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Guest post by Bridget Lowe The friction between our human and animal natures (a dubious distinction from the start) has been the subject of inquiry for a very long time, from Nebuchadnezzar, who loses his wits and wanders as a wild man for seven years, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which proposes a radical fluidity of form…

Guest post by Scott Nadelson Apparently, envy goes both ways. Just last week I had lunch with a sculptor friend who said he really wishes he could have been a writer, that he constantly struggles against the limitations of what his medium can communicate. He’s South African, and his work often deals with colonialism, oppression,…

Guest post by Carol Keeley I first saw Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe at the Music Box, a Chicago theater with faux stars overhead and a live organist between features. While Herzog stuffs garlic and herb bundles into the toe of each boot, he invokes a “real war against commercials, against talks shows” and television, then…

Guest post by Bridget Lowe Most of us wrote them in grade school, our names printed in large letters down the left margin and traced over with marker, our early views of ourselves summed up in a handful of lively adjectives. A few years ago, when leaving for graduate school, I received a particularly excellent…

Guest post by Scott Nadelson So I don’t envy all artists, all the time. I wouldn’t, for example, have wanted to be the Israeli performance artist Sigalit Landau while she was making her piece Barbed Hula. Pronged metal puncturing my belly? (You’ve been warned.) I’ll pass.   Nor would I have wanted to be Marina…

Guest post by Carol Keeley Among the iconic civil rights heroes in a recent Platon portfolio in The New Yorker were the Greensboro Four. The image of these young men at a whites-only counter in Woolworth’s ignited a movement and is part of our national conscience. But this shot includes a terrified young man who…

Several times during her question-and-answer session at Emerson College on April 15, Elizabeth Strout admitted to making things up. No one would begrudge a fiction writer of doing that–fabrication is part of her job. But Strout “just knew” when her latest book Olive Kitteridge was ready. “Which isn’t very interesting,” she added. Strout shared with…

Guest post by Bridget Lowe As a child of the ’80s, I was keenly aware of that vast region of “somewhere else” called space, and the astronauts who donned special outfits to venture into it. This hyper-awareness was in part due to the famed Sally Ride, the youngest and first female astronaut to journey into…

Guest post by Scott Nadelson Of course I’m not the first writer to express envy of the visual artist. As Geoff Dyer notes in Out of Sheer Rage, his book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence (a book I can’t recommend highly enough; it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, and…