George Lippard: Gothic Architect
Lippard’s journalism was lurid and fictionalized, his historical writing Gothic, his Gothicism sentimental, based on real events, and often intended — like his nonfiction — to instruct and improve society.
As evinced by the last four decades of DIY music, we already use the technology of tech-capitalists toward proto-revolutionary ends, even small-scale, revolutionary societies.
After disaster, there is only disaster. It is a familiar and unrecognizable present. And whether we recognize it or not, whether we read it or write it or not, we are living the climate crisis.
Some Questions About First Novels
The history of the novel is also the history of people coming into an understanding of themselves, of the ways in which we use art not only to reflect but also to change ourselves.
What unites both modern subcultures and modern terrorists (and terrorist subcultures) is no coherent ideology but a set of shared affective responses to social chaos—and if the last decade of culture has any lesson to give, it’s that emotional tourism has never been more popular.
The world described by Herrera’s thematic border trilogy is a present that despite—or because—of its hints of the archaic, has the ring of a dystopian near-future.
While reading “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns”
The doubled reality of one Marianne Moore poem
American Anonymity: Reading Alex Dimitrov & Tommy Pico
In our constant fight to feel accounted for inside the crowd, we shout, we overshare, we reword until others think it sounds beautiful enough to publish—whether we are distilling that experience to its most basic, relatable pieces or pushing the boundaries of how that experience can be shared.
Frank O’Hara’s Notorious B.I.G.
The affinities between New York’s most mercurial lyricists.
English-language Poetry in Hong Kong Now
We can certainly no longer say that ‘[t]here is no English-language literary community from which to draw some kind of affinity or against which to react’. One just has to go out, be receptive, join a group, and meet and mingle with other like-minded people.