Published: 02/07/2020
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from[…]
Published: 06/20/2018
Wrapped in modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s 1971 addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, A Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums considers the global ecological catastrophe by way of a speculative address to the art museums of the future, revisiting mid-century modes of site-specificity and speculative collage as utopian practices for the present. Written over[…]
Published: 12/13/2019
Hephaestus Reloaded / Efesto Reloaded, presented in a bilingual (English/Italian) publication, and whose five authors are from Greece, Italy, and the US, invokes as its first inspiration the myth of Hephaestus who embodied a twofold entity: both disabled and technically capacious. The myth of Hephaestus has been passed across the centuries as an ancient metaphor[…]
Published: 11/19/2018
1883. Jean-Pierre Brisset realizes that a close phonological analysis of spoken words will demonstrate that the French language, and therefore the human species, was evolved from frogs. 1896. Consulted as an expert in linguistics and comparative philology, Ferdinand de Saussure reports that the passages of Martian Language transcribed during the “sonambulistic glossolalias” of one (pseudonymously[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/24/2020
Why should there only be literary scholarship about authors who actually lived, and texts which exist? Where are the articles on Enoch Campion, Linus Withold, Redondo Panza, Darshan Singh, or Heidi B. Morton? That none of these are real authors should be no impediment to interpreting their invented writings. In the first collection of its[…]
Published: 03/26/2018
Trouble Songs is a hybrid serial work that tracks the appearance of the word “trouble” in 20th- and 21st-century American music. It reads (and sings) songs and poems, with reference to cultural events ranging from the death of a pop singer to the growth of popular resistance movements. The trouble singer invokes the word “trouble” in[…]
Imprint: Peanut Books
Published: 09/26/2017
In this collection of longer essays nested within brief, lyrical meditations, each piece focuses on some micro aspect of everyday life as a means of exploring complex macro systems—families, dinner parties, vineyards, deserts, nations. For example, Walker’s own experience as the mother of a micropreemie (a baby born weighing less than one pound, twelve ounces,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 07/11/2017
Of the Contract is a version of a text that is as old as any memory, or a form of legal instrument that constitutes the basis of the world in which its terms have been translated. The text remains as open to renewal as that world remains to future alteration, and the terms are both[…]