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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry. […]
Late in Joel Lane’s 2003 novel The Blue Mask, a character discusses his favorite books by Jean Genet: “I often think his scenarios are built up, not just from solitary fantasies, but from real sex. The books are a fundamental part of his love life. What he does on the […]
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond […]
Since writing my previous post about loneliness and horror, I’ve had cause to think a lot about varieties of loneliness, lostness, violence (physical and especially psychological), and intimacy. Some has been purely theoretical, trying to continue to tease out some ideas I explored in that post, some has been more immediate, […]