Immaterial Girl

Natasha Stagg laid it out in her DIS Magazine advice column back in 2011. “The internet is a void, nothing like life,” she wrote to a tween seeking advice on how to boost his Twitter following. “And it is your whole life, sometimes, isn’t it?”

SURVEYS BY NATASHA STAGG. SOUTH PASADENA, CA: SEMIOTEXT(E). 176 PAGES. $16.

Natasha Stagg laid it out in her DIS Magazine advice column back in 2011. “The internet is a void, nothing like life,” she wrote to a tween seeking advice on how to boost his Twitter following. “And it is your whole life, sometimes, isn’t it?” Stagg went on to give the kid a crash course in how Twitter functions not as a grid of RL (real life) but as a system of constructed fallacies. These fallacies, in turn, can be used, like language itself, as a persuasive tool—one that allows you to hide and reveal desires, to be

culture February 24, 2015

The Autotelic Atticus Lish

"I told my wife, 'Baby, I want to write twenty books,' and it’s not a boast; it’s because I believe in the Zen process. You know, if you rake a garden for fifty years, insight comes. My struggle right now is to make it no struggle. If I can do that, I can be a machine. I want to keep pumping out books because rarely can you just knock out a homerun. A perfect book only happens if you roll the dice a bunch of times. Take Cormac McCarthy for example. I think The Road is a perfect book."

Atticus Lish is seeking a state of flow—what the “positive psychologist” Mihlay Csikszentmihalyi calls the opposite of psychic entropy: negentropy. It can only be achieved while in pursuit of a task for the sake of the task. The good doctor also claims it is the secret to happiness.

Atticus Lish, surely right now, is sitting in his chair in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, humming in his routine: two thousand words per day on the next book. He has a system: spit it out, systematically revise, sweep it up.

“I’m back in the groove,” he tells me back in November. “My whole life falls into place if I’m