“A butterfly that lives forever, is really not a butterfly at all.” — Data, character in Star Trek: Picard 1 Immortality is desired by many, figuratively and literally. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18…
Contemporaries Essays
So Bored I Could Laugh
How would you define boredom? If you are a philosopher (my condolences), you may have some convoluted answer involving words like “existential” or “ontological.” If you’re Google, you opt (unhelpfully)…
Wrestling with Boredom, or, On Inspiration in Academic Practice
Let me be honest. I don’t want to be writing this essay; it feels like a monumental digression I can’t afford. I wish I could get out of it but,…
Introduction: “I’m Not in the Mood”
In early 2020, before the pandemic, an artist visited the class I had been assigned as a teaching assistant. It was around the time I was writing my dissertation prospectus,…
Art Acts
“Which game would you rather play? I’ll give you a choice of two. One. Every picture tells a story. Two. Every story tells a picture.”1 So proposes Daniel Gluck to…
Shifting Sands: Re-Reading Ali Smith’s Autumn
I first read Ali Smith’s Autumn in book club. Serendipity dropped me onto an Upper East Side studio couch, and for many months after, I found myself crowded in amongst a cohort…
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life.” — Woolf, The Waves I was reading, desultorily, the stories of Muriel Spark during a…
Ali Smith’s Poetic Attentions
We call a poet a “poet’s poet” when they’re read mostly by other poets. By implication, a poet’s poet is difficult or obscure or both. When I call certain novelists…
Here and Now
It is an incontrovertible fact that works of art age. The distance between the time when a novel is written and the time when it is read only grows wider….
How to be strange
Hi, the visitor called Charlotte says. Hi, he says. Visitor. Visitation. There seems to be a force which bodies, by their very presence, exert on each other — Ali Smith, Summer (76)…