May 21, 2025 On Books A Missive Sent Straight from the Mayhem: On Michelle Tea’s Valencia By Maggie Nelson Photograph by Juergen Striewski, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Michelle Tea once described Valencia as “a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened.” It feels right, then, in a numerological sense, to be addressing Tea’s classic twenty-five years after its turn-of-the-millennium publication. One way to do so would be to hail Valencia as an exuberant, hilarious record of a truly unprecedented and mutinous time in lesbian/queer history—the San Francisco dyke scene of the nineties—and by lauding its spot-on testimony to the fashions (“I had big purple hair, a green studded collar, and roller skates. I looked insane”), the locales (Mission dive bars and apartments, the Bearded Lady, a whorehouse in the woods of Marin), the drugs (booze, crystal meth, mushrooms that taste like “a trunk of moth-eaten clothes,” Valencia Street coffee), the pre-internet technologies (zines, open mics, personal ads in newspapers, pay phones, latex gloves), the gender vibes (all over the place, but generally still using she/her pronouns), and the kinks (“Petra was really into the knife. I got the sense that I could have been any body beneath her, it was the knife that was the star of the show”). Such a read would underscore Valencia’s status as one of the most vivid, thrilling documents of its time, while also ensuring that the explosive and inventive culture it portrays isn’t lost to history, as so much queer history, especially of the lesbian, poor, and debauched variety, can be. But here I want to talk about other things that reading Valencia now makes me think and feel. Namely, I want to talk about Valencia’s achievement in transmitting the conjoined rush of being young, being high, being in love, and becoming a writer—and how that rush feels when these things are pursued all at once, with great abandon. Writers often convey this rush in retrospect, after the dust of an era has settled, or after they’ve removed themselves from a scene (and/or from the substances fueling it). That’s its own trick—and one that Tea has pulled off elsewhere, such as in her great 2016 novel Black Wave. Valencia is something else, maybe something more improbable. It’s a missive sent straight from the mayhem. I still don’t know how she did it. Read More
May 20, 2025 Triptych Recurring Screens By Nora Claire Miller My iMac G3, running Warp. The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence. Instructions for using the screen saver were first published in the tech magazine Softalk. The headline read: SAVE YOUR MONITOR SCREEN! Across from the article was a full-page photo of firefighters rescuing a computer monitor from a burning building. Softalk, December 1983. The article explained that there was a new danger facing computers: “burn-in.” Basically, if a screen showed the same thing for too long, the shadow of its image would be tattooed to the pixels. A screen saver stirs the soup of the image to keep it from sticking to the screen. Read More
May 16, 2025 The Review’s Review A Man Is Like a Tree: On Nicole Wittenberg By David Salle Nicole Wittenberg, Woods Walker 7 (2023–2024), oil on canvas, 96 x 72″. Nicole Wittenberg has painted a variety of subjects over the last fifteen years, but two predominate: lush and lyrical landscapes, often of places where water meets land—generally unpopulated, but with an occasional figure glimpsed among the trees, as if to provide focus and scale—and her less well-known male nudes (along with an occasional pulchritudinous female counterpart), often engaged in sex acts that have seldom been depicted in Western high art. These pictures show sexual beings up close and personal, though maybe up close and impersonal is more to the point. They are exercises in concision and point of view; if you get close enough, anything looks big, and these dicks look monumental, like big trees in a low-rise landscape. Despite their provocative, even polemical subject matter (why not paint dicks?) Wittenberg’s paintings of blowjobs and the form of self-care commonly known as jerking off are also concerned with style, with the how of painting as inseparable from the what. In paintings like Blow Job and Red Handed, Again, both from 2014, the how relies on a gesture that is high-risk and directionally sound. It is the precise placement along with a certain velocity that allows the gesture to adhere to the form. In terms of accuracy of brush mark, Wittenberg might be the Franz Kline of dick paintings. You have to paint something, and you may as well paint what interests you. Sometimes you might paint what interests others, to see if it also interests you. Are these paintings pornographic? I don’t know, maybe. I don’t really care—perhaps that descriptor is even a compliment. I’m not especially polemical in my approach to art or to life, but suffice it to say that the analytically sexual gaze in painting should be equally and unreservedly available to all. These are paintings that say, Oh, is this image making you uncomfortable? Get over it. Read More
