April 4, 2022 At Work How Do We Stop Repeating Ourselves?: A Conversation with Caren Beilin By Sheila Heti Photograph by Jean-Paul Cauvin. Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot. In The University of Pennsylvania (2014) and Spain (2018), she emphasizes the ways we are trapped within our own realities, but also suggests that these realities can be wondrous and huge. Beilin makes the experience of living seem private, wild, abysmal, and buoyant, and implies that we need other people because without them our inner landscapes would become too overwhelming—they would keep expanding and devour everything. Her new novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat (out this month from Dorothy, a publishing project) follows Iris—a creative-writing professor much like Beilin herself—from her receipt of a package of hurtful old letters from her father (detailing criticisms he had of her, ways he blamed her for the family’s problems) through her eventual attempt to escape from her life by portraying a cowherd at an experimental art museum. I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves. Read More
February 4, 2022 At Work If There’s a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert By Jay Graham Scott Covert in 1981. The artist Scott Covert is easy to spot in a crowd by his thick-framed glasses and mop of blond hair. I met him at a party at the Review’s Chelsea office, where I noticed him slipping behind the makeshift bar to swipe a slice from a tower of pizza boxes piled in the corner. “I’m thinking of moving to Paris,” he later told me, “because I don’t speak the language.” Born in 1954 in Edison, New Jersey, he began making after-school trips to New York City at the age of thirteen, catching the bus or stealing unattended cars to get there. After a couple of studio courses at Indiana University and a semester at San Francisco Art Institute, Covert dropped out of school and taught himself to paint. In the late seventies and eighties, he became a fixture of the East Village arts scene that came to be known as “Downtown,” cofounding Playhouse 57 with the theater artist Andy Rees, at the storied performance venue and nightclub Club 57 at 57 Saint Marks Place. Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, there in 1979. He has since exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris; his work appears in collections around the globe. Covert leads a peripatetic life. For some four decades he has crisscrossed the country in his car and flown across hemispheres in search of the graves of composers, rock stars, poets, serial killers, and other cultural totems. From their headstones, he makes on-site rubbings with oil wax crayons, using myriad pigments and varying amounts of pressure. The canvases that make up the Monument Paintings, an ongoing series, are laden with text—layers of names, birth and death dates, epitaphs, and fleur-de-lis—and topped with scribbles and swaths of color. Covert renders some celebrity names nearly indecipherable through the sheer density of their replication; others appear alone in the limelight of the canvas. The paintings showcase his acute sense for depth and texture, as well as his attunement to death’s magnetism and absurdity. His work has taken him to Detroit, Montparnasse, Moscow, Luxor, Cairo, and Geneva. Soon, he intends to visit the Trinity nuclear testing site in New Mexico dubbed ground zero: “I’m hoping the government will give me some help. Get some soldiers out there to lift things for me.” INTERVIEWER When you were a teenager growing up in Edison, were you already hoping to pursue visual art? COVERT No, I was more of a dancer. I took classical ballet, jazz, tap. I got to meet faggots because they were all there. And then I realized it was all goofy, and I ran to New York. Read More
January 28, 2022 At Work A Formal Feeling: A Conversation with Claudia Durastanti By Mia Colleran Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli. Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a region in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for Donna Haraway, Joshua Cohen, and Ocean Vuong—which might give you a sense of her range. Her own fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. La Straniera, her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know, received a PEN award. Read More
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