Throughout the 1530s— a decade when plagues were a touch more commonplace than they are today, though no less dreadful— a German painter by the name of Hans Holbein was a regular presence at King Henry VIII’s court. You may not recognize the name, even if you’ve probably seen his portraits of the English luminaries… Continue reading K Paoletter 18: On Looking
When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright set his Arizona apprentices to clear some land for a permanent camp in the McDowell Mountains north of Scottsdale, they turned up a curious object. Stones were general in the hills, and some of them bore petroglyphic runes the students assumed had been left behind by the Hohokam,… Continue reading K Paoletter 17: Climate Control
Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Thousand Cranes begins with a memory: Running late to a tea ceremony organized by Chikako, the friend and onetime lover of his father, Kikuji remembers the strange birthmark on the woman’s chest that he glimpsed as a child. “It covered half the left breast and ran down into the hollow between the… Continue reading K Paoletter 16: Mind’s Eye
“Dear dirty Dublin” hasn’t been so in some time. Far from the gritty, working-class town of Joyce’s or even Heaney’s day, by some measures Dublin is now the most expensive city in all the European Union to live in, and is only growing more so as financial services firms fleeing London and Brexit keep alighting… Continue reading K Paoletter 15: Gold Harps on the Side
In 2016, Phoenix overtook Philadelphia to become America’s fifth largest city. In response to the news, the city’s WHYY public radio station ran a scorching post that dismissed Phoenix’s growth as little more than the result of “buying up insane quantities of land,” a luxury that reporter Mark Dent made clear was not available to… Continue reading K Paoletta 14: Nowhereville
The first Modernism course I took in college was really a class on Freud. We read case studies, lectures, and Civilization and Its Discontents before we picked up any Joyce or Faulkner. The well-worn argument the professor was making with such a syllabus was that the exploding popularity of psychoanalysis in the 1890s was a… Continue reading K Paoletter 13: Lie Down on the Couch
Similar to the printing of dollar bills or the stretching of taffy, election night coverage on a 24-hour news network can’t help but satisfy any viewer charmed by the spectacle of a machine doing exactly what it was built to do. This past Tuesday I tuned into MSNBC; for all its chuckle-headed progressive optimism, the… Continue reading K Paoletter 12: Too Close to Call
I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say I started writing because of alt-weeklies. As a teenage laggabout in Albuquerque, I spent untold nights lingering at coffee shops on Central reading the Weekly Alibi cover to cover. It turned me on to midnight movies at the Guild, hardcore shows at the Attic, experimental theater at the… Continue reading K Paoletter 11: Requiem for the Alt-Weekly
Once upon a time, the arctic was magisterial. About the glaciers of West Greenland, the great essayist Barry Lopez wrote: “When I saw them, it was as though I had been waiting quietly for a very long time, as if for an audience with the Dalai Lama.” In Arctic Dreams, Lopez’ chronicle of the 5… Continue reading K Paoletter 10: Ice Floes
“There has never been anything quite like Boston as a creation of the American imagination.” So wrote the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick in 1959 in her assessment of a city once “felt to have… a pure and special nature, absurd no doubt, but somehow valuable.” Hardwick was hardly impressed with the Boston of her age,… Continue reading K Paoletter 9: Dirty Old Town
