“On Addiction” by Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson’s moving essay on addiction for this month’s Plume combines both personal and disinterested (not to be confused with uninterested) insights on addiction that he’s gained from his own experiences with addicts, along with his extensive, close reading on the subject by such authors as Denis Johnson and Thomas De Quincey. In so doing, he witnesses, movingly, experiences with
“Under Construction, An Ekphrastic Essay” by Richard Hoffman and JD Scrimgeour
This month’s collaborative video essay “Under Construction, An Ekphrastic Essay” by Richard Hoffman and JD Scrimgeour assays Salvador Dali’s horrific painting, “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, Premonition of Civil War (1936),” which was first exhibited in England six months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Hoffman and Scrimgeour chronicle Dali’s prophetic vision of what Robert Burns called “man’s