The BQE

By Laura Macomber In 2007, Sufjan Stevens added yet another tag to his résumé as musician, composer, lyricist, poet, writer, and overall-creative-soul: filmmaker.  His short film, entitled The BQE, is a self-described “visual travelogue” of New York City’s poorly planned stretch of outer-borough highway and its surrounding neighborhoods, shot in 16 mm and Super 8.  The film first premiered at BAM in November 2007, with Stevens performing the accompanying score, which he composed, live; now, two years later, he is […]

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The Goodness of Art

By Laura Macomber I recently wrote a 45-page paper discussing the paradox of cultural elitism in post-war, post-fascist societies as discussed by three different works of literature: “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) by Paul Celan, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, and The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. Admittedly, the paper was my senior honors thesis in Comparative Literature and I wrote it for no one but myself and a handful of professors. And though I felt deep concern for the […]

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Gregor Samsa Was No Hungarian Butcher

By Laura Macomber Everyone loves a good antihero. He or she is our disgraceful, literary doppelganger, a picaro so ignoble that, in simultaneously condemning and vicariously delighting in their exploits, readers are spiritually elevated. In The Convalescent (McSweeney’s), first-time novelist Jessica Anthony has generated her own modern-day picaro. She treats him with such heavy handedness, though, that instead of exacting derisive social commentary, Anthony creates a character so utterly lonely, so physically despicable and self-pitying, that his wry observations and […]

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