my future seemed to spring forward from my mind without consent / i ducked, thinking i could tear range into the plan
Would you still love me if I had a brass nose? What if I were intractable? What if I were as old as the Sibyll? Beauty isn’t everything. I cannot recall the face of Bach.
These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games.
I will bend my articulable joints; I will bend my slender neck and set myself to the task of deciphering hermetic secrets scratched on tattered onionskin.
Is literature political? How about can literature use activists? If they are people too, I guess it can.
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.
The shadow plane
points perilously
in the direction of
human love.
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.
An error in the game was the realest feature. It formed a foundation. The developers thought how American. How reckless.
There’s a good case to be made that this is the least translatable German book of the last century.
The film cannot be said to be interested in persuading anybody of anything.
Queering the relationship between form and genre, troubling the notion of what makes a novel, working through questions of queerness and bodies and desire and space and language on the page.
Everyone keeps telling me
my mother looked so pretty
in her casket. They try to assure me
the mortician did a good job.
My mother looked better
alive.
The other girls were staring at him rapt as he explained the camp schedule. We had never seen a man like him before. Different from any high school boys we had ever known, football players, brothers, or fathers. I myself didn’t have a father. Just a mother who liked “anything that chugged or neighed.”
If Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.
We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
a continent, seedless and deep
ashes that fertilize nothing
but ashes, ashes that hold
the cool river of the mind
then sink it into ashes
I hang myself out of a self-inflicted predicament
I see the world from a new perspective
and don’t cry for me when you see me on the floor
I am awakened by a smell, sweet and smoked. Clouds brisketed above the lake. Startled and unsure, I close the windows. Check first on the children.
Wright’s architectural vision was a manifest destiny of the self, a frontier for every household, a westward expansion outside every door.
“In being death, you hope that you won’t become death. In being a door-to-door makeup salesperson,” Vick said, “the same.”
Someone sneezed.
The most hard-wearing and commonsensical of writerly truisms is the avoidance of cliché.
But each night in my dream she eats my heart
By exploring the dynamic between seeing and reading, and animating the spaces between text and photographs, these works super-boost the possibilities of feminist narrative.
We’re into the quicksand of borrowing and spending for wealthy sports owners again without the news media EVER trying to put into context what we are spending for Haslam, Dolan and Gilbert.
The tone in Walkman is gentle and nostalgic, the enjambment doesn’t shuck subject from predicate like it used to, the allusions come far less often, and if you’re a partisan of the Obama-era Robbins you will be disappointed by all that.
The people who run the art world are aware that if a true and great artist were to be recognized during their lifetime, they would have immense power. So the artists who are promoted are the lap dogs, the ones they can control.
This archive, in other words, is live. It doesn’t bolster certified versions; it multiplies.