FADESpace

The Picket Pin and the Plastic Soul: A Limbic Reformation ​The history of the human spirit, much like the traveling circuses of the 1930s, is often a Benzini Brothers production: a frantic, starving spectacle managed by a ruthless internal taskmaster. In Sara Gruen’s Like Water for Elephants, we find a staggering metaphor for the traumatized psyche in the character of August—a charismatic but schizophrenic director who maintains order through the bull hook and the redlight. T

The steam rose from the pot like a pale, humid ghost, a specter of semolina and city water haunting the cramped kitchenette of a Schenectady walk-up. Vera stood over the stove, her face caught in the vapor, a twenty-two-year-old high priestess of the Beige performing the nightly Liturgy of the Bland. ​To the world—the world of blowout hair, of "besties" in brunch-line formation, of the "Normals" who glided through life on a frictionless track—it was just a bowl of noodles. Bu