BY VIDAR SUNDSTØL In the old days in Norway—up until the end of the 19th century—the night between the 23rd and 24th of June was the night to harvest any kind of plants that were supposed to hold healing or magical powers. At the same time it was a dangerous night to be wandering around … More Midsummer Eve: A gateway to another, sometimes dangerous, world.
It is not to be expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending *** BY … More Book Ends: On writing, being, and sensing an ending.
BY SHIRI PASTERNAKAssistant professor, School for the Study of Canada at Trent University If Canadians want to understand why some First Nations are sitting out the Canada 150 celebrations, they need look no further than to fifteen community members who took an eight-hour drive from Barriere Lake in Quebec to Toronto on Thursday. The Algonquins … More Algonquins’ struggle for land, coexistence builds as Canada’s 150th approaches.
BY JEFF SOLOMONAssistant professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Wake Forest University Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein should not have been famous. Both secured their reputations between the Wilde trials and Stonewall, when the most widely available understandings of homosexuality were inversion and perversion, and when censorship prevented the public discussion … More Exclusively gay, remarkably famous: The "fabulous potency" of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein.
BY NAMIKO KUNIMOTOAssistant professor of art history at The Ohio State University In 1950, Japanese political parties and grassroots organizations began to stand up and fight back against the Reverse Course, the conservative shift in policies of the American Occupation. Art rapidly became an important avenue for protest, and at the forefront of this intersection … More Art Practice and Protest.
BY MICHAEL CRAMERAssistant professor of film history at Sarah Lawrence College The term “utopia” is most often used to refer to a place (most frequently an imaginary one) as it was in Sir Thomas More’s book of the same name. More’s Utopia (1516), of course, was followed by plenty of other representations of “perfect” societies. … More Imagining Another Television.
BY SARAH STONICH Upon the paperback release of Shelter: Off the Grid in the Mostly Magnetic North, author Sarah Stonich answers questions posed by BookFox. Q. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both. I’d compare a good session of writing to a long day of stone-stacking or gardening. They are very similar in that you’re … More Sarah Stonich on memoir writing, truth, and Shelter.
“Fliffus.” “Word Jazz.” “Instant Theater.” Now we know it as Improvisational Theater. The father of improvisation and founder of the Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis in 1958, Dudley Riggs grew up in the circus. His parents were circus performers and as a young boy, Dudley was thrown into the exciting, adrenaline-fueled world of performance. His … More "Flying Funny": The unusual gravity-defying first act of improv theater’s founding father, Dudley Riggs.
BY NORA MURPHY “We’re just Potato Famine Irish,” declared my grandfather when, as a child, I asked him about our family’s roots in Ireland. A Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, his word sank heavily into my heart and lodged there for decades. They didn’t resurface until decades later, when I began working at the Minneapolis American … More "We’re just Potato Famine Irish."
BY ADAIR ROUNTHWAITEAssistant professor of art history at the University of Washington in Seattle From an art historian’s perspective, one of the most fascinating elements of 2017’s American political landscape has been conservatives’ defense of the National Endowment for the Arts. These statements of defense have followed the Trump administration’s budget proposal, which as is … More With NEA under threat, arguments across the aisle are united in surprising ways.
