Monthly Archives: March 2012

Julia Kristeva and Nitnit, from Charles Burns’s X’ed Out, sharing an abject gaze.

Temperature in forest: 71. Sample sentence from Freedom: Joey noted that it had taken no more than one allusion to her beauty to get her to open up and start talking about herself.

Every medium creates not only the conditions of its use, but also shapes the way we know. In textual studies, the pathways that lead us to texts somehow affect how it is we come to think about these texts. But … Continue reading →

The Orange Eats Creeps, by Grace Krilanovich, in woods twenty minutes prior to storm.

While inhabiting the body of Arthur Megrim, Sheppard Lee (1836, see pt. 1) Sheppard Lee has terrible nightmares, an almost comically gruesome pile-up of exceptionally unpleasing ways to suffer and die: My dreams, indeed, so varied and terrific were the … Continue reading →

X’ed Out, by Charles Burns, in forest.

Some of the strangest, most violent, most reality-twisting American novels are also some of the least known. They include Sheppard Lee (1836) and Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay (1837) by Robert Montgomery Bird and The Down-Easters (1833) by … Continue reading →

The dust jacket for Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in woods, at night.

Poster in forest for Straight Time (1978), starring Dustin Hoffman.

Here is a small section I had to cut for length purposes from my D.W. Griffith piece in the March/April 2012 Believer Film Issue: In her pioneering essay “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir,” Sylvia Harvey suggests that … Continue reading →