Periscope articles and content
We opened our exchange at the beginning of May–almost two months after New York has issued a shelter in place order. We end just before the 4th of July (or “the 4th you lie” as it’s known in some Black … Continue reading “Letters”
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”
