or Mudface, Ryder teases [...]
Also tagged Literature, Photography, Poetry, The Arts and CultureRecently, no less than three glossy magazines published photo serials which reenact earlier high points of visual culture:
Vanity Fair published a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, recreating classic moments with new actors.
New York Magazine recreated Marilyn Monroe’s photo shoot with Douglas Kirkland for Look Magazine, often referred to as “The Last Sitting”, using Lindsay Lohan [...]
2007 was a very good year for Kerouaciana. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the publication of his break-through novel On the Road, but it was also a year marked by many new scholarly initiatives and publications, media products and artistic productions of various kinds, and not least a full blossoming of [...]
Also tagged Documentary, Literature, Popular CultureThose of you who can read Danish might be interested in visiting Kulturkapellet, a new Aalborg based portal featuring reviews of all things cultural. It covers film, literature, theatre, music, games and the arts. Also featured are occasional essays – slightly longer and more ‘academic’ pieces on cultural and philosophical issues. There are also reviews [...]
Also tagged Film, Literature, Reviews, The Arts and Culture