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Book vs. Film ~ Jurassic Park
What began as a revolution in computer generated special effects finished as a national sensation over gargantuan dead reptiles (which have more in common with present-day birds) nationwide. As a child growing up in the late 90s, I was quickly infected with the same curiosity about dinosaurs which had engulfed millions of my peers, and ...
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Book Review: The Other City by Michal Ajvaz
The idea of another city or world on the fringes of our own, accessible only at night to those who are particularly astute in feeling that they don’t belong, will be familiar to readers of magical realism and fantasy fiction. But Michal Ajvaz’s novel The Other City does not take this idea into the fantastical ...
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Your Old Furniture Holds My Sweaters
I recently had a crisis of morality, darlings. Let me preface by telling you this: I did not cave, but I did spend a long time pondering it after the fact. When I left for work one morning, I saw on my next door neighbor’s porch a bevy of old (gasp, read: retro) furniture. Good ...
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Yarn Bombing
My semester has ended, and I have big plans for the summer. Not big plans by most peoples standards, but plans enough to coincide with my projected 60 hour work weeks. I’m going to make it through the entirety of Infinite Jest (for real this time), crotchet a few scarves (assuming that next winter will ...
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Book Vs. Film ~ Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great writer not because he gives each of his readers a window into a world, but because he gives them a vista. His masterful, take-my-hand-and-I’ll-take-you-there style invites each one of us into the verdant sprawl of South American jungles, festering humid air, lands ripe with fruits and fauna, as well ...
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Book Review: Woolgathering by Patti Smith
New Directions rereleased Patti Smith’s tiny book Woolgathering last year with more writing and new photographs in a hardcover: the back reproduces the lines, “Everything contained in this little book is true, and written just like it was. The writing of it drew me from my strange torpor and I hope that in some measure ...
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My Postman Never Knocks At All
I’m just going to say it. I cannot hold it in any longer. I suspect my mailman (he is a man, though I suppose I should say “person”) is not paying the necessary attention to his job—and that’s the least of what I could say. I’m being as nice as I possibly can here. I’m ...
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Street Art Part 2: Claiming Public Space
This post is the second in a three-part series on street performance. To read the first part, click here. Public space is a funny thing. Ideally, it is meant to be shared—we each have the right to use it for whatever we need, provided that we respect it and leave it in a condition so ...
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A Vegan Week
I usually try to keep my eyes straight ahead while walking through the college center; frankly, I’m almost never in mood to get called out—let’s just call it like it is: harassed—by student organizationss who want me to attend their events or buy their merchandise or send a daisy to a friend on Valentine’s ...
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Book vs. Film – Of Human Bondage
It was difficult reconciling with my favorite author after discovering he may have been Hollywood’s first in a long tradition of sell-outs. W. Somerset Maugham was the novelist who Orwell described as, “The modern writer who has influenced me the most”, praising his ability to tell a straightforward story without frills; in other words, a ...
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Interview: Milenko Milanovic, author of Slow Dying
Milenko Milanovic is the author of Slow Dying: The Bosnia War Prison Camp at Visoko, reviewed here. Tell me about the book: My book is an interesting personal story, and it is unusual. I have been working on that book for approximately 10 years, trying to find a publisher or agent. I wasn’t so lucky! ...
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Book Review: Slow Dying by Milenko Milanovic
The Bosnian War was, on the surface, a war over territory; but the conflict divided people along ethnic lines, pitting neighbors against neighbors in some of the worst atrocities and violences of ethnic cleansing since WWII. Reporting of the war was propagandistic in the Balkans and the West, painting the conflict with a heavy anti-Serbian ...