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
