by Nicholas Cannariato

You, Me, and Everyone Else

Bruno Bettelheim and the informed heart

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Few have ever witnessed the dehumanizing potential of mass society so up close as Bruno Bettelheim. After internment at Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim came to America, where he served as director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago from 1944 to 1973. There, he practiced what might be best described as a humanistic form of psychoanalytic theory. His approach was profoundly influenced by his experience of the camps, and, because of this, he went on to view his students — most living with either autism or prior emotional trauma — as struggling to develop an authentic sense of self in balance with an authentic sense of community. It’s important to note too that “authentic” here means what is emotionally and psychologically sustainable, derived from profound consideration of one’s self and one’s community. Many who were closest to Bettelheim in his decades at the school speak of his steadfast dedication to the regeneration of his young students, but, it should be noted, considerable controversy has mounted on this subject (and his reputation in general) since his death. More… “You, Me, and Everyone Else”

Set List
by Stephanie Haun

My Love Affair with Luciano

It's just a little crush

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Since the winter of 1995, I have had an ongoing love affair. It has continued even to this day, nearly 21 years later. I have been engaged in this romance, if you will, during the course of several relationships and my marriage. I have always been open and honest about my love for Luciano and I will continue to maintain the open and honest attitude about him in any future relationships.

People change over time. Relationships change and evolve, or end. However, Luciano is the one constant in my life. While my thoughts and ideas about him have changed, I can say the changes are positive ones. That is, as I have matured, the way that I think of him has also matured. As I have spent the years watching him, drinking in every nuance of his movements as he speaks or walks across a room, I have moved beyond a mere infatuation. I have become enamored by him: his presence, his work and humanitarianism, and his care and compassion for others. More… “My Love Affair with Luciano”

Foodstuffs
by Aaron Gilbreath

Our Basement Izakaya

In search of a dram of comfort

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My better half Rebekah and I are turning our basement into an izakaya. The reason: I’m obsessed. Also, because izakayas have a singular feel that no other social space can match, and I want perpetual access to that.

An izakaya is a Japanese bar that serves food, not the other way around. You drink while you eat a succession of small plates. Aesthetically, there is no one type, and the name izakaya is widely and vaguely applied, but the ones you commonly see in urban Japan have an aesthetic you might call “pub cluttered.” I like the way they look, stuffed with sake and whisky bottles, posters, hanging red lanterns, and people drinking at low tables made of beer crates under wooden signs whose Japanese characters could say “Hey ugly!” for all I know. Izakayas swallow you up. The clutter feels like a cozy blanket. I want to feel that at home. When the world can’t deliver, you have to make things yourself. We’re trying to make a lair, a lounge, a burrow, not a gendered “man cave,” but a cozy place to read books, listen to records, talk with friends, or be alone. And as people in Tokyo know, there are few spaces as snug as a room underground.

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Pop Studies
by Ernesto Oyarbide

Sacred Monsters

Browsing the lives and minds of the men in gay pornography

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June can be the cruelest month in London . . . if you originally come from Spain. At this point in the year, most cities in the Iberian Peninsula showcase a splendid sun: a warning of the blazing summer that is to come.

But this was not the case in the gayish Soho district. It was a rainy and chilly afternoon as I hurried along, weaving my way through the crowded Shaftesbury Avenue. I was late for my coffee with Robbie Rojo, a tanned and good-looking expat from Cadiz who I knew well from the internet. Still, I had almost no knowledge of him. This is usually the case with porn stars. If you have seen them in action, you know very intimate details about them, but you have almost no idea about who they really are. “Will his demeanor be as wild as his performances on screen?”, I wondered as I looked for him in the Starbucks of Wardour Street.

What brought us together on that gray London day were intellectual concerns. For a long time, men have commercialized the female body through the media, especially in porn. A Netflix show, Hot Girls Wanted, has recently brought many of these stories to light. But what about those men who become objects of pleasure for other men? “Who is the person behind the body? How do you live your life when you become an object of desire?”, I asked Robbie on Facebook. He found my highbrow doubts amusing. He was the first of many. Over the past year, I have been in touch with a good number of gay porn stars. Much maligned sometimes, yet also secretly imitated and revered, these men had many things to say about the ups and downs of a profession greatly transformed by the internet in recent years.

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Ideas
by Chris Orlet

Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse

A forgotten masterpiece of new journalism

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Among the overlooked gems of the influential but short-lived genre known as New Journalism is the curious account of the violent conflict between a small band of country hippies and local businessmen in rural Missouri in the spring of 1972. Uniquely evocative of its era, Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse by Joe Eszterhas is set in the waning days of the war in Vietnam as America’s heartland is riding its last great wave of prosperity. Within two to three decades, countless Midwestern towns would be decimated by the 1980s farm crisis, the loss of good paying (read: union) manufacturing jobs, and the methamphetamine and heroin epidemics.

