Dear Chancellor Green Café,

A couple of days ago—I’m sure you remember; it was only a couple of days ago, just work with me here—I sat down to skim the rest of a Faulkner short story in the three-and-a-half minutes I had before lecture, when I was interrupted by the music you were playing. Can we talk about that for a sec?

Now that it’s October and this year’s parade of “Oscar hopefuls” is in motion, the time has come to ask the question: What were this summer’s movies—collectively—all about?

It's the little things you remember when you die.
The children. The moments. Your face after
achieving multiple simultaneous orgasms. The orgasms.
The presidential campaigns, the incipient volcano
underlying the western half of the continental U.S.
It's the little things that make you wonder.

People change. People estrange. The wear and tear on the asbestos flange
took my grandfather at seventy-five. My grandmother is alive,
and turning eighty. The moon landing is forty. I am twenty. Ten, five.

One night in Kyoto, a friend and I ended up in a room the size of a small Princeton double, drinking beer with two blond-coiffed Japanese men who, despite their doting, seemed anxious for us to leave. The place, called “Athena”, was a host club — a lounge where female clients pay for an all-you-can-drink bar menu and an hour or two of conversation with a well-dressed male attendant.

After her father escaped the October Revolution, and after her parents fled deeper into Poland from the Russian Invasion of 1920, Magdalena Abakanowicz was born. At the age of nine she saw the Third Reich sink its talons into her homeland. At the age of fifteen, she watched the Nazi ...