This is more personal blog than review of Ben Lerner’s Transcription because I am mostly interested in describing my ideal literature based on my own private obsessions (CRITICISM AS FANFICTION) (then again, isn’t that the only correct way to approach this book? “to listen to a story [is] to become involved in its composition”)— in fact most of it could have been written without even reading Transcription, just “judging the book by its cover,” something I absolutely believe in (not as an imperative, merely as inevitable). Probably the play on “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” occurred to me because of the iPhone-shaped stone monolith (on the US cover) that is every reader’s first understanding of what this thing Transcription is, and which is therefore an ideal starting place for understanding the experience of reading this book. So, if Ben Lerner’s book is understood best as a sculpture (without field), rather than a novel—what might this mean?

Maybe no one knows what a sculpture is anyways, but let’s say that it is not a painting, regardless of whether either kind of object involves paint. As much as painting might try, by clever mental and physical and contextual gymnastics, to go “beyond itself,” as much as this has produced (or at least been applied retroactively to) great art, and as much as I appreciate this impressive example of discursive evolution in Western thought from an anthropological perspective, the solution one might prefer is for work in any medium—this includes novels—to have ambitions greater than being “painting” at all, i.e. the ultimate rarified luxury commodity interred in a nerdy discourse that is totally contrived and totally irrelevant to pretty much all of life. Lerner seems to me to have come to a similar realization. Though his conceptual concerns are in many ways consistent, I think one can identify a gradual redistribution of thematic emphasis across his novels: from mostly being neurotically obsessed with whether or not they are novels (by way of neurotic, self-obsessed protagonists), to questions of a more generous, PUBLIC, less exclusively “literary” or even “representational,” but on the other hand of a much more fictional, even metaphysical, nature. Transcription is however unique in that it is also engineered to temporarily reshape, or at least have us think, our relationship to material objects (in this case, iPhone and book).

Transcription is about the iPhone, and the most important thing about the iPhone is that we all have one. The internet is the internet because we are all on it. The fact of universal connectivity is something we are all aware of, yet no one can verify by personal experience. This non-sensible relationship, this non-figurative psychological and material and political economy, is one that objects in a gallery find difficult to express formally in a convincing way. Etc etc etc. Transcription, however, achieves the status of infinitely reproducible semi-physical, semi-virtual monument, one perfectly non-situated to speak to our embodied experiences of digital decentralization and decontextualization. It occupies no physical “field” or pedestal, nor does it require a particular discursive context to be effective as an artwork. In this sense it is public; it is also about the public. But it is not immaterial. My point isn’t merely that Transcription is a good example of an artwork of “Dispersion”—but that the book, and Lerner’s in particular, is a medium whose particular privilege is its ability to construct complex, fantastical relationships between the virtual and the physical.

Transcription is not, say, an mp3 file, but an object that can, like an iPhone, be held, simultaneously, by thousands of readers—readers who are moreover made to appreciate this, the fact of their belonging to a readership, by virtue of Lerner’s story, which is not just about networked digital technologies, but collective imagination more abstractly. Transcription invents a world in which dreams—i.e. memory, media, novels—are the products of interpersonal, rather than individual, creativity. The novel, both “traditionally” and, it seems to me, again today, is the vehicle for expression of individual subjectivity; and novelists are hagiographized as wellsprings of quasi-mystical genius like creators in no other medium. This is ironic, since anything we articulate to ourselves and others is collaboratively constructed because it is informed/corrupted by the shared, inherited system of language. All language is social. Lerner reminds us of this (in many ways that I won’t get into because you’ve probably already read this book).

If we are reminded that the world participates in our language, we are also reminded that we participate in the language of others: in short, that all language is personal. And so the reader is made to understand that, although she is reading the same novel as many other people, she is also reading a different novel, her very own Ben Lerner’s Transcription. (The algorithm, on the other hand, does not like to remind us that we are not participating in a shared experience of Instagram.)

This not-very-novelistic story rather recalls narrative forms older than the novel, older than writing itself. By virtue of the magic trick through which it has completely twisted reality, character, and causality inside-out by its conclusion, but also in its abstractness and simplicity, Transcription is a fairytale (“a fairytale set in LA,” one character says). The particular subjectivities of individual characters are not so important—rather, this is a myth about sons and fathers and their daughters; duplicates and inversions; ether and object. It is a fable about oral storytelling itself. As much as it mimics oral transmission, Transcription is, ultimately, however, a 130-page object. This particular object forces the iPhone, too, to take on an unusually material form. In the first couple of pages, their protagonist drops his device in the sink; it dies. But this dead iPhone continues to haunt its owner’s gestures; he keeps “tapping and swiping, the way [his daughter] used to pretend to send text messages from one of her wooden blocks or magnet tiles.” And so the reader becomes acutely aware of the non-presence of her own iPhone, which she cannot use in that moment, precisely because she is using Ben Lerner’s novel (which roughly has the dimensions of an iPhone). She realizes the materiality of the book at the same time as the novel disappears, because, instead of reading, she is thinking about (not) using her iPhone. Both objects, of course, are devices of and for “transcription.” And so a relationship of doubles materializes. This relationship is constituted by an interplay of presence and absence. In the same way in which the reader is made aware of the impossibility of belonging to a universal readership, but that it happens anyways, there is a “duck-rabbit effect” in which book and iPhone cannot be in the same place (one’s hands) at the same time, but they are.

This same dynamic between physical and immaterial recurs again in the girl (or is it girls?) who cannot eat. She can only pretend to eat, nibbling away some of the chocolate coating a Klondike bar, a mirror image of her father (or rather, her father’s double) scrabbling away at the surface of his dead iPhone. She only learns to eat by forgetting that she is eating at all: when her mind is occupied—by the virtual version of eating: watching “satisfying” videos on Youtube—her hands take over, and she can eat the real thing. The videos she watches are unboxing videos, which are not so much visual or auditory forms of content as semi-kinetic, non-retinal magic tricks, in which one experiences by proxy what it is to make an object materialize from its surface, from its abstraction, the cardboard box. The unboxing video, in the way it trains and aestheticizes our relationship to real objects in our IRL lives, might be another kind of sculpture.

Lerner’s own metaphor for “fiction” in Transcription is objective, in fact an actually-existing sculpture held in the collection of a museum at Harvard: the hyperrealistic glass flowers made by a pair of craftsmen (father and son) that the protagonist encountered and was moved by as a young man. “I kept seeing the flowers as organic one moment and artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect… Eventually I’d call this [oscillation between given and constructed] fiction.” Lerner’s character “senses” that the flowers are “trembling from the exhalations and voices and footsteps of all the people who had ever been in their presence, still vibrating, too, from the journey by boat from Europe…” He “senses” — a word that bridges “sees” and “imagines”— that the flowers are trembling, though they’re also not, not to the protagonist’s human eye. I googled the flowers and they’re actually colored glass, but I imagined them as transparent. These transparent glass flowers evoke the sad chromatic poverty of the written word in Gutenberg’s modernity: its doomed attempts to capture the crazy spectrum of HD-4D-IRL-life; on the other hand, the wonderful and unique capacity of literature to express, beyond even the imaginary, the unvisualizable and impossible—the virtual.

Lerner is obsessed with this virtual dimensions of language, a problematic he has laid out most thoroughly in The Hatred of Poetry. Why are excerpts of poems so much better than the poems themselves? Because a fragment allows us to imagine that there is more out there, beyond the literal word, that surely the real true poem is even more beautiful, expressive…that there is an ultimate perfect poem out there waiting to be realized! This for me is the miracle of all language, which is on the page but also somewhere else entirely, which tries so desperately to describe both things and images, neither of which it can hope even to approach. Writing is never “satisfying” and never complete; it has no field yet goes everywhere; unlike a sculpture, it is infinite.

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For Heavy Traffic Magazine, published July 2025.

