A note to visitors:
The writing available on this website is extremely old and not particularly representative of what I'm up to right now. You can find links for many newer and better things posted in the feed below, or get in touch and I'll happily direct you toward them.
I publish a Substack called Spigot, about contemporary art but also music, books, movies, and especially wine. If you'd like to subscribe, I'd be thrilled. It's free, though paying subscribers get perks like a handmade friendship bracelet.
Otherwise, I'm fairly present on IG, sometimes engage on Twitter, and have accounts on Substack Notes, Threads, and probably some other sites I've forgotten.
My email address is available under Info/About Domenick.
**
A dip into the reality (re)emerging in the postpandemic art world via Frieze Week, with barbs about Hudson Yards and reflections on the art world's regularly recurring infatuation with image minting and money making:
https://www.artforum.com/diary/domenick-ammirati-on-frieze-week-2021-85721
5.12.21
*
A piece on one of my favorite artists, and a sorely underappreciated one:
https://www.artforum.com/print/202105/openings-domenick-ammirati-on-whitney-claflin-85482
5.01.21
*
Possibly my magnum opus, on one of my favorite musical artists (even if the piece may not make it seem like it):
https://www.artforum.com/music/domenick-ammirati-on-taylor-swift-s-rerecording-project-85437
4.7.21
*
A new review on Margaret Lee at Jack Hanley Gallery that tries to open up a different perspective on the artist/eminence grise:
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202104/margaret-lee-85267
4.1.21
*
Somewhere in here I read Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which is every bit as good as I expected--super complex psychology (for Julien Sorel at least) and dense social critique.
3.5.21
*
A long review about the '90s cult-fave artist collective ArtClub2000 at Artists Space, which I hope illuminates why they're a little more serious than they might seem. With those Gap photos, they're a little like Meret Oppenheim and her teacup.
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202101/art-club-2000-84671
1.3.21
*
I've really gotten lazy with the whole reading journal thing, in part because it's been so hard to read during the pandemic. But I did read Hannah Arendt, the Bois/Krauss Informe catalogue, and . . . some fiction in there somewhere.
1.1.21
*
A review of the James Luna at Garth Greenan. Hoping he accrues more acclaim even though it is, in a sense, too late.
12.1.21
*
With my characteristically exquisite timing, I've published a story today in Joyland Magazine--the first piece of my fiction to appear in print in four years. It involves doomed romance, my favorite trope, and Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. Enormous thanks to both Joyland and my wonderful editor, Amy Shearn:
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/the-last-word/
11.2.20
*
My lovely friend Josh Kline asked me to contribute an essay to the catalogue for his first major museum show, taking place at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo. In the piece, I discuss the relationship of the readymade and Conceptualism and locate Josh's work with regard to the way both came to be deployed in the early twenty-first century.
https://www.afmuseet.no/en/magazine/josh-kline-antibodies-exhibition-catalogue
10.1.20
*
A new review out in Artforum, on the wonderful and unduly obscure Gene Beery:
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202008/gene-beery-83993
10.1.20
*
Nobody with even minimal experience of the limitations of real life, i.e. no genuine adult, could have drafted the confident but patently absurd slogans of the Parisian May days of 1968 or the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969: "tutto e subito," we want everything and we want it now."
https://libcom.org/files/Eric%20Hobsbawm%20-%20Age%20Of%20Extremes%20-%201914-1991.pdf
8.7.20
*
Nosing tentatively around the corner, a little new writing:
https://www.artforum.com/diary/domenick-ammirati-on-l-e-s-mario%20viroli-night-83641
8.3.20
*
It seems as if my interview around the unfolding crisis is going to turn into at least a short series. Today, a conversation with an out-of-work art handler named Alex Russi:
4.15.20
*
A review of a show Corin Hewitt at a tiny artist-run place in Bushwick. It was one of the most finely constructed shows I've seen in a while and, given all the circumstances, is likely to be overlooked:
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202004/corin-hewitt-82510
4.1.20
*
In response to the crisis, I felt the urge to do some writing, but somehow my own musings seemed not so important. Thus I talked to a brilliant friend in a bad spot, the artist Whitney Claflin:
3.27.20
*
A review of a very beautiful Nicolas Moufarrege show that started in Houston and visited Queens, curated by my dear old friend Dean Daderko and organized at QMA by the inimitable Larissa Harris:
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202002/nicolas-moufarrege-81995
2.1.20
*
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
https://archive.org/details/middlemarchastu07eliogoog/page/n10
12.25.19
*
A piece I wrote on the wonderful Ei Arakawa, leaning into the holiday curmudgeon vibes:
https://www.artforum.com/performance/you-better-wework-81605
12.16.19
*
I found one for free on Craigslist, a worn but fully functional eighty-eight-key spinet piano at a community center in Jamaica, Queens; somehow I persuaded my two roommates to allow me to keep it dead center in our small dorm room. In the weeks that followed, I molested the thing. I tore out the wood paneling over the hammers, clumsily modifying the strings so that the piano would snap and hiss metallically when certain keys were struck. I tore pages out of used books, including the pop psychology classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and papier-mâchéed them to the instrument's aging flanks. Feminism, I thought. For weeks, my hands and clothes were covered in DIY paste, making me look like a compulsive masturbator, which I was.
