-
Love Without a Safe Place, but With Emotional Realism John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence feels much less like a polished Hollywood drama and much more like an emotional crisis unfolding before our eyes in real time. What was slightly polarizing upon watching was how uncomfortable the film is willing to be. It lingers…
-
The Heart of the Matter (1953) Graham Greene’s works never fail to stage moral crises within colonial settings, where personal decisions reflect broader tensions about imperial decline. In The Heart of the Matter (1953, dir. George More O’Ferrall) and the first half of The Quiet American (1955), the messy entanglement of private lives with political…
-
A Dry White Season (1989) Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga (1951) and Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989) are separated by both form and medium, but they do share a main concern of how white protagonists end up confronting their implication in systems of racial domination. Both works successfully expose the hard-headed structures…
-
Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) both undoubtedly chart the descent of European men into imperial spaces where conquest is framed as both inevitable and just as morally ambiguous. While Conrad embeds Marlow’s Congo journey in the rhetoric of civilization and trade, Coppola decides to…
-
Out of Africa (1985) Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s short story “My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa” (2006) provide two different and polarizing portrayals of Africa under the umbrella shadow of colonialism. While Pollack’s film transforms Karen Blixen’s memoir into a lush, nostalgic romance of white settlers in Kenya, Gurnah’s…
-
The marsh was not supposed to burn. Its waters, shallow and dark, had for centuries swallowed sparks and doused careless flames. Children once dared each other to toss matches into the reeds, certain they would do nothing more than fizzle and vanish. Elders laughed at the thought of fire ever taking hold. But in the…
-
I’ve published one more original piece on the site: “The House Beneath the House.” It’s a short story about grief, accumulation, and the terrible discovery that rock bottom occasionally has a basement. If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you already know I’m interested in rhetoric, memory, and the hidden architecture of what people…
-
There is a point in life at which sorrow stops behaving like weather and begins to take on architecture of the mind. I used to think grief arrived like a storm. Loud and brief. Cinematic. I imagined it as something that passed through, wrecked a few things, and moved on when it got bored. It…
-
I’ve added a new article to the site, and it’s one of my favorite kinds of pieces. It’s part rhetorical analysis, part digital autopsy, and part “why does the internet solidify our forsaken digital footprints like this?” The new essay, “Why the Internet Remembers in Fragments,” uses a bizarrely specific set of keywords and search phrases, including Lily, Memorial, Confidence, an…
-
Notes from the archive, the algorithm, and the emotionally compromised search bar. If the internet has taught me anything in my twenty-six years, it’s that memory is rarely neat and never dignified. Nobody remembers their digital life in smooth, polished paragraphs. We remember it the way the web remembers us: in fragments, in scraps, in…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Static Pages, Moving Meaning 