At the time, however, town elders in villages like Harrisonville, Missouri were focused on a more tangible enemy in the guise of a few shaggy-haired, weed-smoking ne’er-do-wells — many of whom were disillusioned Vietnam vets — instead of rising land prices, mounting debt, disastrous trade policies, and the rise of corporate agriculture. More… “Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse“

Ideas
by Denise Agosto

Exchanging Notes

On university teaching (and learning) in China

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Graduation week has special meaning to me as a university professor: It signals the end of my time with my students and the beginning of their new professional careers. As we end the academic year, I am remembering graduation week last summer. I spent part of my sabbatical from my university in Philadelphia at Sun Yat-sen University in the Guangdong province of southern China. The Sun Yat-sen University campus looks a lot like my own university campus during graduation time, with students clad in black graduation gowns milling around campus, many carrying bouquets of flowers and followed by misty-eyed parents and grandparents who keep stopping to snap pictures and take videos of their darling offspring. (And who can blame them for being so proud? I wept openly with pride throughout both of my children’s preschool graduations, and all they had to do to graduate was show up to class and not bite the other children.)

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Beyond Words
by Kelly Cherry

Absolutely Sweat the Small Stuff

Little things make a big difference

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You have no choice. There is no way around it. “It” being the small stuff. And if you can learn to love it, you will be happier. Face it: the big stuff is surrounded by the small stuff, to all of which you must attend. You cannot back out. You cannot trust someone else to do it for you. It comes with the job. It is your job. Sad to say, copy editors make mistakes. Even sadder to say, almost no one now knows the difference between “lie” and “lay.” Television reporters have destroyed it. Even English professors get “lie” and “lay” wrong regularly. Moreover, if you want somebody to understand what you have written, you must employ commas. Saddest of all, a complete sentence is not an incomplete sentence. (Though I sometimes write is if it were.) Oh, it goes on and on, this ravaged language of ours, the discarded punctuation — “Hello John” is not an address because it lacks the comma of address, to wit, “Hello, John” — the misspelling, the objects of preposition, the elegance sacrificed, the logic washed away and languishing beside a rope of weed next to a dying pond. How have we arrived at this woebegone place, this place where nobody knows grammar, this wasteland, this last, best place before we drive off the map? STOP RIGHT HERE. GET OUT OF THE CAR. GET READY TO TAKE NOTES. Without grammar, you are lost. With it, and only with it, you will be able to continue. To get where you want to go.

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Ideas
by John L. Micek

A Theory of Game Theory

Wine glasses and other things that made the band great

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When Donnette Thayer thinks about the definitive moment of playing in Game Theory — the much-beloved, if woefully underappreciated, San Francisco pop band in which she held down guitar and vocal duties from 1986 to 1988 — she thinks about the wine glasses.

Thayer, the late Game Theory frontman Scott Miller, and producer Mitch Easter were listening to the finished tracks on the band’s final album, Two Steps from the Middle Ages, when their review of the L.P. opening, “Room for One More,” was interrupted by a studio employee putting away stemmed wine glasses.

As the glasses clinked together, “they made the most beautiful, bell-like sound that fell into the track like it belonged there,” Thayer recalled in a written interview.

She told Easter, best known for producing R.E.M.’s debut E.P., Chronic Town, and its first two albums, Murmur and Reckoning, that they had to find a way to add the glasses to the track.

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Ideas
by Adam Golaski

There’s a Ghost Behind You

A review of the latest Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James

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If you’re a character in The Ring (’02) and you watch Samara’s psychically imprinted video cassette, you will receive shortly thereafter a phone call. “Hello,” you’ll say, because that’s how people answered the a phone at the turn of the millennium, and a voice will reply, “Seven days.” You’ll either be perplexed and/or dismissive — “a prank call” — or you’ll shudder because you know you have but seven days to live unless you can overlook the ethical — nay, moral — implications and show the video to someone else who’ll then themselves have a week to resolve the same dilemma.

Night (or Curse) of the Demon (’57) is about an easily insulted warlock who murders rivals with a slip of paper inscribed with runic characters; if said paper is passed by the warlock without the victim’s knowledge, the victim is pursued by a demon for three days, then killed — unless he can return the paper to the warlock without the warlock’s knowledge. Maybe you’ve sung along with Richard O’Brien and Miss Strawberry Time’s lips at the start of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (’75): “Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes / And passing them uses lots of skill.” You’ll be happy to know that Dana Andrews, before his three days are up, passes the runes to the warlock.

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Pop Studies
by Byshera Williams

Flipping the Script

Get Out, blackness, and horror

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I don’t watch horror movies. Most of them involve demons, too much gore, and unrealistic stupidity that makes you think that the characters must have wanted to get murdered by the serial killer. I also don’t care for the trope of the black character (usually a man) dying first. But once your Twitter is being flooded with everyone talking about a film, it becomes something that you have to see. There was something about Get Out that seemed more complex and even more dangerous than the average man-in-mask-chasing-teens-through-woods kind of movie.

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