The shadow plane
points perilously
in the direction of
human love.
It is an anti-elitist, capaciously democratic argument against the disfiguring mystifications that turn labor into commodities and art into the purchase of a privileged few.
The story of Saint John’s Abbey Church is thus a kind of creation myth: an origin story that illustrates the advent of a new symbolic language, formed by the dialogue between liturgical and architectural forces, and forged for an uncertain moment of rapidly-emerging modernity.
As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.
When I am sitting up in bed, which I often do, I think in terms of submersion, as if I fell through the floor.
Is literature political? How about can literature use activists? If they are people too, I guess it can.
The forms demand to be reckoned with. Reverb, a new project of St. Louis artists and curators, works on these themes. Inside Bunker 3, artists confront the site’s history of violence and explore the disturbed state of the forest.
Mattia’s unafraid of repetition; she knows it constitutes us and forms our habitus, and that it also creates structure for other, less visible parts embedded around its scaffold—repetition as performance of self, something you wake up and enact every day.
Reason 2. Your brother is already married.
If I am going to get into your family, it’s
going to have to be through you.
There’s a line that says, “my mother looked better alive.” I was having a conversation with Donald and “we look better alive” just kind of spilled off my tongue.
Heather McCalden wants me to write about my dead father because she wants every reader of The Observable Universe, her scattered, shrewd, and heartbreaking debut, to write about their dead parents.


