A Website of the Radical Imagination
Charles Keil emailed First of the Month a series of essays, notes and poems during, and immediately after, the war in Kosovo. Keil’s messages were marked by his determination to keep thinking — and feeling — in the face of fascism. Here are excerpts from his communications. April 29 A month into this war against … Read more
David Horowitz, still here, has lately fashioned himself into a martyr for Free Speech. He composed an ad in opposition to the idea of reparation payments for the United States’ part in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade; tried, with mixed success, to place the ad in various college newspapers; and then spun that mixed success … Read more
What follows are remembrances of Amiri Baraka by First writers and readers (new and old). While there’s nothing official about this tribute, everyone who contributed hopes it might serve as a comfort and/or calmative to Baraka’s wife Amina and his sons and daughters. Baraka was a brick for the bunch who started First … Read more
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.” The video shows Swift—a young … Read more
Questlove says it all well. American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general—which has defaulted into hip-hop—is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a … Read more
Sure, I’ll yuck it up with the press about my novel, Oasis of Love, but the truth is if it wasn’t as good as Jonathan Franzen it was at least no worse than Jonathan Safran Foer, that cocksucker, vegetarian, limp-wrist, he’s never saved hundreds of Yazidis on a hill, he’s never bombed the shit out … Read more
The unreliable narrator is a notable feature of the modern novel. The sophisticated reader is expected to pick up clues (planted by the novelist as distinguished from the narrator) in order to correct whatever false impressions he or she receives from the narration. The novelist forgoes the privilege of omniscient narration to awaken the reader … Read more