https://www.thenation.com/article/andrea-long-chu-females-interview/
11.24.19
*
The essay I read at Miguel Abreu Gallery in late October, titled "Laura Preston Is Someone You Don't Know," is now available online, thanks to Sequence Press:
http://miguelabreugallery.com/exhibitions/encore/
11.22.19
*
An essay I wrote about Georgia Sagri appears in this month's Artforum:
https://www.artforum.com/print/201909/domenick-ammirati-on-the-art-of-georgia-sagri-81067
Note that the piece is paywalled. I'm pretty pleased with it, so if you can't access it, let me know. I can help you out.
11.1.19
*
I'm doing a reading on Wednesday, October 28, for the launch of this wonderful book:
https://www.sequencepress.com/products/always-starts-with-an-encounter-wols-eileen-quinlan
I'll be appearing in place/in honor of my friend Laura Preston, who couldn't make it to New York for the occasion. The reading takes place at the 36 Orchard Street location of Miguel Abreu Gallery, during the opening of the exhibition "Encore." Thanks to my friend Helena Papadopolous for the very kind invitation.
10.28.19
*
We ate our supper and after supper my mother would have another little bit to drink. Then she would read articles from the newspaper aloud to me.
‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘what a strange story. A hunter shot a bear who was carrying a woman’s pocketbook in its mouth.’
Oh, oh, I cried. I looked at the newspaper and struck it with my fingers. My mother read on, a little oblivious to me. The woman had lost her purse years before on a camping trip. Everything was still inside it, her wallet and her compact and her keys.
Oh, I cried. I thought this was terrible. I was frightened, thinking of my mother’s pocketbook, the way she carried it always, and the poor bear too.
Why did the bear want to carry a pocketbook, I asked.
My mother looked up from the words in the newspaper. It was as though she had come back into the room I was in.
‘Why, Lizzie,’ she said.
The poor bear, I said.
‘Oh, the bear is all right,’ my mother said. ‘The bear got away.’
I did not believe this was the case. She herself said the bear had been shot.
‘The bear escaped,’ my mother said. ‘It says so right here,’ and she ran her finger along a line of words. ‘It ran back into the woods to its home.’ She stood up and came around the table and kissed me. She smelled then like the glass that was always in the sink in the morning, and the smell reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.
10.13.19
*
New writing for AF about the triennial Bergen Assembly exhibition: New York seriocomic neurosis meets Scandinavian angst.
https://www.artforum.com/diary/Domenick-Ammirati-at-the-Bergen-Assembly-2019-80738
9.16.19
*
She knew he was an intense conservative, but she didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr. Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his life—he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind, though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen only cared, if possible, too much.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19718/19718-h/19718-h.htm
8.28.19
*
I should say in my own defense that German girls, even very respectable ones, call the procedure for getting an educated man into bed "aufreissen." You rip him open, like a bag of chips. Otherwise he just sits there, giving you to understand through a series of guarded observations that sex is not exactly comme il faut.
*
Tune in to Montez Press Radio at 6 pm, Friday, June 28, for a convo between me and my brilliant friend Elvia Wilk, author of the new novel Oval, just out from Soft Skull Press. Topics may include speculative fiction versus "real" fiction, the shame of writing about the art world, and Elvia's interests in both medieval times AND Medieval Times. There will be costume changes for the enjoyment of the listening audience.
Note that Montez is currently building out an archive, so while in the near run, the only way to hear the conversation is to tune in, it should be available as part of their library soon.
