Unchosen Temples

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?” These questions are posed in the broken English of Remy Maranthe, one of the Wheelchair Assassins who populate David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. After Canada is forced into the trans-national Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.!), secession movements arise in Quebec, the Assassins among them. Maranthe is a double-double agent who reports to Hugh Steeply, a cross-dressing agent for the Office... Read more

Unchosen Temples

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Dark Music

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Putting “film noir” and “musical” in the same sentence may seem absurd. If any film genre is sunlight and sentiment, seething with clappy optimism, it’s the musical. And noir is something different. Sheri Biesen’s Music in the Shadows shows that the two forms have cohabited for decades: “The atmospheric world of the ‘noir musical’ was characterized by smoke, shadows, and moody strains of jazz and blues. . . . Storylines involved antiheroes—tormented performers and musicians—battling obsession and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.... Read more

Dark Music

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Sacrament of the Suffering Body

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Felecia Wright McDuffie’s To Our Bodies Turn We Then is a study of Donne’s understanding of the body as “word and sacrament.” Drawing from Donne’s poetry, sermons, and prose writing, she summarizes Donne’s view of the human body as created, fallen, redeemed, and recreated. All along the way, McDuffie exposes Donne’s eccentric views, arrestingly presented. Regarding the created body, for instance, “Donne argues against the traditional view that the body is ‘enlivened’ by the soul.” Rather, “he claims that the... Read more

The Center