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: History
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”
Sarah Vaughan
Essay · Music & Lives The Divine One and the Instrument She Was Given Sarah Vaughan possessed what may have been the single greatest natural voice in the history of American popular music — a contralto of three-octave range, extraordinary richness, and an improvisational intelligence so developed that it functioned less like singing and moreContinue reading “Sarah Vaughan”
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”
Joan Rivers
Essay · Comedy & Lives Can We Talk? Joan Rivers was the funniest woman in the history of American comedy, and the qualifications embedded in that sentence — the word woman, the word history — are themselves part of the argument she spent sixty years making: that the comedy establishment’s willingness to tolerate her existedContinue reading “Joan Rivers”
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”
My World of Interiors 