February 2018
Privileging Your Checks

I am team-teaching a course on the later Wittgenstein this semester with a somewhat skeptical but radically open-minded philosopher.
Read MoreAre ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you?

Your phone ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself – and all this dating back years...
Read MoreSalt to Sprinkle on the Meat

The presence of the political in Ashbery is not negligible, and those who would say so are not reading his work very carefully...
Read MoreIt’s Your Letters

I started writing in isolation. For me, it was the natural result of reading too much: those extra words bred in the pools between my ears, multiplying and evolving, and finally spilled out of me in a tidal rush.
Read MoreAs Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on...
Read MoreYou’re Interested in New Zealand

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand. If you’re interested in how our current cultural anxieties...
Read MoreThey Didn’t Know Any Women

Beware the callow misfit who becomes part of the ruling class; rather than disrupt the social order that excluded him, he might just reap its spoils for himself.
Read MoreDrinking at the Ladbroke Arms

The Ladbroke Arms, Notting Hill. Photograph by Ewan Munro. From London Review of Books: The Ladbroke Arms is a pub in Notting Hill known for years as the policemen’s pub. The explanation is obvious: over the road is the local police station. Two decades ago, if you went for a drink...
Read MoreRussell Bennetts and Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

Glitch Feminism is about modes of experimentation beginning online before entering the world. The house of gender needs to be dismantled...
Read MoreJoe Linker: Read Surfing

What is it about the predicament of digital writing and reading that has so many literary provocateurs abuzz? “Mies van der Rohe said, ‘The least is the most.’..
Read MoreGetting Lost in Narrative Virtuality by Will Luers

“Getting lost” in a work of fiction is a conventional expression that speaks to the immersive power of narrative...
Read MoreEverybody Draw the Dinosaur

What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye...
Read MoreColin Raff: Slivers, Torpid

Here the story shifts focus to Grunduline, who, having sung an air describing her flight from the convent, arrives in Vadtstul to find her groom-to-be embracing her mother...
Read MoreIt is a Melancholy Conversation that hath no sound…

It is said, That Silence a great virtue: It is true, in a Sick person’s chamber, that loves no noise; or at the dead time of night; or at lunchtimes that natural rest
Read MoreOne generation’s subversion is the next generation’s marketing plan…

In an essay on The Face published in Dick Hebdige’s 1988 book, “Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things,” which Gorman quotes...
Read MoreJay Aquinas Thompson: Re-Reading Jose Perez Beduya

The five-year-old poetry book can be a lonely thing. After a hoped-for hothouse blossoming of critical conversation dies down and the book is no longer taught...
Read MoreCandidates

In accessible and engaging prose, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick chronicles the political careers of three women who attempted to ascend to the American presidency.
Read MoreSome Degree of Voting

On 21 June 1908, half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to celebrate “Women’s Sunday”. There were 30 brass bands, bugles and 20 platforms...
Read More‘Tea began our mornings and punctuated long afternoons’

At the studio, along with a box of tea bags and a bag of powdered milk, the cheaply made kettle assumed its place on my vast stone counter.
Read MoreEd Simon: When Books Read You

Towards the end of 1642, or possibly the beginning of 1643, but either way in the midst of a miserable winter of civil war, King Charles I found himself...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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