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Inhabiting the Invisible Plane, and Other News

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On the Shelf

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A monotype print by Grady Gordon. Image via Beautiful Decay

  • “My mind is so dumb when I write. Each story requires a different style of stupidity … I don’t know how the mind works, but isn’t there a part of it that deals specifically with reason and sense? The brainy asshole of the mind? … That asshole is my intellect. He’s a really shitty writer, as you might imagine.” Lorin Stein interviews Ottessa Moshfegh.
  • Librarians versus algorithms: Who recommends better books? The latest developments in a John Henry story.
  • A new exhibition at Tate Britain shows paintings alongside William Hazlitt’s criticism about them, reminding us of what a vital, unusually perceptive critic he was. “One purrs at what he’d have made of the homogenized, commercialized art world of today—and how surgically he might have cut into it.”
  • Sven Birkerts in (and on) convalescence: “How the feel of time changes when all the terms are altered. What on most days had moved with an almost hectic momentum, an ill-choreographed succession of one thing after another, one day just halted, causing the hours to then pool up behind it: the afternoon immobilized, with almost nothing to mark the change or confirm that this is not the world paralyzed into still life.”
  • Grady Gordon makes monotype prints “by removing thick black ink from a plexiglass surface.” They’re ghoulish. They “bring about the characters that inhabit the invisible plane.” They make great gifts for your enemies.