Alison Lurie

By: Joshua Glenn

Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo’s White Noise — were penned by a novelist who’d done short time […]

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Odd Cameos

By: Joshua Glenn

I’ve been watching a lot of movies on my desktop, lately, via Netflix: Watch Instantly. Works great. The only problem is, the selection is quite limited, so I end up watching movies I’ve never heard […]

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Laylah Ali: Doodler

By: Joshua Glenn

Another postscript to Matthew Battles’ meditation on doodling. I originally wrote this item for Laylah Ali: 5 Responses to 5 Paintings, an exhibition brochure published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2002. *** Late […]

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Gary Cooper on Doodling

By: Joshua Glenn

Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be “pixillated” — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes […]

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OGXers in all but name

By: Joshua Glenn

In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 […]

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Double Exposure (7): Free-Range Children

By: Joshua Glenn

“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]

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Double Exposure (6) — Food Fight

By: Joshua Glenn

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]

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René Goscinny

By: Joshua Glenn

Unlike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault, exact contemporaries of his who were merely inspired by pop culture, the French-born comics writer RENÉ GOSCINNY (1926-77) cranked the stuff out. Les Aventures d’Astérix, which he authored (and Albert […]

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