A.V. Marraccini
@saintsoftness
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essayist + art historian + theorist ⎔ book WE THE PARASITES: ⎔ Critic In Residence + adjunct prof at IDM, NYU Tandon ⎔ she/her
Brooklyn
Joined December 2009
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For the
@PoetryFound
a new piece from me, on cubes, dice, love, fate, oracles, manifolds, collapsed orbits, architectures, named seasons, and Goldberg Variations:
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Ana Mendiata, we will remember you forever. The man who killed you can die in ignominy.
Carl Andre, a sculptor who was among the foremost artists associated with the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s, died on Wednesday at 88.
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If you're following Columbia, turn on WKCR right now-- it seems like the cops are cordoning off even public streets and there are no legal observers allowed in, but NYPD counterterrorism units are massing. Listening to the police state prepare to pounce in real time, ghastly.
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@JortsTheCat
@AgnesCallard
Fun fact Jorts: this is the professor best known for crossing a picket full of struggling University of Chicago grad workers and justifying it as a “philosophical emergency”. This is therefore and unsurprising turn. Cruelty to workers—> cruelty to children. Checks out.
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Aaron Swartz would be my age if he were still alive today.
I'm an academic, I use JSTOR, Ebsco etc every day. But ringfencing academic knowledge with huge institutional subscription fees has consequences, including Swartz being hounded to death by JSTOR in court.
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@AgnesCallard
@jonathanbfine
Your article was about justifying your colossal narcissism in crossing a picket. Graduate students: equal enough for you to sleep with but not equal enough to respect as workers and colleagues?
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Just a warning about British jobs like this— £27k per annum pre tax is not London living wage. And it’s not enough to make any UK visa minimum. You can’t live off this no matter how fun it sounds, and since it’s full time, that basically means it has to go to someone wealthy.
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During the Great Depression, my grandmother took all sorts of temp jobs, and went standing room at the Met to every opera she could. She remembered all those operas until the end of her life and told us, her grandchildren about them. She was a working class immigrant.
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This piece is striking, and clearly indicates in public language a condemnation of liberalism as a working political order I’ve heard in more theoretical terms on the left for a long time:
‘If liberalism shows no ability or desire to protect civilian life, regional security and even its own electoral prospects, then its mission-defining claims of principle and competence collapse.’
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Asking for me: when do I get to just be a writer and intellectual as a woman without having to posture as an “it girl” to sell books? Why do we have to commodify smart women’s writing this way?
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@mcmansionhell
I’m sorry but if you can’t describe the awesome interior details of a secret paranormal fish hospital for naiads with joy and realise their deep importance, you don’t need to be a writer. Perec would kill it.
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The moment your eye catches why the title fits, sees the arches and the figures, sees the gestural sameness— this is hermeneutics as flying, as map and territory dissolution, as historiographical mashup paperjam joy. The thrill of it!
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This is absolute god-tier hater level behavior and I am honestly impressed in a way I no longer thought was possible. Hater comrade salute!
One obituary was never going to be enough, so we wrote a book and... waited.
Web:
Print:
@GregGrandin
@sunraysunray
@VersoBooks
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“Sai Toombi”
Please, let the asteroid hit soon.
These are paintings by Sai Toombi, one of the most expensive contemporary artists.
The price of his paintings starts at $ 2 million. up to $75 million.
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Nah, I’m a snob and I hate bad prose. YA features a lot of phone it in industry-category prose. Because ultimately it’s a marketing ticket for fiction that wouldn’t hack it as lit fiction most of the time and we alllll know it. Plus it’s usually censored/censorious.
We need to talk about how a compelling story is often more important than the level of the prose, and how snobbery isn't a good look on anyone. Wtf does 'sound like YA' mean? Readable? Compelling? Relateable??
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You know who can't use JSTOR? Most of the global south. Any precarious or contingent academic not currently on a contract. Almost any non-academic without research library access. The cool girls won't get hats and merch from them but what's fighting this is SciHub.
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The fucked up ecstasy of the asymmetric rococo cartouche: yes, always, immoderately.
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They called this installation a "library" and yet... not an actual book of published poetry in sight. I'm sorry but she has the adoration of fans and billions of dollars-- she could have used this to highlight some actual poets she likes!
Poems on display at Taylor Swift’s ��Tortured Poets Department” Los Angeles library installation.
