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Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character--a composite of literary and visual artworks--as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity--from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture--women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference. Keywords: Virginia Woolf / Paul Mpagi Sepuya / physiognomy / biography / portraiture / faciality, In 2019, the Aperture Foundation hosted a photography exhibit inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). (1) Tilda Swinton, the actor who played Orlando in Sally Potter's 1992 [...]

Comedy films, cheekiness, about laughter's relations to manners and about cinema's relation to both are analyzed. The analysis suggests that early film era could be termed 'comedy's greatest era,' wherein the films provided a lot of good laughs to be had in watching the silents, as opposed to watching films of modern era, in which laughs are 'pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short.

As to marriage and love. I believe these are probably the most tabooed subjects in this country. --Emma Goldman 'Marriage of two margins,' the phrase Sara Suleri uses to designate [...]