Pankaj Mishra on the crisis in modern masculinity: Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a man have caused a dangerous rush of testosterone around the world. Donald Trump, master of the masculine shrill: The celebrity has replaced the hero in our image-based politics — and now we’ve got one on steroids. The rise of male supremacist groups: Stephanie Russell-Kraft on how age-old misogyny morphed into an explicit ideology of hate. Where have all the real men gone? Magazine cover features “beta
…Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions.
…Howe has long been interested in distilling signs and symbols, whether “art objects” or words themselves, into something more revelatory. Considering riddles, lost languages, doubled surfaces, spells, magical thinking, and other elusive forms of expression, Howe sounds the depths.
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