Maybe it was the strange relationship to time the pandemic created, but at some point after this thing started I finally watched the movies of Andrey Tarkovsky. I say finally because, despite being a lifelong film lover, I’d never seen Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, or Stalker.
During the many months of quarantine, given an infinite amount of time to read and write, my husband and I binged most of Netflix. I remember very little of it. Murder mysteries blend into each other; some of them include grey shorelines of various parts of Great Britain, and others are set in grey cities of indiscriminate corruption.
The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach
As an admirer of rampant kinds of poetics, I first discovered this Longenbach volume shortly after its 2004 publication and was instantly struck by its refusal to make poetry accommodating, accessible, to evidence the strain so many other poetics texts possess in their aim to convince the reader of the genre’s palatability, transparency, likeability.
Congratulations to Shirley Harshenin whose story "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" won gold at the 2023 National Magazine Awards for One-of-a-Kind Storytelling! "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" appeared in Issue 292 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2022).
I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.
