By Molly Tompkins I remember nothing of my sixteenth birthday, save the arduous task of making a memory. Everyone wore white and denim. After quick embraces, my friends hustled me into a series of photographs. Jaws popped against my cheek as they adjusted their smiles between clicks. I embraced from the side, the front, and…
Read MoreLiving Small: Profound Good in the Simple Life
By Molly Tompkins Who would I be without my resume? Would I still profess a desire to change the world? Would my interests be distributed across academia, athletics, and of course service? Resumes are meant to reflect our sincere interests. However, we undoubtedly magnify our engagements to appeal to others. We work to prove ourselves…
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Redecorating the Wheel: Feminine Desperation
By Arundhati Ghosh CW: mentions of suicide, self-harm, nymphomania, substance abuse Depictions of inward, self-effacing feminine emotion have evolved through time and mediums, but their themes remain universal. Society’s inherent overarching patriarchal nature has generated an ever-lasting debate over whether women have autonomy or if they are at the mercy of the situations and circumstances…
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Rebirth of Tradition: Placing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in Conversation with Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come
By Addie Lamb Our heads are round so thought can change the direction. Allan Ginsberg “Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazz bands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums!” -Ginsberg, Footnote to “Howl”, 21 The language of sound knows no rules. Insipid rigidity within poetics was thrown into dissolution…
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Miserable Beauty, Beautiful Misery: Re-Thinking the Byronic Hero
By Nicolas Silva A rocky cliffside soars above a raging sea. Its stones silently endure the fiery lashes of the lightning above and the foaming crashes of the waves below. The pouring rains drown out the howling winds. No living thing exists—or ever could exist—within such a storm, save the lone individual standing at the…
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On Archives and Ghosts
By Megan Snopik [An archive is] not only the history and the memory of singular events, of exemplary proper names, languages and filiations, but the deposition in an arkheion (which can be an ark or a temple), the consignation in a place of relative exteriority, whether it has to do with writings, documents, or ritualised…
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What The Living Do
By Medha Anoo I play “Say Shava Shava” from my favorite movie on loop for a few days and someone I know who follows me on Spotify asks me if I need to talk about anything. Why are you watching me on Spotify, I ask, and he shrugs. I was on desktop. When my friend…
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Love and Lost Time: An Unromantic Study of Romance
By Kara Hildebrand Meteorites Let’s call him Damian, a name which means to tame or subdue in Greek. I decided he was The One for me with stars splayed out before my eyes and cool blades of grass scratching my cheeks. Despite my resolution, my palm seemed to recoil under his. He said he loved…
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Hark, Triton! Plumbing the Depths of Nautical Fiction
By: Lana Haffar Grime, putrid and ancient, coats your shoes and your lungs. The wind bites and the salt spray stings your face and arms. Below you, the water churns in primordial agony. Around you, sunburnt tourists in cargo shorts enjoy a perfectly temperate afternoon. But to an eight-year-old, that catamaran in San Francisco Bay…
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Pushing the Boulder: Existential Absurdism in Film
By: Jack Gross “Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.” -Albert Camus Forsaken to an eternity of menial labor by the gods, a man must slowly push a boulder up a hill until he reaches the top. At the peak…
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Why Spidey Matters: How to Portray the Working Man’s Hero
By Summaiya Jafri Who would have thought a nerdy kid from Queens could reach such unfathomable “heights”? According to research conducted by British retailer Game, The Amazing Spider-Man is the most popular superhero in fifty-seven countries, making him the world’s favorite comic book character by a long shot. What makes Spider-Man so appealing to audiences…
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Accepting the Weird: The Children in Karen Russell and Kelly Link’s Fiction
By Morgan Jeitler On my copy of Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen is a review by Karen Russell: “Pity the poor librarians who have to slap a sticker on Kelly Link’s genre-bending, mind-blowing masterpiece of the imagination.” Pity, too, the librarians of Karen Russell. Karen Russell and Kelly Link are writers who continually defy genre.…
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