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My new piece in Public Books, “The Female Body of Punk.”

The movement that had acquired definite shape in London and New York City by the end of 1975 was given its name by the American fanzine Punk.Cofounder Legs McNeil explains that the name for the magazine—and soon, the movement—was an act of reclamation. “On TV, if you watched cop shows … when the cops finally catch the mass murderer, they’d say, ‘you dirty Punk.’ It was what your teachers would call you. It meant that you were the lowest. All of us drop-outs and fuck-ups got together and started a movement.”

“Punk” was, then, like “queer,” a strategic reclamation of a slur. One wonders now, however, how aware the founders of Punk and of punk were of the specifically sexualized, feminized history of the term. A “punk” was originally a derogatory term for a female prostitute; in Measure for Measure, Lucio warns Vincentio, “She may be a Puncke: for many of them, are neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife.” By the end of the 17th century, the term had been adapted to mean “a boy or young man kept by an older man as a (typically passive) sexual partner,” and later “a man who is made use of as a sexual partner by another man, esp. by force or coercion”…

My new piece on Public Books.

December 1, 2015 — In the past month we’ve seen two different versions of the same phobic imaginative scenario. In it, a precious and vulnerable space, a space that must be protected, is invaded by an imposter, one in disguise, one who takes advantage of liberal sentimentality to enter under false pretenses and do terrible harm. According to the logic of the scene, the invading agent would, under normal circumstances, have been prevented from entering, but circumstances have arisen that allow him to hide his features, to pose as someone else, to sneak past the barriers….

My new piece in the Chronicle: Has imaginative literature become (again) a scandalous “guilty pleasure” to “read when nobody’s watching”?

My new piece “About Elly, About Jane,” about the Jane-Austenian subtext of Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

If About Elly reimagines Antonioni’s film, it also offers – somewhat like Amy Heckerling’s Clueless – a loose retelling of Jane Austen’s great novel Emma…

Forgot to link to this piece of mine in The Toast.

You are known as Queen of the Teasers. Even as a young girl, your wit is likened to a barbed hook hidden within the feathers of a fishing lure. You enjoy composing cruel poems to make your sisters cry. A favorite insult: “You look like the eldest and ugliest of the Bronte sisters today.”

Your closest companion is a pet lamb named Miranda that you bring with you to church and to bed. You write a poem about her that includes the rhyme “Me-ran-der/ Soon to the butcher I must hand her.”

After an emergency appendectomy, you sell your sister your appendix in a bottle, for one pound. It soon smells so much that Nanny must wash it down the loo.

You are legendarily beautiful. When your incredibly wealthy fiancé introduces you to his mother, he declares, “And she can cook, Mummy,” to which she replies faintly, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s too clever.” But in reality, you can make nothing other than fried eggs.

My review in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

FEW SOCIAL PRACTICES now seem more antiquated than the formal duel by swords or pistols. The so-called “judicial duel” became widely practiced in Europe in the early Middle Ages, influenced by Homeric and other Classical accounts of single combat, and survived more or less intact for centuries. Over the same span, duels appeared endlessly in stories, paintings, poems, and novels. Duels seem “particularly hospitable to literature,” John Leigh proposes in his lucid and thorough new study, because they are “self-contained dramas”; “the most deliberate, self-conscious of acts,” the “ritualized combat” of a duel stipulates a consistent pattern of word and deed….