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Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. . . . He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hun…

The only movie theaters that were worth anything, said Charly Cruz, were the old ones, remember them? those huge theaters where your heart leaped when they turned out the lights. Those places were great, they were real movie theaters, more like churches than anything else, high ceilings, red curtai…

Is there an honorable objection to the serious, humanistic study of film? The idea of humanities is, grammatically and institutionally, fixed in the plural. Thoreau is the only writer I know who uses the singular of ''humanities" to refer to a kind of knowledge. His speaking of a humanity is a part…

[...] But how can renewal come about? -- the perennial question of reformers and revolutionaries, of anyone who wants to start over, who wants another chance. Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the wor…

[...] I have had occasion in speaking of the career of Othello to invoke Montaigne's horrified fascination by the being's horror of itself, as if to say: life is human hard, but then let us not burden it further by choosing tragically to call it tragic where we are free to choose otherwise. I under…