It made sense to me that writers or artists should utilize constraint in our present world of seemingly limitless possibility.
States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic – Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris
The isolation, the fear, the breaking of actual communication, and the lack of touch draws together Camus’s worlds and our reality.
The Bad Angel Brothers – Paul Theroux
In short, no fun, the having of a brother.
Messina’s writing is bleak and tender and honest and is not trying to persuade me of anything, least of all that things will work out.
I love gossip in poems, and I love to see friendship performed in pieces of art, so I don’t know how to create things like that without those kinds of references.
Bright Unbearable Reality – Anna Badkhen
Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?
Against Safe Sex: A Review of Kathleen J. Woods’s White Wedding
To ask whether the pornographic narrative style does anything (and to value it accordingly) is to buy into the promises of virtuous consumption. It is to believe that consuming a book somehow transforms aesthetic experience into social action.
Daria Morgendorffer, Jodie Landon, and the Privilege of Cynicism
Why is cynicism so seemingly tied to whiteness?
With comics, for better or worse, you can’t really hide from who you are. You’re spending so much time working on these things that you can’t keep up a persona for that long.
Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below – ed. Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi
Many of the people we encounter in the pages of this book do not identify as smugglers but as workers of various kinds.