Essay: “Parody in Philip Larkin: A Trick Which Dispels Fear” by Charles Holdefer

“Books are a load of crap.” This is the conclusion of Philip Larkin’s ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. In this poem, a disillusioned reader recounts how literature has let him down. Nowadays he prefers to get drunk. In three short stanzas, he describes a lifetime of searching and changing tastes and, in the process, deftly […]

Non-Fiction: “Army Math: Bringing it all Back Home” by Sam Mills

“I see a black light.” – Composer Joseph Haydn’s last words – and he had never seen a lava lamp. Word went around Madison that summer of 1970 that something “heavy” was “coming down.” Already, the New Year’s Gang, a local terror cell of SDS Weather Underground, had bombed both locations of campus ROTC and […]