Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers...
In 1904, University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman cooked up the idea of starting a magazine whose mission would be guided by new books and the inquiries they provoked about the world of literature and the world at large. Though...
After a wretched, wakeful night, my hot head buzzing with annoyance, I sat squirming in my study waiting for Ollie to arrive. At nine he put his head in, smiling with his usual greeting, “How are we doing, Andy?”
I gazed down at my boss’s lifeless body and was gripped by a queasy feeling. Was it horror? Remorse? Arousal? No. It was something much worse: inadequacy.
Deep inside our eyes, next to the dark velvet lake of the aqua vitreous, are cones and rods. The rods allow us to see in the gloaming, but only in grayscale. The cones are responsible for color, but they need light to work.
Every piece in its frame, behind glass, is really two works. There’s the rayograph, its vaporous, everyday shapes drifting across the once light-sensitive paper. And over it, caught in the glass, a spontaneous portrait of the viewer...
