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Jazz Remains the Sound of Modernism
Armstrong and Ellington, Coltrane and Davis, Gillespie and Parker, were central to the same project as other modernists; they reconfigured time and space to craft an alternative way of expression.
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Hymn for Walpurgisnacht
Walpurgisnacht is a gloaming time when the membrane between the here and the hereafter is more porous.
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The Miracle of Photography
The invention of photography, less than 200 years old, seems both strangely recent and perilously distant.
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Coffee, the Great Literary Stimulant
Alcohol helps you romanticize being a writer; coffee is what transforms you into one.
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How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?
Literature's history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos.
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Enlightenment, then Laundry
Housework can be a practice, a ritual, a sacrament—the very art of life.
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On War and Literature
War literature, at its best, exists not as scripture but as liturgy, not to explain but to remember.
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Mephistopheles in the Anthropocene
"Him will I drag through life's wild waste, /Through scenes of vapid dullness," Mephistopheles says, and it might describe the experience of endlessly perusing Twitter, anesthetizing yourself as you doom scroll.
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Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels
I think of this as a new literary form, a type of novelistic prose poem, a hybrid, a chimera, whose main currency is delight, wonder, and mystery.
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Daring to Eat the Peach: The Nature of Being Possessed
A flash of inspiration is both evidence that we come from Eden and that we no longer live there; a brief reflection of what it feels like to create as God. A divinely imparted gift. A dangerous present.
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The Lost Art of Not Knowing Something
I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude.
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Read More Puritan Poetry
Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey, for poets like Edward Taylor are not easy. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.
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Tripping the Late Capitalist Sublime
If our religion is capitalism, then our theology is consumerism and our God is the Invisible Hand. Our prayers are "Have It Your Way," "Think Different," and "Just Do It;" our avatars are Ronald McDonald, Mr. Peanut.
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