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In Praise of Nursery Tale Anthropomorphism
"...in Animal Land, it is everything-and."...
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Saving Picasso
This is why I did it, Donna: the bees are dying. She is five years old and I do what every parent is expected to do. I register my child for kindergarten. But I am wanting a half-day option, so I visit the school to see if I can work some magic in my daughter’s favor. I’m willing to pick her up at the ha...
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Snapping Turtle
A poem by Tryfon Tolides...
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Nothing But The Blood
One of Dickens’ antagonists, Ralph Nickelby, boasts he is a man never moved by a pretty face, for he always sees the grinning skull beneath. It’s a vision whose austerity is meant to be an attribute—a steely verisimilitude which prides itself on seeing through all such delicate coverings. But it must be...
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A Very Brief Taxonomy of Doubt
If you are faithless today, it may be because you are doubtless....
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Poetry as Therapy
It was about six months before I realized I had stopped writing poetry. I was digging through my desk looking for a new journal and found a just-started journal, the one I needed. As I grabbed it and headed off for my little writing spot, it dawned on me that this was no longer normal. There was no sense of c...
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Warning to a Wasp
A poem by Johnny Cate...
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Paid Off
For a long time I’ve wanted to be the kind of person on whom nothing was lost, because I once read something in a book on writing fiction that told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should be the kind of person on whom nothing was lost. Even though I’m easily convinced, and bought this line in my mid-...
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The Art of Baseball
It's baseball season once more...
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"Anna Karenina" and the Enchantment of the Ordinary
When I read "Anna Karenina" this time, her plot lured me like a siren song, only to find Tolstoy saying that the passionate, violent, tragic weight of Anna’s story does not testify to the entirety of the human experience. For Tolstoy, what is important in history and in an individual life is what goes unnot...
Humanity
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Saving Picasso
This is why I did it, Donna: the bees are dying. She is five years old and I do what every parent is expected to do. I register my child for kindergarten. But I am wanting a half-day option, so I vis...
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A Very Brief Taxonomy of Doubt
If you are faithless today, it may be because you are doubtless....
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Poetry as Therapy
It was about six months before I realized I had stopped writing poetry. I was digging through my desk looking for a new journal and found a just-started journal, the one I needed. As I grabbed it and ...
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Paid Off
For a long time I’ve wanted to be the kind of person on whom nothing was lost, because I once read something in a book on writing fiction that told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should be th...
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The Art of Baseball
It's baseball season once more...
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Sheep & Wolves
The gulf of "if" is wider than faith, sometimes....
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Forensics
Bearing witness to loss as an insurance claims adjuster...
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Wildcat
Oil is not for the meek, and wildcatting is not for the cowards, even if you’re only playing a board game....
Poetry
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Snapping Turtle
A poem by Tryfon Tolides...
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Warning to a Wasp
A poem by Johnny Cate...
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In the Third Grade There Was No Slouching
A poem by James E. Allman Jr. ...
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Separation and Packaging
A poem by Caley O’Dwyer...
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TO
A poem by John Mark McManus...
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The Gleize Bridge over the Vigueirat Canal
A new poem by Genevieve Leone ...
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Admit Love
Michael Schiavo's “Admit Love” is from a series of “buds”, short poems dubbed from Shakespeare’s sonnets....
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Whatever Grace That’s Said
A poem by Brett Foster...
Film & Television
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Saint Fred
"You can ask a lot of questions about the world and your place in it. You can ask about people's feelings; you can learn the sky's the limit. —Fred Rogers, “Did You Know?"...
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The Last Exorcism
Sneaky Horror and Religious Critique in "Beyond the Hills" ...
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A Garden of Sacramental "Wonder"
With all the Malick-fatigue out there a lot of reviews note a quality of formal redundancy throughout To the Wonder. But through the lenses of theodicy and threshold it belongs to a tradition that bea...
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Blood & Belief
The cringe. Of natural human reactions, it is among the most visceral. Eyes narrow, teeth grind, shoulders hunch in expectation. The cringe could mean fearful anticipation, though—in my experience...
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Life of an Animator
An interview with Tony Bancroft, who, when he co-directed Mulan (1998) became the youngest director of an animated feature in Disney's history. ...
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The Maker of Mulan’s Mushu Speaks
An Interview with Tom Bancroft...
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Don't Shoot, Part Two
What would happen to the entertainment industry if it banned images of gun violence for one year? Sørina Higgins asks around. ...
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Don't Shoot, Part One
What would happen to the entertainment industry if it banned images of gun violence for one year? Sørina Higgins asks around. ...
Music & Performing Arts
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Nothing But The Blood
One of Dickens’ antagonists, Ralph Nickelby, boasts he is a man never moved by a pretty face, for he always sees the grinning skull beneath. It’s a vision whose austerity is meant to be an attribu...
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Tinker, Tamper, Strings and Dampers: the Prepared Pianos of HAUSCHKA and John Cage
discovered via The Avant/Garde Diaries Hauschka - Noise is Music from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo. When you place objects between or on the strings or hammers or dampers of a ...
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Hospitality, Intimacy and The Great American Songbook
"It is grand to sit in the shadows of a great performance, but what happens when entertainers, musicians, choose to play host?" ...
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SXSW Interview with Easter Island
On the eve of their SXSW debut, brothers Ethan and Asher Payne, founding members of up-and-coming dream-pop outfit Easter Island, sat down with The Curator for a quick chat about djimbés, their forth...
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Not by Fate
To be caught up in machinations beyond ourselves is tragic, but it is far more tragic when those machinations come from within us. ...
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Swn y Chwedlonol (The Legendary Sound)
From The Velvet Underground to Meic Stevens, the sound of Welsh neo-psychedelia is the sound of myth (not drugs)....
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The Shot Heard Round the World: Meditations on "Son of a Gun"
Son of a Gun is so human that it seems to bring us to the mirror of existence and let us see for ourselves how much our outline resembles that of others. ...
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Buckley's "Hallelujah"
Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" resides in that pantheon of great songs that have been sung, interpreted, chopped, parodied (intentionally and unintentionally), and beaten to death, ranking so high ...
Literature
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"Anna Karenina" and the Enchantment of the Ordinary
When I read "Anna Karenina" this time, her plot lured me like a siren song, only to find Tolstoy saying that the passionate, violent, tragic weight of Anna’s story does not testify to the entirety o...
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DBH's "The Devil and Pierre Gernet": A Pendulation of Spirit
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment: read David Bentley Hart’s The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories, if for no other reason than that it’s a caravan suppli...
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Arthur, Adapted
This article should be illegal....
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Judging from His Verse
Is it safe to say that Charles Bukoswki would welcome email, text, tweeting, blogging and other networks were he alive in 2013? ...
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Like See-Through Birds
A Review of Wieslaw Mysliwski’s "Stone Upon Stone"...
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The Poem As Lifehack
John Estes asks what it takes to write real poetry during a century in which "the poet’s voice is just one bit of a live feed refreshing into eternity"...
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Try Again: On Follow-up Attempts
When J.K. Rowling published her latest novel, The Casual Vacancy, back in September, many of her devoted readers wanted to know where the magic—overt or otherwise—had gone. The expectation was und...
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Nothing Unplaced
Literature, in an era when nearly everything is, on a certain level, made immediately proximate by means of an ever-expanding digital universe, has lost part of its distinctive connection to place. ...
