Hypocrite Reader

My Own Sanity Within That Madness

It's like your body is imprisoning you. Do you know the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It’s about being immobile, and just stuck there. This guy gets paralyzed from the spine downward and he can only move his eyes—it’s called “locked-in syndrome”—and he writes a whole memoir. When you’re defined by apartheid, you’re visibly what you are, and you can’t be anything other than what defines you.

A Transsexual’s Guide to Horror Cinema

Desire is the problem. It is never truly beaten and it never disappears completely. The final shot of almost any horror movie will remind you of that. What complicates things is that desire is also the road to pleasure, even fulfillment.

Bigness Has No Name

The pig likes the dog run. He doesn’t like the rain. And it rains. It rains all May long.

This Time It’s Personal?

The core of revenge is wild; rather than resolve into a set of specific instances, it wants to radiate outward and contaminate other actions with its significance. Just as an act of revenge can spiral out of control, reproducing itself endlessly—René Girard calls it “an interminable, infinitely repetitive process”—so too can the concept of revenge describe a wide range of actions: living well, looking good, killing someone, writing a book. The specific action is less important than the structuring dynamic.

Hannah Blair, detail from Flood Scroll

A Sea Wall

“She was so beautiful,” says my mom, meaning yesterday, when she was still a little conscious.

Commodity Theater

Traditional narrative structures no longer apply in a society where the only certainty is perpetual crisis, and art must change to accommodate this reality. To Brecht, the catharsis that theatergoers look for in a drama is a distraction from this materialist vision.

INTRODUCTION: AN EXEGETIC CHAIN

Good Morning, Beautiful World

Between the discovery of the Gilboa prison break and the recapture of its last escapee, six exhilarating days during which the dominant feeling was of holding onto a rope in the ocean, a lifeline pulling us backward and forward in time, tying us into knots, binding us together.

“I Will Take the Not-Easy Task”: An Interview with Almagul Menlibayeva

My great-grandmother, she was a person who witnessed and was practicing nomadism. And my grandmother, she was a person who was already settled and was saying, “OK, I’m going to live in the village, you know, in the kolkhoz.” She became a village person. She lost her nomadism. The language remains, but it’s a different language. It’s a settled language, the language of people who worked for the kolkhoz or sovkhoz.

Open Up This Pit

The quiet, empty pit at the end of a long dirt road is a visceral reminder of all the bad ideas that came and went, leaving some ripped-up earth and making someone who lives somewhere else very rich.

I’m Dying Here, Tell the Prime Minister

When I tell the locals that I moved to Armenia on my own and that my family has no idea where I am, they seem surprised, or they get pitiful and offer me help. One guy said, “It’s so cool.” Random old men start asking me for a blow job.

“A Nomad’s Worry” and “Time Passes”

I want to say: once again, each of us a narrative— / a partial dream—mechanical animals tied to the / fading light of memory.

The Sadomasochistic Cenote and Its Legal Upwellings

Unenforceable sex contracts—the kind that establish distributions of power between dom and sub in SM role play—follow the same formula as regular old contracts. As an arena of performance, court proceedings also partake in sadomasochistic power play. None of this should be surprising. If sadomasochism can borrow from the legal sphere, why not the other way around?

Almagul Menlibayeva, Center of Eurasia, 2015