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People who do research for five minutes with their college alumni access love the idea of JSTOR, which is fine. But people who do research for a living and a lifetime know that open source is where we need to be. And how high the stakes are.
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I was curious so I looked up the reason we don't: it's an ADA violation. You can't turn a standard wheelchair in that closet. It's not good design if it's not universally good design. There is no reason new builds shouldn't be default accessible-- human dignity above extra space.
Here's a bedroom closet design we should put in a lot more US apartments
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@AgnesCallard
@jonathanbfine
Giving hypocrisy the veneer of rigor does not constitute actual analytical rigor nor an excuse for hypocrisy.
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Can you name a novel that features only objects and architecture but absolutely no people as characters?
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1. The New School was founded partly because Columbia repressed dissent. The right to protest is in its charter.
2. Many of the founding Jewish faculty members of the University in Exile were anti-Zionist, as were many Marxist and leftist Jews at the time.
Hope that helps!
Sad to see this at the New School, my alma matter where I completed my PhD.
The New School founded the University in Exile to support Jewish scholars who were fleeing Nazi Germany.
Hope it’s still a place where Jews feel safe.
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If you cross a picket, you are responsible for the harms you cause to the workers at your own institution. Full stop. Solidarity is not a hard concept. I am unhappy when people use their positions of power to perpetuate injustice and always will. You should be too.
@saintsoftness
I believe that you have suffered, but doubt that I have played much of a causal role in your suffering; I suspect that your efforts to convince yourself otherwise are perpetuating your unhappiness. I wish you the best.
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Let’s talk about this amazing Kazuo Shiraga and viscous, tangible materiality in the Japanese postwar forever please. Mono-ha my body into something interesting by arrangement, retaining its bodily essence and not at once.
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From bottom to top, and omitting Benjamin on aura right before Adorno as well as Neuromancer with Mark Fisher, these are the texts I’ll be excerpting for my ars/techne/criticism and theory grad class at IDM in the fall. I’m so incredibly excited!
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Twombly, Achilles Mourns The Death Of Patroclus, 1962
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@struthious
Wait, at least when I was at Chicago, there were rules explicitly saying faculty could not sleep with grad students, especially those in their own department over whom they had power by default. They at least shut up about it!
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Oh to be a humble mendicant of a god that is a large and omniscient looming fish.
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Um this is insane, I hope this student is okay. We should not be holding this up as an ideal. As someone whose grad advisor missed letters and was wildly irresponsible, just... ask me for a letter. Literally that's it. Just ask and I'll do it in a timely and professional fashion.
In awe of the student who, after asking for a letter of rec, sent me a Google doc of advice for letter writers, links to the essays he'd written in my classes, copies of my comments on his writing, *and* a list of his memories & takeaways from each class 💫
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Having the person who harassed me and implied my use of the Latin motto of the Scottish thistle was *violent* then turn out to work for … a defense contractor that makes actual missiles? Yes, priceless. Absurd. Novelistic. A screaming comes across the sky, anyone?
Ana Mardoll being found out as a nepotism hire at Lockheed Martin bc of his own tweets about the incredible benefits of working for LM was not on my 2022 bingo card but here we are in the future and it’s McYikes
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Let me bring extremely clear: writing a manifestly anti union editorial in the New York Times is not “asking for an argument”— especially when it helps a university administration crush an ongoing strike of your own graduate students. Publishing choices have politics.
@AgnesCallard
@jonathanbfine
Your article was about justifying your colossal narcissism in crossing a picket. Graduate students: equal enough for you to sleep with but not equal enough to respect as workers and colleagues?
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I'm sure all these people will forget about the JSTOR "trend" in five minutes, maybe after an annoying style mag profile or two. But I'm begging you: don't flatten the cruelties of intellectual history, including the very recent history of the internet, for your "brand".
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What if I don’t want to sell you a book as a product? What if I don’t want to sell myself? What if I just want criticism to be like arson and just burn down your house and my own? What if I want difficulty that doesn’t lend itself to the product-ification of literature at all?
for nylon’s annual It Girl issue, i wrote about Literary It Girls & the exaltation of the book launch ft. the coolest, smartest writers who are changing the book world 🖤
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When tenured chairs are willing to throw down for the students and the justice of their cause, you must absolutely know that you are going to lose. I have never seen universities so united across the board against admin in my life. Opposition to genocide has a way of doing that.
