“I thought my ideas were so clear.” That’s Guido Anselmi, the stand-in for Federico Fellini in 8 ½, trying to explain his inability to take the movie that exists in his mind and articulate how to film it to his increasingly impatient production crew. “I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful… Continue reading K Paoletter 22: in medias res
Despite its recency, my memories of 2010 are decidedly vague. I spent the first months of the year in the rambling house I lived in at Tufts, mostly in my crawlway of a room where I lay in bed watching hour after hour of cross-country skiing at the Vancouver Olympics, and then, some time later,… Continue reading K Paoletter 21: Not So Fast
The conceit of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film “24 Hour Psycho” is simple: the movie Psycho, slowed down to play at two frames per second, an arduous pace that stretches Hitchcock’s masterpiece out to fill an entire day. Point Omega—one of the set of compact, philosophical novels Don DeLillo has occupied himself with… Continue reading K Paoletter 20: Driven to Distraction
What are you willing to give up to end white supremacy? This, our nation’s most recent bout of reckoning with pervasive racial injustice, has blessedly already swept away all manner of noxious media figures, and forced many others to embrace a new level of accountability for how little they have done to ensure equity at… Continue reading K Paoletter 19: Step Back
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
