Mithu Sen

Epitaphs: Two Poems

I realize now I could have looked up the Korean on my phone, or asked the coroner if he spoke English, though at the time my instinct was to turn to my mother, as we’ve always done for each other to find the words that clung to the tips of our tongues in the mouth of the other.

The Violence Is the Point

By the time Meir Kahane was shot to death in a hotel in Manhattan in 1990, he had lost his U.S. citizenship, been arrested more than 60 times, and spent time in Israeli prison for what he called “my ideas” (planning violent attacks on Palestinians in Hebron). None of his apocalyptic predictions of recurring Jewish victimhood have come to pass. Yet last Ramadan, as Jewish extremists paraded through the streets of Jerusalem attacking Palestinians and chanting “Death to Arabs,” a number could be seen wearing stickers emblazoned with the slogan “Kahane Tzadak”–Kahane was right.

Blow-Out

A vast and thanatopic feast is envisioned by Marco Ferreri’s 1973 cult classic La Grande Bouffe, whose four leads vomit, fart, and fuck their way through the film as they set out to eat themselves to death.

Bridge Tooth

Egoless in the orthodontist’s waiting room, I was a steel trap for shame. The multi-roomed office, located in a narrow, shingled two-story, was a winding funhouse, each turn amplifying my self-flagellation.

Antisocial Dentistry

Our inability to easily access dental care is a consequence of the profession’s nearly century-long battle to keep themselves free from the perceived threat of communism. For dentists, the Cold War never ended.

Stories of Bubby’s Teeth

Havana, Cuba. 1925. A dentist peers into the mouth of a young Jewish woman from Dolchinov, Poland. Malas dientes, he says, grimacing. The only fix is to remove them all. The dentist pulls her teeth from her gums, one by one, just as this woman will later, in the Great Depression, pick out all the stones of her single bracelet to pay for her husband’s emergency appendectomy.

INTRODUCTION: NO GODS, NO DENTISTS

Uncomfortable Aesthetics: An Interview With Alex Temple

I am here with Alex Temple, a composer and thinker and brilliant aesthetician, and we are here to talk about teeth, transgender aesthetics, and body horror.

This Constant Becoming: An Interview With Mithu Sen

I’ve edited my Wikipedia page so many times: I change my biographical data, I change my date of birth, I put wrong information. It says I participated in documenta. A particular size and style of my drawings is always signed within a 20-year timeline from ’97 to 2017, so even if I make it today I’ll sign it 2006, or 2012, or 2015.