Tag
Nostalgia
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Frivolity Is Not Unserious
“When we try to write about trauma, no matter what the trauma we wish to explore, it’s the poet’s job to do their homework.”
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The Reboot Will Be Televised
“Star Trek: Picard,” “And Just Like That…,” “Bel-Air,” “Reboot”: even within our age of the reboot, old stories offer new insights.
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Nostalgia’s Empire: A Conversation with Grafton Tanner and Johny Pitts
Nostalgia is both a threat and a refuge.
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B-Sides: Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel”
Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel” allows us to have our nostalgic cake and read it too.
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To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little Jr.
“Nostalgia is not what Shakespeare represents for me; I don’t want to make Shakespeare great again. He doesn’t need that, and neither do we.”
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Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
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A Culinary Golden Age—but for Whom?
In the 17th century, nostalgia was considered a disease. Today, nostalgia has shifted from an individual illness to a collective malaise. It is now often …
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Masculinity on the Mat
From Ready Player One to Roseanne, popular culture in 2018 might be looked back on as “problematic,” to use a polite academic term, in its attempts to bottle and sell 1980s nostalgia. Conservative in both form and content …
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The Bingewatch: Mother Winona
Since its release last July, Stranger Things has been praised as an “original,” “meticulous” homage to the Great Men of 1980s popular culture (Carpenter, King, Lucas, Spielberg) …
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Perestroika Blues
Now nearing the end of its fourth season, The Americans is a confounding success. It’s hard to figure out which of its triumphs is the most unlikely: that it has millions of Americans rooting for KGB agents to outsmart our country every week, or that the FX network has produced a critical darling that is…
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“Democracy and Education” @100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall.” He pauses to let the crowd’s emotions storm up. Then he asks, “And, by the way, who’s going to pay for that wall?” The crowd roars back, “Mexico.”…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson”: A Reading List
In 1995, viewers across America were transfixed by the the O. J. Simpson trial, with its noirish mixture of L. A. glamour and dead-eyed depravity. This February, over two decades later, the trial is back as historical fiction. The aim of FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, as Nicholas Dames wrote last week…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson” as Historical Fiction
The location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA campus. In June 1994, O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings would have had no reason to venture that…
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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A Matriarch in Exile
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The Matriarch—it would be impolite to utter or print her given name—is from the town of Dina in Punjab, Pakistan. She lives in Jackson Heights. Punjabi is her only language. She has been in exile, she says, for…
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Linklater’s Gooey Realism
Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Boyhood is an ambitious film about a Texas boy named Mason, a millennial everyman played by Ellar Coltrane, as he matures from ages 6 to 18. Along the way, he proceeds through the more or less familiar milestones of middle-class life, including, among others, recognition of a disenchanted universe (magic is a…
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Origin Stories
There are many mornings when I cannot help but express my gratitude that I did not come of age in this current generation. As a father of two Millennials and a teacher of hundreds more, I know that any one of the unprecedented hurdles they face—from the grim face of global extinction to the savageries…
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Uses of Uncertainty
No novel, reflects María Dolz, the narrator of Javier Marías’s The Infatuations, “would ever give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime … It’s quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.” The world, Marías’s latest novel reminds us, continually exceeds our attempts to…
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Collateral Melancholy
Two children meet by chance on the night of a historic Santiago earthquake, develop a brief, tentative friendship around a secret task that neither of them understands too well, and then, years later, meet up as adults, both attracted and estranged by the silences and intersecting threads that had earlier entangled them. Alejandro Zambra’s third…
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Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing in used jazz, soul, and R&B vinyl records—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction,…
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Everything Old Is New Again
In the past few years it’s gotten so you can’t go to the movies without finding onscreen a burly guy dressed as Ernest Hemingway, cavorting with women wearing shingled hair and calf-length skirts. Everywhere filmgoers turn, flappers and gangsters and accent coaches abound. Culturally, we’re experiencing an intense fetish for the 1920s and ’30s that…
