meaning | The Smart Set

Cutting Up

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this […]

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Dysmorphia, Degenerate Art, and the Dormancy of Toxic Thoughts

Francesca Spiegel — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 11:23:48 +0000

In 1910, a successful bacteriologist from Denmark put his medical practice on hold to focus on hindering the progress of expressionist art. Carl Julius Salomonsen thought that modernism in all its forms was pathological. Defective eyesight, he argued, was to blame for expressionist aesthetics. He termed it “ophthalmic psychosis,” and designated cubism and Dada poetry […]

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Banished Words

Jerry DeNuccio — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:12:43 +0000

As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United […]

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Always the Optimist

Stefany Anne Golberg — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:12:43 +0000

The recently deceased Václav Havel — Czech writer, political dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic — wrote some very funny plays. Living through the dark times of communist Czechoslovakia, Havel was committed to keeping a sense of humor. Laughter, he felt, was not just an antidote to misery, an escape; it was a […]

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What’s in a Word?

Jessa Crispin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:12:43 +0000

“Feminism is not dead.” If this is the sentence Sylvia Walby was forced to use to open her book The Future of Feminism, it casts doubt that the argument that follows will be persuasive. It carries the tone of defensiveness, of exasperation, of stomping your foot. Of “You guys.” The Future of Feminism by Sylvia Walby. […]

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The Home Front

Jessa Crispin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:12:43 +0000

There are two lives I’d like to lead. One has opera. It is an urban life, a European life, with ballet and pastry and sleeper cars on Russian trains and holding hands with the fella along the banks of the Danube. It involves needing extra pages in my passport. Radical Homemaking: Reclaiming Domesticity from a […]

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