The following four interviews (with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White) were conducted as part of an ongoing project that we’ve been calling “Writing’s Dirty Secret.” Although writing is largely perceived as a strictly intellectual means of
Truss
“Intellectual rigor demands that we give these damned metaphors every chance, even if they are inimical to personal well-being and comfort.” Donald Barthleme, “At the End of the Mechanical Age” “So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man
The Devil and John Malkovich
THE PARATEXT May 3 JM: There is something I’d like you to change in the interview. On page two there is my line, “I never watch my movies.” I’d like to change that to “I don’t watch all my movies.”
World More World than World
The back pain is livid in the southeastern quadrant of my back. Because it is inside of my body, not manifest like an abrasion, it is my secret horrid companion. The only kind of interruption in my story is its
Quickening
1. My mother and I are sitting on the porch swing in the August heat. She is enormously pregnant, and she is asking me what we should name the baby when it comes. “If it’s a girl,” I say, “we
Counting People
I’d met John at my friend’s place a year earlier; then I started seeing him at the library. He is at the library almost every day. When our friendship started, I’d just found a book about Norbert Weiner in the
Untitled #12
Jasper Johns believed in gray: “Black and white is very leading. It tells you what to say or do. The gray encaustic paintings seem to me to allow the literal quality of the painting to predominate over any of the
Formula
The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, make it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. Michel
All Talk
We do not have to believe the things we say, though we may well. The things we say are objects, and we place them in front of us in order to consider them. There may be some repetition in this.
My Toy Interior: A Video Essay
There is a curious way in which writing becomes idealized form. A mysterious process through which the lines become transformed into boundaries which beg to be transgressed, reformulated, upon which we make our attempts at their erasure (or to mark