June 30, 2015
Midsummer, Memory
What do you remember from age four and a half? Anything? Most of my memories begin around age five—and even those are few and fleeting. My earliest memory is one […]
June 11, 2015
The Low Pass Theory, Part 1
The scene is always the same. My feet are planted far too close to a tower of speakers, my head nodding with near-injurious enjoyment to some now-obscure track selected by […]
January 8, 2015
A Physiology of Style: Asthma, Proust, Pharoahe Monch
“This asthma became part of his art—if indeed his art did not create it. Proust’s syntax rhythmically and stop by step reproduces his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, […]
October 17, 2013
The Thin Red Underline
In his essential, slim volume Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes elaborated his theory of the punctum–that element of a photograph that “pierces” you, haunts you, pulls you into […]
February 12, 2012
The Fact of a Poem
Earlier this week, while there were some interesting—and interestingly broad—reactions to the excerpts from the forthcoming/arriving book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal printed in […]