6.26.19
*
"He was crazy. It got pretty ugly on board. He had a bad habit of shitting, nude, over the side of the boat, in front of you. One morning the back end of the boat swung and the job came across and knocked Brian clean over the side, hanging by the guard rail with all this crap up his legs. We sat in the cockpit laughing. Pete and I looked at each other and thought: you know what, a quick crack on the knuckles of each hand--he'd be gone."
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/dan-fox-limbo/
6.16.19
*
When I said I was an animal in bed
I meant a sloth
http://magazine.nytyrant.com/three-poems-ingvild-lothe/
6.4.19
*
From the middle of Miss Colt's forearm to the adductor muscle that closed her large thumb over the palm there extended a scar (Trisha coveted it)--the result not of a failed suicide but of a successful escape nearly thwarted by concertina wire. Such escapes had made the woman both sympathetic to persons in flight, living out of doors, and abel to see the profit that could be extracted from them.
5.21.19
*
A little new writing for spring, featuring a sexy alternative beekeeper:
4.10.19
*
Those journals, flimsy gravestones, confronted me with my husband's death all over again. I dreaded finding his, dreaded knowing his true account, not the featureless, generic mutterings he had given to our superiors upon his return.
"Ghost bird, do you love me?" he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. "Ghost bird, do you need me?" I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.
3.29.19
*
Many of Stumpp's trophy animals had been shot at close range. They seemed . . . disbelieving. That polar bear. Stumpp refused to muse overlong upon the polar bear. Whenever it shambled into his consciousness, it still had the power to mortify him. When you wanted to do a thing properly, that was just the moment when you wanted the process to be over with. You'll do the next one right, something in your mind whispered. There's always a next time, something in your mind said. What was desired, of course, was to hold on to the instant just before. But there was no holding on. Then you were just left with a carcass and a goddam ringing in the ears.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/joy-williams-the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams
2.21.19
*
Lovers of the classics: I went to see the amazing Elevator Repair Service's interpretation of The Great Gatsby and wrote about it.
https://www.artforum.com/performance/domenick-ammirati-on-elevator-repair-service-s-gatz-78530
2.3.19
*
During a portion of the first half of the present century, and more particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. This profession in America has constantly been held in honor, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of "liberal." In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science--a merit appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-she-be-loved-on-washington-square
(Note that I less agree with this take than am intrigued by how it takes small details glossed over swiftly by the author and turns them into large [and highly debatable] points.)
12.14.18
*
I started writing a review of a book about a fake gallery but it turned into an essay about sociopathy and failure:
https://www.artforum.com/books/domenick-ammirati-on-the-jean-freeman-gallery-does-not-exist-77868
12.2.18
*
"You got a picture?"
Richard pulled a folded photo from his jacket pocket and handed it to the man. The Bummer didn't examine it, but placed it face down on the coffee table in front of him.
"What kind of drugs?" the Bummer asked. "What does he like?"
"Cocaine and weed," Richard responded immediately. "That's what he was into before."
"Are you college boys?" the Bummer asked.
We said nothing. I was confused.
"Do you boys go to college?"
"Yes," I said.
The Bummer smiled. "What do you take?" He paused. "In college, what do you take?"
"I study art," I said.
His smile broadened. "You're telling me that while I was sweating and pulling rat-sized leeches off my big white dick in shittin' Vietnam you were sketching naked girls in a sunny room?"
"Every chance I got," I said.
My response took him by surprise and his smile changed in quality. It was oddly less threatening, but it was clear he didn't hate me less.
11.24.18
*
I know we're already on to a constitutional crisis, but I wrote a piece for Artforum about Election Night 2018 and the opening of the Whitney's Warhol exhibition:
11.9.18
*
It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd's lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1991/03/25/the-school-on-the-links
9.27.18
*
SORIN. I shall give Constantine a subject for a story, It's to be called, " The Man who wanted to," " Vhomme qui a voulu." When I was a young man I wanted to be a writer, and I didn't become one ; I wanted to be a good speaker and was a vile one. (Mimicking himself.) " And, er, so to speak, er, as I was saying. . . ." And my perorations that went on and on, till one was bathed in perspiration. . . . I wanted to marry and remained a bachelor; I wanted to live and die in town, and here I am ending my days in the country and all the rest of it.
DORN. You wanted to be made an Actual State Councillor, and you were.
SORIN (laughing). I never tried for that. It came of its own accord.
DORN. To express dissatisfaction with life at sixty-two, you must confess, is ungenerous.
SORIN. What a pigheaded fellow you are! Don't you understand? I want to live!
DORN. That's frivolous. By the laws of nature every life must come to an end.
