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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

Semiotics Mailbag
Dear Théophile: My partner’s sexual praxis might conventionally be characterized as “kinky.” A favorite discursive intervention during foreplay is, “Let’s be someone else tonight.” Is (s)he problematizing core bourgeois paradigms of subjectivity and sexuality, or ...

Colonial Manuscript
Orbit One—Far above my life, one trillion storeys up, above the silver judgement wheels, is a clear civilization, along the sidereal coast, a perpetual glide, where the rapid hearts sleep, where armrest factories puff, “we invite the nervous,” for warm firm handshakes ...

Pop-Tartt
I have just become a part of the publicity campaign for Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History. The book has been demanding my attention—not because of its content, of which I am safely ignorant, but its cover. I had to make a second trip to the bookstore to confirm ...

Semiology and the Cartoon Outdoorsman
The long-running comics-page saga of Mark Trail is certainly one of the most overlooked theoretical treasures of our age. Aside from the popular Sunday installments of this cartoon chef-d’oeuvre, Mark Trail is rarely followed and, to these critics’ knowledge, has never been ...

Chicago
CHICAGO (shi-ka’go) n. American city, lat. 41° 50′ N., long. 87° 38′ W. SYN: three syllables, sounds craving sense; meanings yearned for, drooled, exclaimed, hotly forged, shot and cursed—bellyup in the acres, the buoy has logged itself with sweat and ...

The Sad Edge
He was kitchen drunk again. Times like these he liked to review his life so far. I’ve done well. Hell, I’m a millionaire in 1920 dollars. He had a low coefficient of drag, he quoted Lincoln, looked you square in the eye, had settled down with a female of his species ...

The Earl Butz Farm
ALBION, INDIANA Except for the interpretive center in the trailer of a North American moving van, the Earl Butz Farm, the boyhood home of Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon, is now part of a larger, privately owned farm. The land itself, four hundred acres ...