“The Panic in Needle Park is a 1971 American romantic drama film directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn. The screenplay was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, adapted from the 1966 novel by James Mills. The film portrays life among a group of heroin addicts who hang out in ‘Needle Park’ (then-nickname for Sherman Square on Manhattan‘s Upper West Side near 72nd Street and Broadway). The film is a love story between Bobby (Pacino), a young addict and small-time hustler, and Helen (Kitty Winn), a restless woman who finds Bobby charismatic. She becomes an addict, and life goes downhill for them both as their addictions worsen, eventually leading to a series of betrayals. In New York City, Helen returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Marco, after enduring an unhygienic and inept abortion…

“When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spencer’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that ‘for width of imagination,’ The Lord of the Rings ‘almost beggars parallel.’ Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. … The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel…

“ICalled Him Morgan is a 2016 Swedish produced documentary film written and directed by Kasper Collin which gives an account of the life of and relation between jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and his common-law wife Helen Morgan, later responsible for his murder in February 1972. The documentary was produced over a period of seven years, 2009 – 2016, and edited over a period of three years. Among the participants in I Called Him Morgan are Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, Billy Harper, Judith Johnson, Bennie Maupin, Larry Ridley, Paul West, Larry Reni Thomas, Al Harrison, Charli Persip and Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath. … There are 20 reviews registered at Metacritic. Eight of them are registered as 100/100, and the film has reached a metascore of 90/100. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 96% ‘Certified Fresh’ score based on 52 reviews. The…

“There’s only one historical figure I’ve ever come across who claimed he was hungry, homeless, and happy simultaneously. Given the brashness of his personality and his legacy, it is not surprising that it was Henry Miller who declared that these circumstances colored his existence during his pivotal Paris years. As he roamed the streets of the city, he seesawed between the three states of being and admits he experienced them concurrently more often than not. He was sleeping on sofas and hanging out at cafés hoping a familiar face would stop in to treat him to a croque-monsieur and a glass of wine. In spite of this vagabondage, he claims he was genuinely content because he was writing in a way that excited him for the first time in his life. He also maintained, at least early on, that he didn’t consider himself to be a writer. ‘I am but a man and I…

Occasionally I offer strategies that you can try to see if they work for you. If they do, and not everything works for everybody, then you can add them to your academic writing repertoire. Today I’ve got an exercise designed to support diagnosis of your own writing weaknesses.

In the quiet of your own work space, find a passage of text written by someone other than you. A text which seems to you to be not as well written as it might be. Read the text. Take note of where you think there might be some clunky writing.

Now read it again. Identify the problems.
Here’s a starter list of some things to look for.
• Headings – too many? Not enough? Too vague? Don’t seem to be what the text is about? Too clever by half?
• Meta-commentary – you can’t work out the point of reading this? Where…

“‘Geographically speaking, the Village is only a small part of New York City,’ so states the copy on the side of this remarkable map of the Greenwich Village of 1961 (click the map to enlarge it), which details the restaurants, bars, cafes, apartment buildings, and other notable spots from Washington Street all the way to Cooper Square. This extraordinary illustrated map, drawn and published by cartographer Lawrence Fahey, seems to be aimed at visitors. ‘What is it about the Village that provokes such widespread interest? It stems primarily from the fact that the Village has long been a focus of youthful rebellion and Bohemian life and as such has been the cradle of many innovations in American art, drama, literature, and poetry, the current example of which is ‘Beat’ or ‘Hip’ writing,’ the copy reads. The text on the map reflects its era, containing comments about the relaxed vibe of…

Hudson: A gloom one knows. Dining room.

“Some poets invite us into their homes. W. B. Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee and Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House figure prominently in their poetry while remaining coldly majestic edifices. Not so Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment, whose rooms and objects spark the verbal fireworks of ‘Tender Buttons,’ or W. H. Auden’s Kirchstetten cottage, lovingly displayed from bathroom to attic in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat.’ James Merrill’s Stonington residence plays an intimate role in his work, especially the flame-colored salon in which the poet and his partner contacted the spirit world. Attentive readers of A.R. Ammons could practically draw a map of his backyard at 606 Hanshaw Road, though they’d be hard pressed to describe the inside of the house. Donald Hall’s Eagle Pond farmhouse is a vivid presence in his poems, helped along by copious prose sketches. John Ashbery is not exactly that kind of poet…

The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth‘s conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life (The Blue Marble, 1972 Apollo 17 photograph)

“The Gaia hypothesis/ˈɡaɪ.ə/, also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. The hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal in part for his…