Val Vinokur

Oct 2, 2024 | publicseminar.org | Margaret Atwood |Aaron James Wendland |Val Vinokur |Chris Holdaway

Children’s painting of Margaret Atwood (2016) | Bank of Canada / Public DomainThis interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

Sep 6, 2024 | publicseminar.org | Lyndsey Stonebridge |Val Vinokur |Carl Landauer |Chelsea Ebin

“Destroyed Village, War Front” (1974) | Donald Shaw MacLaughlan / Smithsonian American Art Museum / CC0One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer’s long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about mass death insists on human particularity.

Mar 31, 2024 | tabletmag.com | Val Vinokur

Without a word to her husband or their daughter, my grandmother shoved a chair against the wall and stepped onto the seat. She considered the thing, one hand pinching her forehead, the other on her hip. It wasn’t a fuse box. Or if there ever was a fuse box, it had long been overgrown by a tumor of blue, red, white, and black wires humming and throbbing with disorder, like a dust-covered galaxy threatening to be born. No wonder my grandmother hated it.

Mar 27, 2024 | publicseminar.org | Val Vinokur |Ayad Akhtar |Eboo Patel |Chris Holdaway

The Turk (1789) | Joseph Racknitz / PDM 1.0 DEEDIn May 2020, long before most had heard of large language models, researchers at OpenAI published a paper showing their forthcoming GPT-3 model “writing” poems imitating Wallace Stevens. The following piece got the most attention: “Shadows on the Way”There is a way in the world.

Jun 15, 2023 | tabletmag.com | Val Vinokur

Miami has no seasons. Its time floats in an undifferentiated promiscuity that made the children of South Beach resemble its retirees. As a 7-year-old, I often went around shirtless and wore high-waisted swim briefs, just like our first landlord, a Treblinka survivor named Oscar, who used to take me three blocks east to the 14th Street beach, where we would do headstands on the sand, which took a lot more time to wash out of my hair than off his bald pate.