You Cannot Kill What is Already Dead: Evan Michelson with an Illustrated Ode to Goth, Live on Zoom Date: Tuesday, May 5
Time: 7pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE
This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. A link to the conference will be provided on the day of the lecture.
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“Who has turned us round like this, so that,
whatever we do, we always have the aspect
of one who leaves? Just as they
will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,
on the last hill, that shows them all their valley -,
so we live and are always taking leave.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy, #8

The term Gothic can refer to an aesthetic, a sensibility, an architectural movement, a type of novel, a type of music, a fashion statement and a lifestyle. To be gothic is to be alternately heavy and ethereal, colorful and drab, immoral and virtuous. Gothic is hilarious and melancholy, conservative and transgressive. It’s a lifelong obsession, a passing phase, an epithet and a misnomer. Most of all Gothic is camp, theatrical and very often ridiculous. At its worst it can be foolish, shallow and annoying. At its best it is sensuous, uncanny and sublime. There are as many ways to define the gothic as there are people who have fallen under its spell; from Walpole’s country villa to the band Bauhaus and beyond, the gothic has been revived and reinterpreted in every era, and it continues to comfort, confound and fascinate to this very day. But there is a kind of continuity to the gothic - a thread that runs though the centuries, through all the revivals and reversals; there is the seed of an idea, and a way of being in the world. That central idea looks backwards while it moves forwards. It is immortal; you cannot kill what is already dead.

Evan Michelson is an antiques dealer, essayist, lecturer, award-winning curator and collector of strange, rare and beautiful objects. She was the founder and co-owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities, a landmark in New York City’s East Village for more than 24 years. Evan was also a co-star of the hit reality TV series “Oddities,” which ran for five seasons on Discovery Science, and she has held the post of Morbid Anatomy Scholar-in-Residence for many years. Evan has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times and The Financial Times of London, and she still wields a musically percussive sledgehammer from time to time.

Image: Gustave Doré, 1883, illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”