Expanding Eyes: The Newsletter

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Last week’s newsletter about that yearning for the lost past that we call nostalgia set me to thinking about a symmetrical yearning in the other…
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What is the use of nostalgia, this yearning over the vanished past, this clinging to what is gone and will not come again? On Mother’s Day, I stood over…
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Last week, at a concert, an amiable parking lot attendant thanked us for being more pleasant to deal with than his previous customer. He offered no…
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The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers, has appeared more or less in conjunction with Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23, the connection being that the…
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Last week I raised the issue of the frequent, sometimes intense disapproval of popular storytelling in our time: of the “category fiction” that sells…
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In the previous newsletter, I quoted the great fantasist Ursula Le Guin’s disparaging remarks about what is commonly called formula fiction or category…
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Here there be dragons. According to a common piece of folklore, that inscription appears at the margins of maps in the olden days. What it really…
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The first rule in the Manual for Quest Adventures is, “Always leave the beaten path and get lost in the woods”—a rule that counts double for April…
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The release of a new Pixar animated feature—to me as welcome an event as the appearance of the daffodils in the front yard, and for much the same…
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For two years of a pandemic, we have been isolated from one another. John Donne said that no one is an island, but we have all been castaways…
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Last week, I wrote about the role that chance plays in our lives, for better or worse. Chance obligingly proceeded to provide me with examples. A writer…
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Last week’s newsletter was about the conflict between our desire to create an identity and a life for ourselves and those forces that resist the human…
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© 2022 Michael Dolzani
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