by Gus Mitchell The following piece is my own minor contribution to the “Surrealism Centenary.” I begin with a disavowal of the entire “2024 centenary” enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breton, great though he sometimes was, to continue to define…

by Gus Mitchell Part 1 of this interview can be found here. Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation. His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then,…

by Gus Mitchell Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation. His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly…

by Gus Mitchell (Read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) Everything is content and content is everything. An uncountable noun, like information, content has a monolithic singularity to it. A meme, tweet, image, targeted ad; a song, podcast, TV show or movie on a streaming platform; an explainer, a reaction; clickbait articles, legitimate journalism; bodycam footage of…

by Gus Mitchell This article is from a presentation made for the Rosemary Bechler Inaugural Memorial Lecture, an event organised by DIEM25, of which Rosemary was a founder member. It took place at the Marylebone Theatre in London on January 21st 2024.  That music you just heard is a recording of the Aka People, recorded…

by Gus Mitchell (Read Pt. 1) If there has been a decline in many parts of our culture in the last several years, and if we are increasingly bored by the infinitude of content offered us in exchange, then the blurring of art and content has a lot to do with it. Increasingly, both societally…

by Gus Mitchell In Henry VI, Shakespeare seems to have coined the expression “heart’s content.” The phrasemaking of King Henry is telling: “Her grace in speech”, he says of his Queen, “makes me from wondering, fall to weeping joys. / Such is the fulness of my heart’s content.” Juxtaposing “wondering” to the joyous “fullness” of…

by Gus Mitchell When we hear the constant cry–that we need “better stories”–there is surprisingly little followup. How or where we are going to find them, how are they going to be told? The “how” is the thing. Knowledge, our fetishizing of knowledge, our demand that we have an opinion on every new fact makes…

by Gus Mitchell 1. Art comes out of act. The act of making images, of making sounds, the act of making words and symbols. And these “acts” are really accretions, many individual “actions”, acts in a process, acts which don’t often seem like “acts” at all. The acts of doodling, of scribbling, of sketching, of…

by Gus Mitchell This September marks 50 years since the deaths of three men. One died at the very beginning of the month, in Oxford, one in the middle, in Santiago, and one at the end, in Vienna. Anyone likely to be reading this will have heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died on 2 September…

by Gus Mitchell The idea for this essay came not just from Thoreau, but from a conversation between Professors Robert Pogue Harrison and Andrea Nightingale of Stanford University. That conversation can be heard here. I gratefully recommend it to everyone. 1. Sometime “early in ‘46” Henry David Thoreau sets out to measure the depth of a…

by Gus Mitchell ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’ Henry James apparently spoke these words to his nephew Billy James in 1902. TV personality Mr. Rogers later took it up – with an intriguing preface:…