My name is Olivia and I was born in 1997. I am happy. I express myself easily and authentically. My voice is my own. My mind catches the light. My thoughts move fluidly from point to point: forwards, not backwards. There will be a time when I no longer want new things. I have a desire, then another one! I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am an open book. I have a favorite pop star, model, magazine. My black hair waterfalls to my waist. When I smile, it is like opening a can of Coca Cola; I have straight teeth. I breathe in. I breathe out. I am vulnerable but not fragile. Sometimes the taste of salt enters my voice; I hold the note. It costs no energy to hold still. When my breath clouds the windowpane, I do not have to draw my name. The way I spend my days never fails to give shape and sense to my life, somehow. I have short hair because I decided it’s cool. This is what makes me me: a collection of true hard facts. Facts are facts because they never change, only accumulate. In the summer of 2021, I broke my foot dancing in flip flops on a table in a bar on Chrystie Street. By the summer of 2024, I’d had three concussions. I wear loose cottons. I love cowboy boots. I have a pet liger which is a combination between a lion and a tiger. In December, I will go to Jamaica, if the tickets are not too expensive. I love travel. I probably love Jamaica. I hate or love something in increasingly sophisticated ways for years, then stop and switch. Aphex Twin: I will never change my opinion on... I am not like a well, I am like an infinity pool: clear, flowing outwards. I am the same as ever, just a different weight. When I smile, it triggers the release of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. I read and began implementing this fact as a child. When a dreamy, faraway look enters my dark brown eyes, it means I am thinking about something….When someone sees me mouthing what I am thinking, I pretend I was listening to music, but sometimes, vice versa… I became depressed in 2010 and chill in 2020. I’m afraid of things losing shape. Some things never change. Every good thing comes my way. It is my birthday. I communicate my opinions on music, literature, art, and fashion. I love music. I love Mexican food. I love to give presents. I don’t mind if my girlfriends talk shit about me if they actually like me and I never hear about it. If you do not constrain yourself to facts, there’s more to say; that’s why women talk to each other so much. Like most women, I file many of my observations under “men” and “women” without knowing whether men do this. I used to be impressed by men who are good at math. I can vaguely imagine the divine majesty of mathematics and the euphoria a brilliant mathematician must feel when grasping the perfect laws of an immutable universe both real and invisible. Girls on TikTok believe the universe can be changed through words only. They state a wish as a fact and the universe listens. Usually, this statement seems to be about something else, when really it is about boys. The universe is listening and implementing the will of women whose desire is to be desirable! Though I have tried with method acting, I cannot actually truly imagine what it would be like inside the brain of one of those women. Deep down, it is hard for me to believe in stuff that is not real. It’s disappointing to discover the limits of my will. I like to play pretend. My dreams are mostly banal wishes I already knew about, but when I have a fever my dreams get abstract and procedural. I know what it’s like to be five lines of C++ executing a recursive function: like Don Draper’s shadow in the Mad Men intro, falling through the same window outlined in a red-hot glow over and over until the function bottoms out and I wake up! That is my favorite dream. When someone tells you a dream, they are telling you something about themselves they do not understand, so you better listen up…One time I appeared so accurately in a boy’s dream that I felt apprehended. I spend a lot of time with people and things who do not see me: magazines, for example. But through his description of his dream of me I saw myself like through a telescope. I was startled. How could the real me have gotten into his head. Even stranger because, to me, of all men he was ultimately hardest to remember. He was a music video. He was beautiful. He was like a boy a girl would invent, which in retrospect maybe I did. Watching him was great but thinking too deeply about his subjectivity, a migraine. I assumed at first he was one of these boys who have alternately fed and starved their emotions, folded and twisted their opinions, generally tortured their insides until they resemble a kind of rare and writhing orchid. I was already familiar with the type. This was when I liked professions of love being made to me in a graveyard. He, too, acted suspiciously similar to Romeo in Romeo & Juliet. His intensity was charming but ineffectual: like the flame of a candle, mostly symbolic. But over time I realized there was nothing so gardened about him. He was a natural. One night, I was troubled to feel his heart beating very fast in his chest. He was awake. There was all this botanical complexity growing blindly in the dark. I don’t know, I like the desert. We mostly walked around listening to music together, one earbud each. Lol. And that is the only information through which he’d be able to identify himself in my description…but it’s okay because he’ll 99% likely never hear about this… I love to hear other people’s dreams, which worries me because supposedly this isn’t true for most people. I sometimes worry that I don’t understand what is the normal content of a casual conversation. I never see my reflection in a dream. I dream of malls without words through which I wander calmly pocketing things. My mall dreams are familiar as a screensaver. There is one mall near the central train station of a European city with escalators impossibly intersecting each other while violin music plays. I have been there three times. There is another mall that is a flat box stretched out on the horizon of a neverending parking lot in Los Angeles, Texas. This one has lower quality stores than the other. When I go there, I first drive my SUV to buy an ice coffee at the gas station convenience store cathedral. I don’t know what happens to the coffee once I enter the mall. I like dangling the keys to an SUV from my fingers while wearing sunglasses and drinking ice coffee, then I feel like Kris Jenner. The bigger the keys, the better. If I were Balenciaga I would make fake keys like that. I see myself flip-flopping improbably around the Lower East Side with my Kris Jenner keys. It’s a way to trick boys into thinking you’re rich. Jingle the fake keys to a huge mommy SUV in their peripheral vision. My dreams are different from life because they do not have pictures in them. They do not have opinions, only feelings. To me, sadness is a feeling like water spreading up a paper napkin…no, it is dawn and you realize you are too light like a meringue…meringues are stupid…no…it is a photograph of Marlene Dietrich…tumbling into a waterfall…I am sad: I’m on a bridge and a black-and-white photo of Marlene Dietrich slips from my slim fingers into the rushing current like a teardrop…I had a children’s book called Doomed Queens. I was interested less in the melodramatic demise of Cleopatra (snake bite suicide) than the ironic composure required at the guillotine. The executioner shall not have much trouble, for I have a slender neck! This quote, attributed to Anne Boleyn, surely influenced my current personality. I looked forward to getting shots because I could practice stoicism. I watched the needle enter my skin impassively. Everything was and is deadly serious to me. The levels of theatricality one can perform secretly on the inside surpass the possibilities for outwardly exhibited theatricality tenfold. Apparently my mom took me to the doctor because she thought I had an ear problem, but I was just pretending not to hear her. I am not sure what influence ballet had on my current personality, except I like to wear either high heels or flip flops. As a little girl I had a pet cobra named Principessa. I loved to play with Barbies, as you might expect. Around her neck, Anne Boleyn wore a tight pearl choker with her name, a gold B, hanging off it. In the subway, I look at my reflection. My breath fogs the window pane. I do not rely on metaphor; I see things as they are. I do not know where my thoughts come from; they surprise me. I do not know what you think of me, but I’m sure you have the right idea. No matter the shape of my sunglasses, the form of my face never changes. Surely, my eyes work just the same whether or not I wear mascara. When I smile, it is like I have remembered something mysterious. I breathe out. I trust you know a thing or two about me. What belongs to me will find me. I do not believe there has been any miscommunication between us. I adore puppy dogs. I have a twenty-one-year-old boyfriend I like to dress up in a Chrome Hearts hoodie; he takes care of all the animals. To suggest that I have a positive work attitude, my Slack profile picture is the smiling emoji. I have cried in front of my boss. I fantasize about a dashboard of “That Was Easy”-type buttons or even better an electric shock bracelet with which to give myself constructive criticism. I am not complicated…Deep down, I believe the world is composed of points distributed at equal distances on the same plane without pattern. There is no such thing as deus ex machina. There is no such thing as character development. There is no such thing as a conclusion. There is a catch in my voice. I look down quietly. One time I… crashed my car into a bridge I watched I let it burn. I wink. “I Love It.” I look up. Sure, I’ll tell you about it some time later. I breathe out. In my room I have books. In my bed I have sheets and under it, a lot of stuff. In the summer I have tan lines. I don’t know much about my insides. I assume you have the right impression of me; information circulates naturally from inside out; it happens whether I want it to or not. I like fashion trends because they move naturally. Girls everywhere react simultaneously to the current cultural conditions: one morning you wake up and remember Twilight. A year later there’s twenty-one-year-olds wearing Twilight t-shirts. In fifth grade Jack D. got time out for saying he wanted to “kill” Edward Cullen from Twilight but I was rarely disciplined. I am the perfect audience for an advertisement by Don Draper. I like being influenced. I love to succumb! I write dramatic statements in my diary. I also write in books as I read them. I annotate using four symbols: star, asterisk, exclamation point, heart. Star and asterisk are the same and mean what you’d expect. Exclamation point is for interesting yet extraneous content that may distract from the main issue. Heart is for something on the page that seems not universally relevant to all readers but speaks to me personally. Like how when I smile, I’m looking right at you: we like to be addressed. I am not telling you this for any particular reason. People have touched me without my permission. I have a pet cheetah with a pink, crystal-studded collar. I could be blond………..Did you know it is possible for me to see myself 100% clearly. My face and voice give information that enables you to interpret the meaning of my words. Sharing the occasional true hard fact about myself is surely a necessary and natural part of casual conversation. A true fact is a hard fact…That’s not me that’s Michel Foucault, sort of. I’m not so sure “knowledge is power.” It is interpreted as the one gaining knowledge gains power. However exercising honesty is in my experience similar to hurling your subjectivity at someone’s head like a BRICK: I used to enjoy that feeling. Oh I am open with people I know and private with strangers. I drink tequila and kahlua, never gin. You know, some men cause everything to contract to a point. Other men cause things to expand. I am actually not drunk. I am afraid of the right things. Saying something and saying the opposite of that thing are much more similar than saying something and saying nothing, in fact sometimes the effect is indistinguishable. According to some, expressing yourself is a form of vulnerability, but only if it costs you something. I want a daughter and a sports car. I shrug. I smile. I love ice cream. My eyes flick from your left eye to your right eye. Men tell things how they are, and so do I. I communicate my preferences in matters of taste. I have a favorite painter, a favorite poet, and a favorite philosopher. Painting is so great; I love it. Yum. I drink coffee. I get nervous. My face gives information. Never have I ever faked an orgasm. Humans are just animals who can talk. I am sad when I am hungry, tired, or on my period. I have a favorite noise musician. I have a pet monkey who can talk. This cute monkey loves to ask me questions about myself. I think the most beautiful scene ever is in Bladerunner when he gives her the test to find out if she’s a robot. She cries because there’s no way for her to tell whether it’s a robot crying or a human. It’s so sad. I always laugh because the question she fails the human test on is whether she would eat a dog and I definitely would…I cried in the Barbie movie…Sometimes, upon waking, I realize my dream has been nothing but a long sequence of ballet. My mind is deep teal and calm as a lake in shadow. When I speak, it is like Daisy in The Great Gatsby: softly, so you have to lean in close. When you throw a BRICK in a lake, it disappears from view. Oh, no, I do not remember that. Oh yes, it is my birthday. Only the real hard facts tell you anything about anyone. Like things that have happened in their lives. I’ll never know how many times I have been pregnant; I guess I could be pregnant right now. Desire always feels like an opening—really, it is a terrible contraction. Everyone knows that people have shockingly similar dreams and desires, which is why one does not ever need to speak of them! Like most people, I don’t ask questions when I don’t want the answer!! I have had sex with seventeen people but, just so you know, some of them were women!! By the way, I am not telling you anything for any reason!!! I put my headphones on, I listen to my favorite song. I worry a lot what other people mean. I am communicating to you that I have a favorite noise musician. What if I told you I have a pet mountain lion named Baby. My period comes every twenty-eight days. I smile. I do not chase, I attract. My favorite flavor is black raspberry with white chocolate chips and rainbow sprinkles. I have a little sister; her name is Lucia. I have opinions on C++.

