by Nerdy Spice

Homeland Recap: 5×06 “Parabiosis”

After the events of this past weekend, it seems a little strange, and frivolous even, to recap a soap opera about CIA agents chasing down terrorists in Europe. I thought for awhile about what to write here—but in the end, this seems like the wrong venue to say anything other than that our thoughts are with the people of Paris and Beirut.

Because the episode wasn’t particularly violent or scary, I am comfortable posting about it today, with the side note that this recap will attempt (as we always try to attempt) to highlight any ways in which this episode might encourage assumptions that we should instead be questioning. And with that, on to the recap.

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by Janes

Euripides + Britney Spears = Feminist Manifesto in Rachel Cusk’s “Medea”

“Why are you watching me? Do you enjoy watching me suffer?… I am all the parts of you that you disown. I take on all of the punishment you abdicate. That’s why you’re here.”

Rachel Cusk’s modern interpretation of Euripides’s classic tragedy is a lot of things—consistently compelling, politically engaged, extremely loud—but subtle it is not. While I am nothing if not a fan of tendentiously feminist literature, sociopolitical themes are much more effective when they are a little more subliminal. In Medea, characters break the fourth wall to explicitly implicate the audience in Medea’s taboo desire to murder her children not once, but twice, and the lack of delicacy dilutes the play’s worthy message. Continue reading →

by Nerdy Spice

Halloween Read: Death with Interruptions, by Jose Saramago

Bewildered, confused, distraught, struggling to control their feelings of nausea, the firement extracted from the mangled remains wretched human bodies that, according to the mathematical logic of the collisions, should have been well and truly dead, but which, despite the seriousness of the injuries and lesions suffered, remained alive and were carried off to hospital, accompanied by the shrill sound of the ambulance sirens.

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