For those like biologist Christopher Murray who has spent decades closely studying alligators, it's high time to move past their reputation as cold-hearted killers and recognise the varied roles they're playing as caring and constructive ecosystem engineers. While the cute, herbivorous beaver is widely celebrated for stewarding temperate wetlands, it is the "gnarly swamp monsters" who deserve plaudits in the southeastern United States and many other places, says Murray, associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "I think we're just beginning to understand that crocodilians, in general, and specifically alligators, do a lot more good than we think."
When I first knew myself, there were only two of us. Me and the other, and that was it. That was our entire universe. I could see nothing in front of me, I perceived nothing except this single other thing surrounding me on all sides. So I called it just that, nothingness, but not emptiness. No place was empty of it. I was always staring at nothing, and nothing was staring back at me. There was little else to do.
When it was just the two of us, we were not hot before cold, light after dark, yin balancing yang. We were opposites, as different as two things can possibly be, but the world was far too simple then to allow for anything more. Features would come later, when many other things also existed to provide a context for such nuances.
As fans of the genre know, horror is often about borders—between life and death, the human and the monstrous, the known and the unknown. The new anthology Global Indigenous Horror, edited by scholar and poet Naomi Simone Borwein, invites readers to consider how horror can become something more fluid—less about containment than about transformation and exploration.
So the recent release (in paperback) of the 600-page biography Kubrick: An Odyssey would seem to be mammoth overkill. But Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams, building on their previous studies of the filmmaker, along with twenty-nine dense pages of sources and a lucid chronology of Kubrick’s doings, generate plenty of rewarding insights into an unparalleled body of work.
But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page.