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The Great Escape
April 16, 2013
by Speer Morgan
For over three decades of my life I watched few movies and even less television. I watched so little TV that I told my wife that I had discovered a “new” sitcom called Seinfeld. She just rolled her eyes. Despite …
The Unnatural World
February 12, 2013
by Speer Morgan
The older and more experienced one gets, the closer the zones of the natural and the unnatural become, to the point that one begins to wonder if these categories are of much significance.
Risk
December 10, 2012
by Speer Morgan
In their lives Joyce and Kubrick were consummate risk takers, while the subjects in their art were an entirely different matter. Joyce’s characters, most notably Leopold Bloom, the homo prudens protagonist of Ulysses, often squelch their desire to act, while in Kubrick’s world a person who rises must take a heady tumble. A similar wisdom plays out in the stories, essays and poems in this issue of TMR.
Reinvention
July 24, 2012
by Speer Morgan
The full text of this foreword is not currently available online.
Weird
January 6, 2012
by Speer Morgan
It doesn’t take a genius to point out how weird life can be or, to put it more clearly, how proximate the zones of the normal and the strange can be at almost any moment in our lives. The strange is just an instant or a membrane away, as this issue’s authors point out.
![34.3 (Fall 2011): "Legacy" [Cover art: Mosh Pit 2000 by Dan Witz]](http://www.missourireview.com/archives/files/3403big-150x198.jpg)
Legacy
October 8, 2011
by Speer Morgan
Much of the writing in this issue calls to mind the laws of motion in human life: the power of momentum, mass in motion, as well as friction and inertia in forming the legacies of our lives. What we inherit and how we are acted upon by the world can sometimes influence our direction and fate as much as free will.
Significant Other
July 17, 2011
by Speer Morgan
I sometimes wonder why the best literature so often has a element of unlikelihood: why one of the great novels of the twentieth century is an 800-page description of an ad salesman and a student walking around one day in Dublin; or why one of the defining American classics is about living in a shack on a lake for a couple of years; or why one of the finest English lyric poems is a depiction of an antique urn in a museum. Why is the most memorable stuff so often the miraculous transformation of a seemingly limited subject?
Peril
June 27, 2011
by Speer Morgan
When he was a professor at the University of Missouri, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett began to wonder whether there wasn’t something identifiably different about people in their twenties-if it wasn’t in some ways a unique stage of life.
Blindsided
December 1, 2010
by Speer Morgan
Because much of the literature about this subject is by nature corrective-offering solutions easy answers and descriptions of “stages”-it is oddly refreshing and useful to see an author describe and fully recognize the derangement of grief and trauma. At least someone who is suffering such agony knows she isn’t the only crazy person out there.
The Shadow
September 1, 2010
by Speer Morgan
While Jung gave a name to an amoral and potentially “dark” side of the mind, the idea is of course as old as dragons, devils and demons. The pulp fiction, comic-book series and radio show The Shadow became an often-imitated model for popular dramatizations of “what evil lurks in the hearts of men” and the trickster figure who fights against it. Several of the contributors to this issue explore different corners of the dark or destructive forces in human nature.
Crash
June 1, 2010
by Speer Morgan
The differences between generations-the Lost Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y and Z (where do we go next?)-is a popular subject full of questionable simplifications. Sweeping statements about age groups in different eras are at best elusive, due to both sudden changes in history and the diversity at any given time among locales, classes, ethnicities and personalities. Lately one of the often discussed issues concerning the Millennial Generation is whether they suffer from hyper-parenting, with their perennially in-touch parents not giving them enough freedom to develop independence. They need to actually be allowed to make a few mistakes, the argument goes, in order to be inoculated against what to avoid.
Uncharted
March 1, 2010
by Speer Morgan
In Fiona McFarlane’s Jeffrey E. Smith Prize-winning story “Exotic Animal Medicine,” a young Australian woman veterinarian in England undergoes a disturbing set of incidents on the day that she marries her English boyfriend and presumably starts a new life. Midway …
The Questionable Past
December 1, 2009
by Speer Morgan
In the company of old friends, what surprises me is not forgetting shared experiences or remembering them slightly differently but the fact that we have anything like the same memories. Perhaps that is a simple confession of aging. Yet psychologists have grown increasingly skeptical about the human ability to remember and accurately recount the distant past, just as historiographers are dubious about our understanding of history. This declining faith in our grasp of “what really happened” has taken a particularly dramatic dive over the past century.
