America the Beautiful & Other Indictments

Sinkholes are everywhere now – Whimsical, satirical, often biting and surreal, these verbal lightning flashes illuminate our contingent, federated selves, the intersectionalities of our strange interpenetrations. The Europeans have a word for this: feuilleton, which was originally a supplement attached to editorial pages of French newspapers, and later in German and Middle-European newspapers. They can be anything from political or non-political gossip and news, surreal short-short stories, art criticism, reports on the latest fashions, philosophic epigrams to charades and other literary pieces in the guise of trifles. Practitioners have included George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, Capek, and Kafka. They’ve been in and out of fashion, and back in again, and in Eastern Europe were often written to side-step censorship.