Andrew David King
Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience
The term “erasure,” when used to describe a poetic technique, might be a kind of misnomer. To erase something is to “rub out or remove” it, according to the Oxford American Dictionary; to destroy it, to render its presence void.…
‘Were there but world enough and time’: Tom Phillips on A Humument
If the un-canon exists—or the alternative canon; a trove of works treasured outside of the mainstream—then it indisputably includes Tom Phillips and A Humument, his capstone project. A painter by trade, Phillips’s work has been inducted into importance mostly by…
Black to green to gone: in the (perpetual) colony
No consideration of the tattoo as a literary form—or, conversely, of literary forms as tattoos—would be complete without a consideration of what the act of inscription implies. And I can think of no more forceful an example of inscription than…
A Humument in the age of mechanical reproduction (part v)
(This post is a continuation of a series. Italicized lines in this piece are sourced from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and each corresponds to the section of the original essay in which it…
Short Takes: Dickinson in the Digital Age
“Mad people = people who stand alone + burn,” wrote Susan Sontag in her journals. “I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.” Read some of her other quotes about love—illustrated gorgeously by Wendy MacNoughton—here.…
