If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress” (19), then Williams’s project in his book-length poem Paterson is no/

Ruth La Ferla recently wrote an article on the rampant vampire trend in books, movies, and television.  She references the "True Blood" and "Twilight" craze and adds that even fashion has been influenced by vampiromania.  No, she's not talking about supermo

Natalie Dylan may have shocked people by auctioning off her virginity for $3.7 million to “help her pay for college,” but a new book by Jessica Valenti argues that Dylan’s case is merely another instance in a long history of the commodification of virginity. Today

I just can’t see Jean-Luc Godard walking around dressed as a potato, as Agnès Varda does in her new documentary/biography through art, "The Beaches of Agnès" ("Les Plages d’Agnès"); I mean, he won’t even take off those dark glasses most of the

“Waking Life” (2001) was written and directed by Richard Linklater, who caught the eye of critics with his 1991 film, “Slacker.” The film’s title comes from the George Santayana maxim: “Sanity is a madness put to good use; waking life is a dream cont

With carefully observed dialogue, Lynn Shelton's "Humpday" opens on a scenario that is pretty familiar to most couples: beginning to get intimate, finding out the other one is tired, both feeling relieved; but the ensuing scenario is one with which they are probably less familiar

In her book, Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object http://www.amazon.com/Live-Nude-Girl-Life-Object/dp/1557288917, Kathleen Rooney wants to tell the world that as an art model she is different than your average Playboy pin-up or stripper spinning on a pole. &nb

This week, a couple of articles touched on two-dimensional women, both literal and figurative. The literal one was a perversely absorbing New York Times article on Otaku culture, or the Japanese subculture that is unusually devoted to the world of manga, anime,

As a teenager, I once looked for female role models by plugging “amazing women” into an Internet search engine. The results produced hundreds of pornography sites. Google seemed to be telling me that the only amazing women were sexualized ones. Like generations of women, I find i

Boaz Yakin’s "Death in Love" is a study of paralysis and pain. The family in the film suffers from what appears to be a collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from the mother’s (Jacqueline Bisset) affair with a Nazi doctor during the Holocaust. Probably as a nod to

The blogosphere is abuzz over Scarlett Johansson’s new look.  No, she didn’t get a boob job (why on god’s green earth would she???) or plastic surgery (again, why?); she’s gone red for "Iron Man 2" (2010).

Now, not everyone shares my taste, but

You’re not going to believe this, but "I Love You, Beth Cooper" could have been a good movie.  I’m pretty convinced that if the film were just about the friendship between the lightsaber-brandishing Denis (stand-up comedian Paul Rust) and the Bogart-quo

There is a lot of antipathy towards Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction both in, and outside of, academia.   In the interest of furthering the dialogue, I add my most basic view on the topic to the fray: In all the accusations of nihilism and meaninglessness, it’s e