Mary Shelley was nineteen years old when she wrote the defining myth of the modern world. She probably did not know she was doing this. Two hundred years later, the novel she produced in a wet summer beside a Swiss lake reads less like a Gothic romance than like a diagnosis — precise, unflinching, andContinue reading “We Are All the Monster: Frankenstein, Late Capitalism, and the Things We Made and Left to Die”
Category Archives: Essay
Anne Sexton
Essay · Poetry & Lives The Woman Who Made Death Speak in Stanzas Anne Sexton wrote about madness, abortion, adultery, menstruation, incest, and suicide with a directness that the literary establishment of the late 1950s had agreed, without quite stating it aloud, was not available to women. She made it available. The cost was everythingContinue reading “Anne Sexton”
Malcolm X
Essay · History & Lives The Man Who Kept Becoming Someone Else Malcolm X is one of the most difficult subjects in American history to write about honestly, because the honest account requires holding simultaneously several versions of the same person — the street hustler, the Nation of Islam minister, the Black nationalist icon, theContinue reading “Malcolm X”
The Human Condition According to Chekhov
By Bergotte After Homer’s wars, Ovid’s metamorphoses, Dante’s cosmology, Shakespeare’s kingdoms, and Dostoevsky’s metaphysical detonations, Anton Chekhov arrives with a doctor’s bag and a short story about a man who cannot sleep. The reduction in scale is not a diminishment. It is an argument. What Chekhov understood — and what makes him the most quietlyContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Chekhov”
Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of a Mother
Grief, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Maternal Love: Jørgen Vestergaard’s Historien om en moder (1977) By Bergotte The Story of a Mother Here is a film that is seared into my memory from childhood: Jørgen Vestergaard’s 1977 Danish stop-motion animated short Historien om en moder (The Story of a Mother) represents one of the mostContinue reading “Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of a Mother”
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose
They were young, they were beautiful, they were consumed by their own myths and their own fevers before any of them reached forty. Byron, Shelley, and Keats between them invented the idea of the artist as hero — as outcast, visionary, martyr to beauty and freedom. The invention was magnificent and partly fraudulent and changedContinue reading “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose”
Leonard Cohen & David Bowie
Essay · Music & Ideas Two Ways of Dying in Public Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both knew they were dying when they made their final albums. Both kept the knowledge largely to themselves. Both produced, from that knowledge, work of extraordinary quality that addressed mortality directly and without evasion. And there the similarity endsContinue reading “Leonard Cohen & David Bowie”
Ovartaci
Essay · Art & Lives The Chief Loon and the World Inside the World Ovartaci lived for fifty-six years inside a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near Aarhus, and made, in those fifty-six years, approximately a thousand works of extraordinary formal intelligence and phantasmagoric density — paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media pieces built from whatever materialsContinue reading “Ovartaci”
The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky
By Bergotte The series has been moving, in its way, toward this. Homer gave us mortality without consolation. Ovid gave us transformation without stability. Dante gave us love as the architecture of the universe. Shakespeare gave us the self as performance, unmoored from any fixed ground. What Dostoevsky gives us is the consequence of allContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky”
Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969
Essay · Music & History Four Days on Max Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock was not what it was advertised to be. It was not three days of peace and music — it was four days, the weather was frequently terrible, the organisation collapsed almost immediately, the food ran out, the sound system failed repeatedly, and atContinue reading “Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969”
My World of Interiors 