Cultural Studies

The day is my enemy. The day is empty. And it must be filled with words. The night is empty. And it must be filled with words. My head is filled with words. My heart is filled with words. My soul is words and silence. My ears buzz, alive and relentless. The emptiness, the hole

I discovered Mary Kouyoumdjian and her work while listening to Q2, the contemporary classical music station counterpart of WQXR here in NYC. This is the Kronos Quartet performing it live. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNegch1_dyU This is the kind of music that must continue to be created, regardless of its "accessibility," because this music creates the kind of access required. This

If a new subgenre could be coined for John Kolchak's book, Next Year in Jerusalem, "grim gospel" would be more than satisfactory. Set somewhere in the arid wastelands between Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Gore Vidal's Julian, Kolchak weaves a Hobbesian Palestine where the life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short, especially

The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but

Today marks the annual federal recognition of the life, work, and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. For many Americans, this will be our only explicit nod to not just the man, but what many of us consider a positive face of race relations. It is hard not to be caught up in the vision