The Big Cats, Part V
On crime and punishment and missing out on parties
The virus is born and already dead, a script / for another life’s dis-ease. ...
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The Tangled Web of Familial Homophobia
A Secret Love (Directed by Chris Bolan, Netflix, 2020)
But I was not prepared for the central role in the documentary film played by Terry’s nieces, Diana Bolan and Tammy Donahue; nor was I prepared for their jarring, casual homophobia.
A Secret Love begins with Terry and Pat coming out to their families after having been a couple (they told ...
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The Big Cats, Part IV
On Joe Exotic and Bill Gates
Tiger catches / Joe Exotic by the toe. He won’t run, / let him go. My mother said Bill Gates / is going to pick the very last one....
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Creative Careers: Making A Living With Your Ideas
A journey through fashion and design
I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in, Madison with a double major in philosophy and psychology. I tried to get a job as a sage, but he wisdom factories weren’t hiring, so I got a job in a small clothing boutique. One day a friend of mine called and ...
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The Goths & Other Stories
I
In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months through barren hills along the confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum, and just kinda crash and charge their phones.
“My ...
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The Big Cats, Part III
On fever dreams and wounds to lick
A wounded animal conceals itself
to hide from death and to seek it....
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When the Penis Is Property
Why we can’t talk about the sexuality of enslaved African American men
In Joseph Lavallée's novel, The Negro Equalled By Few Europeans, an enslaved African man named Itanoko describes being raped by a white slaver named Urban. The white man was "struck with my comeliness,” Itanoko says, which "made him violate, what is most sacred among men.’” According to Thomas Foster’s Rethinking ...
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The Big Cats, Part II
On sleeping dangers, grocery runs, and hiding out in the wilderness
Last night I dreamed there was a tiger sleeping / in the bosom of the family, the same light canary / color as the dog. ...
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The Big Cats, Part I
On tigers, Richard Brautigan, and six feet of distance
In the Bronx the tigers have come down / with a dry cough and febrile dreams...
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Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic
Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague
We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase.
Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...
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The Urn
How I Stopped Loving Design
Despite the disappointment, something very valuable was salvaged from our conversations. We had been sharing our enthusiasm for the writers Jerzy Pilch and Olga Tokarczuk when Pawel introduced me to the work of Marcin Wicha. Wicha is as sardonic as Pilch and Tokarczuk, and like them, he writes about politics. ...
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Void Bitches
To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world.
If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because our bodies are a disaster already. Now that the whole planet has some kind of dysphoria, maybe it’s our time to shine.
It’s a ludicrous idea, I know, but one reads in these times with a ...
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