ISSUE 3 | APR 2011

NATURE AND ITS ENEMIES

Frostbite

boots stiff with the cold - mottled white and purple - « we should probably hike out tonight » - rewarming - the bedpan - « there’s no need to be brave » - « freeze in January, amputate in July »

unreduced—an eyesore - full of details, often trapping details - beauty as consolation prize - an ordinary word like « talking » and invest it with a meaning that makes it hard - a desert - an erection - rumination vs. reflection - capture for the sake of capture

Sophie Huber

Nabokov and the Fate of Poses

« merely a pose » - the Museum of Comparative Zoology - the Bering Strait migration hypothesis - « a friendly little push » - rhadamanthine aesthetic - trance states and pills - « Dying is Fun » - time and its casualties - a « reversible suicide » - belletristic invulnerability

Michael Kinnucan

The Rape of Gaia: “Avatar” and the Politics of Nature

insatiable greed and mere bloodlust - the damaged boy meets a girl - guilty before nature - the gifts so freely given - « we as a society » - the constitutive sin of left-liberal politics - nature should tame man - we enjoy feeling knowingly guilty - practice and physicality

Carina del Valle Schorske

Radical Flags

where is Aztlán - a kaleidoscopic confusion of imperial desire - nations are made through rhetoric - the American flag is not a symbol - « how can we become like the immortal eagle » - the impossibility of a definitive origin

Brian Libgober

Apocalypse How?

ready to witness the apocalypse - « if Sydney’s frozen, you know the planet’s in a bit of trouble » - « wrathful nature » films - making eco-politics functionally irrelevant - anti-Humanists are mocked - you can brave all the odds

Ellis Calvin

The Natural City

« I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago » - Garden Cities of To-morrow - debtors’ prisons and public parks - « this unholy, unnatural separation » - a city in a vacuum - «an expensive housing scheme for public servants» - « ruin porn » star - collapsing concert halls - Detroit’s silver bullet - « the real source of wealth »

Avi Garelick

Snakes on a Paradise

sin and exile - one primary being and one helper - fabrics and words - why is the imaginative faculty called « snake »? - outside the garden before we know it - one interdicts, the other contradicts - hiding in the bushes from our actions - paradise as a bus stop

Marcel Knudsen

Mondrian, the City, and the Birth of Abstract Art

« general revulsion against green and growth » - the city as motif and ideology - walls of buildings and the throng of humanity - freedom from drawing Perseus and alpine ruins - an assault on natural beauty - « whatever is capricious and twisted in nature » - as we descend into a world of lines, boxes, and rectangles

Alice Sturm

Everyone Hates Vegetables

P.S. 98 in the Bronx - a brush with verdure - one-way power struggle - « poor Gladys » - Plant Based Food Day - « I’m not going to cut you, ‘cause I love you » - Juanita, the iron fist - watching televangelists late into the night - zesty meat - the necessary spunk to be accepted