Sitting down to dinner together last year, my friend Jess asked me the same question we had begun to ask one another each time we met: “Where did you see Ted this week?” Anyone listening to our conversation might assume we were talking about a mutual friend, but that assumption would be wrong. Ted isn’t a friend of ours; in fact, the name doesn’t apply … Continue reading Searching for Ted
“What did you do this summer?” Every time I arrive back on campus for fall semester, I answer that question more times than I care to count. It is really almost as bad as freshman year (“What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you want to major in?”). This past fall, however, the question didn’t get old, because the answer sounded surreal to … Continue reading Summer Beauty
“Fair is foul and foul is fair,” sing the witches in Macbeth as they toss toads and newts and thumbs into the pot to make “double, double, toil and trouble.” Despite the appearance of sorcery, they do not supernaturally bewitch Macbeth. All they do is speak. Macbeth destroys himself of his own free will. It’s a subtle boast from Shakespeare: by giving the witches the … Continue reading Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads: Keeping Poetry Honest
This summer, I spent extensive periods of time in the car with my sisters who have recently developed an affinity for pop country music. For the most part, I was able to sit and bob my head along while my sisters sang. By the end of the summer I even found myself singing along to a few of them myself. As we drove through the … Continue reading Beauty is Hard to Trust: Reflections on the Movements of the Heart
This past July on a warm summer afternoon, I attended a family friends’ poetry night—a classy little shindig with hors d’oeuvres, heels, sophisticated people, and, of course, poetry. A few months later, one of these poems unexpectedly resurfaced in a conversation with a friend. It was a poem entitled “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” by Christina Georgina Rossetti: You tell me that the world … Continue reading The World Is Fair, in Spite of the Old Fall
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
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
Hillsdale Forum 