WATCH: Among those arrested today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University.
I’ve asked for a comment from Emory on this arrest, no word yet.
This video provided to us by an
#Emory
PHD student. You can hear him in this video.
@ATLNewsFirst
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@AgnesCallard
Even if agreed on every point of this (which I don’t), you crossed a graduate student picket during a 2019 strike. Dating a graduate student seems to suggest you regard them as psychosexual equals. Why not also then treat them with equal status and dignity as academic workers?
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The arts aren’t ‘posh hobbies’ for the rich; an egalitarian society gives everyone as much access to them as possible. Bread AND Roses.
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History will not look kindly on all those silent celebrities when Jonathan Glazer had the courage to say something even if he knew the ensuing blacklisting might effectively end his career. Good on him.
Deeply embarrassed for everyone in Hollywood who signed a letter saying Israel isn’t targeting civilians
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This broke me.
Just read this on "queering the map"-
My heart is so broken rn and i just can't stop crying
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My phone cannot capture the spiky luminousness of this weird-ass early Rothko, but it tempts me into weighing earliness as just as important as lateness as an aesthetic turn. Thistles of early:
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I spent my day at the Met teaching my undergrad students that classical art, history, and literature are for everyone. I came on here tonight to find a lot of anti-intellectual populist stuff about “snobby” Greek words. Stop it. THESE ARE YOURS TOO, ALL OF OURS. FIGHT FOR THEM.
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In three or five or ten years the NYT is gonna figure out that they missed an entire wave of avant garde+ actually substantially experimental lit/crit/little mags online while they were busy giving column inches to Dimes Square Girlboss Inc.
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She loved Bukowski even though she only had a high school education. She taught herself to pay piano. The idea that the arts aren’t for people like my grandmother is classist and toxic. Subsidized tickets are fabulous.
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Lots of Marguerite Yourcenar is still out of print in English translation. The economics of publishing under capitalism that peak in YA getting these endless reissues when lit in translation is sustained by nonprofits and small presses? Vile.
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I am teaching some comparative visual analysis writing with these two together. When we talk about techne and the work of the hand, I think this is what we mean, ultimately, the way it's embedded intractably in the thing made by it; a glance-glint, a sunken field, a pebble sun.
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@LouisatheLast
The critic who wrote the scathing NYT review is gay. Don't erase the queerness of those of us who found the exhibit's approach facile just because you don't like criticism.
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Damn, the Times assigned a TERF to review Butler. Whatever you think of the new one or its failings, this is just an embarrassment of a review. Between this and the Oyler/Observer incident, I'm starting to think a lot of major UK papers simply do not care if reviewers read.
Judith Butler's got a new book! And I'm the lucky one who got to read it
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The thing that most struck me about that New Yorker piece about the death of the humanities is that it could have been a powerful critique of the neoliberal positions and labor conditions that made such a death possible— but of course it wasn’t, because it’s the New Yorker.
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Cat news: IT’S BENIGN. I sobbed, my vet teared up on the phone, this was like a 1% chance and my precious boy is totally FINE!!! And he probably had a foreign body in irritated gums so now I have to learn to brush his fangs. I am collapsing in joy. Thank you all for your love!!!
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[whispers] Amanda Gorman is another arguably bad poet too.
wild to see rupi kaur make a concrete professional sacrifice to publicly condemn Biden's warmongering while amanda gorman retweets (checks notes) a screenshot of a "both sides" instagram story by P!nk
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Saw a random undergrad in an elevator carrying a cool bag, so I googled it because I thought I wanted one. It costs more than my rent, and about half what I get paid to teach a course. This is not Dark Academia, this is Pitch Black academia.
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Because I’m in deep tonight, two more Fragonard foliage studies, two more real unreals, woods between the worlds of representation and life:
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Suddenly obsessed with literatures of closed-off-ness, interiorities, walled gardens, eyeless mouthless masks, bricked up anchorites, sealed societies inside giant chromium spheres. Suggestions in this vein?
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Famously, no one has ever examined Picasso through a contemporary, critical, or feminist lens.
Opening on June 2… It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.
