Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.

Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...

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Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

At The Beginning Was The Imagination

At the beginning was the imagination, with its capricious subversive nature. But then a charming guy called "capitalism" arrived on the scene and promised to bring bread to everybody. People believed him, although it was soon evident that he was more interested in actually enriching somebody. But, most of all, ...
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At The Beginning Was The Imagination

RetroDada Manifesto

The RetroDada Manifesto was written at the invitation of Anita Hugi and David Dufresne for an event at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, 4 & 5 March 2016, to celebrate the Dada centenary, in there place where it all began. For more information on that event, and related projects see http://dada-data.net/en/  Below ...
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RetroDada Manifesto

How to Beat Writer’s Block

Try these games to unblock the flow, or direct it somewhere new.

These games are offered as solutions for two kinds of problems. One is writer’s block. Let’s be done with the waiting for ‘inspiration’. Let’s just get to work. All one has to overcome is one’s resistance to labor. The other problem is the opposite: our facility with writing, but always ...
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What is Shakespearean Tragedy?

An excerpt from ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The question ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ can understandably prompt one to start listing distinctive features of various plays by Shakespeare — as if a successful enumeration of its characteristics would amount to an understanding of the ...

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What is Shakespearean Tragedy?