Demons
September 1, 2009
by Speer Morgan
Cheever’s life suggests how often not just writers but most of us suffer from demons. Whether or not they are as dramatic as Cheever’s, they can be both commonplace and cumbersome in our lives. The modern word “demon” comes from a proto-European term for “god” or “celestial,” yet its different usages over time refer to a variety of hidden powers or forces, from the higher self of Greek philosophy to the destructive demons of medieval Christianity. For Freud, demons were impulses arising from repression. Modern philosophers use the term “Morton’s demon” to describe our surprisingly frequent tendency not to see what belies our currently held biases.
The Uncertain Witness
June 1, 2009
by Speer Morgan
…For these reasons, literature can sometimes describe highly charged events more compellingly and with a truer sense of emotion than history or even eyewitness narratives. By admitting to its own fiction and slanted reconstruction, literature paradoxically serves as the best of witnesses.
A Hundred Visions and Revisions
June 1, 2009
by Speer Morgan
Several of the pieces in this issue reflect directly or indirectly on artists and their potential influence on us. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Munro Country” tells of her own amazement as a young writer when her model author, Alice Munro, wrote …
Hope
December 1, 2008
by Speer Morgan
So remember — the guy who paid for the American Revolution went broke in real estate speculation, inspiring the bill that will keep you out of jail when you go broke. Be happy.
Pick Your Poison
September 1, 2008
by Speer Morgan
Why are flaw and conflict so basic to literature? Literature, like sport, starts by meaningfully enacting conflict and somehow dealing with it. Conflict is basic to literature because it is basic to life. Without it, the airplane usually won’t fly. We are meaning-making creatures with little tolerance for chaos. It’s a platitude but also true that literature, like religion, gives shape and meaning to the struggle of living.
Agonists
June 1, 2008
by Speer Morgan
Sisyphus is a mythical example of one agile enough to defy fate, at least for a while. He is frequently thought to be an archetype of hopelessness and the futility of life because he was ultimately condemned to an eternity of pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll down again. Yet Sisyphus was a powerful rogue, the founder of a city, successful in love with mortals and immortals, capable of talking his way out of trouble with angry gods and once even out of Hades. A destiny of ongoing effort for such a resolute heavy hitter seems a natural fate-and also not a bad deal.
Off the Grid
March 1, 2008
by Speer Morgan
Going off the grid can result not just in changes of behavior and attitude but also in discovery. Many of the breakthroughs in science and technology have been the outcome of one kind of research or work-often with a modest goal-becoming something that no one could ever have guessed.
Fractured
December 1, 2007
by Speer Morgan
In one of his many helpful letters of advice sent to young actors — published for the first time in this issue — Laurence Olivier describes the essence of a Shakespearean tragic character as a “perfect statue of a man,” made vulnerable by a significant flaw that finally will destroy him. Olivier’s remark calls to mind a quality of literature and indeed of all the arts: they relate to the core of an individual, the human, not the “statue,” and they articulate danger. The masks of literature, like those of primitive art and ritual, suggest “the other” that lies below the social being — the primal conflicts, the animal, and the sometimes scary forces within us.
Foreword: “Exposed”
September 1, 2007
by Speer Morgan
Along with a surprising number of other artists, George Grosz thrived in the unlikely world of the Weimar Republic. His cartoons and watercolors pierce the facades of society, government, the military and the church. They exemplify the fervid bohemian moment between the wars in Germany and Austria, also remembered in such work as Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which was later to be the source of the play Cabaret.
Truth in Fancy
June 1, 2007
by Speer Morgan
The history of the United States is as replete with mistakes and distasters as that of other nations, despite our not unusual tendency to admire ourselves and view the past through a haze of nostalgia. I do it myself.
Love and Loneliness
March 1, 2007
by Speer Morgan
Love and loneliness, paradox, uncertainty, nonfiction necessarily tinged with fiction–this issue’s authors offer the lumpiness, conflict, illogic, and ambiguity of life as lived.