Skip to content

Odds and Ends

From the Magazine

Semiotics Mailbag
September 2012
Issue No. 6
  Dear Théophile: I went to the trade show with one of each of Magnus Bredenbek’s 41 classic types of business leader: a Facilitor, a Blamer, a Denier, an Opportunist, a Passive-Prevaricator, an Aggressive-Prevaricator, a Terroristic-Truculent, a Terroristic ...

Aeroflot ’93: Dispatch from Moscow
Aside from their obvious political consequences, the events of October 3 and 4 in Moscow also contained important meaning for students of pop culture. The primary target of the neo-Bolsheviks’ assault was the Ostankino complex, a television tower and revolving restaurant, from ...

Eulogy: Sun Ra
It would be nice to know that Sun Ra rests comfortably under the ground in North Philly, or wherever it is he’s buried. After all, on one steamed summer of ‘89 day in Lexington, Virginia, this definitive grand old man fixed my car, healed the crotchety engine of my ...

Semiotics Mailbag
August 2012
Issue No. 5
Dear Théophile: A number of books of deconstructive literary criticism, which I very recently borrowed from the Regenstein Library, were recalled. As I never check my mail more than once every two weeks for fear of the inherently terroristic authority of the unexpected ...

Business Punks Rule
It’s Business Punks now. Those words went through my head as I saw a broad-shouldered Armani-suited lifer shove a lesser man aside, striding down the streets of his hard-rocking birthright. The city, being white or at least buying it, always buying it, but shopping smart, ...

Bafflers Behind Bars
The adventures of our editorial staff since the last issue. As most of our readers who live in Chicago know by now, three of the Baffler editors (Greg Lane, “Diamonds” Dave Mulcahey, and me) were arrested the night before Columbus Day and held in one of the city’s ...

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 ...