Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
While the film isn’t without interesting ideas—the notion of an environmental reckoning, for one—these ideas dart, glimmering and mostly unconsidered, through the nets that Aquaman reserves for its preferred but drabber game: the return of the king.
We call this tradition—because why wouldn’t we—our “Filling Out of the Carle Foundation Hospital’s Application for Financial Assistance Christmas Tradition,” or FOCFHAFACT, for short.
What matters here instead is the implicit challenge, the casual middle finger, that the novel tosses off at the rest of the genre.
“I think the water’s boiling, Jes.”
“Can you get that?”
“Caffeine or decaf?”
So, we should ask again, and with renewed urgency: why Lovecraft? In the face of his cultural saturation and manifest awfulness, how do we account for and reckon with his appeal?
All I know about the donut scene in Champaign, Illinois, I owe to a man named Pete.
For a long time, my reading habits resembled a Michael Pollan polemic, if Michael Pollan had been trying to cure the Western diet with genre fiction instead of carrots: Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
Or to put it another way: what happens when marriage comes to be defined by the promise of sex?
I spent a good chunk of my prewriting time for this blog post keeping Satan at bay.
We’re used to standing apart from the places we occupy, fillers and subduers of the earth that we are.
Turning out in droves despite rain and wind and snow, we marched and chanted and beat on bucket-drums and blew on whistles and papered the campus with fliers. We disrupted classes. We shut down buildings.
I do not want to strike. No one wants a strike. But if it comes to it, Jes and I will be on the picket line February 26, bright and early, because at that point we will have no other choice.
Season 11 aired its first episode on January 3 of this year and picks up, sort of, where its predecessor left off. I say sort of advisedly.
Still, having experienced it myself now, I can sympathize with the twinge I’m about to give my many well-meaning English teachers when I divulge this next bit of information.
“Merdarth, general of the Dark Lord’s army, stood, terrified, before the Orb.”
If nothing else then, the Illinois Regional College Fair confirmed for me what I already knew: I would make a terrible salesperson.
The smoothies are revoltingly healthful. One recipe, dubbed “The Beginner,” calls for pear, banana, pineapple, avocado, and a full six cups of kale.
Like any good sci-fi tale, then, Orphan Black is finally far less interested in predicting what might be, than it is in describing what exists now.
The cheese cube relish, while very much not my thing, had a sort of melt-away pickle flavor that was not wholly unpleasant.
Two weeks ago, in the lead-up to a concert, I got to read poetry off a video screen that was larger than the end zone of a football field.
Toward the end of the graduate bible study my wife and I led this past academic year, two things were almost always certain: cheesecakes and IRB forms.
I’ve found that the mundanities of teaching quickly and quietly bleed a name of its import.
But as much as this story would insist that Link is the star of this latest quest, the real star of the show isn’t a person at all. It’s Hyrule itself.
The number nineteen appears with such frequency in this deposition, it begins to feel rehearsed.
The show excels in precisely the same way as its source material: it approaches its subject matter with a pitch-perfect ear for dark humor, and with an impishly ironic attitude toward storytelling.
If this is grace, it’s as lovely as it is disconcerting. It takes the very ugliest of us and says, “I can work with this. Child, I can work with you.”
and when it bursts I imagine in my place a heap of broken bylines allusions clickbaits hottakes jpegs gifs intros outros all spooled out on the floor
If anyone in contemporary America can sympathize with the frustration of first-century Christians awaiting the imminent return of Christ, it’s we Cubs fans.
Specifically, I want to suggest that irrespective of the cloak-and-dagger politics it portrays, The X-Files does an excellent job of exposing our secret pleasure in conspiracy theories.
More crucially, the Time-Turner plot that comprises the latter two-thirds of the play codes almost as a kind of high-level fan-fiction.
