The Arts Archives - Page 24 of 37

Literature

The Rest of Us Are Already Here

A lyric essay on fleeing a city in crisis

April 12, 2020 • by Nancy Barnes

The streets are empty No one’s there I stare -- is it true? Just yesterday, people streamed everywhere, high pitched humming currents of worry, rushing chunks of ice colliding The streets are empty No one’s there I stare -- is it true? Overnight Broadway goes dark, no money back ...

History

The Coronavirus Time Warp

Reading medieval literature in the midst of a pandemic

April 10, 2020 • by Eric Weiskott

We are in a fourteenth-century time warp, living through another pandemic originating in Asia and laying waste to Europe. Although this plague is less deadly than the Black Death, it has globalization on its side. The Black Death took ten years to reach Europe; coronavirus took two months. The Black Death ...

Art & Design

Archives of the Everyday

Finding what is hidden in the dress archive

April 10, 2020 • by Ellen Sampson

Much has been written in recent years about the role, position and display of dress in museums, about the ways that fashion exhibitions function as manifestations and metaphors for the predominant preoccupations of our times. Less explored, however, are the numerous garments that reside within museums archives, things which are ...

Fashion

Sartorial Steersmanship

We behave as if fashion is superficial — but only because it is so important

April 9, 2020 • by Otto von Busch

Everyone hearing the comment knows, don’t they? It’s never really about the shoes, but about who is in control. The utterance takes aim at my desire to just, for once, be the pilot of my own life, and dress the part, and that is not taken lightly. Teen angst and obsession with minuscule details ...

Body & Mind

The World Is Absolutely Full Of Wonder

An Interview with Mary Ruefle

April 9, 2020 • by Gina Chung and Mary Ruefle

Gina Chung [GC]: I thought we could start by talking about the title of your book. What do you think are the benefits of embracing one’s own “duncedom”? Mary Ruefle [MR]: You know, we’re all dunces, to begin with, and I guess at my age, I am not afraid to be ...

Interviews

This Body Is a Gift: Natalie Diaz

The award-winning poet on her new book, Postcolonial Love Poem

April 6, 2020 • by Natalie Diaz and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

To celebrate this achievement, we're reprinting this interview with the author, originally posted in April 2020. Native Americans account for just 0.8 percent of the population of the United States. Yet according to four decades’ worth of data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 2 percent of ...

Fashion

The Dharma of Fashion

If you crave fashion, make friends with your desire

March 30, 2020 • by Otto von Busch

It is said that on the eve of his enlightenment, the Buddha sat beneath a tree and was assailed by the demon Mara. Mara is literally “Death,” the personification of temptation and distraction. Using seductive images and ultimately doubt, Mara challenged the Buddha, distracting him from his goal of enlightenment. ...

Climate & Ecology

A Promiscuous Formalist

An Interview With Brian Teare

March 29, 2020 • by Brian Teare and Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharp [RS]: In “Clear Water Renga” you place each stanza on the page to create what looks like a river flowing downstream. How do you decide on forming your work and how does it impact the message specific to that poem overall? Brian Teare [BT]: I’m a promiscuous formalist. Promiscuous ...

Literature

The Strangeness and Miracle of Being

An Interview With Ilya Kominsky

March 27, 2020 • by Ilya Kominsky and Jessalyn Johnson

The following interview with Ilya Kominsky, a 2020 finalist in poetry, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his book Deaf Republic, award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky explores political disorder in a community where the people are united in a time of tragedy, ...

Feminism

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

March 13, 2020 • by Lucasta Miller and Kate Tooley

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

Literature

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

March 10, 2020 • by Jon Baskin

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...

Film & Performing Arts

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

March 9, 2020 • by Elana Levine

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...