January 14, 2022 At Work You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed By Maya Binyam Photo of Sara Ahmed by Sarah Franklin. Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a company-wide address during which he called someone, a childhood friend, by an ugly racial epithet. When I complained about his speech, I was told there was no recourse. That’s simply how my boss’s boss’s boss was. No one felt the need to specify exactly what this meant. They just invoked some vague idiosyncrasy to explain away his bad behavior, which might otherwise be confused for something sinister—heavy and historical and violent—something that could, if it were named, prove to be a liability. I repeated my complaint twice: first at a mandatory “diversity and inclusion workshop,” during which employees were encouraged to share grievances, and then again after I had decided to quit, during my exit interview with HR. Both times, my complaint, once spoken, seemed to disappear. But complaints, according to the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, never really go away. If you are the complainer, they tend, as she puts it in her newest book, Complaint!, to “follow you home.” Read More
October 13, 2021 At Work Never Prosthetic: An Interview with Chi Ta-wei By Chris Littlewood Author photo by Tang-mo Tan. By 2100, as feared, the earth is scorched. The ocean is a second sky: humanity has migrated to the sea floor, leaving combat cyborgs to play out war games on the surface. After a childhood spent in quarantine due to a deadly virus, Momo now lives mostly in isolation in New Taiwan’s T City, lit by the glow of her screen. In the tightened grip of capitalism, Microsoft has been supplanted by MegaHard; Momo, a renowned aesthetician, applies a transparent, protective layer to her clients called “M skin,” which, unbeknownst to them, surveils their movements and transcribes their sensations, from the nip of a mosquito bite to the “$#@” of an orgasm. Even though the world of Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is almost solely populated by women, and queer love is the norm, this is evidently no utopia—the author told me he had no interest in writing feel-good representations of queer life. “I was and am simply too cynical.” Chi’s extraordinary novella was first published in Taiwan a quarter of a century ago, and is at last available in English in a brilliant translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich. At just 134 pages, its scope is dazzling. Now, from the vantage point of the future, its playful and unsettling insights into digital saturation, the traps of consciousness and labor, and the fugitive fabulations of identity and the self, have only grown more profound. Read More
October 12, 2021 At Work Alternative Routes: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin By Claire-Louise Bennett Photo by Lauren Elkin. Lauren Elkin’s new book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is composed of short diaristic notes that she made on her phone while traveling twice weekly to her university teaching post in Paris between 2014 and 2015. The idea that they might be collected in a volume and published did not occur to Elkin at the time of writing; the purpose of her project then was a personal one. It encouraged her to “observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world,” she writes in the book’s introduction. At the core of Elkin’s work is a commitment to noticing, paying attention to the everyday and the communal places we share and move through. Inspired by the cataloguing methodology of Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux’s journal keeping, No. 91/92 is a thrillingly intimate work. In a recent interview, Elkin describes it as a “hinge book,” since writing it facilitated a shift in how she brought together external influence and direct personal experience, bringing about “a transition from feeling like a secondary source, to feeling like I could be a primary source.” Elkin is an incisive, playful, sensitive, and deeply curious thinker. We exchanged emails regularly over just a few weeks, a period of time that saw us both visiting friends and family as the world was beginning to open up again. It seemed apt that we were discussing the origins and significance of a book written in transit while we were both on the move, and I felt fortunate to have such a smart and fun traveling companion to help me navigate back into public space as a writer, as a woman, as a body. Read More
October 7, 2021 At Work Sentience and Intensities: A Conversation with Maureen McLane By Anahid Nersessian Maureen McLane. Photo courtesy of Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Maureen McLane’s poetry is deceptively good-natured. It draws you in with its smooth, meditative rhythms and genial mood only to veer into hidden channels of ambivalence, cynicism, acute sadness, and occasional hostility. Reading McLane is like having a conversation with an old friend and being suddenly reminded that she has whole continents of experience you’ll never visit, judgments (including against you) you’ll never hear, and difficulties in which you’ll never share. In that sense, her work is an ongoing investigation of subjectivity: it plays with voice and tone, perspective, and persona to create an emotional world that is at once intimately recognizable and treacherous, strange. Always in dialogue with a richly conceived literary history—and with figures like Dickinson, O’Hara, the Romantics, and especially Sappho—the poems speak of a human nature at once less variable and more dynamic than we might have guessed, especially when it comes to the vagaries of desire both erotic and intellectual. With the release of More Anon, a collection of poems from her first five books of poetry, McLane takes us on a sort of tour of her world, a well-ordered place where things (metrical forms, marriages) nonetheless go frequently awry. Her restless lyricism travels through bedrooms and classrooms, forest paths and quiet cars, searching, perhaps, for a stillness that doesn’t feel like paralysis, and never quite finding it. I spoke to McLane over email about her relationship to genre, “rhetorical IEDs,” and what it means to write in a queer poetic tradition. Her responses were generous, learned, and—like her poetry and her own criticism, of which she’s produced several books, including the acclaimed literary memoir My Poets—evidence of an omnivorous sensibility that finds almost everything interesting and takes nothing for granted. Read More
September 29, 2021 At Work Allowing Things to Happen: An Interview with Tyshawn Sorey By Craig Morgan Teicher Tyshawn Sorey. Photo: Sharif Hamza. Tyshawn Sorey is a remarkable figure in contemporary music. For the past twenty years, he has been among the most highly regarded and in-demand drummers in avant-garde jazz, playing with major contemporary figures such as Steve Coleman, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, as well as veterans like Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn. On albums like Alloy, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, and Verisimilitude—the trilogy of trio records he released between 2014 and 2017—he blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical music, exploring sound textures and patches of silence as well as driving rhythms. Over the same period, Sorey, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has been developing his oeuvre as a classical composer. Read More
September 22, 2021 At Work A Woman and a Philosopher: An Interview with Amia Srinivasan By Lidija Haas Photo: Tereza Červeňová/Morgenbladet When Amia Srinivasan published her essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” in the London Review of Books in early 2018, several months into the public discussions surrounding #MeToo, it provoked many strong feelings—not to mention gave the world the sentence: “Sex is not a sandwich.” Opening with a reading of the incel manifesto written by the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, it became a far-reaching meditation on the ideological, political, and public dimensions of sexual desire and how we might begin to think more critically about them. Srinivasan trained as a philosopher at Yale and then Oxford, where she has since established herself at the heart of the old boys’ club that is analytic philosophy. In 2019, she was given the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory once occupied by Isaiah Berlin; she is the first woman, the first person of color, and the youngest person ever to take up her post. Most readers, however, will know her for her rich and entertaining pieces in magazines like The New Yorker and the London Review, including my favorite, a 2017 paean to octopuses—“the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.” Read More