Tag
Experiment
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Experiments in Feral Futuring
Two futurists ran an experiment: What happens when a room of strangers plan for the future together?
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“Democracy and Education” @100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall.” He pauses to let the crowd’s emotions storm up. Then he asks, “And, by the way, who’s going to pay for that wall?” The crowd roars back, “Mexico.”…
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Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes the transformation of a writer exchanging the patient, polished realism of her first four books for a disquieting abstraction. It is a pleasure to witness sudden…
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Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest
Reading Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst is eerily similar to contemplating a wound that won’t heal, inspiring trepidation at what might soon—or potentially worse, not ever—change. Such was my experience of following the novel’s protagonists, Raynand and Paulin, as they attempt to make modest yet always ill-fated bids for basic human happiness in a Haiti in…
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Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot device, from the Book of Esther to Fight Club. But what seems strikingly timely about the sleeplessness imagined by Karen Russell’s novella Sleep…
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The Other Side of the Looking Glass
The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an endlessly elusive source text works double duty: it grants a fictional world intertextual legitimacy, while simultaneously opening a void at its center. Andrei Bitov’s latest…
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Toxic Literature
When all that is solid melts into air, the plot thickens. Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and Heather Houser’s first monograph of literary criticism, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, both explore efforts to go on in situations of pervasive toxicity. Indicating the saturation of a particular space by…
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The Essential Gratuitousness of César Aira
It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of…
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Translating the Architecture of Desire: An Interview with Wallace Shawn
Well over a dozen years in the making, Wallace Shawn’s theatrical collaboration with André Gregory on Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play A Master Builder opened this summer in New York theaters—movie theaters, that is, as a film directed by Jonathan Demme. Much like Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s 1994 film based on an earlier Gregory/Shawn…
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Blue Peter: On Peter Gizzi
Brice Marden used beeswax to kill the reflective luster of his triptych color panels. Ad Reinhardt leeched the gloss out of his chromatic blacks. Jasper Johns accreted his white flags with matte paper and cotton. Such works defend the big Nothing of minimalist experimentation with the eloquence of rich monochromes that are apparently porous, surfaces…
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Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for…
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Whitman with Quinoa
Although David Copperfield grows up to be a successful novelist, Charles Dickens’s contemporary readers had no reason to suspect the historical author had based parts of his protagonist’s story on his own life—that he had, in fact, assigned his own most traumatic childhood experiences to David, going so far as to incorporate passages from an…
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Organic Machines
Matthew Barney and Edward Burtynsky are two contemporary artists not typically discussed in the same sentence. Barney is a provocateur known largely for his elaborately staged films filled with outlandish costumes and graphic imagery. Burtynsky is a large-format photographer known for his epic depictions of anthropogenic landscapes like dams, factories, and shipbreaking yards. While Barney’s…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
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Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
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Changes
The first thing that happens, when a literary historian starts using computers to think about literature, is that the object of study changes. Not just the tool; the object itself. “The objects studied by contemporary historians” have this peculiarity, Krzysztof Pomian observed some time ago, that “no one has ever seen them, and no one…
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The Joys of Multiplicity
Translation contains multitudes. Since there is no one right way to translate most things worth translating—though there are many wrong ways—translation opens up a sphere of multiplicity in which you can elect to enjoy your Bovary à la Lydia Davis or in the style of Steegmuller. Whose Crime and Punishment was Edward Snowden reading in…