(Autoportrait)

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Originally published in Heavy Traffic Magazine, 2023.

The private investigator opens a door, then closes it behind him. Everything in the room takes shape very quickly, because there are no mirrors, no closets, no curtains, nothing not in plain sight. Inside, in the blink of an eye, all objects are there. The private investigator can see well in the dark. Outside, it is always raining. He wonders why. He takes off his hat. He is a bachelor—though he wasn’t always. (He sighs, thinking about that.) In the corner, the police radio is on: “…double suicide, romantically motivated…” But that doesn’t explain anything, does it?

Which is what the private investigator is thinking, too. He sits down at his desk. He turns on the tape recorder. His voice is like silver fog over asphalt at midnight. His thoughts are dark and diffusing rapidly. From his trench coat (beige), out comes the evidence, of which there are two. The little bag of shimmery white powder is an unidentified substance that the police have been finding everywhere, recently: bedrooms, bars, casinos, greenhouses. Speculations are many; conclusions are few. It might be a drug, a poison, or invisible ink. It might be purely decorative—he puts it aside. He turns to: a pair of long, black gloves, lying in the lamp-light like shadows of themselves. Gloves are worn for many reasons, he muses, and sometimes more than one at the same time. His right hand twirls a pen. His left hand swills a clear drink on ice. The most compelling reason to wear a glove, for the private investigator, would be in order to prevent personal information—fingerprints, fluids, etc—from contaminating an object. But these particular gloves would be ill-suited to such a function: sparkly particles have flaked off the fabric and onto his desk, leaving a silhouette, like a chalk drawing around a corpse. When he compares this crystally drop-shadow trace with the snowy white powder, they are a perfect match. But anything, he knows, might look like anything else, but be quite different… He sighs. He has not touched the powder directly. He can see tomorrow’s headlines already: Star-Crossed Lovers, maybe Crimes of the Heart…. His thoughts run out. He turns off the recorder. There is the murmur of the Pacific Ocean, coming in and out, like a bad signal—he turns off the light.

1. The Invisible Hand

A luxury department store always has the same kind of lighting—doesn’t it? Soft and warm? But tonight Leo, who has stopped by right before closing, seems to be nightmarishly hallucinating the flickering of fluorescent overheads, the kinds they have in those public non-luxury spaces he’s never visited, like courtrooms. The mirrors on the display cases warp into a funhouse maze of weird reflectives, suggesting one-way windows; boxes with unusually many sides; magic tricks involving saws; the riddle of the locked room and the pool of water—things like that, occurring just around the corner, behind a card tower of monogrammed leather wallets.

Although a whole day has passed since opening, the plushy carpet shows no footprints.

This must be the oft-reported death of retail, which reminds Leo of the death of movies, which reminds him of his own death. Then again—he cheers up—dead or no, neither—stores nor movies—ever seem to really go away. By the accessories counter, another undead: a limply angular black hoodie, floating as though unoccupied. On the counter, beaming back up into the void of the hood, is a face-up, lit-up phone. A trap song Leo hasn’t heard in forever comes out of it: I can’t feel / tryna figure out if this shit re-e-al…whining animatronically around the mirrored rectangular columns, like a fly shut in a metal tin.

And who should be producing this mood of zombie carnival, who should be wearing the hoodie tonight…but Alexis, yes, you can tell it’s her because the tips of her slender tattooed fingers peep out from one of the sleeves. They twitch mechanically over the phone screen. Leo remembers her mainly as the girlfriend of her boyfriend, a rapper who made it; Alexis, it seems, didn’t. They’d seemed cute together, always in matching Rick Owens, her draped around him like something equally untailored. Did someone cheat, in the end? Leo can’t remember. Now, Alexis’s hoodie is way oversize on her. She’s gotten way thin. Leo himself, blond hair, is scarily rosy, like someone who has just eaten babies. His long wool coat cuts him a villainous silhouette. He appears as the devil. And Alexis, hoodie-d head being pulled up now as if by invisible string, like a female grim reaper.

