Before we are aware of it, we all of us find we are talking about Shakespeare. —Lytton Strachey, “Words and Poetry” Yet Shakespeare is a very queer case. —Virginia Woolf, “Personalities” 1. Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury and Will Tosh’s Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, I […]
“Please remember — you are dealing with the human form.” Those are the first lines of dialogue spoken in a David Lynch film, his 1968 short “The Alphabet”. * While working on Blue Velvet, David Lynch tried desperately to get the rights to This Mortal Coil’s then-recent version of Tim […]
The annual Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention ended this past weekend. I was not there. Last year I attended the convention in Philadelphia, but a few months after it, I decided to let my MLA membership lapse because of a specific interaction that highlighted MLA’s lack of support for underfunded […]
1. In both F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 reimagining of it, the lasting beauty for me lies in the films’ presentation of love as something momentary and evanescent, and the way that real love ends up being strengthened by sacrifice — even when, as in Herzog’s film, […]
1. In November 2016, I was in graduate school and formulating plans for a doctoral dissertation on 20th century literature. I knew the writers I wanted to focus on (Virginia Woolf, Samuel Delany, J.M. Coetzee) and the general approach (modernism and metamodernism), but I didn’t have an angle on that […]
The Substance ends with voices calling out: So beautiful! We love you! You’re irreplaceable! These words are what everyone who seeks fame and attention wants to hear and can never hear enough of. Narcissism is a bottomless pit — no attention, no love, no praise is ever enough. Nor could […]
I did not look at the election results as they came in last night, because why bother? I’d voted, there was nothing else I could do. The results were unlikely to be definitive before I fell asleep. No need to torment myself. This was the right decision. I slept well. […]
When Val Lewton took the job of heading up horror films for RKO in the early 1940s, one of the conditions he had to accept was that the executives at the studio would give him titles and he would then have relative freedom in how he turned those titles into […]
I continue, having really hardly stopped for decades now, to read Virginia Woolf’s two Common Reader collections. In the absence of an adequate Selected Essays (the Oxford World’s Classics one is thin and lacking even “The Death of the Moth”), the Common Readers must suffice. (For more of my thoughts […]
Published in 1910, Algernon Blackwood’s The Human Chord is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good novel. But it is a strange and intermittently interesting one, and historically important in that it attempts to give fictional life to some of the key ideas of the Hermetic Order of […]
Fifty years ago, the world ended and a new world was born. * The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a movie made for less than $100,000, had its general release in the U.S. on October 11, 1974. October 1974 saw some other notable low-budget releases, including one of Larry Cohen’s best […]
Friends came over this weekend and wanted to see a horror movie. Something contemporary, something without many jump scares, something with a bit of intellectual content. That should be easy for me to provide — after all, I own literally hundreds of horror DVDs and Blu-rays, and I subscribe to […]