Browsing: March-April 2022

March-April 2022

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IN 2009, Heather Love’s first book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History established her as a soft-spoken rock star in the world of Queer Theory. Why, then, in a panel discussion uploaded to YouTube from 2016, did she attest that she was in the middle of a “personal crisis in the humanities”? She expressed impatience with the limits of her academic training and wanted to test its assumptions. That prompted her to ask a question that’s usually lobbed by skeptics: “What is Queer Theory about?” Her answer can be found in a new book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory.

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Inseparable is a bildungsroman that documented the emotional, physical, and sexual awakenings of its protagonist. It is, in fact, a fictionalized account of de Beauvoir’s unrequited love for her friend Elisabeth Lacoin (aka “Zaza”). In the novella, Zaza is known as Andrée and Simone is called Sylvie.

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            The structure of Miranda’s film is ingenious, working on a kind of “meta meta” level. Larson’s musical tick, tick…BOOM! was itself a one-man-show about the creation of the musical Superbia, focusing on those crazy days before the big workshop and (spoiler alert) the failure of any producer to come forward.

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Kahlo at La Casa Azul and Sackville-West at Sissinghurst truly became artist-gardeners in a bewitching combination of wildness and restraint, all passion spent on their astonishing and memorable visual spaces. Their gardens have inspired my own. During the pandemic, my love of gardening has flourished, giving me so much comfort, purpose, and joy, as Kahlo and Sackville-West surely found in theirs.

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There is a painting by the Dutch master Frans Hals with the rather misleading title Merrymakers at Shrovetide (1616–17). Shrovetide? Well, if you notice the orange beads around the neck and wrists of the “maiden” at its center you can easily tell what holiday this group of merrymakers is celebrating. Today we call it Mardi Gras. Just think how much more approachable the painting would be if it were titled “Mardi Gras Party.”

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            Days before the unveiling of his history-changing sculpture of David (1504), the 29-year-old Michelangelo was chosen to paint an image of The Battle of Cascina on a wall of the Palazzo de la Signoria in Florence. This battle was fought between Florence and Pisa on a scorching July day in 1364.

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