Writing

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.

The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies

When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.

I thought it would be a fun exercise, as a means of assessing this activity over these last few months, to assign Pokemon types to each piece we published.