Category: Uncategorized

First, on receipt of Buck Downs’ The Sound of Music (referred to here in this reverie as SOM), the collector reckons with the cover art, Isaac Duchemin’s Tabula Asinaria. Engraved in 1612, Tabula depicts a raucous scene of servants bathing donkeys; donkeys invading the estate to pull down curtains, destroy lutes & horns and desecrate…

StartleResponse.com, ever curious about creative process, engages here with the culturally generous Chris Mason and Mark Jickling, whose Old Songs translated and set to music in 2024 a beguiling gathering of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Many Sapphos is a little bit folk, a little bit rock ’n’ roll, and a good deal of cross-era raucousness.  An…

Today at StartleResponse we give mad, heartfelt props to a formative influencer, an undersung educator of the variegated hordes picking up prereqs at the estimable UNC-Chapel Hill. I speak of G.O.A.T. professor Dr. David J. Halperin (DDJH), who taught an introductory course in Judaism when I was an undergrad back in the day, circa 1990….

Boris Dralyuk’s translation of Yevtushenko’s “People” expounds that in mortality, “it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.” With the entry of Mole Fizz into circulation among word lovers, we move slightly closer to the worlds we lost in Michael Ball. I suspect they were vast and many, and perhaps sometimes terrifying but also euphoric….

Around the time COVID lockdown lifted and we extenuated souls began venturing out to rediscover our masked community, I heard Old Songs perform from Callimachus at Normals Books & Records in Baltimore. I have since practically worn that CD out in my Toyota Tacoma sound system. That music is pure solace as I drive home…

from The Rest of Your Unnatural Life, by Heather Fuller Sherilee lingered in the ocean until the man holding binoculars on the pier retreated to the dockside bar. Each time a wave broke against her torso, her bikini with the side string ties slipped to expose the cleft of her ass or a crescent of…

Ghost stories have enthralled me since I was a kid. My home state North Carolina is rife with them. It is, after all, the locus of the notorious Devil’s Tramping Ground near Siler City and the Uhwarrie Forest “lights.” Even where I live in Carolina Beach, locals report a rotating cadre of apparitions haunting the…

from The Rest of Your Unnatural Life, by Heather Fuller The ear on the sidewalk outside the emergency room was unequivocally human. Its helix curved elegantly into a pert lobe bearing the dimple of a retracted piercing. The triangular fossa still framed the shadows of the ear’s superior contours. Even the tragus remained intact, implying…

TODAY at StartleResponse.com we pair an inventive novel by one of the avant-garde’s clarion voices and a sumptuous textile crafted in Japan. Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal appeared inconspicuously in the mail-order listings of Bridge Street Books in 2020, in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Bridge Street was one of my lifelines while…

Today at StartleResponse.com we pay homage to process. StartleResponse.com possesses great reverence for process, the act of methodically and thoughtfully working through an undertaking. That undertaking could be as simple as brewing an espresso or writing a thank-you note. There is something highly satisfying about applying process to these tasks. Do we buy our coffee…