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Woman with a Movie Camera: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)
Aug 8, 2024
As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer...
Queer “Orientations” as Counterblast Manifesto
May 16, 2024
When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry) launches the futurists on a rocket ship back to Homer via stanzas containing questions about how we come to sense each other in a vortex, since “after all humans are dark inland pools full of anguish and panic-stricken love.” As an...
Humanities to the Rescue: A Militant Editorial Project
May 8, 2024
The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. The powerful AIs employed by social media giants like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), YouTube, and TikTok have been trained to generate the...
Judging by its Cover, Part 2
Mar 21, 2024
The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t be confronted for whatever nefarious, oblivious, or self-deceptive reason. The pieces are interested, too, in how covers spur questions about what others are thinking and what one’s own book is doing—and what it is about the cover image that links...