The hood falls back; its oval shadow is replaced by her oval face; surprising lavender effects surface around her eyesockets—cool makeup—but—Alexis’s eyes—Leo’s heart skips a beat—seem to be half-way missing!? Something keeps glimmering in there before going flat, or filling and emptying, or appearing and disappearing: something, at any rate, that eyes don’t normally do.

“…Cool makeup,” he says.

“Not wearing any.”

Leo smiles. A lie? But he’s just here to buy a Christmas present for his new girlfriend.

The music sounds farther away now, vibrational and vinylic, like a record player locked in the department store’s basement. Alexis nods. For sale in the case between them are many pairs of multi-thousand-dollar gloves, posed mid-gesture and arranged in awful little tableaux. Leo spies not only peace signs, hearts, middle fingers, finger-guns, fingers simulating sex, baroque letter formations that Leo guesses must relate to gang membership, a Dolce & Gabbana lace mamma mia, a deconstructed riding glove bearing a stigmata-like cigarette burn—but also much more enigmatic, indecipherable digital configurations, such that the display appears to teem with disembodied hands permanently pursuing many unintelligible but shockingly emotional conversations, like animals in a zoo, or, rather, animated taxidermy.

Leo doesn’t speak sign language, but he interprets their message like this: that a gift is often a stand-in for some thing less tangible. This December, Sarah, icier and more inconstant than that month’s weather, will be getting the present of Object Permanence. Like the mirror stage, or language, object permanence is a phase of development that many girls never quite graduate from, a problem to which presents—being a kind of evidence or note, an antidote to “out of sight, out of mind”—are the solution. Because when people are gone, they are usually still there, just somewhere else. Sometimes, baby has to go away on a business trip. And when he comes back? He does not like to have been forgotten. Leo looks up from the sign language diorama. He meets Alexis’s eyes, so weirdly metallic.

“I’m in Love,” as the expression goes. “So it’s got to be nice.”

The question of whether or not Leo is in fact in love is a regular subject of interpretation for the papers, but the word inspires no such suspicions in Alexis who, unlike the private investigator, cherishes a literal understanding of everything.

On closer inspection, it seems there’s something silver hung strategically over Alexis’s pupils: a crescent moon?

“Love?” she whispers. “In that case, I have just the thing for you.”

…and now, as her sleeve unfurls, hovering several inches above the vitrine, Leo realizes that Alexis is just wearing novelty contact lenses. And her nail art flashes terribly in the fluorescent light.

2. Sunglasses at Night

Sarah’s been acting brand new. And sources close to her say it’s not even acting: for, since Christmas, the impermanent presence of Leo and the indeterminate relation Sarah bears to him have mysteriously hardened into real live Love! It took shape less like a carbon-based flowering and more like a sudden salt crystal from a hyper-saturated solution; easier than expected: just add salt. It feels a little like sepia-tinted sunglasses, a little bit like silky gloves, and it’s made her, as the perfect accessory ought, into a whole new girl.

Now, at a party in Tribeca, she blinks around the room. She’s slightly on drugs that make pinpricks of light collect over and around her irises, not unpleasantly but a bit distractingly, so her cat-eye sunglasses are pulled down over her face. Sarah was born under a lucky star. Tonight she wears a hot pink crushed-velvet dress, boots that edge to a knifelike point, and gloves that go all the way up her arm. Leo’s talking to someone behind the potted palm. Although she can’t see him, she knows he’s there.

She’s made her rounds at the party; these people are her friends, kind of. No, Sarah doesn’t want to go home. Sarah’s never one to go home—not to her apartment, not really to Leo’s apartment, and certainly not to her parents’ house in NJ. So Sarah must want to be here—she looks up—right here, under the crystal chandelier: each dangling pendant ends in a sharp yellowed point; each points right down at Sarah, like in the maps at the mall; hundreds of arrows indexing that You are Here. “You” is in this case Sarah and “here” is a penthouse. But “are”…

A wintry draft blasts through the door as it opens and closes, another guest enters, and the crystal droplets quiver and chime. The room is cold, but Sarah’s hands are warm. It’s her first time out in her new black gloves, which, her boyfriend had explained, are made of a hyper-thin baby-lamb-leather treated to a trademarked liquid-vinyl-acid-denim texture. From minute to minute, depending (on light, temperature, mood, etc), her arms might appear as though skinned in any one of a dozen different materials, textures best described by the kind of linguistic follies invented to name shades of nail polish: not only Black Leather but Fog Over Asphalt at Midnight, say, or Who-Dun-It!? or Molecular Mystery or Color Her Cadillac. Downing her drink, Sarah notices that the perspiration pearling down the stem of the martini glass doesn’t seem to soak through the liquid-vinyl-acid-denim leather. And that the gloves make a murmuring sound when they move, like background voices? When she steadies herself on a shiny white couch, it seems to respond: Oh My God, Your Skin is So Soft!

…? Sarah is on drugs, but not that much—she blinks downward. A french-manicured hand is touching her own. And it’s moving, stroking what is actually not, technically, her hand at all, but the outside skin, the liquid-vinyl-acid-denim leather…And Sarah literally can’t feel the touch at all!

If paid, the private investigator might observe that gloves are a rather unpredictable medium for grasping object permanence. This is because the wearer of a gifted glove can’t even touch her present: the inside of it is touching her. The glove is the one touching, using her hand. And Sarah has, recently, the annoying feeling that her hand is empty.

“I’m wearing a glove,” she says to the girl on the couch, “and it’s expensive.” And withdraws her hand. It’s a bit much. These girls can’t get next to her, she reminds herself. But, in a physical sense, they, unfortunately, can. She needs air. She turns to the window. Outside, it’s snowing. Inside, for no reason really, as though inhabited by an invisible hand, Sarah draws the window curtain around herself with a swoosh. She disappears from the scene. The noise of the party mutes. Time stands still. Sarah spreads the five fingers of her right-hand glove on the glass. NYC blasts back at her from the other side. Maybe it’s just a good moment, at 11:59 PM on New Year’s Eve, for Sarah to take a step behind a black velvet curtain and reflect, for the first time ever, on the nature of love!

Sarah is indeed feeling brand new, though the exact brand of these feelings will, for now, remain a mystery. She’s hot and she’s cool. She wants to leave; she wants to stay. It is less that Sarah is an unfeeling person and more that emotions run through her head like overpopulated deer through the woods: there and then gone and therefore not worth much thought. So, Love?…

Sarah self-reflects, though not for long.

…Yes, she figures, she must be feeling so much love for Leo that she can’t even be in his presence. She has heard of this, how love sometimes causes you to do things that are the opposite, flipping over into a kind of mirror image. She listens: fireworks go off. 00:00. The new year is here. And Sarah’s here, too—isn’t she? She need only draw back the curtain…

But when she tries to move her fingers, still splayed on the glass, they’re stuck, frozen to the windowpane. And her arms—what the fuck?—have gone totally numb! Poor blood circulation? The gloves had fit perfectly at Christmas, but maybe Sarah has gotten fatter. And who knows what paralysis-inducing chemicals might have gone into that trademarked textile?

Because the gloves are indistinguishable from the black velvet of the curtain, it’s like her arms break off right under her shoulders. A marble Venus statue. The window, also black, goes floor to ceiling: in it, snowflakes fall, so detailed, like a movie. Sarah looks further west, to New Jersey and beyond. She closes her eyes.

