Category: Issue 10

I teach poetry—not writing poetry but reading it. Students in my class start with a study of sound and rhythm in hip hop. Then we turn to Shakespeare’s sonnets, opening with the familiar summer’s-day “Sonnet 18,” a poem that passes for a love poem but one that keeps its best love for itself: “So long […]

First Lap The pools were all closed in the summer of 2020, because of the pandemic. I missed them more than you’d think, if you knew that I forgot to go swimming at all in the summer of 2019 and only swam a couple of times the summer before that. Yet it was July, and […]

“Why would you enter a dying field?” “You need a master’s degree to shelve books?” “Must be nice to sit and read all day.” Such commentary is a rite of passage for librarians, inflicted by everyone from family members to university administrators. Equally often, however, the remarks are effusive: “I LOVE librarians!” “Librarians are superheroes!” […]

In 2020, with another financial crisis looming on the horizon, the US culture industry has appropriately mythologized the 2008 financial crisis—and the soundtrack slaps. Consider how two films that directly represent the financial crisis, The Big Short (2015) and Hustlers (2019), use their soundtracks to place the audience back in the mindset of 2008. In […]

If a photograph is like a time capsule, a tribute that one pays in the present to the future, then before you is a capsule within a capsule. Standing, as if on the balcony of a first-floor apartment: a mother, her husband, and their two daughters, presiding over a small gathering. The woman’s eyes are […]

…restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what it should, and would have effaced, if the understanding had been allowed to take a wider range. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) “Sentiments become events.” These three words from Mary […]

The poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was not yet forty when she wrote her novel, All Passion Spent, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1931 and reissued by Virago in 1983. The novel should be better known than it is, both for the quality of the writing and for the subject matter […]

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you. ~ Anaïs Nin, Philadelphia College of Art Commencement Address […]

A deep swab of the nostril is rarely an auspicious beginning to a fun night out. But in the era of COVID-19, this particular imposition was not only necessary but one we also welcomed as two people who had snagged coveted tickets to a live performance of “Dave Chappelle and Friends” in the Summer of 2020. More unlikely still, we […]