“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”
— Annie Dillard
The Liminal in Bhanu Kapil’s “Incubation for Space Monsters”
Incubation is a state between being born and being unborn, or un-alive, or not. It is a way of hitchhiking, which is a way of being between where you are and where you want to go. An immigrant is someone who is in between two countries—the country of origin and the country of destination. And…
Suburban Gothic
On cleaning days, my mother used to toss my brother and I out of the house. We weren’t allowed to return until evening, when the carpets would be groomed into neat rows by the vacuum, and the hardwood floors smelled like Pinesol. One such day, banished to the outdoors, my brother and I decided to…
The Users of Enchantment
In his (in?)famous book, The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim analyses classic fairy tales through the lens of Freud. He posits that the darker elements of these tales, now scrubbed and sparkled over by Disney, actually served to help children grapple with existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalry. I read…
Technologically Enmeshed
on human/machine love in Margaret Rhee’s Love, Robot I stood alone on the beach looking out to sea. The sun was setting, sinking into the horizon, turning the waters a gleaming gold and leaving the sky dappled and purpling like a bruise. I felt tranquil—a rare feeling for me to encounter in a dream—and I…
Exquisite Agony
The first time I remember feeling it, I was a child growing up in Minnesota. The end of winter in that still, gelid land was almost a religious experience. It overwhelmed me and sent me yearning for some kind of ultimate connection I could not name. To satisfy the yearning, I developed a ritual. The…
Sensawunda
“Things are getting worse,” my director, Ryan, declares. It’s a hot, mid-summer day and I am lounging with a dozen other women on the floor of one of the old, empty houses on Governors Island. We’re participating in an artist’s residency for a devised theatre production called The Great Filter. The name derives from one…
February
I can’t believe it’s still February. Time crawls by. I wonder if this is what Pope Gregory XIII thought when he plotted out these 28 endless days. He probably dipped his quill in the well and whispered, “Forgive me God, but I just can’t do this anymore,” and then consigned us, and all of history,…
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Laura Linart 