Blog

Beyond Earth (Earth Primer #5)

September 29, 2023 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Red and Green Tomato Plants on Train Rail, photo by Markus Spiske)

(Earth Primer #4)

For some time now, tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and strawberries and raspberries and other plants have been grown in tiny containers, often small plastic jars filled with peat, usually in plastic greenhouses that manage partially or fully to slip the snag of the seasons. Peat, used one time, then thrown out. Peat, little by little used up, because it took thousands of years to form. Peat comes from bogs, environments with an unusually diverse variety of lifeforms that are dug up and cut off, often leaving behind holes filled...

Open Letter to President Magill

September 28, 2023 - By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks

26 September 2023

Dear President M. Elizabeth Magill:

My wife Anna Botta and I have many wonderful memories from our days as graduate students in Comparative Literature at Penn in the late eighties and early nineties. One in particular will serve to frame and reflect our complex experience this past weekend, when we attended the Palestine Writes literary festival in Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

As you will see, our feelings—of both pride and indignation—during and following the festival are not easy to summarize; that may indeed be the reason our thoughts turned to a light-hearted essay that a certain saintly scholar once wrote to encapsulate his own sense of what academic conferences are all about. Gerry Prince—who was...

Living Documents: An Interview with Vauhini Vara

September 27, 2023 - By Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Tell us the journey of how you came to write the stories in this wonderful, unsettling collection. Were there some that came quickly and others that took more time?

Vauhini Vara: For me, everything I write feels like a living document, up until the time it's published in a book, and I’m no longer allowed to change it. I love going back into the same pieces over and over, getting them closer to what they’re meant to be. I began writing about half of these stories in 2008, when I entered graduate school. At the time, I didn’t conceive of them as belonging to a collection because I was just starting out as a writer. The revision process was really long—ten to fifteen years—for all of the stories I...

Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic

September 25, 2023 - By Earl Douglas, Jr. and Darrell M. McNeill

(Photo: from the BRC photo gallery, “30 Years of Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic”)

The Black Rock Coalition emphatically and wholeheartedly condemns Jann Wenner’s thoughtless misogynistic and racist statements in the New York Times regarding women and Black artists. While his comments were beyond reprehensible, they are no major revelation to Black artists who’ve struggled with the White rock establishment from Day One: Wenner only confirmed and re-emphasized how mass media outlets have—and continue to...

Coming Home (Working Titles 8.1)

September 22, 2023 - By Judith Filc

Routes
In Minima Moralia, Adorno reviles U.S. highways. They represent the irruption of capitalism in nature: “the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings.” They are artificially devoid of marks—neither foot nor wheel can leave a trace on them, just as their manufacture is devoid of the impress of the hand. “It is as if no one had ever passed their hand over the landscape’s hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless.”

The highway as a landscape removed from human hands recalls the feeling of inaccessibility linked to the sense of foreignness and uprootedness. Does his refugee status color his view? And he’s not just...