13 December 2024: Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails for Dispatches Magazine
When the peacocks arrived in San Francisco, I didn’t think too much of it, but Alyona, my yoga teacher, was not happy.
“They’ll take the park,” she said. She said these words in a whisper as she looked up at the houses on Telegraph Hill, where the birds had been sighted earlier in the week. “I’ve seen it happen. In Pasadena.”
She was right.
Two weeks after they touched down on Telegraph Hill, the peacocks migrated to Washington Square Park. We found them behind the statue of Benjamin Franklin, in the grassy oasis where Alyona had led our weekly Saturday morning yoga class for the past fifteen years.
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29 August 2024: Dispatches at the DNC
It’s grain filling season in Illinois. All around me, the corn fields are having sex, and lots of it. Those are the words that Brian, the Free Methodist sitting next to me on the train to Chicago, uses to describe the fertilization of corn husks. “The tassel (the male part of the corn) pollinates the ovules on the ear (the female).” I look outside my window and see the never-ending fields of corn on either side of the train. “You’re telling me these fields are making love,” I ask, because I don’t know much about agriculture, and I’m trying to find my feet in the conversation. “That’s right,” Brian says. “This is the stronghold of American corn.”
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17 July 2024: Person-to-Person with Willis Barnstone for Dispatches Magazine
WB: …left him with no vision in one eye, and a little bit of vision in the other. He could hardly see color, but he remembered colors.
DM: When did you first meet Borges?
WB: Do you know the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) on 102nd Street and Lexington Avenue? Every week they’d have a great writer or painter, and one day they had Borges, and afterwards I went up on stage and spoke to him in Spanish.
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16 February 2024: Through a Screen, Darkly for Dispatches Magazine
PEEL THE PROTECTOR OFF THE PHONE, take a photo of it, blow it up, print it, and hang it on the wall. That’s what Graham Littell has done in “I, Phone,” his latest solo show. He’s done it eight times with eight glass protectors and the effect is fantastic: If you walked inside the Schmidt Gallery at Principia College last month, you could have been in a cathedral with screen protectors for windows. Look in the windows and you would have found a lens into the life of the modern mind—broken, cracked, and confidently falling apart.
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5 September 2023: Person-to-Person with Sarah Schulman for Dispatches Magazine
DM: You published your first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984. It’s a detective novel. But I’m wondering if it’s a parody of a detective novel.
SS: At that time there were very few queer detectives because it was a popular cultural genre, and most lesbian fiction was pulp or underground or coded. So the idea of taking a popular cultural form and inserting a lesbian character was a brand new idea and sort of arrogant. It was like saying, “Oh, we don’t just have to be in these marginal forms. We can also be in popular cultural forms.”
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26 July 2023: Person-to-Person with Alfredo Jaar for Dispatches Magazine
DM: The theme for this issue is “The Postwar,” and the way the editors define it is very conventional–from the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But as you showed us in your talk, there really isn’t a postwar.
AJ: Well, you’re right. In thinking about “postwar” today, in light of what’s happening around us, “postwar” is an illusion. And this so- called postwar really planted the seeds of the next war. And that’s where we find ourselves today.
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19 May 2023: “Steinberg’s Tantric Universe” for Dispatches Magazine
IN VARIOUS CARTOONS BY SAUL STEINBERG, the number five makes love to a question mark, a woman smoking a cigarette is actually a chair, and a man greets another man by removing not just his hat, but his whole head. In a cartoon by Saul Steinberg, an airplane is a word—“WHZZT”—with motion lines in its wake (below, on a horizontal line of earth, a man looks up). In a cartoon by Saul Steinberg, a man draws himself into a spiral that may or may not be the world. John Updike called these scenes “wormholes between different universes.” Roland Barthes went further. “Voilá,” he said, the “petite autarkic universe” of Steinberg, “encumbered by heteroclite objects in the middle of which we do not find ourselves.”
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3 November 2022: “The End of the World Smells Like Tomato Soup” for Dispatches Magazine
“Sir, are you okay? You’ve barely touched your Monet mashed potato.”
