FROM THE DESK OF THE ESSAY
The practices we build in remembrance of the dead become the afterlives of the dead for the living.
The beaches in St. Petersburg, Florida, shimmer, flickering sand that phosphors against the bay’s cool turquoise translucence intermittently inscribed by waffling heatwaves bending in ribbons, defined then blurred in that ancient futurity, the between worlds, those visible & observable & those not.
Water whooshes sand as fine as flour between…
FROM THE RACE & HIGHER ED DESK
If whiteness is always piratical & appropriative, what would it look like to face the oblivion of itself?
Whiteness is a sibylline poetics of insatiability. Think fork-tongued. Think slithering serpent, from Eden to the Jungle Book.
It urges coaxes all alterity—marked by difference—into its orbit. It devours.
It envisions & commits unthinkable acts knowingly &, with moralizing naivety, manipulates the former acts or inactions as narratives of historical…
FROM THE OPINION PAGES
Why are we writing about how to write & not writing what utterly & wholly compels us?
There are days like yesterday, when “I found”— greenhorn that am I ever—a professor sharing elaborate resources and coursework about Wallace Stevens’ (the greatest American poet of the twentieth century) later work & its relationship (intellectual and philosophical, though I’m down for a queer reading of any text) to George…
FROM THE PAINTING DEPARTMENT
What happens when we de-value valuation? What happens when we abandon language itself & are left only with the materials of painting?
From the alley situated messily behind my brother’s house a dog barks & the sun sets, lighting the clouds. It’s cool, 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
The absence of cicadas strikes me as an audiophonic poverty. The state’s polymorphous in a personality disorder kind of way: it shifts various shapes & identities…
FROM THE DESK OF THEORY & PRACTICE
How does one trust the unique vision & process of one’s practice while remaining radically open to the varied input & criticism of others?
Showing one’s work to another offers a rare relational intimacy that often registers with great somatic intensity. Witnessing another person attend to a thing one’s made alone offers an awe of overwhelm. Why would anyone give their time & psycho-physical powers to a thing one made?
When it’s time to…
FROM THE DESK OF RACE, CULTURE, & POLITICS
What do we make of “multiracial” whiteness, of non-white participants in, & advocates for, Neo-fascist white supremacy?
An NYU professor, Christina Beltrán, published an essay in the Washington Post’s Opinion column. …
THE HOMELESSNESS DIARIES
Conversations with a Denver cab driver about the future of the U.S.
The sun moves into the blinds of my friends’ apartment’s windows, splitting into rays. It reminds me of my favorite cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp.
The plants lean toward diffracted rays. A lime-green light seems to float into the room & linger as I zone out.
…
The Homelessness Diaries
What happens when we feel constructed out of loss & no desire to fill the voids of us?
PAINTING’S TERRORISTIC IMPULSE TOWARD THE TYRANNY OF THE SIGN
A painter & poet reflects upon the subversive power of painting.
With two duffel bags slung over my shoulders—a red one with a Toyota insignia & an unmarked black one—& twenty paintbrushes connected by speaker wire in a kind of ritualistic-looking, oversized necklace, I walk up the stairs from the basement & head out into the yard of dirt & half-standing…
The pervasive, pernicious reproduction of whiteness even in the name of antiracism, decoloniality, & like discourses
I’m driving a 1997 Plymouth Voyager van on Interstate 80 through the agricultural corridor of the plains.
Eastern Colorado’s scrubby grass & a few “dairy farms” extend toward a horizon whose event seems simply to be continued catastrophe for high margins.
