“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence. . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” - Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity
In her fascinating (and completely sincere, fun-to-read) The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson quotes Artaud’s The Theater and its Double:
“No one knows how to scream anymore in Europe. . . people in the theater who can do nothing but talk and who have forggoten that they had a body and and have also forgotten the use of their throats.”
She writes:
“Years later, when I read a translation of the transcript, I finally learned what Artaud had been saying. He had been saying to be someone, one must have a BONE, not be afraid to show the bone, and to lose the meat in the process. He had asked, Is God a being? To which he answered, If he is one, he is shit. He had asked, Do you know precisely what is meant by cruelty? To which he answered, Off-hand, I don’t.”
“Using camera work that can have more in common with laparoscopic surgery than with cinema, hard-core porn knocks itself out to get supernaturally close to the body’s capacities for contact and penetration. The closer you go — that is, the more hard core it gets– the more abstract it becomes. And the more abstract it becomes, the deeper the mystery of why it works– why watching close-ups of throbbing pink body parts moving in and around each other instantly turns most of us on. ‘That is porn’s greatest strength, its almost mystical dimension,’ Virginie Depentes observes.”
Nicholson Baker interviewed by Sam Anderson in The Paris Review. Excerpt online here.
“I think I felt some of the terrifying arbitrariness that someone who’s writing a folk tale feels — ‘Once upon a time, the old miller climbed a tree. No he didn’t, he dug a well. No, actually he swam out in the middle of a pond and met a genie.’ It doesn’t matter. Who cares? Anything can happen. There are a hundred possibilities. But if you bring it very close to something you know, then the number of possibilities drops way down. And it becomes interesting to come up with words that wrap about reality’s utility pole.”
This interview, plus the Julianna Barwick and Ikue Mori FRKWYS release = maximum Sunday optimism.
At table No. 1, Dennis Freedman, the creative director at Barneys, traded gossip with Frank M. Moore, a collector and neurosurgeon. “Have you ever noticed a certain woman who always shows up a few minutes late for the auctions in a tight dress?” Mr. Moore asked. “I mean it makes total sense: some of the world’s richest, sophisticated men are there with the best taste … well, maybe not the best taste.”
At another table was the Parisian gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, the artist Chris Ofili, the architect David Adjaye and the Russian art collector Inga Rubenstein. “Auctions can be kind of boring, but I went to one in London last spring where protesters had snuck in and started moaning,” said Ashley Shaw Scott, a model and Mr. Adjaye’s girlfriend. “They had to be hauled out by security, it was so much fun.”
“The contraband wasn’t narcotics or guns. It was male deer: big bucks with big racks, brought into Texas to breed with the state’s delicate native deer.
The antlers can span up to four feet and are often festooned with dozens of thick knobs and nubbins.
The look is achieved by breeding in captivity. These creatures don’t exist in the wild—but hunters can bag them for a fee at one of Texas’ high-fence ranches, where barriers keep the animals from escaping.
With proper permits, breeders can buy sperm—but it’s expensive (one vial from a buck with baroque antlers can cost as much as $20,000, according to an industry consultant). Breeders can’t legally import the deer, however: Texas law forbids transporting live deer into the state in order to protect the local population from disease.
So smugglers are clandestinely hauling northern animals across state lines and tapping them for their coveted semen, to use in breeding programs and to sell to others, according to investigators.
“It happens more than you think,” says Mr. Merida, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who eventually tracked down the smuggler, a 77-year-old deer breeder named Billy Powell.”"
- link
My story “Good for You” was published in Faultline and just reprinted online in The Reprint!
Obsessed with Spencer Soper’s reporting on the conditions of one Amazon.com warehouse in Pennsylvania. However, avoiding shopping with Amazon is not easy or fun and what if every pleasure the internet brings me ends up ruining lives?
I’ve got a story in the Guernica blog’s new flash fiction series — and am very excited to have work coming out in issues of Unsaid, the Reprint, and NOON (alongside heroes like Lydia Davis and Deb Olin Unferth and friends Ann DeWitt, Anya Yurchyshyn, James Yeh, Roxane Gay, and Lincoln Michel. There are ostriches on the cover).
I am reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and when I need a break I reread this mesmerizing Wikipedia entry:
The patronizing “we” is sometimes used in addressing instead of “you,” hinting a facetious assurance that the one asked is not alone in his situation, that “I am with you, we are in this together.” A doctor may ask a patient: And how are we feeling today? This usage is emotionally non-neutral and usually bears a condescending, ironic, praising, or some other flavor, depending on an intonation: “Aren’t we looking cute?” In distinction to the patronizing “we” is the non-confrontative “we” used in T-V languages such as Spanish where the phrase ¿Cómo estamos? (literally, “How are we?”) is sometimes used to avoid both over-familiarity and over-formality among near-peer acquaintances.
