Criticism-in-finity!
Posted in Reviews on Mar 27th, 2012
A post-menopausal teacher sits at the desk, more interested in her romance novel than the class. Boys sit on one side of the room, girls on the other. A self-imposed segregation, we steal glances across the room, still unsure how to cross that divide. We are supposed to learn typing from Mavis Beacon, but the [...]
Posted in Replies & Rebuttals on Mar 21st, 2012
#1: Music drifts from the clubhouse, pings carry from the driving range. Ahead, a strange landscape: wilderness that is not wilderness; everything leafy and beautifully green, everything manicured, cut, chopped. #2: This is not quite a park, not quite a garden. It is not quite a place to be discovered, not quite natural or unnatural, [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 15th, 2012
At around 53 minutes past the hour, a hair-dyed ex-basketball star slowly lumbers his way to the ring. Like all of the ring’s former heroes, he gets cheered for a minute before the crowd realizes exactly what they are cheering. After all, this man does what bad guys do: attack their heroes in order to [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 12th, 2012
In “Serial Seduction: Living in Other Worlds,” Ron Simon claims, “more than any other art form, the soap opera creates an alternative world, where the characters and their environment seem to exist in a parallel dimension.” Thirty-four years ago, when I first started watching my soap, I skipped French club and yearbook meetings on the [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 7th, 2012
Revered Roman statesman Cato the Elder urged that babies should be bathed in the warmed-up urine produced by an adult who had eaten cabbage. Cato, whose cognominal was sometimes suffixed “the wise,” was a notorious party pooper and not prone to frivolous micturatal larks otherwise, yet he must have got the idea from somewhere, right? [...]