Pablo Picasso is a mainstay of the modernist art historical canon, but what does his legacy look like through a contemporary lens? A critical lens? A feminist lens?
🔗
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It's really striking to me that we have an actual moral problem of a genocide in real time and we have Peter Singer thinking about... how to sleep with animals? Agnes Callard who loves to have an opinion on everything suddenly tweeting pictures of her desk? Real public humanists.
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Um. What European country does Jacobin think colonized Edo Japan? The Portuguese prior to their expulsion? The Dutch restricted to Dejima/Nagasaki? Japan has a long history with colonialism as an imperial power— as the colonizer! This is, like, basic bitch history.
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Perfect insomnia post: Agnes Martin, Starlight, 1963.
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For late nights, for late lives-- in thinking about lateness here I think with Ashbery:
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Many of you know how much I love my cat. Today I found out he has a tumor in his mouth that is likely squamous cell carcinoma. He is having a biopsy on Friday but his current prognosis is 2-4 months. I just wanted you all to know why I won’t be around as much just now.
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@andevers
This is very true. Double mask if you can. Hoard an n95 for anytime you have to dash inside to pick something up. Multiple people I know who were insanely careful got the new strain just picking up groceries.
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Lying in bed learning to be an even more epic hater.
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One thing those subsidized tickets in 1930’s New York created were the conditions for her granddaughter, me, to become an art critic. People who work for Tory think tanks and call the arts posh are just trying to take them away from us all.
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A lesser known Twombly masterpiece-- White Rabbit, 1966.
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I found the rococo frivolous and it did not appeal to me for half my adult life. Then, slowly, it became revelatory, almost radical, one of the last eddies of strangeness left.
Sometimes I need to visit the Wallace Collection to remind me of the things I hate. A good exercise.
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@AgnesCallard
hey
@the_point_mag
-- aren't you running a whole summer symposium supposedly on being a public humanities and politics with this woman? Reductive tweet dichotomies about enslavement and edgelord prose aren't a great look. Might wanna rethink that marketing. And her prose.
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@speechleyish
I mean, cyberbullying works. Not now sweetie, Mommy’s trying to avert a genocide.
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It’s announcement season, and hence, announcement: next year I’ll be the Critic in Residence at the Integrated Design and Media program at NYU Tandon. I’m moving to New York City! I’m thrilled and excited and yes, a little nervous but also a big fan of assertive rodents, so…
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A lot of these student reporters have been on air for 26 hours straight to make sure we know what's going on when very limited press can get in. So we have to listen to them.
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One of the fun things about being at museums with students is that they often are drawn to things you aren’t. A kiddo really liked this Lee Krasner that does nothing for me, and now I’m psyched to read about it.
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If you're a philosopher who plays at being a public intellectual on Twitter, do you prefer to be a meaningless edgelord or model thinking about the human history of slavey and enslavement thoughtfully and with real rigor?
You must go back in time: would you prefer to live the life of a slave owner, or the life of a slave?
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It's kind of funny, actually, that as a teenage girl the ferocity of Sontag's prose and the sharpness of her argumentation inspired me to write criticism, and now I've lived to have her son block me on twitter for being "woke". Kill Your Darlings has been transfigured.
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I GOT THE GRANT TO GO TO TOKYO!!! Metabolism and convenience store mochi and third wave coffeeshops HERE I COME!!!
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This is the kind of house where you live in your strange dreams where the world is ending in some sort of vague cataclysm you can only watch from the balcony, and then the house becomes all you have left of the world.
The Owen House, Block Island, Rhode Island. Designed in 1975 by architect Christopher H.L. Owen.
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Hephaestus Contra The It Girl: A Manifesto
To the sick girl, queer girl, crip girl, wrong girl, to the girl with stubble in the wrong places, to the fuckup in the non-glamourous way girl....
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Students pay tuition, how can you arrest them for “trespassing” on their own campus? This is precisely where it is safe and legal to hold protests according to universities themselves! Such hypocrisy!
NYPD JUST ARRESTED EVERY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDENT AT THE GAZA TENT ENCLOSURE!!
JAIL SUPPORT NEEDED AT ONE POLICE PLAZA!!
#cu4palestine
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I love this anthropocene accretion as a modern Wunderkammer object:
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Critique or post-critique, every art historian I know is really sick of English faculty ignoring everything we’ve written and then walking into a museum or using visual culture for their own work. Art has a historiography too!
