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.
In 2017 Daniel Benjamin and I organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today, a gathering of writers and scholars to celebrate and complicate the work of a group of writers that has not often been considered by academic criticism. We … Continue reading “Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Remembering Queer Theory’s New Narrative”
This spring, before the world was turned upside down as result of the global health emergency, Audre Lorde’s memory was to be inscribed onto the cityscape of Berlin. A citizens’ initiative had successfully called for the renaming of a street … Continue reading “Poetry as a Way of Living: An Interview with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro”
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: Media Itineraries”
Any poetic writing about and through pop culture wants to flush the residues of a Romantic ideology of original virtuosic composition without also thereby disposing of the subject. Kathy Acker describes the insouciant fun of unoriginal writing: “It’s like a … Continue reading “Action Kevin”
May Day 2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the demonstrations in support of Bobby Seale in New Haven and the unlikely presence of “homosexual outlaw,” Jean Genet, as the invited guest of the Black Panther Party. A good friend, New … Continue reading “Jean Genet’s May Day Speech, 1970: “Your Real Life Depends on the Black Panther Party””
The adage “this too shall pass” is perhaps a source of hope in living through the current COVID-19 crisis. But, when the conventional notion of safety is put into question and when precarity is distributed unevenly across different “safe spaces,” … Continue reading “Home Sweet Home: Everyday Precarity in Lockdown”
In his own words, Kevin Killian’s “Tagged” was a project in which he photographed “individual artists and poets, mostly male, naked, their junk covered often by a squarish drawing, almost a caricature, of a cock and balls by Raymond Pettibon.” … Continue reading “On Kevin Killian’s “Tagged” Project”
In the time of COVID, I do a lot of laundry. At first it was because I was finally still; no longer traveling so there was more time and a backlog of dirty clothes. Then, it was for other reasons. … Continue reading “Sweat”
It’s something of a relief, when, late in Fascination, Kevin Killian reflects on the cruelty of the youthful romances that he’s been narrating: “…as I look back I see that I had a ruthless streak; I could be horrifyingly manipulative” … Continue reading “Very Good: On Kevin Killian’s Fascination“
The nation state shuts its borders. It has frozen all transit and freezes you into place. The benevolent state, you are told, now fully controls the airways and highways. It sets up roadblocks and checkpoints. It organizes your intimacy. You … Continue reading “The Impossible Ritual”
How do queer studies operate outside Western contexts? What can American queer studies learn from outside of its parochialism? How should American queer studies engage with the non-American ones? These are the underpinning questions behind this post. In the postscript … Continue reading “Pedagogy of the Homeless: Poor Queer Studies in Indonesia”
