March 06
"They are making bourgeois garbage and I have been making revolutionary garbage." Thus quoth Jean-Luc Godard, about his former friends, the "bourgeois" filmmakers Truffaut and Coutard, in this 1970 interview with the Evergreen Review's Kent Carroll. It's a fascinating text, in which Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, his partner in the class-conscious Dziga-Vertov Group, discuss American students, revolutionary struggle, and "what the Chinese call a bullet wrapped in sugar." We hope you enjoy!
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February 22
What does it mean to have, or to love, a black body? Taking on the challenge of interpreting the black body's dramatic role in American culture, Nana-Ama Danquah's anthology The Black Body asks thirty black, white, and biracial contributors—award-winning actors, artists, writers, and comedians—including voices as varied as President Obama's inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, actor and bestselling author Hill Harper, and former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts.
As part of our celebration of Black History Month, we're publishing Danquah's introduction to The Black Body here on the blog. It's a wise and thoughtful piece that delves into complex questions of bodies, blackness, and perception. We hope you'll enjoy.
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January 29
You may know Franz Kafka's "The Trial," a tale of nightmarish bureaucracy, but do you know Anton Chekhov's? Written in 1881, when Chekhov was only twenty-one, it contains the germ of much that would later come to be considered Chekhovian: petty cruelty, country life, and the inability of one generation to come to terms with the other. And because it's Chekhov's birthday today, we're publishing his short story, "The Trial," exclusively here in the blog. We hope you enjoy, if enjoy is indeed the word.
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