Category: IMPERIAL REVIEWER

IMPERIAL REVIEWER, po-uh-treeLeave a comment

INCREDIBLY CAPABLE CRONE: a book review

Steven Augustine

Lizibeta Snitt’s surprisingly popular  Incredibly Capable Crone  series is a trilogy of graphic novels in free verse. The title character is a woman beyond a certain age, a battle-hardened dissident who cut her street fighting teeth on the front lines of Nixon’s crackdown, against campus protests, in the 1970s. TZ (the Crone, who remains otherwise nameless) wasn’t at Kent State the day the National Guard fired live rounds into crowds of student protesters (killing four), but she could have been, being roughly student age at the time.  Like Batman,  and years before she took on the identity of the Incredibly Capable … Continue reading INCREDIBLY CAPABLE CRONE: a book review

IMPERIAL REVIEWER, the lash or the cuddle: reviewsLeave a comment

KUDOS, by RACHEL CUSK: a Book Review

Steven Augustine

Too often, when I fall for the trick of being seduced into buying a new novel or collection of short stories, I get the feeling, while reading the book, that I’m grading the dissertation of a clever student who’s trying to get away with using glib rhetorical strategies to hide the fact that she/he is not in control of the material. That he/she doesn’t even fully understand the topic and hasn’t developed coherent enough opinions on the topic to convert those opinions, via his/her research and personal outlook, into a dissertation worth reading; the dissertation is, in other words,  a … Continue reading KUDOS, by RACHEL CUSK: a Book Review

FIGHT THE STUPID, IMPERIAL REVIEWER, well i didn't see THAT comingLeave a comment

CHILDREN of the NEVALUTION

Steven Augustine

Will this Inspire or Depress you? John Cassavetes’ film, FACES, came out in 1968, when I was nine, and I first saw it in 1980 or so, when I was 21, and it seemed to point, if not to a smarter popular culture, then to the possibility of a thriving subculture of frank, intelligent expression in The Arts. Already a minority within a minority (a Matryoshka doll of identity) I didn’t mind the idea of spending the rest of my adult life among the marginals capable of enjoying, or even making, a film like FACES (or William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, also from 1968); … Continue reading CHILDREN of the NEVALUTION