SORIN. You talk as a man who has had his fill. You're sated and therefore indifferent to life; it's all the same to you. But even you will be afraid of death.
DORN. The fear of death is an animal fear. One ought to repress it.
https://archive.org/stream/twoplaysbytchekh00chekiala/twoplaysbytchekh00chekiala_djvu.txt
9.5.18
*
Hence the world appears to us already as a set of museum pieces. Torn between amnesia and the desire to leave nothing out, we try to foresee today the museum of tomorrow and to assemble today's archives as though it were already yesterday.
https://collectivememory.fsv.cuni.cz/CVKP-52-version1-Hartog.pdf
8.24.18
*
HS: Speaking of the biosphere--and changing topics--there is an example that keeps fascinating me: Steve Bannon actually managed the Biosphere 2 experiment for a while. People were locked into a greenhouse sphere and had to be completely self-sustaining, including the production of food and atmosphere. It was an oligarch-funded experiment, a test for space colonization. Could they produce oxygen? Sustenance? Social bonds? The answer is that it all failed and that cockroaches and ants were the species that turned out to be the best adapted to the oligarch space colony. Oxygen dropped to dangerous levels. The climate was completely fucked up. I think it's a great metaphor for techno-fascism. That's what happens when you try to develop a superior race--say, stormtroopers with tentacle faces. You get a lot of cockroaches.
https://journal.hkw.de/en/kunst-ohne-tod/
7.1.18
*
In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch the hawk as they ran. The complexity and speed of this process, he said, could not be overestimated; the pack flowed silently over the landscape, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on its target. To follow the subtlety of the hawk's signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. This idea, of the two dogs sharing the work of reading the hawk, was one he found very appealing. It suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/rachel-cusk-novelist-transit.html
5.19.18
*
DONALD: If you're working on something and you stop and think about what you're working on . . . you screw it up. I know. I've done this. So stop and think about that. Don't--what do--what do you think we need to prevent this from happening? . . . Well I'll tell you. You need an activity that will help your mind detach itself from your body. Chew gum. Chew some gum. This will distract you enough.
BEF: We're not allowed to chew gum.
DONALD: Huh? Oh.
BEF: It says in the manual about it. We can't chew gum on the job.
DONALD: I know, I know. That manual may be out of date.
BEF: So why did you say it?
DONALD: What? No, nothing. I'm--
ORAL: Donald, we should get back to work. There are customers waiting.
DONALD: Yes. By all means. Go back to work.
https://www.nycplayers.org/projects/burger-king/
4.4.18
*
On the least depressing night of the week, SUNDAY
In the least polluted neighborhood of New York City, GREENPOINT
In the least depressing room of a building, BASEMENT
In the most thriving of all retail categories, INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE . . .
I'll be reading with brilliant and charismatic author of page and screen Jon Raymond, on tour for the paperback edition of his novel Freebird. You may know his multiple collaborations with directors Kelly Reichart (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Night Moves) and Todd Haynes (Mildred Pierce).
Note that I do not currently appear on the store's marketing materials because of an ongoing dispute over my having submitted, in lieu of an author head shot, a photograph of a dog holding a pineapple.
BUT I am actually reading. And I would love to see you there.
Word Book Shop
126 Franklin Avenue
Brooklyn
Sunday, March 4
6 pm
2.28.18
*
An existential risk is one that threatens to cause the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or to otherwise permanently and drastically destroy its potential for future desirable development. Proceeding from the idea of first-mover advantage, the orthogonality thesis, and the instrumental convergence thesis, we can now begin to see the outlines of an argument for fearing that a plausible default outcome for the creation of machine superintelligence is existential catastrophe.
1.16.18
*
There was one fly trampling about in the ointment of my content: I was now the proud but shy owner of about half a million pounds' worth of hot Goya--the hottest piece of property in the world. Despite what you read in the Sunday papers, America is not seething with mad millionaires panting to buy stolen masterpieces and gloat over them in their underground aviaries. As a matter of fact, the late Krampf had been the only one I know of and I did not much want another like him. A superb spender, but hard on the nervous system.
Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker's moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never. Why, even the Woosters had a code, as we are told on the highest authority.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/20/the-genuine-article
12.30.17
*
Dispelling the sense of utter futility one faces on a daily basis, I was lucky enough to receive an honorable mention in this year's Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction contest with "Wynette," an excerpt from my novel. And I'm thrilled. Thanks very much to Zoetrope and the judge, Maile Maloy.
http://www.all-story.com/contests.cgi
12.19.17
*
I snuck onto the list of music cognoscenti with a paean to the brilliant UK musician the Rebel, aka Benedict R. Wallers of Country Teasers fame, and his performance this fall at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 in New York:
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/looking-back-2017-music/
12.16.17
*
To old dogs the hour comes when, whistled by their master setting forth with his stick at dawn, they cannot spring after him. Then they stay in their kennel, or in their basket, though they are not chained, and listen to the steps dying away. The man too is sad. But soon the pure air and the sun console him, he thinks no more about his old companion, until evening. The lights in his house bid him welcome home and a feeble barking makes him say, It is time I had him destroyed.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-malone.html
11.23.17
*
I'm easing my return to the USA by listening to a lot of music, including the most recent release by the brilliant Yves Tumor.
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/make-some-noise-yves-tumors-experiencing-the-deposit-of-faith
11.15.17
*
The final documenta issue of South as a State of Mind has appeared. I'll refrain from eulogizing it or the rest of the d14 publications except that I can't imagine working on any books made with a higher degree of intellectual complexity and absolute care, both for the thought conveyed and the exactingly crafted objects themselves. I was vastly fortunate to work on the whole project.
For this issue of South, I sat down with Adam and the director of Athens's EMST, Katerina Koskina, a few weeks before the show opened in Kassel. I did ask happen to ask Adam if he thought he had broken documenta--thinking purely in the Kardashian-derived sense, I assure. For his response, well, you'll have to click through.
http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/
9.16.17
*
Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, and his hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers. Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has caused a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case. He opens his mouth, gasping and started, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half drawn out of the brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.
On the evening of the following day he will tell the police, quite truthfully, "The first time I saw her was at the airport. Then on the plane. She sat beside me."
"You never saw her before at any time? You didn't know her?"
"No, never."
"What was your conversation on the plane?"
"Nothing. I moved my seat. I was afraid."
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/09/24/empty-vessals/
6.20.17
*
The next morning, Norm's wound is badly infected. A spike of sepsis reaches to his shoulder. Under a thick wad of bandaging, his arm continues to bleed.
"Blood poisoning a-going to kill him now," an orderly tells Penny. "This man got no immune system." He smoothes a fresh sheet with his hand while two nurses support Norm, who has been rolled onto his side. His skin, soft as silk and drained of muscle and fat, lies draped over his shoulder like a shroud.
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/writing-for-rejection
5.17.17
*
This grand enterprise opens today:
4.8.17
*
According to one witness, the mercenary was kind enough to make an effort to surprise the lady lying there bare from her shoulder blades to the crown of her head. With his sword raised high and ready to come down upon the queen’s neck, he asked carelessly: Has anyone seen my sword? The woman twitched her shoulders, perhaps relieved that some chance occurrence might spare her. She closed her eyes. Vertebrae, cartilage, the spongy tissue of trachea and pharynx: the sound of their parting was like the elegant pop of a cork liberated from a bottle of wine.
Jean Rombaud refused the bag of silver coins that Thomas Cromwell offered him when the job was done. Addressing the whole gathering, but looking into the eyes of the man who had schemed until he unseated the queen, he said that he had agreed to do what he had done to spare a lady the vile fate of dying under an executioner’s blade. He made a sideways bow to the ministers and clergymen who had witnessed the beheading, and he returned straight to Dover at full gallop. Earlier that morning, the lord high constable had packed the categorical braids of the queen of England in his saddlebags.
Rombaud was an avid tennis player, and this seemed sufficient payment: the hair of those executed on the scaffold had special properties that caused it to trade at stratospheric prices among ball makers in Paris. A woman’s hair was worth more, red hair more still, and a reigning queen’s would command an unimaginable price.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/5397229/lvaro-enrigue
3.31.17
*
Bomb magazine asked me to contribute to their look back on the year past:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/52331215/looking-back-on-2016-literature-music
Unsurprisingly, the list is heavily shadowed over by politics. I'm far from an exception. I chose a talk I saw by the effulgent Terre Thaemlitz in Athens. For Thaemlitz's writing, sound, and art, look here:
12.16.2016
*
Beginning today, I'm taking a full-time position as an editor at documenta 14, working from Athens and Kassel:
Huge debt of gratitude to Quinn and Adam for inviting me over--pun very much intended.
