Staying faithful to Earth

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Home is where the haunt is

Ghosts, like people, tend to be attached to a particular place. The term ‘to haunt’ in English has three linked meanings. First, for a ghost to manifest itself at a place regularly: a grey lady who haunts the chapel. Second, to be persistently and disturbingly present in someone’s mind: the sight haunted me for years. Third, to frequent a place often and repeatedly: that’s his old haunt. Home and haunting go hand in hand. Ghosts don’t haunt an entire city. They haunt a specific house, a dwelling, usually assumed to be the place where they died.

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Kale

Poetry In her arms she cradles the kale, knowing these are precious days. She stares down lovingly at the kale, who stares back. She’s never sure...

Gay saints

Non-fictionWhat is it that makes cinema, for Pasolini, sacrosanct? The answer lies in his affinity for a painter who made only one fresco. Not only was Caravaggio’s reputation restored by Pasolini’s teacher and mentor, Roberto Longhi, but Caravaggio and Pasolini have the same taste in men. Swarthy, young and savage – as likely to sit for a portrait or engage in a bit of sloppy top as to stick a knife in your ribs. You wouldn’t want to run into his John the Baptist in a dark alley (unless maybe you would). It is not just the revolutionary psychology of Caravaggio’s painting that speaks to Pasolini but his selection of subjects – his sacralisation of the scorned, the unclean, the seething subproletariat both created and rejected by an indifferent urban landscape; Caravaggio’s ‘new kinds of people’.

Believe it or not

IntroductionCultural critic Chuck Klosterman reminds us that ‘any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true – both objectively and subjectively – is habitually provisional.’

A meditation on our planetary kin in the universe

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