Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: Domestic Inspectors”
Every day for the past two years, I have heard horses ride down the road outside my flat. There are always two of them, and they always take the same route, down the hill and round the corner before their … Continue reading “Horses and History”
today was the day we were going to make it all the way over to there before we knew it— “they should’ve done it differently” “it was never there in the first place” … Continue reading “Poem”
1. Is the rectum a shopping mall: where the old grave was overhauled and gentrified from the bottomless pit of time & the boundless boundaries of pleasures into the automated bright lights at the parking lots eating alive your Amex … Continue reading “Is the Rectum a Shopping Mall?”
Nothing about Tomorrow How will it be different in the future? It probably won’t. Is there a future? There are the limits of the body: age / illness / something else not said out loud. For example, yesterday I couldn’t … Continue reading “Four Poems”
Hedi El Kholti’s book of collages, A Place in the Sun (Hesse Press: Los Angeles, CA, 2017), collects images of subversive beauty, drawn largely from magazines, and transforms them as they play off each other, creating resonances over a wide … Continue reading “An Unbounded Universe of Adventure and Risk: Notes on Hedi El Kholti’s A Place in the Sun“
What does the politics of gratitude do in our shared public health crisis? In almost all nation-states, essential workers are heroized and appreciated on numerous social media platforms. These campaigns produce particular affect in our traumatic times, and when we … Continue reading “Vampiric Affect: The Afterlife of a Metaphor in a Global Pandemic”
The murder of George Floyd at the height of a global pandemic has provided anti-racist rhetoric with an unexpected but virulent new metaphor. A lawyer for George Floyd said that a pandemic of racism killed his client. The president of … Continue reading “Mythology Today Today”
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: The Tiny Hands of the Market”
Anxiety is its own prolonged unreckoning this visionary script moves like an old hand shaking wild playtime kissed into the layers of muscle at home base no less than being still, we press on into the night earnest garbage … Continue reading “Meals”
In Central America under Covid-19, specifically in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, white flags have appeared all over the social terrain as indictments of a failed political and economic system whose primary effect for common people has been enduring a … Continue reading “On Waving the White Flag”
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: Between Pandemia and Pandemonium”
This edition of Periscope focuses on the writing of Kevin Killian, the poet, memoirist, playwright, and fixture of New Narrative writing who passed away last June. The writers here—Steven Zultanski, David Kuhnlein, Kay Gabriel, Eric Sneathen, and Cam Scott—examine a … Continue reading “On the Work of Kevin Killian”
The hallmarks of poet and novelist Kevin Killian’s style are various—variousness, in fact, may be counted among them. Writer Dodie Bellamy, who married Killian in 1985, speaks of his “protean slips between high and low culture,” modeling an absolute equality … Continue reading “Extreme Remedies”
Note: All drawings and charts are sampled from Google Patents.
