Cherchez la Femme
Kermit Westergaard, an interior designer, had come to SoHo from his home in the neighborhood where Greenpoint, Brooklyn, nudges up against Ridgewood, Queens, to attend a 110th anniversary retrospective...
View ArticleWhat We’re Loving: Romanian Cinema, African Art
For three years—ever since it came out—people have been recommending this unusual family history, by a potter named Edmund de Waal, all about the fate of a collection of Japanese miniatures whose...
View ArticleBarthes Foresees the Rise of Trump, and Other News
Barthes, looking into the hideous future of electoral politics.The Internet is awash in devastating, graphic personal essays—young writers are encouraged, maybe more than ever, to monetize and...
View ArticleGive Your Valentine Our Special Box Set
Valentine’s Day is less than a month away. Started that love letter yet? You could be forgiven for putting it off: even Roland Barthes felt that “to try to write love is to confront the muck of...
View ArticleThe Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google
Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of...
View ArticleNarcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a...
View ArticleA Study of Kanai Mieko
Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on...
View ArticleSound Tracks: An Interview with Simone Forti
Simone Forti, 2012. “Someone must have handed me a piece of flexible tubing from the hardware store and shown me that I could play it, the pitch rising and falling according to how hard I’d blow...
View ArticleThe Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt
There’s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps
Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth...
View ArticleThe Spectacle of Women’s Wrestling
Vintage newspaper photograph of women wrestlers. “The virtue of wrestling is to be a spectacle of excess,” Roland Barthes begins—but we are wary of excess in women, wary of too much flesh, too much...
View ArticleIn Praise of the Photocopy
Essays by Roland Barthes marked with fluorescent highlighters; poems by Carlos de Rokha or Enrique Lihn stapled together; ring-bound or precariously fastened novels by Witold Gombrowicz or Clarice...
View ArticleTo All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before
Konrad Kachelofen’s printing of Eclogue of Theodulus, 1492. Public domain. “I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the...
View ArticleGive Your Valentine Our Special Box Set
Valentine’s Day is less than a month away. Started that love letter yet? You could be forgiven for putting it off: even Roland Barthes felt that “to try to write love is to confront the muck of...
View ArticleThe Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google
Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of...
View ArticleNarcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a...
View ArticleA Study of Kanai Mieko
Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on...
View ArticleSound Tracks: An Interview with Simone Forti
Simone Forti, 2012. “Someone must have handed me a piece of flexible tubing from the hardware store and shown me that I could play it, the pitch rising and falling according to how hard I’d blow...
View ArticleThe Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt
There’s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps
Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth...
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