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
In Vertigo, W.G. Sebald describes a youthful Franz Kafka taking a journey to Venice by way of Vienna. He stops over in Trieste, and there “on the borderline between grinding weariness and half-sleep he wanders through the lanes of the harbour quarter, sensing under his skin how it is to be a free man waiting… Continue reading K Paoletter 8: Anti-Flâneur
Kanye West is that most fascinating of celebrities: an artist whose behavior and public statements beggar belief, even as his undeniable talent makes him impossible to dismiss. For fans, Kanye’s approach to his music has long been clear-eyed enough to justify ignoring his incomprehensible, megalomaniacal interviews and his fish-out-of-water appearances on a certain Calabasas-based television… Continue reading K Paoletter 7: He Who Wears the Red Hat
A refugee must be fleeing. That is the distinction, as far as immigration law is considered, that separates them from your standard-issue immigrant. An immigrant goes to, a refugee flees from. That both often arrive in the same place through the same means is inconsequential: once the refugee has claimed their status under international law,… Continue reading K Paoletter 6: Flee, Fled, Flown
The Hero’s Journey was formulated by the mythologist Joseph Campbell back in 1949 as a novel attempt to draw together the legends of innumerable cultures around a single narrative structure. The thoroughness with which the idea has permeated our culture since then is staggering: not only does it form the foundation for analysis of antiquarian… Continue reading K Paoletter 5: Epic Fail
Sam Lipsyte’s collection Venus Drive— a modern masterpiece, at least as far as writing professors in MFA programs are concerned— opens with a story called “Old Soul,” featuring a lech of a narrator who spends his days alternating between the booths at “Peep City” and “Peeptown” (there’s a difference). The story’s climax comes when he… Continue reading K Paoletter 4: Men in Winter
Few novelists working today are as obsessive about citation, reference, and homage as Alain Mabanckou, and none quite so ambivalent about the caché those allusions to literary history carry. In Black Moses, the latest addition to Mabanckou’s series of novels about the Congolese port city of Pointe-Noire, he uses those references to prop the specter… Continue reading K Paoletter 3: Congo Canon
Monsters are meant to scare. That’s obvious, even if the actual mechanics of fright aren’t. Wandering the hastily-assembled aisles of whatever seasonal Halloween superstore has set up shop in a vacant strip mall near you, the few truly frightening costumes (distinct from the ones that are gross, sexy, or Pikachu) lean on the concept of… Continue reading K Paoletter 2: Monster’s Ball
In the 1930’s, storms could still arrive without warning. The most reliable forecasts were those dictated by the seasons, like the steady drumbeat of precipitation the Japanese know to expect in June and July. But how to react when a rainy season turns catastrophic? In The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki describes such an event when… Continue reading K Paoletter 1: Rising Water
