- An Editor Has Her Say: What is The Straddler?
Our hope is to provide a venue for work that understands the importance of its context.
- An Editor Has His Say: What is The Straddler?
Criticism largely misses the point.- Enough of Your Yankee Bloodshed by Dan Monaco
Appearing within a year of the Civil War's beginning, it is difficult not to read Emily Dickinson's Victory comes late— as a response both to the war and to the national and religious ideologies which underlay both sides' (but of particular importance for Dickinson, the North's) efforts in that war.
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Poetry by William O'Hara, Elizabeth Murphy, and Frank Arthor Drake
- Going Places: Fiction by Greg Bennetts
How did this happen? Must trace thoughts backwards…back before Atlantic City…back before pending trial…sometime after the birth of disco (but how long?). Must be a reason for what it was that went wrong—or at least someone to blame for part (ideally all) of the troubles.
- Let the Rhythm (and Melody) hit 'em:
3 Communiqués from Classical Music's Long March
I think there is still hope. The problem is, does [classical] music have any meaning in and towards society?
- Painting by Mark Johnson
- The Straddler Review: American Gangster, The Crime You Need When the Mob is Not Enough
The American gangster film is itself symptomatic of life under American capitalism. The dynamic insecurity that American capitalism produces has a certain excitement about it; but, over the long haul, this excitement really only remains invigorating for the winners, and it is precisely the winners who are most insulated from any real pain that instability produces. The gangster film—with its celebration of extravagant wealth, life outside the law, violence, amoral entrepreneurism, unfettered capitalism writ large, and stock morality in its ninety-nine-cent-store "tragedies"—is a tonic, but a paradoxical one. It is a way to escape by enmeshing yourself further into the very logic that ails you.