Rules for Consciousness in Mammals
Clarice Lispector. Anyone who talks about Clarice Lispector and psychoanalysis is likely to say something foolish, not least because psychoanalysis is a discipline of listening, not talking. And, in...
View ArticleThree Movements
Reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. Isadora Duncan, 1905. There’s a story of Isadora Duncan and the press that has stuck with me since I read it years ago: “I’m going to Egypt to lay flowers at...
View Article’Tis Pity Such a Pretty Maid As I Should Go to Hell
From the cover of the NYRB reissue of The Fire Horse. 1 I have just closed Isaac Watts’s once-famous book of children’s poetry, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children. This...
View ArticleWhere the Farts Come In
In Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning, well-placed farts stand in for the limits of language. Still from Good Morning. In 1953, two years after my mother was born in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was...
View ArticleI Love You So Much I Would Drink Your Blood
Notes on Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves. Jim Goldberg, Megan, Sherman Oaks, 1991. © Jim Goldberg. All images courtesy of the artist, Pace/MacGill Gallery (NY), and Casemore Kirkeby (SF). Friday?...
View ArticleGrowing Up with the Odyssey
Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey appears in our Summer issue. Here, she remembers performing in a child’s production of the Odyssey as a girl in Oxford, England. From the Odyssey, adapted...
View ArticleGreat Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo
Photo: Pixels Digital Stay with Me, the debut novel by Nigerian Ayobami Adebayo, explores a contemporary marriage in a Yoruba community stubbornly tied to tradition. Despite suspicious in-laws,...
View ArticleThe Most Selfish Choice
Justine Siegmund, Diagram of a Fetus, Lying on Its Side, in an Opened Womb, 1723. I am not by nature a decisive person. Anxiety freights each choice with the potential for disaster, and where...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Peasants, Postpartum, and Palestine
Kate Colby. Photo: Caroline Larabell. Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches is the book I never knew I needed. I wrote last week about my love for fiction about women interacting with art, and Colby’s...
View ArticleDoes the Parent Own the Child’s Body?: On Taryn Simon’s Sleep
Taryn Simon, detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021. When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great...
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