“Yes,” I told the server. “I’m okay. But my husband left me, and I’m not hungry. He left a note on the fridge. And a pair of slippers. He left a pair of slippers I bought him in Paris. He organized a search committee for my next lover, which is a kind gesture, don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s a kind gesture? He was precise. In the note, he said, “I’m asking Michelle to find you another husband.” The problem is, I’m not popular. . .
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28 October 2022: On “Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965” at the Barbican Centre for Dispatches Magazine
It’s April 1945. Hitler is dead in Berlin, his blood still warm in his body, and an American woman is posing for a photo in his bathtub in Munich. Her name is Lee Miller. She’s bathing. A picture of the Führer, propped on the bath rim, observes her naked body. On the basin to her left there’s a statuette, maybe of Venus. It’s quiet, but the whole scene feels like gossip.
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10 May 2022: On Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie for Dispatches Magazine
It was raining when we emerged from the Metro and walked to the Holiday Inn on Rue de Lyon. With less than 24 hours before our train left Paris for Marseille, we dropped our backpacks and returned to the streets. A death in my girlfriend’s family had brought us here. It was June, summer, and none of us had prepared for cold weather. We shivered in front of a half-burnt Notre Dame and a deserted Eiffel Tower.
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20 December 2021: On “Afterparties” for Dispatches Magazine
If the title of Anthony Veasna So’s debut collection of stories, Afterparties, is a way of thinking about the stories themselves, then the party, the main event that his Khmer American characters are leaving, is genocide. It’s an impossible departure. The Khmer Rouge’s rampage, which murdered millions of Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 and led So’s parents to California, haunts every character in the book. And as keen as they are to get away from the pain, to leave the party once and for all, trauma keeps them in remembered time.
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18 July 2021: On the South West Forests in Western Australia for Dispatches Magazine
One morning in July 2020 I drove three hours to the sawmill town of Nannup. I had been invited to get in the way of some loggers in a neighboring forest called Helms, one of those whitefella names for Wardandi Noongar Country. This “action” was secret and the organizer hadn’t told me where to go, but a message would come later that day. I left Perth before sunrise. A good camper, I had loaded the car with one bottle of water, a carton of vegetables (including a lentil soup mix), Pringles, and three books of nature poems, which, I reasoned, could be used as fire starters if necessary. I didn’t bother with a tent, deciding instead that I would brave the conditions of the car over the forest. The drive was pleasant. The South West is full of paddocks. I didn’t take my time.
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12 May 2021: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti for Dispatches Magazine
A guy in a Ferlinghetti poem divorces himself from civilization. He goes to San Francisco and falls in love with the waterfront. But even here, at land’s end, there are too many freeways and too much petroleum. The guy divorces himself again and plans to board a ship. He makes a call from a phone booth on a pier and says, “It’s All Over Count Me Out.” The fog lifts and the man moves through the city one last time, only to return to the phone booth where he’s expecting a call from lawyers with the final word on his divorce from civilization. The poem ends in obscurity: as his ship prepares to leave, the guy sits down in the booth and the phone rings.
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1 May 2021: Short story “Sounds like” published in Mistake House Magazine
HEARTBEAT:
I turn on my side, form an electro space blooper
drooping to the next beat, an unseen needle —
imagine an auto tune bzzzz
“bzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzz” moving up-down– wavelike
pitch moving like a shard of iron, leaping to magnetic pole.
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16 Jan 2021: On the Decameron Project for Dispatches Magazine
In the year 2020 millions of people got sick, went mad, and hated one another like never before. Foreseeing, or perhaps intuiting how the pandemic would unfix normalized and imperfect ways of living worldwide, the editors at the New York Times Magazine commissioned a group of fiction writers to channel Boccaccio and build stories of solace for the belabored mind. The result is The Decameron Project, a collection of 29 stories first published in the Magazine in July that remember, lament, and escape a strange and deadly contemporary moment.
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10 Nov 2020: On the 2019/20 fires in Australia for Dispatches Magazine
Fires were burning in every state and territory and some local groups in Perth had organized a vigil. A few minutes late, my partner and I ran from the parking lot to the yellow steps of the Cultural Centre where about 400 people had gathered in a circle. We joined them. Appeared casual. Saluted the hot afternoon with fresh beads of sad sweat.
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