In commemoration of J.D. Salinger, we repost one of our favorite essays, “Better to Fade Away than to Burn Out?” Editor Mary Borkowski defends authorial privacy in an era where digitally enabled self-promotion is the norm; and with the rise of self-publishing—an imperative.
When we travel, the meanings consumerism ascribes to objects become opaque, and the choices we have to make — where to eat, where to go, what to do — can abruptly seem arbitrary, pointless. The ubiquitous marketing discourse that normally serves to orient us instead prompts terror in the midst of plenty. The consumerist bounty
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library: "Hypnography: A Study in the Therapeutic Use of Hypnotic Painting." Mears, Ainslie. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957.
E-books promise not a plenitude of ideas and narratives but a wealth of information to better rationalize the unpredictable behavior of readers. E-readers make us into the content.
(via) My vocation [as a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be…
Dinner on a Man-of-War, Anonymous, ca. 1893 Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay’s sharp, scintillating 1856 biography of British author Samuel Johnson turned out to be quite…
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library Danger! Icebergs Ahead! Poole, Lynn and Gray Johnson Poole. New York: Random House, 1961. The Reanimation Library is a…
Monologue from The Cruise (1998) The image makes me think of this conversation with this woman the other day. She was this fastidious Judaic type woman…
John Tremblay at Francesca Pia (Contemporary Art Daily) “Writing, as such, takes an almost intolerable combination of hubris and naiveté. This has destroyed many a…
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.