May 24, 2019
An Artist’s Life: An Interview with Marcia Butler, author of Pickle’s Progress
Marcia Butler’s debut novel, Pickle’s Progress, has been hailed by Michael Schaub of NPR as “Surprising and audacious…. Pickle’s Progress is a deeply weird novel that succeeds because of Butler’s willingness […]
January 23, 2017
Gam Zu L’tova (This too Is for the Good)
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible […]
June 6, 2016
The Data Mine of Rap
The Raplyzer is a computer program that automatically analyzes rhymes from rap lyrics and ranks rappers according to their Rhyme Factor. Created by Eric Malmi, a doctoral student in Computer […]
March 30, 2016
Phife’s Islands
The third death of A Tribe Called Quest occurred last week with the passing of Phife Dawg. The first death came after The Love Movement, when the group broke up; […]
December 4, 2015
Slang Cinema: On Camp Lo and Ski Beatz
If you were a hip hop head in the late 1990s, then you probably remember the exact spot on earth you were standing when you first heard Camp Lo’s first […]
August 14, 2015
Rap Athenas: From Juvenile’s “Ha” to A$AP Rocky’s “Peso”
There are two hip hop videos that remind me of the birth of Athena. The goddess leaped out, full-grown and armor-clad, from Zeus’s skull. It is an unexpected ending to […]
June 12, 2015
The Low Pass Theory, Part 2
Beyond the dense childhood memories of musical sound sieved through cinder block, another archetypal memory carried by a number of hip hop producers and artists—including KRS-ONE, the RZA, as well […]
December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
October 11, 2013
Skyscrapers of Light
In 1938, Westinghouse buried a time capsule in a section of Queens described as a “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. The time capsule was supposed to contain a […]
June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
June 8, 2011
Materials Wednesday: raw and refrain
In 2008 I moved from suburban New Jersey to Hollywood, California, and spent about six months feeling completely overstimulated and unable to cope with all of the helicopters and green […]