Featured
5
Come on, compadre. Come on!
There is absolutely nothing about Point Break that is not wonderful. Even the bad parts (there are no bad parts). You can watch this movie with anyone. Your brother. Your boyfriend. Your crappy ex-boyfriend. Your friends (all friends, over twenty years of your life). Your students. Maybe not your mother. But maybe your mother-in-law. The plot…
6
Silly Theory
Some years ago, I found myself at 24-hour vegetarian diner in a California college town, breakfasting with a dear friend. We had ordered coffee, but the main course was psychoanalysis. “You can’t read Lacan without Hegel,” I assured her earnestly. She broke into a grin, paused for a brief, dramatic moment, and then sang my…
18
Love in the Ruins: or, Should I Go To Grad School?
On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench overlooking a prospect of conventional, but nevertheless pretty estimable, pastoral loveliness: green valley and distant hills, cinematic cloudscapes, placid lake, etc. The friend with whom I sat was just then at the collapsing end of a…
2
Essays that we, as ladies of early middle age, would like to see written*
“Witty Meeting Comebacks that Indicate Your Displeasure While Concealing the (Professionally Discrediting) Whirling Dervish of Your Rage” “Throwing Money at Problems: A Justification” “Is This Sex Position Degrading or Just Uncomfortable?” “Age-Concealing Procedures: Talking to Someone While Pretending They Haven’t Had One, or, Injectables: Agreeing to Disagree” “Strangely Funny Moments in The House of…
0
A Family Adventures “Into the Woods”
Avidly is very avid about beloved cultural objects — movies and musicals among them. In anticipation of the new movie version of Into the Woods, due in theaters December 25, we asked one of our most beloved families of Sondheim fanatics, the Blum Eburnes, to give us their thoughts. Reporting that they “live in jaundiced anticipation” of…
0
A Modest Proposal for Memorable Holiday Cards
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Hansel and Gretel Baby Food Stylists Make Your Baby Look Good Enough to Eat! It’s holiday card season, which means it’s time to show off your plump offspring. While well meaning, many home cooks and amateur photographers make mistakes when staging the all-important roasting pan baby photograph that could have the unfortunate…
1
Hands Up
An embodied meme, or a bodily metaphor redoubled: what goes viral is always already rooted in our sense of shared—but decidedly unequal—vulnerability. If this is a visceral phenomenon, it is also visual one; “hands up” circulates as rallying cry, as status update, but most of all as image. This week in class, in disbelief and mourning…
0
The Broken-Bodied Girls
Watching horror films as a child was primarily an exercise in witnessing the injured perpetuate more injuries. Freddy Krueger’s body is a giant burn that doesn’t heal. The only kindness ever extended by Jason Voorhees over the last three decades has been to cover his deformed head with a hockey mask. The eerily symmetrical torture…
1
Bound and Unbounded
The work of fiber artist Judith Scott beckons us to touch. Sized to the proportions of the human body, her intricately wrapped bundles suggest at once the envelopment of a cocoon and something bound and yearning to break free. Their forms are familiar, evocative, tempting us to recognize the shape of a butterfly, a human…
0
Destiny’s Julia Child
- Jordan Alexander Stein
- Bodies and Minds, Books You Should Read, Close Reading, The Wide, Wide World, Uncategorized
- No responses
Editor’s Note: this essay was scheduled prior to the announcement of the Ferguson Grand Jury’s decision. We have decided to publish it as scheduled, following the belief, expressed here, that love and pleasure are not the opposite of politics, rage, or grief, but rather are politically essential expressions of our humanness. This is a difficult…
2
Our Deep Springs Syllabus
American Encounters Drs. Sarahs Office Hours: 9-midnight Office Location: Cabin, fireside Note on Class Policy: Never, ever email us. We will not respond. September 7: Methods Introduction: How to Do Things with Words Herman Melville, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Moby-Dick Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus” September 14: Concepts Michel Foucault, Discipline…