9.28.16
*
There was a line he kept repeating to himself that had the mystery and power he'd felt nowhere else but in the shared past of people who had loved each other, who lived so close they'd memorized each other's warts and cowlicks and addled pauses, so the line was not one voice but several and it spoke a more or less nonsensical theme, it was a line for any occasion or none at all, mainly meant to be funny but useful also in grim times to remind them that words stick even as lives fly apart.
Measure your head before ordering.
It was the line that says everything. All the more appropriate and all the funnier because outsiders did not understand and all the better finally because there was nothing to understand.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo
9.12.16
*
As of today I'm taking up residence--for only a month, sadly--at Denniston Hill. I'm very grateful for my selection.
9.2.16
*
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony. The word cacophony was incidentally a favourite of my maternal grandfather’s. And the phrase he hated more than any other was thought process.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/25/the-art-of-extinction
8.13.16
*
. . . Turn off the glow of the screen.
Nobody owns anybody. You've reached
your quota for aphorisms. Lay down
each vertebra and let the steam roll
up from beneath the earth and take you
down to the dream of the gate, the house
of stones with little lanterns and a secret
yard. This house is your house. It cannot
be foreclosed. Close your mouth and take
out the dirty money. Give it away freely.
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/02/the_abortion_i_didn%E2%80%99t_want
7.29.16
*
Merchard and I threw ourselves down on the bed and raised our arms in the air harmonizing our animal sounds directing them to the goddess's ears. I realized we could get back our ten dollar deposit on the giant black RCA we really wanted. We bombed down to St. Mark's Place and I showed the guy my slip and asked for our ten dollars back. He tried to throw us out of the store--five people have tried to buy the teevee but I was saving it for you so you can't get your money back--Get out of here! I pleaded, tried to reason called him a bastard and he awkwardly called me a bastard back. Somehow only males are called bastards. He was a large black guy who was really getting fed up. Get out of my store, now. No. I want my money back. I jumped in anger in this weird characteristic way I have since a child. I look like an angry frog. You can jump your ass off but you're not going to get your money back. You've got to give it to me. We're hungry. We won't have any dinner tonight. Nothing. You've got this store with all these teevees. You don't need my ten dollars. You're just doing it for spite. I didn't do it on purpose to you. I'd rather have that teevee. I love that teevee. But tonight I'm so broke I can't eat. Everytime he said get out I said no. I've never used this tactic before. Finally he peeled a wrinkly ten off a small wad of bills--Here, now get out.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/24/eileen-myles-crossing-the-invisible-line
6.16.16
*
Frieze week happening: launch at Printed Matter for my old friend Josephine Meckesper's new book. I contributed an essay where, among other things, I discuss Germanness without any cheap Walter Abish references.
https://www.printedmatter.org/events/445
5.5.16
*
Forming the hair into a cohesive mass was a losing task: single hairs drifted from the bundle, falling in slow motion to the carpet. . . . I wrapped the stuff around my finger until the wad was the size of a walnut, but when I pulled it off it swelled up in my hand and I understood that this was going to be difficult no matter what. I looked to B.'s face, saw her eyes dark and frightened like little gaping mouths. Then I stuffed it in. Tongue clinging to the dry fiber, gums wettening but still sticky, struggling to stay slick. There were bits hanging out, but I couldn't open my mouth or I'd risk losing the whole thing. I tilted my throat back and tried to choke it down. I put my thumb and fingers on opposite sides of the neck and stroked down, the way I used to get my dog to swallow a pill hidden in a lump of peanut butter. At the back of my throat it stuck like a wet rag at the threshold and I had to cough it up a bit, gasping around it, needing much more saliva to get it down.
http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html
4.19.16
*
I'm extremely pleased to note that Bomb magazine has chosen to publish an excerpt of my novel in its Spring 2016 issue:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/420033/marcy
3.21.16
*
The proofs against my immortality were adding up.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-danilo-kis-by-brendan-lemon
3.8.16
*
I have a new piece coming out in Mousse. Here's the TOC:
http://moussemagazine.it/archive.mm?lang=en
It's kind of a screed, or felt like one as I was writing it, anyway. And the brackets in the title were an editorial misunderstanding.
2.17.16
*
Sometimes, when no one was home, Lila went into the little room where she had hidden the shoes and touched them, looked at them, marveled to herself that for good or ill there they were and had come into being as a result of a design on a sheet of graph paper. How much wasted work.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante
1.11.16
*
Judy, when I saw you having sex with that insect in Naked Lunch I said to myself, "Here's a woman who thinks as I do."
http://therumpus.net/2011/12/the-rumpus-book-club-interviews-laurie-weeks/
12.8.15
*
Another project I'm lucky enough to be involved in:
http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/
South as a State of Mind is hosting documenta 14 for its next four issues. I'll be serving as the magazine's associate editor. It's great to be working again with Quinn Latimer, who graciously brought me on board.