May 15, 2025 First Person A Night and a Day and a Night and a Day and a Night and a Day in the Dark By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver. Day One All around me are short, shiny young Romans groping each other. The old ones engage in the more solitary pleasures of hawking loogies and eating out of greasy paper bags. I’m on my way to a dark retreat on a farm so high up in the mountains it requires five modes of transportation to get there—plane, train, metro, bus, taxi—each more confusing than the last. You buy your bus ticket at a particular newsstand nowhere near the bus. The only reason I knew this was because Antonello, the dark-retreat guide, had emailed me travel instructions … paragraphs of them … which I had memorized for dear life. Clutching my ticket, I tried to go through gate ten up the stairs to platform ten, as instructed, but the gate was locked. I tried gate eleven, but there was a sign saying not to cross the platform, which would have been the only way to get to ten. Vomit or diarrhea had been flung over the wall of the stairwell at regular intervals the whole way up. How did anyone have so much stuff in their guts? And why would they keep going up the stairs? I would have laid down and called 911. These Italians are of hearty stock. The smell was amazing. The arrow indicating the way to the metro switched directions so many times it curled and pointed at the sky. I guess you just guess here. Don’t even think about asking for help from the people in little cages like tollbooths scattered about. Signs in front of the booths warn in English: “We’re Not Here to Give Information.” Read More
May 13, 2025 First Person There Is Another World, But It Is This One By Luke Allan Freeman Gage Delamotte, Illuminated Initial from Hymnal, 1830–1862. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966. Public domain. 1. Before my mum died I was a rain guy. Weren’t we all? Now I get it: the wind. Its shoulders. Smooth and deep as a bowl. Like a lullaby about a big old brush. Glowing, of course, but on the inside, far away from our world. Who could possibly go through the death of their mother and come out the other side anything less than a total idiot for wind? It is the golden whistle. God’s first attempt at a dinosaur. A holiday from all that silence and color. 2. In her final text messages, sent the night before she died, my mum invites her friend over for sex, a reminder that two things can sometimes meet the same need. 3. The invitation to sex in the midst of death is my mum at her most desperate, so it’s also my mum as I most love her, miss her. Like the embroideries she made of my stepdad’s poems when he was dying of cancer, it weaves together death and love into something that can be shared, a made thing amid all the unmaking. 4. My mum always had a needlework going, though she called them her tapestries. Big old castles were a particular specialty. So were grumpy bowls of fruit. But what I remember most about her tapestries are the backs, that mess of colored thread that looks like a vomited version of the castle or sunset or pineapple on the front. When you live with a tapestry maker (tapestrist? tapestreur?) you get used to seeing this frayed mass of color, which they carry around with them at all times like a small shield. The hours my mum spent tapestrating appeared to be spent inspecting the reverse of a mysterious hairy object. Read More
May 12, 2025 Lectures John Ashbery’s Analyst By Hannah Zeavin John Ashbery, 1975. Photograph by Michael Teague, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. John Ashbery was analyzed by Carlos Carrillo. Jane Freilicher was analyzed by Edmund Bergler. Bernadette Mayer was in analysis with David Rubinfine. Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. James Schuyler was hospitalized at Payne Whitney and Bloomingdale, where the day got slowly started. John Wieners was sent to Medfield and then sent us Asylum Poems. Was Barbara Guest analyzed? Someone told me she was, but I couldn’t prove it. Alice Notley told me she was in treatment for a bit after Ted Berrigan died. There is no information about Frank O’Hara being analyzed. No information about Amiri Baraka being analyzed, save for when Vivian Gornick imagined how it might go down, in the Village Voice. We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’s negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis. Read More