• Footnotes: On St. Ives, Education, and Death by Andrew Woods

    Too many books are printed in St. Ives. I came to this conclusion as I harvested publication details for the bibliography of my latest paper. Students and scholars alike dread the tedious duty of transcribing this information—from the name of publishers to the year of publication—into the footnotes and reference lists of their essays. And,…

  • Judging by the Seminar: On Buses and Fascism by Andrew Woods

    Most people do not place much faith in bus schedules. Congestion and traffic lights always conspire to delay buses by five minutes or more. When I moved to London, Ontario, I learnt quite swiftly that the arrival and departure of buses in this city do not follow any logical system. At least their randomness allows…

  • Powell’s Bookmarks: On Leaving Portland by Andrew Woods

    Powell’s Bookmarks: On Leaving Portland by Andrew Woods

    A few weeks ago, I re-watched the 2002 Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, which seemed to be playing at the local cinema as part of a Nicholas Cage retrospective. Cage plays the screenwriter Kaufman as he struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s mesmerizing book The Orchid Thief into a movie. The structure of the…

  • In Defense of Laggardism by Andrew Woods

    In Defense of Laggardism by Andrew Woods

          “I KNOW WHEN I’M BEING CATERED TO, I KNOW WHEN I’M BEING CATERED TO, I WILL NOT SETTLE FOR THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR.” Car Seat Headrest, “Not What I Needed.” Marshall McLuhan’s “Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity” appeared frequently on my graduate school seminar syllabi. My professors believed that it…

José Guadalupe Posada