I mean, it’s 2020, for gods’ sake. We’re in the middle of a plague. We’re struggling through the turbulent last months of a demagogue’s ascendancy. If there is any time in post-Berlin Wall history when we should be glaringly aware that the past is present, and is also horrific, it should surely be NOW—and yet, in this year of hellscape 2020, there are still people … Continue reading why are we still fetishizing the past?
One hundred years ago today, a teenage boy out to cool off drifted over an invisible line in the water, just off a beach just north of the neighborhood where I grew up. Most of us can’t see lines in the water, unless it’s the line that marks the sandbank, or where the water gets deeper. Nothing else is visible. It wasn’t visible to Eugene … Continue reading July of Blood: 100 Years Since the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago
There’s something marvelous about reading works from the Spanish Golden Age, and from the English Early Modern: they are incredibly modern. It’s one of the things that has always drawn me to Shakespeare; it’s drawn me to Sor Juana, too, and to adaptions and re/imaginings of her work and life. So—in a very rare case of Facebook getting its advertising right—when I saw a sponsored … Continue reading Fuente Ovejuna at City Lit: the Past is Present
Essentially a Nerd 