Mia You lives in the Netherlands and teaches at the Universiteit Utrecht and the Sandberg Institute. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote, 2007), and her criticism has appeared in Artforum, the Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Mia You
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Writing on Public Books
The Lyric Me, Too
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” “that man”), “the” indicates primacy and universality (“the word,” “the man”). As Wallace Stevens famously declares in “The Man on the Dump,” “Where was it one […]
