Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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A Riot Grrrl Zine in the Modern Age
A personal explanation: I grew up in a small town, and when I say that, I actually mean miniscule—exponentially smaller that most would assume when one describes the phenomenon of a small, rural town. 1200 people small, to be exact, and located smack dab in the heart of Texas. Land of exceedingly right-wing conservatives and…
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Eating Galettes in Rennes
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The sky above Rennes spits gentle rain. In French we call this crachin, from the verb cracher, meaning to spit. Brittany is harsh. It has the pointed chin of a witch, jabbing out into the Atlantic Ocean on…
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Rereading Walden
Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is …
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Japanese on Montagu Street
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “My colleagues think I’m going to come back with this crazy haircut,” says the man in the swivel chair next to mine. He’s talking to his stylist. “It’s ‘cause I told them I was going to a Japanese…
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A Curious Feat of Description
For Sarah Waters’s novel The Paying Guests (Riverhead, 2014), Public Books is simultaneously publishing a written review by Heather Love, “Give the People What They Want,” and an original one-panel illustration review by Alison Bechdel. My assignment was to create a one-panel graphic review of The Paying Guests. I swiftly accepted—I was eager to read…
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Why You Should Experience Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn
If you think you know New York City history, Black history, American history—anything about Brooklyn at all—but you don’t know about Weeksville, then go to the Creative Time project Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn before it closes this Sunday, October 12. There are five major sites specific to this ambitious, neighborhood-spanning creative…
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Up from the Willamette
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. If you tell people you live in St. John’s, everyone says, “Oh, that’s a really interesting neighborhood,” or “I’ve been there!” as if it were a destination. To get there, you take the highway along the Willamette River…
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Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is nonetheless a country backwater. The town lies aside narrow Route 291, which snakes and tunnels its way to Yuzawa, the onsen (hot spring)…
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The Art of Extraction: An Interview with Jean-Claude Carrière
Acclaimed French screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière has had a career spanning more than 50 years and 90 writing credits, including the adapted screenplay for 1979’s The Tin Drum, which won both the Palme d’Or and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for that year, and many films directed by Luis Buñuel. One of…
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How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us
There was little choice. From the earliest conceptions of what would be done at Ground Zero, there would be one. A museum. And now here it is, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened to the general public on May 21. Part of the necessity to “do something,” it was not easy to figure…
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Little Big-Time Garage
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Virginia. Downtown Charlottesville. A man in a white suit walks down First Street, heading toward the pedestrian mall. Behind him, a woman pushes a baby carriage along the narrow sidewalk. The woman’s dress is the color of sand.…
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The Market and the Fest
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the rural villages of southern Germany, the rain rolls in breakers down the hills, curving along the little streets, stretching its path in tiny rivulets, dampening window box gardens. The villagers are so efficient: on the highways…
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In the Yellowstone Valley, a Beet Farmer with an Artist’s Soul
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of rural southern Montana. It has microbreweries, artists, a cowboy hat–fixing genius, solar-powered lofts, and huge summer street events, along with homeless people, addicts,…
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Rereading Edith Wharton
It’s difficult to justify an admiration for Edith Wharton these days. Her fiction has no social conscience; the world she describes is narrow, shallow, and stifling, a world of country homes and Paris fashions, a world in which an unmarried woman’s “reputation” matters more than her personality. Her novels are obsessed with clothes, jewels, furniture,…
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Mysteryland
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “I have come here to lose the smog,” Joni Mitchell sings in her trademark falsetto, “and I feel to be a cog in something turning.” Her imagined destination (and the song’s namesake) is Woodstock, the year 1969. Forty-five…
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International Forum on the Novel: Keywords
Every year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to speak on a “keyword” of their choice. The following videos and accompanying text are drawn from this year’s forum, presented by Villa Gillet and Le Monde in partnership with France Inter and Les Subsistances (Lyon). The full list of participating English-language writers and keywords can be found…
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Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a distance. While we’re plenty familiar with drones thanks to the War on Terror, Asaro details the strategic rationale behind their use, along with the…
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Monsieur Zierold’s Guide to Paris
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The typed index card in Fielding’s 1956-57 Travel Guide to Europe smells old, and its edges are yellowed. It is a note, to someone. It is part of Paris on a card. The book’s former owner must have…
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Everybody’s Protest Play?
Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman restages a familiar scene: a young black man is killed, his body discarded like jetsam by his fellow citizens. This signature Black Arts play was revived this spring, for its 50th anniversary, by the National Black Theatre and the Classical Theatre of Harlem and after each performance the audience reflected with the…