As her lids shut, a teardrop pearls off her extra-long eyelashes and splats down, unnoticed, onto the glove of her right hand, where it pools into a shiny shape: a perfect heart? A gun or skull? A pretty star? Impossible to tell, on the optically-illusionistic liquid-acid-vinyl-denim-leather background. Meanwhile, Sarah is passing through the screen and falling out the other side, tumbling through the air, flipping head over knife-shaped heels, down down down, past other screens, big billboards and lit-up apartments, the snowflakes thickening around her into a silver-white movie screen light….

3. Crimes of the Heart

Sarah wakes to the sound of a scream that might have been her own, or not. A coyote?

—But the first thing she notices is that she’s wearing: a tightly-tailored double-breasted Ticonderoga-yellow-and-sunset-pink tweed jacket with a matching pencil skirt, a pill-box hat perched dangerously on her hair, rhinestone-sprinkled bow-shaped earrings—and the gloves, current shade: Topanga Twilight. Her hands are un-frozen. The air is warm. When she opens her eyes, everything is black! Then she remembers her sunglasses; she pulls them away. A swiss-dot-net-lace pattern appears, but that’s just the cute veil swooping down from her hat. Behind it, a scene comes into focus: a road at night, into which her nylon-stockinged feet extend, and a stucco wall, against which she is slumped. A cactus with a pink flower glows up ahead. A sign reads Private Residences; another: Topanga Canyon, with an arrow pointed enigmatically askance. The scenery is under-dimensional, all flat façades and stark shadows concealing nothing behind, like a set. Sarah has the weird feeling of experiencing a side effect of something she doesn’t remember taking. She knows she’s in L.A. From her outfit, she knows she’s in the 1940s… But that doesn’t really explain anything, does it?

Headlights come around a corner. A cool white Cadillac pulls up. No one gets out. A window rolls down: “Need a ride?”

Sarah always plays the cards she is dealt. She knows when to talk to strangers. She feels a call she knows she will obey because she always does. She gets up, gets in, and shuts the door behind her. The inside is made out in a handsome ochre leather. The smell: teakwood and tobacco. The man next to her wears a hat pulled down low and a big trench coat.

“That was easy.” His mouth curls. “Nice accessories.”

“Do you have a… ‘smoke’?” Sarah improvises, already used to the way things are going here, getting lost and then found, picked up and transported away. He produces a cigarette, straight from thin air, and off they go. In the rear-view, instead of a face, there is only the sunset-orange glow of the cigarette in his mouth. The snaking road disappears at a steady rate into the background. And Sarah smiles at how easy things are when you play the roles you are given.

…But the stranger has other ideas for where they’re headed. “It’s time for you to go home,” he is saying, in a voice like fog over asphalt at midnight. “Your husband’s been calling nonstop, I’ve been chasing you all the way up and down the coast since Christmas, and my fee doesn’t cover new tires—got it?”

The plot has thickened quickly, as it always, in Sarah’s experience, does. She sighs. It was better when it was just the outfit etc. Holding up her hand, she suggests that he might have the wrong girl? “See? No wedding ring.” Just a glove.

Unfazed, one hand on the wheel, he flashes some kind of identification. “Private investigator.”

“I see.” Sarah considers her situation, arrives at no conclusion, sits back, and folds her hands in her lap. “Well then…Who am I?”

Unfortunately, the name he says will turn out to be a dead end for both of them. “I don’t think I am,” although, being unsure of the exact shape of the two letters monogrammed on the silk handkerchief in her jacket, or whether they’re even supposed to correspond to her initials at all—

But he is already producing a manila envelope and tossing it into her lap. Out falls a black-and-white photograph: of arched glass doors forming an alcove, inside of which is posed a figure. She wears a powder-white wedding gown and a swiss-dot-mesh veil to match. Though the veil drops down from her head like a snowy floor-length shadow, obscuring her face, it unfortunately does little to conceal the outfit’s other accessories: cat-eye sunglasses and gloves, both black, visible through the veil like ink on the flipside of a page. And is that a swoop of curtain there, in the upper-right corner? In the side mirror, Sarah catches a glimpse of a profile wearing sunglasses. Objects Are Closer Than They Appear, she knows…though it doesn’t have that printed there, as it’s before safety rules. She looks to the road, imagining disembodied features, slinking hands and cat-eyes, jumping, like deer, out of the night and into the headlights. And just like roadkill, another piece of paper flutters out the envelope, thin and shiny, like receipt paper. It’s a note in a woman’s loopy handwriting, unsigned and unaddressed, dated from a couple weeks ago:

I’m leaving home and never coming back. I’ll drown myself after what you’ve done, probably. I hope you’re happy now please have a great life and please don’t ever look for me!!!

Melodramatic. Sarah wouldn’t be caught dead writing that. Unfortunately, her feminine intuition regarding this matter of the heart in relation to her prose style won’t prove anything to anyone. “I don’t write in cursive,” is all she can manage. If only she had a fountain pen to prove it! But writing tools don’t seem to come with this outfit.

The private investigator only laughs—“Time to give baby a call?”—and a brightly-shining telephone booth lurches up out of nowhere.

He pulls over. The ignition turns off. He opens the door; she puts her gloved fingers in his. She steps out; he disappears into the phone booth. Sarah watches his mysterious silhouette as he dials a number by rotating the vintage telephone ring of digits. The walls of the booth are four glass panels framed by wood. From the ceiling drops a flickering bulb. There’s some limp curtains for privacy, which the private investigator does not pull around him. Time stands still once again. He dials what seems to be the same number as before. Salty droplets spray up to land on Sarah’s cheek, for the booth, it turns out, is standing at the very edge of a cliff, below which waves are crashing, higher and higher… And though the man takes off his hat when he steps back out, Sarah still can’t read his face. He fishes a final piece of paper from his trench and hands over the number.

When she enters the booth, the outside sound mutes. In every glass panel, extending in an infinite multiple of four, is a reflection of Sarah. Though it is warm and cozy inside, she has a creepy feeling that’s the opposite of brand-new: Déjà-Vu. As she stares at the swoop of black curtain framing her features, a moving picture begins to well up on the inside of her dark designer sunglasses: of the party on the other side of that curtain back in Tribeca, and of Leo, just beginning to raise his glass in a toast!

Though she is happy to see him, he doesn’t see her at all. Being, she figures, a kind of ghost, Sarah slides closer. As in a card game in which each player’s hand is given a final meaning only in relation to those already on the table, Sarah finds it difficult to act out her feelings without a bit more context as to Leo’s own. But they can now “be as one,” as she’s heard love called, like a hand into a glove—a position from which, Sarah hopes, she might resolve a certain question all lovers love to ask. Does Leo love Sarah? From inside his pinstripe suit, she looks down at herself. Sarah always looks great in menswear. But is that a thought that Leo would have about himself, or Sarah about herself, or Leo about her, or Sarah about him? It’s all too much like her whole problem tonight, the mystery of a glove! And as she peers out from behind his blue-green eyes, at the champagne being made to flow in a waterfall down a pyramid of delicate glasses, out at the tuxedoes and the…flappers?—it occurs to her that what she’s seeing is less a wrinkle-in-time-space-fabric caused by true love, and actually just a scene from Great Gatsby, the movie.

Sarah blinks away the image. Instead she sees the number. Alone again, fingers trembling, she moves her liquid-vinyl acid-denim right hand clockwise and counterclockwise over the dial. A single ring hangs in the pocket of air curled under Sarah’s blonde hair. Then a click, like the start of a recording, and a voice:

Hello. I couldn’t feel anything, I was so unsure what’s real…so I took a walk round the canyon and to the beach just now. There I found her body. At least I think it was her; it was hard to tell. If you’re hearing this, I’m sorry to say: it’s too late. You’ll find me in my private residence. There will be a glass of water on my nightstand, under the lamp and next to the book. Please don’t drink from it; it is poisoned. Good night now.

