176 – Summer Reading Collage Criticism

By atlasnewsletter, August 11, 2017

A body is never just a sum, though identity categories can trick us into thinking this way. Yet the significance of a body is irreducible to parts.

Pelvises, limbs, a tongue seem to emerge from the morass and then break apart again.

All the countries that decided they were losers and filth and accordingly spat them out.

Inquiries among American lamaseries (there are more than 100 Buddhist societies in the U.S.) have been quietly initiated in the hope of finding monks or priests who are serious baseball fans and who might persuade Finch that the two religions (Buddhism and baseball) are compatible.

When you are less than two percent of your nation-state’s population and the public discourse about your people is dominated by stereotypes and misinformation, self-representation is profoundly important.

Nixon’s brain led him to this idea by means of some bizarre accident – he apparently thought “Tory men and liberal policies” are what “changed the world,” and saw the plan as the ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics, something that would make his name ring out forever: Richard Nixon, guarantor of universal dignity.

Travis, who wears wide-wale corduroys and a sweater from Structure and seems to subsist entirely on Starburst Fruit Chews, tends to speak with the same deprecatory irony that is the whole staff’s style, introducing himself to new media today as either “Your press lackey” or “The Hervé Villechaize of Bullshit 1,” or both.

This sentence gave the false impression of blackmail, and HanAssholeSolo suddenly became a free speech martyr to the right.

Does someone who is writing within a more obvious regime of censorship somehow have more obligation to engage, in their art, with political issues? That seemed to be the implication, and it’s a strange one.

Although it resembles a giant phallus, and this masculine claim to conception seems willfully sexist, Guston posits the act of creating something out of nothing as grotesque but also magic; the monumental scale implies the exaggerated magnitude of this act.

Boom—boom—boom. Not only the girl but everything in the soundscape disappears, cleared away for a chorus that emerges in an entirely different space again. A space you enter, too, as inevitably as one moment follows another.

But in a cynical moment, she wondered if anyone would watch video of an eclipse after the event.

-Many Authors (compiled by Jeff Bergman)
August 2017

Leave a comment Cancel reply