ISSUE 101 | JUL 2023

FACING THE THING

Hannah Blair, detail from Flood Scroll

INTRODUCTION: AN EXEGETIC CHAIN

Bigness Has No Name

The pig likes the dog run. He doesn’t like the rain. And it rains. It rains all May long.

Traditional narrative structures no longer apply in a society where the only certainty is perpetual crisis, and art must change to accommodate this reality. To Brecht, the catharsis that theatergoers look for in a drama is a distraction from this materialist vision.

Misha Crafts

A Transsexual’s Guide to Horror Cinema

Desire is the problem. It is never truly beaten and it never disappears completely. The final shot of almost any horror movie will remind you of that. What complicates things is that desire is also the road to pleasure, even fulfillment.

Sanders Isaac Bernstein

This Time It’s Personal?

The core of revenge is wild; rather than resolve into a set of specific instances, it wants to radiate outward and contaminate other actions with its significance. Just as an act of revenge can spiral out of control, reproducing itself endlessly—René Girard calls it “an interminable, infinitely repetitive process”—so too can the concept of revenge describe a wide range of actions: living well, looking good, killing someone, writing a book. The specific action is less important than the structuring dynamic.

Kit Eginton, Lawrence Lemaoana

My Own Sanity Within That Madness

It's like your body is imprisoning you. Do you know the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It’s about being immobile, and just stuck there. This guy gets paralyzed from the spine downward and he can only move his eyes—it’s called “locked-in syndrome”—and he writes a whole memoir. When you’re defined by apartheid, you’re visibly what you are, and you can’t be anything other than what defines you.

Hannah Blair

A Sea Wall

“She was so beautiful,” says my mom, meaning yesterday, when she was still a little conscious.