• print • Winter 2024

    Immaculate Imperfection

    IT IS A FITTING IRONY that when trying to describe Anne Carson’s sensibility, one quickly hits the limits of language. To measure the breadth of her brain across her twenty or so books, one might acquiesce to hyphen-chic—as in, she is a poet-translator-scholar-of-ancient-Greek-essayist-visual-artist-playwright-maker-of-performances-and-dances—but such frantic stitching would fail to impart how seamlessly entwined her practices are. To distinguish her literary occupation from that of other authors, one might be tempted to conjure a new word via the dark arts of negation—she is an uncontainer of

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Artful Volumes

    IN A 2014 INTERVIEW with Entropy Magazine, poet-filmmaker-scholar-anarcho-feminist-writer and dreamer Jackie Wang apologetically names a “piece of art that has recently undone/inspired you” as Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. “What was it that made me receptive?” she wonders. “I don’t want to credit Lars von Trier!” Wang’s ALIEN DAUGHTERS WALK INTO THE SUN: AN ALMANAC OF EXTREME GIRLHOOD (Semiotext(e), $18) is perhaps not strictly an “art book,” but I make no apologies for selecting it, and I do want to credit Jackie Wang. Modestly illustrated with doodles, some black-and-white film stills, and

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  • print • Winter 2024

    A Woman Apart

    THE FIRST THING I NOTICED about 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7, one of the more enduring hits from filmmaker and artist Agnès Varda, is that the run time is not two hours but ninety minutes. Where did those thirty minutes go? How did she make a “real-time” film that doesn’t execute its promise? I always neglect to keep tabs on that missing half hour; I’m enjoying the film too much. Such is Varda’s slippery genius. She creates a structure, then leaves just enough room to show you how she did it—if you know how to see it. Varda knew all about the difference between looking good (as her characters often

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Algorithm and Blues

    AT THE BEGINNING OF DECEMBER, music-streaming behemoth Spotify laid off 1,500 employees. It was its third set of axings last year in response to the tightening of capital markets, altogether adding up to more than a quarter of its global staff. But this round was different, because it included Glenn McDonald.

    McDonald, whom I first became aware of when he was a music blogger in the late 2000s, joined Spotify in 2014 as part of its acquisition of the MIT-offshoot, music-research company Echo Nest. He became the streaming giant’s “data alchemist,” which meant he conducted experiments to transmute

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Grief Lessons

    MIDWAY THROUGH ABOUT ED, Robert Glück revives a line by Frank O’Hara: “Is the earth as full as life was full, of them?” Referring to three of O’Hara’s recently deceased friends, the line appears in “A Step Away from Them,” where it clangs against the rest of the poem and its meandering attention to noontime activity in midtown Manhattan, 1956. It perplexes Glück, whose About Ed remembers Ed Auerlich-Sugai, a lover and friend who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. “The misdirection threw me,” Glück writes, “from the earth being full, to life being full, instead of Ed being full of life.

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Lady Lazarus

    IN THE POEM “POST,” from her posthumously published collection, The Cipher, Molly Brodak writes:

    The dead come back

    not for you,

     

    for themselves,

    to hear their own stories

     

    for the first time.

    I couldn’t shake the feeling while reading Molly—writer Blake Butler’s anguished chronicle of the decade he and Brodak, his late wife, spent together—that she was listening in, and that she and I had surfaced from some underwater place to bear witness to Butler’s act of witnessing, to choke down his story of her life

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Jamison vs. Jamison

    THIS IS ONLY AN OPINION, BUT: no one should make art about their divorce until they’ve experienced at least one heartbreak after the marriage’s end. I keep an inventory of all the times I encounter an artist who manages, in telling a story about a divorce, to also include the story of another breakup that followed the supposedly definitive one. I love to see anything that complicates more straightforward accounts of life after divorce. That next heartbreak—the more devastating, the better—must be reckoned with, because it dispels any remaining illusions, or maybe delusions, about what one is

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  • print • Winter 2024

    ARE WE ALLOWED TO ENJOY THIS? Chicks and dicks, fags and chicken thighs? Sarah Lucas’s sculptures use corner-store staples—bananas, cigarettes, a cucumber or two—to usher frisky innuendo into staid institutions. In the foreword to HAPPY GAS, a new book accompanying Lucas’s massive London retrospective, Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, writes: “Binary gender differences are exaggerated to the point of absurdity—no artists’ oeuvre is as populated with penises and breasts—then transgressed and undermined.”

    Lucas doesn’t always expose her subjects in flagrante—the act itself is left

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Nonlinear Thought

    IF, AS CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS PROPOSED, “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction,” then the act of keeping a diary, that practice of private self-mythology, is at least partially an attempt to overcome the contradictions inherent in a self. Granted, there’s a raft of differences between myths passed down over eons and those made about oneself within the span of a single life. The myth of Icarus, for instance, has survived due to its decisive ending and moral weight. But self-mythology—whether in the form of a journal, internet persona, or daydreaming—is

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Page Against the Machine

    WHAT IS AN AUTHOR? A conduit for the divine or a poor schlub combining and recombining stale units of meaning? Both answers share the assumption that a literary work is the product of one consciousness. This assumption is a kind of spell: even a book’s acknowledgments, where the many other hands that went into its making come into view, or its publisher’s colophon, which advertises the institutional infrastructure behind the text, cannot totally ward it off.

    Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction sets out to break the spell of authorial autonomy. It considers an impressively broad swath of literature: more

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Dublin Plays Itself

    “I’M NOT EVEN INTERESTED IN MOMENTS.” The German photographer Evelyn Hofer (1922–2009) knew her aesthetic was in some ways at odds with her time; her postwar streets and squares are emphatically not in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his influential “decisive moment” or the street photographers who followed his example: William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, and so many more. In six books devoted to cities, and another to Spain, Hofer adhered to a monumental, frontal, and large-format style that owes more to Eugène Atget and August Sander. Working with Mary McCarthy on The Stones

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  • print • Winter 2024

    Prairie Swooner

    WILLA CATHER WAS A MASTER OF BEGINNINGS. O Pioneers! (1913), her first novel after the false start of Alexander’s Bridge (1912), opens on a provocatively odd note: “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.” Soon the attention shifts to the “cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky . . . set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for

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