11.2.15
*
This opened:
http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2015/uh-oh-frances-stark-1991-2015/
I'm very pleased to be among the contributors to the exhibition catalogue.
10.11.15
*
VINCENT: No, seriously, we were talking about Fitzgerald.
EMILY: Right--Fitzgerald says to Laurette Taylor: "My God, you beautiful egg, you beautiful egg, you beautiful, beautiful egg." And Laurette Taylor turns to her husband and says, "Oh Hartley, I've just seen the doom of youth. Do you understand? The doom of youth itself, a walking doom."
VINCENT: Now that's gorgeous. And do you know what made that gorgeous which the other thing you read didn't have? A beginning and an end.
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm/linda-rosenkrantz-talk
8.26.15
*
Every now & again he'll interrupt his keeping of yes & no unsplit to mention something from the realm of wishes or cool feelings like the babe from Wayne's World or something about Thurston Moore, you know, like gesture toward a time-tested entity from popular culture about which it is possible to have only positive feelings, then proceed to cite a family memory that never fails to cause me surgical pain.
http://arianareines.tumblr.com/
7.21.15
*
So when I say to you you [sic] can either sleep with me or have your own bed in my apartment, etc,. I mean that. I mean, I want to be with you and so you set the terms 'cause that's how the relation so far has been arranged. I'm not fucking playing games. I'm just being straight-forward and trying to be, like good-mannered. Of course, I want to hang with you. My apartment isn't a hotel. I'm trying to be gracious, fuck you. Now if you want me to make the decisions, you have to say so. You see, I'm really not into these out-of-bed games. Fucking just tell me what you want and I'll go with it.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201409/?read=article_kraus
7.10.15
*
What are men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone--we will recollect what we have seen.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-pdf.pdf
6.1.15
*
The Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who's going to get fucked and who's getting a taste of mother's milk. It's constitutional pornography in there.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2329/paul-beatty
5.17.15
*
Friday, May 8, at 7 pm, I'm doing my first reading in NYC this millennium:
http://newyork.tigerstrikesasteroid.com/tagged/this-is-how-i-remember-it
5.7.15
*
Too little reading these days. But some writing:
http://artforum.com/diary/#entry51880
4.30.15
*
Finally, it's out. And it's actually not bad:
http://dismagazine.com/discussion/74960/the-invisible-giant-postmodernism-redux-part-1/
Viz., my opus on the absorption of "French theory" by the art world in the '80s and postmodern's recent slight return. Big thanks to Dis.
4.2.15
*
In the same Time article in which she declared Oldenburg's readiness to "kill" her, Sturtevant, "with a faraway look in her eye," and non-nonplussed by artistic death threats, delivered one of the acutest statements about her pursuit and its consequences:
I have no place at all except in relation to the total structure. What interests me is not communicating but creating change. Some people feel that a great change in esthetics in general is happening, though few understand exactly why. Mainly, there is a great deal of anxiety.
The artist puts herself and her work, whatever it is, in relation to the total structure, whose center was not holding, but she never clarifies the parameters of the no-place from which she operated or the extent of the totality of the "total structure" she articulates. Does the no-place have a climate? Is it wind-whipped or sultry? . . . Contrefaction is her métier, and "creating change" results, in part, from her making work that, hiding in plain sight, appears as the donée of what operates freshly as art--Oldenburg's or someone else's.
http://artforum.com/words/id=44018
3.11.15
*
The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index.
Analogies
bare leg on a cold night, 40
cautious businessman, 34
guest who becomes a permanent lodger, 53
Polar expedition, ill equipped, 98
When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, "But aren't you afraid you're going to get lonely?"
Get?
Imaging studies have found that the pain in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.
What John Berryman said: I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all run, even that would be better.
At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/24/jenny-offill-smallest-possible-disaster/
2.5.15
*
I decided to update the publications section, at left, adding my most recent piece of nonfiction, on Darren Bader from the October issue of Frieze, and an excerpt from the beginning of my novel, published in the journal Tammy last fall.
