Jascha Kessler Lots of influence. Lots of anxiety. The graduation photo that once stood on the baby grand stuffed into the small living room on the sixth floor just beneath the ash-dropping chimney of the incinerator shows a 16-year old with clear eyes and the carved features of some unknown, handsome youth. Somehow it does not show the acne, although an-aged writer sees in his shaving mirror today its faint scarred pittings. Neither...

Simon Bresler One thing you should know about my father is that he has an abnormally large stomach. The kind of stomach that, if x-rayed, would reveal a picnic bench of five angry truck drivers demanding a 4th serving of fillet mignon and mushrooms (if they happen to be sautéed and available). With that being said, my dad is not a particularly overweight guy. In fact, he spends an hour on the elliptical every morning and works out...

Scott Hightower Breakfast with Thom Gunn Randall Mann, University of Chicago Press, 2009 10: 0-226-50344-5, $14.00 _______________________________________________________ “BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN”-Desire, Beauty, Unbeauty, and Vanity Randall Mann’s first book, Complaint in the Garden, won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. Mann has delivered a second book, “Breakfast with Thom Gunn.” It is a smart, even quiet collection...

James Feller Around 1 am, after my parents had gone to sleep–mom in bed, dad passed out to the Discovery Channel on the couch–I quietly tiptoed out of my bedroom. The whole downstairs smelled strongly of cigarettes and I remembered my childhood. Summer mornings, obsessively examining my baseball card collection, I would call out to my mother. After no response, I knew she was in the basement again, half-heartedly attempting to hide...

Ryan McCarl First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school. Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and...

Benjamin Lockerd “Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism.1 Thirty-five years later, the situation has not changed, for T. S. Eliot’s cultural criticism continues to be more maligned than studied. It is not uncommon to hear Eliot accused of having “flirted with fascism” and of having proposed the...

Jascha Kessler The title of the following observations might better be offered as, “…from wanton destruction by the present heirs and/or occupiers of the lands of their original creators.” As we were sadly aware, immediately upon the lightning-swift liberation of Baghdad after a campaign of less than four weeks it was discovered, even as guns were still rattling outside, that the Iraq National Museum had been despoiled by gangs of...

Ryan McCarl Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai,...

Erik Tucker At the dawn of what many hope will turn out to be a 2009 version of “Morning in America,” we are confronted with a litany of challenges that are making even our strongest of willed nation buckle at the knees. While discussions of credit default swaps, subprime mortgage foreclosures, and economic stimulus dominate both the airwaves and the front pages of our republic’s ever-dwindling newspaper circulation, it is the...

Jascha Kessler The assumption that “contemporary history” is also manifested in “contemporary literature” is one of those notions with a long tradition. It can be traced back in critical discourse to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he remarked that poetry is superior to history. The metaphysical problem underlying historical writing was already present in Plato’s The Sophist: where it is asked whether “history,” a narrative...