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In Judith Goldman’s agon, there is an ironic, performative embrace of such a doubly annihilative top-object, mobilizing the discourse of “weaponization” as her totalizing gesture. But her reading avoids the excesses of speculative anti-humanism and provides a text that is both critical of its own operations and anti-critical in its attempt to conceptually map the violent socius without providing an overarching explanation. One could even say she engages in the paradoxical practice of annihilative poiesis by shaping her text under this totalizing rubric of “weaponization” — not as celebration but as sufferance, while avoiding classicizing or formalizing this dark interpretative gambit as hard theory.
By Joe Milutis.
The blank flat fields that used to be swamp. The harness
Of history lighter until it’s gone completely, vanished
Into a particular sound that only the owls can hear. It’s funny, Lena,
How you thought punk could save you in three chords
As if no future was something real you could touch
And mold like Play-Doh or the shapeless sound of your father’s belching
Purring tractor on the far black fields outside Monclova where, in six
Months we’d find you face down.
By Nicholas Rombes.
There are chunks of white space throughout the book, enveloping the shorter snapshots of their lives. These found an echo in a coincidental viewing of John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its repeated and somewhat unusual freeze-framing before fading to black — both had the same feel for me: heavily pregnant dead space designed to sear what went before into your mind’s eye; a bubble of time around small but significant events. It’s in these shorter segments that Losack’s writing is at its most stripped back and carries the greatest weight.
Matt Neil Hill reviews Kelby Losack‘s Hurricane Season.
Does this sense of detachment as I gaze down on the board in mid-flip suggest mastery or loss of control? Maybe this is what the Situationists meant by psychogeography, the invisible influence of the “terrain.” Guy Debord writes in “Theory of the Dérive,” “In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” I find myself timing my snap to avoid the lines on the court.
An essay by Zack Anderson on skateboarding and the politics of free fall.
Every morning the petrichor came thick. Some days a tangible mist rose from the sun-hot macadam. We would sit for a time sipping cream in Persian tea on the front porch. No one came to the far end of our cul-de-sac, no sane one anyway.
A short story by Samuel M. Moss.
You are a guest at the demolition of your own reality. It’s like watching a building that’s imploding in extreme slow-motion and then realising you are that building. Buildings and buildings and buildings implode around you and within you. You’re a series of buildings that implode. You can see yourself in the fragments of concrete floating in the air. Everything changes continuously in the outside world, but your world remains caught up in a series of interconnected implosions. You take each day as it comes. One day at a time. You know all things must pass.
Read an exclusive extract from Susanna Medina‘s novel Spinning Days of Night.
And thus will dark academia become another collection of dead images, nothing remaining but the husks of its erstwhile influence. Its proponents will grow up, move on, and maybe find a book or two they genuinely enjoy. But the schism between Old World and New World will remain, a schism that art broadly, and literature, in particular, is finding difficult to straddle. If it is true, as Vargas Llosa suggests, that images are replacing ideas, then literature has a new obstacle to surmount in its perpetual struggle to endure.
An essay by Elroy Rosenberg on the aesthetic of Dark Academia.
When lockdown began, and the pictures of old men on stretchers appeared in the news, I remembered my father, who had died of pneumonia, following a long battle with cancer, a few years before. I thought of all the friends I would not see for some indefinite period. I thought of the pubs and people I had sought refuge in, in times before. Paintings of pubs became the refuge more intensely, now; I finished the larger paintings, in those first early weeks, aware as I did so that they now represented, accidentally, a whole new kind of nostalgia. They were everything I lost and longed for, those I loved.
Christiana Spens presents her upcoming exhibition in London.
On the day we met, in the part of the newsroom where we Business section reporters and editors did our daily work, he threw me a compliment as he went in for a handshake: “So you’re the guy who wrote that piece.”
“I guess I am.”
A short story by Jim Windolf.
“Fiction has a new star in its firmament” gushes Carol Ann Duffy on the cover of Yes Yes More More. And for once, such praise is substantial — and deserved. There is indeed something glistering, hard-edged and remote about these stories; but they hold, too, a woozy wonder, a sense of dream-like possibility. After all, we prod the night sky with telescopes and satellites. But our first response is perhaps the most honest: to lie back, to stare.
Alex Diggins reviews Anna Wood‘s Yes Yes More More.