1.25.15
*
The player at the machine had his face turned away, and Doc at first noticed only the fine careful attention to how he was pulling the lever, another customer intent not so much on Fun as paying down a grocery tab somewhere in the neighborhood, until, quickly scanning the other slots nearby, Doc recognized the swastikaed head of Puck Beverton, who was busy pretending to play a nickel machine. That would make the "genius" working the other machine Puck's running mate Einar. . . .
Doc, shifting into a word-with-you-my-man mode, was just about to step forward when several kinds of hell broke loose. To a military fanfare heavy on the bass horns, plus train whistles, fire sirens, and canned athletic-stadium cheering, a quantity of JFK half-dollars began to vomit out of the machine in a huge parabolic torrent, falling onto the carpeting in a growing heap. Einar nodded and stepped away and--had Doc blinked or something?--just like that disappeared. Puck gave one last yank to the handle on his nickel machine and got up and headed over to claim the jackpot, when suddenly the laws of chance, deciding on a classic fuck-you, instructed Puck's nickel machine also to hit, with even more noise than the first, and there stood Puck, paralyzed between the two winning machines, and here on the run came a delegation of casino personnel to confirm and certify the two happy jackpot winners, already one short. At which point Puck, as if allergic to dilemmas, broke for the nearest exit, screaming.
http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_1
1.14.15
*
She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams
12.13.14
*
Your twin sister carried your soul in her little box, it came down to that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPQiNEYjXF4
11.21.14
*
ISBN: 9780991603718:
http://tammyjournal.com/post/100036028801/its-here-thanks-to-all-who-contributed
My third publication of fiction in approximately ten years, an excerpt from my novel. It's a very nice journal put out by some alums of the prestigious UMass MFA. Contribs include Kate Schapira, Paige Taggart, Clara Sabater, Anthony Madrid, Francesca Capone (some great compressed-text works), and Liza Birnbaum.
Available by mail order and in extremely selective bookshops. Plus I have one extra copy that I'll let you borrow if you promise to read it with gloves on.
10.31.14
*
Their hearts gave out. Alas, the heart is not a metaphor--or not only a metaphor.
http://penamerica.blogspot.com/2007/12/every-gesture-is-gloved-wayne.html
[I don't usually editorialize, but mere minutes after I had selected the above, I saw it in a subway ad for Robert Gober at MoMA. He offers a strangely backhanded appreciation:
http://observer.com/2014/09/some-thoughts-from-robert-gober-on-the-eve-of-his-moma-retrospective/]
10.15.14
*
I wrote this piece on Darren Bader recently:
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/whats-not-to-like/
Some day I hope to make it from behind the paywall. In this case I think if you're a free registered user you can access it as well.
10.4.14
*
If you're in London:
http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/Michele%20Abeles/ecards/medium.html
9.1.14
*
. . . the dustcloud in which the buggy moved not blowing away because it had been raised by no wind and was supported by no air but evoked, materialised about, instantaneous and eternal, cubic foot for cubic foot of dust to cubic foot for cubic foot of horse and buggy, peripatetic beneath the branch-shredded vistas of flat black fiercely and heavily starred sky, the dustcloud moving on, enclosing them with not threat exactly but maybe warning, bland, almost friendly, warning, as if to say, Come on if you like. But I will get there first; accumulating ahead of you I will arrive first, lifting, sloping gently upward under hooves and wheels so that you will find no destination but merely abrupt gently onto a plateau and a panorama of harmless and inscrutable night and there will be nothing for you to do but return and so I would advise you not to go, to turn back now and let what is, be.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner>
http://www.faulknerjapan.com/journal/No7/Suwabe2005.htm
8.8.14
*
Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn't likely to be the forgiving type.
http://io9.com/5542862/cyberpunk-detective-novel-altered-carbon-really-is-all-that
6.1.14
*
One can hardly imagine that lions would be more efficient predators if they lavished large amounts of their time and energy on placating nonexistent beings from other worlds. And what about the gazelles? Would they have any chance of escaping the cheetahs if they kept being diverted by parades of spirits, elves, or angels?
http://www.grahamhancock.com/archive/supernatural/
5.5.14
*
With one week left in my term at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, it seems a good time to update the selections from my novel in progress:
http://www.domenickammirati.com/index.php?/ongoing/the-bottom-of-the-top-excerpts
The newly added sections include two people joking tastelessly about a death, a reflection on meaning and loss, and a reflection on a pop song.
4.24.14
*
I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the stone, and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that I should always be there. And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words that I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks, and they didn't frighten me any more. I sang the songs I thought of; songs full of words that must not be spoken or written down. Then I made faces like the fa
