Writing is, as Joan Didion states in her essay “Why I Write,” “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” In forming words into sentences, stringing them into paragraphs, and lacing those into chapters of books, a writer participates in a sort of coercion. The writer’s goal is to show something to the reader through force of talent. Books, however, should...
Culture
POETRY: Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry of exploitation impoverishes the reading experience
The National Book Award selection panel pulled no punches with their poetry winner this year. But Daniel Borzutzky’s achievement was a political victory, not a poetic one. In “The Performance of Becoming Human,” Daniel Borzutzky’s National Book Award-winning collection, poetry is a political weapon, a bombshell meant to explode Americans’ delusions about their privileged position in the world, and to...
FICTION: Life turned literature loses steam in Whitehead’s historical novel
Enslaved, abandoned, bloodied, shackled, but never conquered. This is Cora, a slave picking cotton in antebellum Georgia, an escapee disappearing into assumed identities, a free woman emerging in the far north. Colson Whitehead uses historical, pre-Civil War America as a backdrop for Cora’s story, but his plot hinges on a highly-fictional version of the Underground Railroad: his characters escape...
Choir and orchestra perform Handel’s ‘Messiah’
The Hillsdale College Choir, Chamber Choir, and Symphony Orchestra will perform George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” at College Baptist Church Dec. 2 through Dec. 4. “’The Messiah’ is a special opportunity and I am very excited to be a part of it,” sophomore Alex Pankow, a member of the chorus, said. The choirs and orchestra have joined to perform the...
