It all came to me freshman year while studying Russian syntax and reading some Puskin. I’m there with a semi-erect penis (a state in which I often find myself when studying anything Slavic) and snacking on a chocolate chip cookie from Olives. I look up from my black leather ...

Bob Dylan has gotten the canonization machine working in avalanche order these days, from the Scorsese documentary to the chart-topping Modern Times. The new album is surprisingly good – if not the second-coming so many are talking about – and yet it rubs against the grain in one particular sense. As it ...

My favorite movies are always about dreams. As are my favorite books. In my mind, the standard by which all artistic output should be weighed is how successfully the creative mind has tapped into his or her dream-world, and how completely he or she can immerse the audience in an ...

1. “Picasso and American Art” (through Jan. 28, 2007) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century. Or so I contend. One measure of his greatness, currently on display at the Whitney’s superb exhibition “Picasso and American Art” is as a ...

As far as I understand it (per OED.com), the main thing that separates a symposium from a conference or a convention is that the first of these three is actually supposed to be engaging. In Ancient Greece, it was actually synonymous with a drinking party, while conferences and conventions ...

“‘Ere we come, ‘ere we come, ‘ere we come to eat some snacks!” That’s the song you sing as you roll your way to the feeding tubes, you glutinous masses of orca-fat-fattened lard-balls! And what do you have to say for yourselves? Nothing, because your mouths are blocked up by the pendulous weight of your sagging cheeks and you have forgotten all words except “more” and “a little bit more” and “perhaps just another dollop.”

I was raised with the barest trappings of religion. My mother is a ‘reformed’ reformed Jew while my father is a lapsed Anglican who made the leap from agnosticism to atheism at some point during my early teenage years. I had candles in my menorah and lights on my Christmas ...

We here at the Nass are great lovers of literature and, if we do say so ourselves, the latest in a long line of great participators in the epic, Wilsonian tradition of the precept. We love few things more than a lively precept involving a close, thoughtful reading of a poem and an exhilarating discussion of poetic technique.

To read good poetry is to pull a Band-Aid off a wound. I heard someone say that once.
Not a big wound, maybe just a paper-cut, where the skin puffs pink and new. When we remove the covering we return to our trauma, and the act is pleasurable, despite the ...