Regarding “Innovation Redux” by Malachi Black and this post by Ron Silliman (which were both partially responding to something I…
Tiny Shocks Revisited (A Continuing Criticism of James Wood’s How Fiction Works)
Earlier today John pointed toward Nigel Beale’s cleverly-titled criticism of my post “Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James…
Why Do We Have Readings? (A Polemic)
This is an intro I wrote for a panel discussion that I moderated last September: “Why Do We Have Poetry…
Art as Inheritance, part 1: That Lingering Smile
This will be something of a long and meandering trip, only to wind up back where we started. But I…
Innovation in Art
What is innovation in art? This is something I’ve circled in my other posts, for example: “Notes on Twee, part…
Notes on Twee, part 2: The Crash Test Dummies (Those Avant-Garde Harbingers of Mainstream Superheroes, School Plays, and the Willful Embrace of Nostalgia)
In my last post in this series, I embedded and linked to every single music video I know that uses…
Reading Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, part 2
Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8…
Some Thoughts on Agnès Varda’s “Vagabond”
Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), is a 1985 film by the Belgian director Agnès Varda. Varda was part of the…
Experimental Fiction as Genre and as Principle
Christopher Higgs at HTMLGIANT recently posted this question: “If you were teaching a class on American experimental fiction, what texts…
Art’s Morality (A Reading of William H. Gass’s “The Artist and Society”)
Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects. (Of course, artists are often…