A breath; another click; the recording ends; Sarah has a stinging salt feeling around what she’s pretty sure is her heart. The phone has dropped in slow-motion to dangle from its cord. For one second, it swings freely. When it hits the booth’s wooden edges, hard, the bulb overhead goes out with a pop, and the reflections of Sarah vanish too. And now the light that has been pooling all night at the rims and inside corners of her eyes begins to spill out and down her face.

From outside the booth, the private investigator watches Sarah’s mysterious silhouette begin to cry, and he wonders at the strangeness of sympathy, of symmetry. Can it be—real tears!? Sarah’s “been through it”; by now, she’s “iced out” in more ways than one. Yes, Sarah “came up on her own,” and no, Sarah never cries. But now a cold glaze, like nail polish, streaks her cheeks from eyes to chin. Inside the upper-left pocket of her technicolor-tweed blazer, she feels a receipt paper crinkle. She pulls it out, unfolds the suicide note. Inside, writing has appeared that she didn’t notice before, silvery-white lines, like invisible ink.

I met death in that one specific disguise he will never take off again long before I realized that was his name. Nor did I know I had loved him already in various forms! Because I was so innocent, I lied to everyone and pretended I did not know what I wanted when he took me in his [redacted car model / redacted graveyard; temporal signifiers too embarrassing i.e. too revealing to write here]. He told me he loved me because I looked just like him. I wish I could look exactly like a mirror; we all know what mirrors look like: they are silver. I will know many people who die, but I will only know death once. When I meet him again I know things will last. For now he has indeed shown me a mirror to myself: the one image that will never change!

Melodramatic, and yet…The private investigator has opened the door, is holding out a hand. Sarah steps straight into a puddle. Saltwater seeps through her stockings. She reaches out to give him the note: not that it explains anything really, it’s Sarah who wants to explain something now, how she feels maybe—but as she looks down at the writing, she realizes that it’s gone: all that is printed there is an itemized receipt, from a luxury department store, for a series of accessories, at an exorbitant cost.

“I guess that’s that,” he shrugs. “I got the wrong girl.”

“Seems that way.” Sarah feels at a loss, unsure where things could possibly go from here. She turns her face upwards to his. “Are we going to kiss?”

“No,” he laughs — sadly, Sarah thinks, but maybe she’s flattering herself. Then it starts to rain. Even the weather-proof liquid-vinyl-acid-denim-leather gloves don’t stand a chance. She feels tears in the rain, then the rain on her skin: this must be the end. So Sarah decides to take matters into her own hands. She peels off the gloves, soaking wet. Turns out there’s a manicure on her bare fingers: vintage-style, little crescents rising above the nail bed. The gloves hang down from her fingers in black silhouettes, fluttering like shadows come unsewn from her skin. Sarah manages to toss them to the private investigator—“Case Closed!” she winks, and he catches them deftly—just before she lands on her feet, right where she should be: it’s New Year’s Eve, and if Sarah’s in love, at least she’s alive.

4. Case Closed

Evenings are slow in a luxury department store. The goods for sale here are highly contemporary, which, this Fall-Winter season, means: pillbox hats; gloves; retro sunglasses. Each twinkles in a coffin-shaped case. Some of the vitrines are arranged vertically around a shiny black mannequin to form a kind of modernist grotto; these repeat, in regular groves, across the carpeted glades of Floor 1. The mirrors in the cases are old and warped, so the objects inside appear closer or farther than they actually are.

At least, that’s how it seems to Alexis, from the shadow in which she stands, between a skyscraper of hats and behind a low counter of Louis Vuitton. Alexis’s fashion contact lenses, the private investigator might note, are partially responsible for the more otherworldly mise-en-scenes of form and content that play out around her station as her shift draws to a close, her manager leaves her to lock up, and the traffic goes to rush hour outside.

Though her eyes are often sources of diptychal illusion, Alexis’s motivations are simple. She has worked for years at the department store in the hopes of encountering her ex-boyfriend, who has always had a taste for designer: already swag back in high school—then, mostly wearing imitation—he has, now, the funds to shop in sprees, and in-store. He’ll be back from LA one day, on a business trip, maybe, and when he sees Alexis, it’ll be here, just like this: and beauty and love will extend forever in every direction. There’s only one moon over 5th Avenue tonight; on Alexis’s nail art, there are ten. She looks at the bags and wallets on which certain intertwined initials are stamped, embossed, embroidered, and made to repeat infinitely. The gloves in her case repeat, in perfect pairs, real and fake, all across the globe: in factories, on street corners, and in cases just like this one, deep in a foreign mega-mall, LA or Dubai or Shanghai. Her ex, this very moment, might be touching any one of them.

In the meantime, Alexis has been playing a movie on her phone. Now, as it comes to a close, an emotion begins. Trapped between her iris and the film of her contacts, it comes into her vision like a blot of ink on a wet paper napkin: a dark color spreading every which way but growing, simultaneously, fainter and fainter, moving not towards a form (as all things should), but away from one. A feeling like this happens to Alexis at most once a day, usually at twilight, so it is precious and unpredictable. Having no cause, it might have no end. She must direct this feeling somewhere, anywhere; must force it into a crest that breaks, or a shape with edges, or a door that opens. She sharpens her focus on what’s in front of her. Sunglasses, hats, and gloves: in those enchanted minutes before closing, they seem to twitch and distend, leech-like, growing saturated and animate, full of something life-like-but-not-quite: Love?

“Prada…” she whispers, like a magic spell. “…Balenciaga.”

And as she blinks away her tears and flicks off the lights over Floor 1, Alexis notices, not for the first time, that some of the accessories have taken on a renewed sheen, as though glazed in crystals; dipped in brine, and then hung up and dried.

I understood the Artist’s Take prompt as “things that inspire me” and/or “things I like.” I realized I don’t have much to say about things I like and that the things that inspire me do so because they leave something half-empty / fill me with negativity. I also just like things because they are bad. Mulling over my taste, I often think of a line in Huysmans’s Against Nature: “𝒯𝒽𝑒𝓈𝑒 𝒷𝑜𝑜𝓀𝓈 𝓌𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓈𝑜 𝒶𝒷𝓈𝓊𝓇𝒹, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓌𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓌𝓇𝒾𝓉𝓉𝑒𝓃 𝒾𝓃 𝓈𝓊𝒸𝒽 𝒶 𝒹𝒾𝓈𝑔𝓊𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓈𝓉𝓎𝓁𝑒, 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒷𝓎 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓈𝑒 𝓉𝑜𝓀𝑒𝓃𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓂𝑒 𝒶𝓁𝓂𝑜𝓈𝓉 𝓇𝑒𝓂𝒶𝓇𝓀𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓇𝒶𝓇𝑒.” Huysmans’s hipster edgelord aesthete protagonist, Des Esseintes, has a very advanced contrarian aesthetic sensibility, especially as regards badness of all kinds. His turtle doesn’t match his rug so he encrusts it with jewels until it dies! This is a list of things I’ve obsessed over but feel badly about in different ways.

1. Rihanna

In 5th grade I read a New Yorker article about a woman who has written many hit songs for Rihanna. It described her process: singing random phrases into the microphone while scrolling through her notes app, into which she had copied language ripped from TV shows or advertisements encountered while walking around the city. That’s when I knew, I love words…(Equally inspiring to me: how Young Thug writes songs, which is, scrawl a shape on a napkin while on drugs, then “read” it in the recording booth while on drugs.)

So because since 5th grade I’m into language, I like that Rihanna has an album called Talk That Talk. Rihanna is ALWAYS singing about saying stuff or even WRITING. “Birthday Cake” rocks and it’s an extended metaphor involving writing stuff in icing on her birthday cake. (“Come and put your name on it / Put your name on it / … Cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake… / And it’s not even my birthday / But you wanna put your name on it!”) Rihanna is not a singer, she is a speaker, the blown-out speaker in an Uber that is playing the radio that is playing Rihanna. This is the ineffable beauty, mystery, and melancholy of Rihanna, and I find it very moving, but I feel this good girl gone bad’s music is, mostly, bad as in not good.

