Category: Essays

ISSUE #20 | MAR 2018, Religion

In My End is My Beginning: On the Mercy of Time in the Season of Lent

This is the cold time, the long time, the Lenten time. All of creation groans for new life, but the ground whispers, Not yet. All of God’s people groan for the final redemption, for the here-and-now of God-with-us, but the still, small voice whispers, Not yet. The Resurrection is coming. The Resurrection has come. From an eternal perspective, the Resurrection is. Christ cried, “Finished,” as … Continue reading In My End is My Beginning: On the Mercy of Time in the Season of Lent

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ISSUE #20 | MAR 2018, Miscellaneous

Leg in a Jar: The Amputation of the World’s Greatest Actress

When an employee at Bordeaux University was told to rearrange the morbid artifacts of an out-of-the-way store closet full of shattered skulls, guns, hangman’s ropes, and aborted fetuses of siamese twins in 2009, he moved a few jars to find, on the back of the shelf, a tall, sealed beaker covered with decades of dust. It contained the lost amputated right leg of the great … Continue reading Leg in a Jar: The Amputation of the World’s Greatest Actress

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culture, ISSUE #20 | MAR 2018

The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. —Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray The video opens with a typical vlog set-up: A woman sits centered in front of the camera, her pristine background out of focus. The Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic is enough to make any 22-year-old vaguely covetous. Her platinum blonde hair … Continue reading The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism

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culture, ISSUE #20 | MAR 2018

The Unlikely Peripatetic, or, A Postscript to the Paperclip

He meets your eye from the book’s broad flyleaf, a vivid figure on a ground of flame blue. Piercing through a quizzical squint and the flash-fixed vapor of a cheeky cigar, the gaze is more forward than one expects from such age. Facing the title page’s monoglyph—Design—the portrait reads like a dare. In a way, it is. A household name in his native UK, Terence … Continue reading The Unlikely Peripatetic, or, A Postscript to the Paperclip

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Essays

Life with the Moomins: Lessons in Stability and Freedom From Moominvalley

            “The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow … Continue reading Life with the Moomins: Lessons in Stability and Freedom From Moominvalley

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Essays

These Worlds We Hold: Memory and the Role of Storytelling

  My great-uncle’s full name was Verdon Ganger, but everyone called him Bud. By the time I knew him, Bud was a soft-spoken widower in his 80s, who kept an immaculate garden and took a keen interest in the birds that nested in his backyard. As a little girl, I never bothered to think of him in terms beyond that. Like all the others who … Continue reading These Worlds We Hold: Memory and the Role of Storytelling

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Reviews

Paterson

How does one make poetry in film? Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s most recent film, takes on this issue by taking on the poetic style of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, presenting, through the film form, reality breaking in through the prosaic rhythm of life. The film follows Paterson, a poetry-writing bus driver played by Adam Driver, and his loving relationship with his wife, Laura. Unlike … Continue reading Paterson

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