Robert Loss teaches writing and literature at Columbus College of Art and Design. Other work about music and comic books has appeared in The Panelists, BookSlut and OxMag. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Filigree and Mayday. In his other life he fronts The Wells, a rock band in Columbus, Ohio.
Features
Tuesday, February 28 2012
Past Present Future: An Interview with the Carolina Chocolate Drops
"Our job is to tell everyday stories about what's happening with people on the ground. It's more effective to tell a great story than it is to try to be political."
Wednesday, June 29 2011
Afflicting the Comfortable: An Interview with Terry Moore
The comic industry's great humanist talks about the end of Echo, his new series, Rachel Rising, and ponders ideas such as, "What if you mate the China syndrome with a collider?"
Monday, June 7 2010
New Theories of Everything Prompted by Guided by Voices Appreciation Night, or, Good News
Tonight I will go belly-up in some kind of mental cloud, a meandering consideration of what tribute shows are really about, and why Guided by Voices deserves one, and what they were really about -- and that will lead to thoughts about prophecy and nihilism and Ralph Waldo Emerson and postmodernism.
Monday, April 26 2010
High Stakes Criticism: An Interview with Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus on Van Morrison, the yarragh, the blues, the memoir, race, authenticity, imagination, his career and what constitutes 'high stakes' criticism.
Friday, February 5 2010
Risk and Equilibrium: The Impact of Greil Marcus
The entirety of Marcus' famous 1970 "What is this shit?" review prefigures the sense of profound, disturbed wonder in the best of Marcus’ criticism.
Columns
Tuesday, April 10 2012
Grunge: Straining to Challenge the Status Quo
Grunge: Music and Memory casts grunge as the unsure middle weight stepping into the ring against one pop music brawler after another. Down goes Michael Jackson, down goes Guns 'n' Roses, and while Springsteen is putting the finishing touches onHuman Touch/Lucky Town, Nirvana and Pearl Jam release the most influential albums of the decade.
Friday, April 6 2012
Not Gonna Lie: 'The Hunger Games', Twitter, and Reverse Victimization
Would it matter at all if Katniss Everdeen, a white teenager in the book The Hunger Games, had been portrayed in the film by a suitably teenage and female, black actor? For the young racists who have gone berserk on Twitter about the supporting character Rue being portrayed by an African-American actor, apparently the answer is yes.
Friday, March 30 2012
We Need This Map: Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder's 'Thinking the Twentieth Century'
This is a three-dimensional map of intellectual terrain, marked hastily but with enormous detail and vividness in the course of a conversation between two well-regarded historians. They have spread the map out on the hood of your car—or perhaps, in honor of Tony Judt, the map has been handed to you in a train station.
Friday, March 11 2011
Strong and Soft Opinions: Tony Judt, Public and Private
Like J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet reveal the diverse cross-pollination of public and private speech. Ill Fares the Land ostensibly contains the strong opinions, The Memory Chalet the "soft" opinions.
Tuesday, October 12 2010
Philip Roth's 'Nemesis': The Case Against God and Man
Here is Philip Roth in his familiar, brutal finery, his most biting and honest eloquence: the great existential wondering which has tormented so many of his characters.
Reviews
Monday, October 3 2011
The Malefactors of Great Wealth: Today Is the Best Day of My Life
Songwriter J.P. Olsen's magic far exceeds that of his hapless protagonist(s).
Monday, December 6 2010
'Best Music Writing 2010' Ought to Be a Collection of Risks
Few magazines or websites in our increasingly silo-structured information age can achieve this anthology’s intended scope.
Wednesday, January 6 2010
The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again by Tom Ridge
Determinedly apolitical, refreshingly willing to shoulder responsibility, folksy, even charming, Ridge is the good soldier dangerously close to living by blind faith in his superior officers.
Monday, December 7 2009
Saint John of the Five Boroughs by Edward Falco
This is another dilemma of postmodern realism in fiction: the culture which insists that everything is important saturates the form of the novel itself.
Wednesday, November 25 2009
Writing in the Dark, by David Grossman
Most aspects of culture, Grossman argues, teach us to resist our innate urge to identify with the Other, but writing fulfills our wonder.