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I think you alllll already know my thoughts on this so I’ll just add that this woman’s book is on a literary list at FSG, usually considered a formidable and serious imprint. The aesthetic impoverishment of living under late capitalism really is coming for our necks.
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A fabulous novel that does NOT make the mistake of claiming carefully cordoned off zones for Europeans in Edo Japan constituted Settler-Colonialism is David Mitchell’s gorgeous and meticulously researched The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, set in Dutch Dejima (post Shogun).
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It’s Black Friday which means you all have to show us your fellow black cats!
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Honestly, asking for me: when will we see a robust model for feminist public intellectuals take hold that's neither learned-helplessness-babygirl nor gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss adjacent? I need some light at the end of the tunnel here, people.
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@tahereh_safavi
@JortsTheCat
@AgnesCallard
Google her, it’s an uh, rare delight. Fun fact: we wanted excess fees remitted and better health care that included such luxuries as dental. They still haven’t recognized their union. I got my PhD in 2018.
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Does anyone else feel that on the one hand, they cannot look away from the continued horror of the genocide in Gaza, but also on the other, that anything they could possibly say or write is somehow insufficient? I am paralyzed. I wish I was better and could do something material.
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When you’re wild and jump up on the tall shelves, but also need a nap.
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I have recently written about cubes, dice, and fate, and these monumental Richard Serra cubes remind me how to be with the sheer mass, the weightiness of being a material thing sometimes. I didn’t touch the steel but I wanted to put my cheek to its cold desperately.
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Everyone needs to know exactly how much I love Haeckel prints of jellyfish. There's some fascinating history of science written about them, and Haeckel's grief at the early death of his love that motivated them ():
@KatyKelleher
Like honestly: I'd be a horrible pop culture essayist for a general magazine/big press audience. I always end up at Herodotus or the Haeckel prints of jellyfish or some shit! I think I'm exempted here by my own natural incapability.
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To be clear, we loved making fun of her because her poetry sucked ass. But I’m glad her excellent political opinions exist too! I’m a critic, not a poet, so these two things are allowed to exist in my brain simultaneously.
Academic poets loooove making fun of people like Rupi who are bringing younger + QTBIPOC folks into the poetry world out of jealousy & bitterness
Meanwhile, she has ten times the backbone, with the stakes of an infinitely larger platform, than most of y'all 🤡
THANK YOU RUPI!
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@JortsTheCat
@AgnesCallard
Jorts, my entire family and respective cats are fans (!!!) and also this was a totally intellectually bankrupt article she wrote about scabbing as neo-Socratic civility, just in case anyone needs evidence that she crossed the picket:
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I strongly believe criticism is allowed to be mean, angry, impassioned, indelicate, cutting, and even nasty in general. It is also allowed to be riotous, joyous, exhilarated, breathless, and lyrical. This is what having a truly impassioned public discourse with real stakes means.
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It was an obscenity to arrest our students for peaceful protest. It is a further outrage to arrest my colleagues. I cannot believe I'm watching this happen. These are not the principles of the university we work to constitute.
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The thing about the Tortured Poets/Dark Academia/Coquette Lyricist/NYC Literary It Girl continuum is that it profoundly underestimates the writerly relationship to sweatpants and having to file taxes.
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I cannot agree more. I have a forthcoming piece that gestures toward my anger at this briefly, the way in which we are pressured to market feminine trauma as our identities online, ostensibly as feminists, to this sad pre-formed heteronormative gaze. Imagine more radically!
I am sick of this shit. I’ve had enough. I’m sick of “fuck all men teehee and yet my entire self is crafted around being exploited by them.” I’m sick of “isn’t it tragic that I’m beautiful bc then bad men love me too much.”
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This Ashbery cover is perhaps perfect. The marbled paper pattern gestures toward the rich complexity of the poems inside it. The italic sans serif with varied kerning feels like momentum; its art deco frame gives it a luxury, another layered reflexiveness like the work itself.
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SOME NEWS
A huge congrats to Firmament columnist A. V. Marraccini (
@saintsoftness
) for being named an Emerging Critics Fellow for 2021-2022 by
@bookcritics
… and a perfect occasion to announce that we will be publishing her debut book, WE THE PARASITES, next autumn!
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