I think Des Esseintes is fascinated by bad books because the worse something is, the more impressive the mental labor required to enjoy it. In my heart, I know I don’t “like” Rihanna except in some convoluted intellectual way, which makes me sad. So does Rihanna. Her best lyrics are: “Yellow diamonds in the light / Now we’re standing side by side / As your shadow crosses mine / What it takes to come alive.” The senseless fragments of her club song lyrics hopelessly grasping for meaning yet failing to achieve any kind of real emotional resonance is very poignant to me.

2. Edouard Levé, Autoportrait

It got back to me that someone—“this guy”—said my work is a “narcissistic self-affirmation project.” My writing is like always an explicit interpretation/homage to other people’s writing/art/etc!! But yeah I have written about my life sometimes?? (I’m generously assuming this is a genuine critique of my writing and not how I dress FashionNova on instagram.) Obviously all art is partially a narcissistic self-affirmation project, because it means forcing your stupid interiority into an immortal object, then asking other people to care about it. Certainly everything that goes “against nature” is a hubristic human enterprise...but usually only one half of humanity is reprimanded for any of this. Less glaring instances of misogyny are honestly so sad and painful and crushing to me, but towards this unknown (not even interesting to narrow down which guy it was) reader, I feel condescension and abstractly pissed off, which is very very inspiring! I wonder whether “this guy” likes the autofictional work of Huysmans…Mishima…Josef Strau…Proust… Or Edouard Levé, another male inspiration of mine:

Levé’s Autoportrait (English translation Lorin Stein) is a short book composed only of true, first-person statements about himself. The variability this simple constraint produces is stunning: the book is a time-lapse experience of content moving around in a very tight contour, meaning being created through rhythm and differentiation. Autoportrait is a new literary form, but also a tale as old as time…The truth and beauty of all autobiography is that it’s the most humbling form of literature: nothing mutilates your own subjectivity so much as reducing it to a text. It is also the most generous to the reader: nothing teaches you about your own subjectivity like the ruthless dissection of someone else’s.

But in order to learn about yourself you unfortunately first have to learn a lot about Edouard Levé, who seems like a typical guy and asshole. You learn the facts of his life, but also, more interestingly, that he believes an accurate self-portrait can be rendered only in facts. Facts, he clarifies, are unchanging truths. So he can write about his eye color and what parts of women’s bodies he has come on, but not his feelings or future. Even more suspect to me, the implication that a person/ality can exist in a void—the longer Levé’s monologue goes on, the stranger it becomes that all of these confessions lack an addressee. In a text that strives towards unsparing realism, Levé has accidentally constructed a conspicuous fiction: that he exists in a world of one.

Anyways I thought it would be a fun exercise to invent my own protocol of speech to write what I would consider a “true” portrait of myself. I did but my autoportrait was actually agonizing, a hysterical self-negation project!!

3. Euphoria

Des Esseintes also likes the other type of bad: everything that is morbid, perverse, and disturbing. One of his favorite artists is 17th century Dutch engraver Jan Luyken, whose prints show “𝒷𝑜𝒹𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝓇𝑜𝒶𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝑜𝓃 𝒻𝒾𝓇𝑒𝓈, 𝓈𝓀𝓊𝓁𝓁𝓈 𝓈𝓁𝒾𝓉 𝑜𝓅𝑒𝓃 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓈𝓌𝑜𝓇𝒹𝓈, 𝓉𝓇𝑒𝓅𝒶𝓃𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓃𝒶𝒾𝓁𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑔𝒶𝓈𝒽𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓈𝒶𝓌𝓈, 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓈 𝓈𝑒𝓅𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒻𝓇𝑜𝓂 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒶𝒷𝒹𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓈𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝑜𝓃 𝓈𝓅𝑜𝑜𝓁𝓈, 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓇 𝓃𝒶𝒾𝓁𝓈 𝓈𝓁𝑜𝓌𝓁𝓎 𝑒𝓍𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓅𝒾𝓃𝒸𝑒𝓇𝓈, 𝑒𝓎𝑒𝓈 𝑔𝑜𝓊𝑔𝑒𝒹, 𝓁𝒾𝓂𝒷𝓈 𝒹𝒾𝓈𝓁𝑜𝒸𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒹𝑒𝓁𝒾𝒷𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓉𝑒𝓁𝓎 𝒷𝓇𝑜𝓀𝑒𝓃, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒷𝑜𝓃𝑒𝓈 𝒷𝒶𝓇𝑒𝒹 𝑜𝒻 𝒻𝓁𝑒𝓈𝒽 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶𝑔𝑜𝓃𝒾𝓏𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓁𝓎 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒶𝓅𝑒𝒹 𝒷𝓎 𝓈𝒽𝑒𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒶𝓁. 𝒯𝒽𝑒𝓈𝑒 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓀𝓈 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓁𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒾𝓂𝒶𝑔𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈, 𝑜𝒻𝒻𝑒𝓃𝓈𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝒾𝓇 𝑜𝒹𝑜𝓇𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒷𝓊𝓇𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔, 𝑜𝑜𝓏𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝒷𝓁𝑜𝑜𝒹 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒸𝓁𝒶𝓂𝑜𝓇𝑜𝓊𝓈 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝒸𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒽𝑜𝓇𝓇𝑜𝓇 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓂𝒶𝓁𝑒𝒹𝒾𝒸𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈, 𝑔𝒶𝓋𝑒 𝒟𝑒𝓈 𝐸𝓈𝓈𝑒𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓈, 𝓌𝒽𝑜 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝒽𝑒𝓁𝒹 𝒻𝒶𝓈𝒸𝒾𝓃𝒶𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓇𝑒𝒹 𝓇𝑜𝑜𝓂, 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒸𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓈𝑒𝓃𝓈𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝓈𝑒-𝒻𝓁𝑒𝓈𝒽.” That’s how I feel watching Euphoria! Except Euphoria is more than morbid; it is evil. Think of a greedy Hollywood man, or woman, sitting at a big desk, cutting deals, with Eckhaus Latta, with drugdealers pushing fentanyl, making teens ADDICTED to pain, making teens want to rape, wear Eckhaus Latta, and kill themselves… I wish sometimes to create a work as powerful as this.

4. Dallas, Texas (George Bush Meditation Garden)

I went here with my boyfriend on his business trip. I was excited because everyone said Dallas—at least, the parts of Dallas to be seen on a boyfriend’s business trip—was the most boring place ever. I love places like Dallas because I am perverse and take pleasure from forcing a thing to give something up to my perspective against its will [[narcissistic self-affirmation]]. A curious detail, an accidental angle!—it feels good to see something no one has ever seen before. What’s there to say about Paris? But as it turns out, it’s hard to say anything about Dallas, too. It’s hard to see it in the first place. A city that has nothing hidden is the hardest to see, and Dallas has no secret from me. It is not a secret that the city’s symbol is literally the fucking Exxon Pegasus.

I went to the George Bush Presidential Library and there was nothing to photograph that would be like, “holy shit…?” Everything seemed obvious and good, like universal human rights. As a contrarian I’ve always thought Bush was subtly charming and funny, but after driving around his neighborhood in Dallas I know for real how bad being a Republican is, and how being a normie is no joke at all, because they are so fucking rich and run not just Dallas but everything. Actually, Dallas is a Democrat city with a gay rainbow crosswalk area, exactly like my hometown, which made it even worse. Dallas has a thriving LGBTQ community. In fact, Dallas seemed** like a place of perfect equality. Nothing rose to attention or sank below it: an even field.

At one point I did a reverse orientalism exercise where I imagined “a Chinese person” taking note of the phrases repeated in gilded lettering across the mirrored skyscrapers and white wooden signs decorating businesses around the city, trying to come up with the occidental’s Auspicious Moment Good Fortune Golden Dragon Trading Company—something like: ᴜɴɪᴛᴇᴅ ᴍᴏɴᴛɪᴄᴇʟʟᴏ ᴘʀᴇᴍɪᴜᴍ ᴘᴀᴛɪᴏ ꜱᴏʟᴜᴛɪᴏɴꜱ ꜱᴇᴄᴜʀɪᴛɪᴇꜱ & ꜱᴏɴꜱ ʀɪᴠᴇʀ ᴄʀᴇᴇᴋ ʙᴀʀ & ɢʀɪʟʟᴇ ɪɴᴠᴇꜱᴛᴍᴇɴᴛꜱ ꜱᴛʀᴀᴛᴇɢʏ ᴏɴ ᴘʟᴀᴢᴀ ꜱᴛʀᴇᴇᴛ. But then I remembered it’s not my imagination—I technically am “a Chinese person” :(

At 5PM I walked out of the Presidential Library into the glaring sun of the George Bush Meditation Garden. The park achieves what a French theorist wrote about Chinese painting: the ideal landscape displays a perfect blandness; the eye should catch on nothing. Sitting in the George Bush Meditation Garden I realized that, in real life, perfect blandness is terrible feng shui. It is upsetting to walk around in a Chinese scroll painting, not to mention the pages of an in-flight magazine. I mean everything in Downtown Dallas looked exactly like the photos of Dallas printed on ultra-thin-shiny-paper in those magazine inserts, which are basically just real estate catalogues, that fall out of free regional newspapers or the coffeetables of hotel lobbies and bring news of local vineyards and interior design firms that look exactly like the local vineyards and interior design firms in the fake magazines trying to boost the economies of every other United State. When you’re in a car it’s okay because this flat city passes by like a movie, but actually walking around in a 2D-looking place like that gives you a kind of media-dimensional-vertigo that would have a stupid name in a Christopher Nolan movie: “the bends” or something. “It’s all wrong,” diCaprio would say, “See that?” And he’d point at a tell-tale sign like two fire hydrants placed too close together. Then he’d start getting “the bends,” a torturous mental-physical state that comes from being in the wrong dimension for too long. Dallas Syndrome is just Paris Syndrome for people with a narcissistic self-affirmation problem, like hipsters. You’re not supposed to find Paris in Dallas, Texas. I like to do what I am not supposed to. But Dallas didn’t let me!

For example, “George Bush Meditation Garden” is funny, and that’s why I had to invent it. In reality, the garden was named after a different white male politician whose name did not clash so obviously with the idea of Eastern spiritualism and therefore would not make for good writing; I cannot remember the two words at all.

5. Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”

I love this poem so much! I love a lot of things so much, but this is the only thing that is to me like a prayer. If you’re always going around being inspired by things (taking and using them for your own narcissistic etc etc) then what is left that is holy? I think this poem can only be holy because it’s aesthetically alienating to me; the language seems intentionally archaic (it’s 1960), which I usually find embarrassing, contrived, and definitely irreconcilable with my “pop” sensibility. Therein lies the disconnect that creates a negative space, a blank space, an emptiness “so near to the heart / an eternal pasture folded in all thought / … created by light / wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.” The meadow is inspiration :) and this place of inspiration sounds like death.

Originally published in Kaleidoscope Magazine, 2023.

As Sarah Snyder does it: again and again, outside or inside, in an outfit in a square that unfurls into a carousel and then back into a grid. Sarah, a model, is caught in a series of states of unboxing herself. This happens digitally, in discrete islands of time (ski resort, beach, black SUV); what comes in-between, she doesn’t show, though, technically, we see, in the whitespace that both subdivides and connects her portrait, all we need to know. Instagram is designed to simulate a wall of Polaroids, but really it suggests a volume flattened into a single surface, meant, like origami paper, to be folded along lines of perforation (these one must invent and project oneself) and reconstructed into a whole. The points (data: time, location) that would have to be translated into dimensions are too many for such a shape to be realized physically, though a folded paper fortune-teller comes to mind, as do rolls of wrapping, hands or houses of cards, the pamphlets on hotel room nightstands: breakfast in bed. Unlike the mirror Parmigianino had specially constructed to paint his reflection (as Ashbery writes), this structure is not of Sarah’s design. She lives inside of it like a hotel or an airplane, making use only of its most basic and anonymous properties. Picture an airplane stretching along a never-ending strip of rainbow, going nowhere, in which every window is reflecting Sarah.

Hotels—on April 21, 2021, she is in six photos of a room in one of many: rose-tinted sunglasses; a cream-colored carpet patterned with intersecting gold circles (one infinite Venn diagram); tightly pleated window curtains, closed, striped in cream and a darker gold; black remotes; some silver orbs as ornament; circular lampshades and marble-top tables bordered by crocodile leather of the same cream color. Her full-body spandex is printed with overlapping ellipses that wax and wane in a gradient of blues and blurry grays, like phases of the moon appearing, very fast and all at once, on a rattlesnake. From two different angles, she crouches on the carpet like a large cat wearing a diamond wristwatch; from two others, she seems to rotate like a Chinese vase of flowers. The fifth photo is of feet and a hand. Accessories, Bottega: bubblegum pink. In the sixth, Sarah has disappeared completely. Her clothes and their wrappings have been left on the table.

In the background there is a brochure that says Wynn., like a signature flowing on a check. This is the logo of a hotel-casino in Vegas, one of the few on the Strip without a theme. Steve Wynn conceived of this resort as a departure from the others (the Mirage, Treasure Island) he, by 2001, had owned and operated, as “a place that does not lend itself to verbalization. When you start to describe”— indeed, the architecture does not imagine a proper noun, like Venice or Excalibur; rather, it is like punctuation, a comma or parenthesis extruded sixty stories from the desert sand and soaked in bronze glass. An artificial mountain obscures much of the mirrored surface, creating a sense of mystery. The name of the resort was initially to be Le Rêve, after a Picasso, owned by Wynn, depicting his young mistress, the “golden muse” who is also the model for a similar painting hung somewhere in the back of Sarah’s six-figure slideshow, Woman with a Book, Picasso’s homage to Ingres, painter of women inside surfaces who, Baudelaire wrote: “adores color, like a fashionable milliner”; is “morbidly preoccupied with style;” makes his models into “paper-patterns, inflated in a soft, lifeless manner;” causes, with his satins and screens, a mixture of “uneasiness, boredom, and fear.” M. Ingres, Baudelaire worries, lacking Imagination, can only repeat the data that is given. “No more imagination: no more movement.” In Macau, there is another Wynn. Its theme (per Wikipedia): “Life imitating art.” There will soon be a Wynn. Marjan. It’s hotels and Sarah’s self-portrait that allow her to occur in these places simultaneously, yet perfectly still.

“The mountain is pretty, but it is only the back of the stage!” Sarah’s structure unfolds also in my phone, in a rental car in Nevada by a mountain range on a dirt road called Cash St. I’m looking at photos I took of myself on vacation in Death Valley, deep in white fog: I do look dead. When I look at Sarah I think she is looking in a mirror. I have always wanted to look like a mirror; we all know what mirrors look like; they are everywhere; they are silver. Like a Picasso, Sarah is a woman “with” features, things, discretized, rearranged—yellow hair, hat, purse—only she has all of them, all at once. Sarah smiles that Venice, Paris, and Excalibur should all be on one Strip even though they are all the same. She smiles that one should sit at slot machines if one likes to see them play. She levels mountains and valleys into the topology that is her portrait: a never-ending striptease. Her soft, heavy limbs curve calligraphically down the grid that is their skeleton (or perhaps they are balloon-like, floating up it: an infinite scroll knows no direction but accumulation), repeating her self into a surface that is more realistic than a portrait, even by Ingres: a pattern. She has no theme, only postures. “I just play the hand that I was dealt,” she has said. “Everything was already written, I’m just living it.” Sarah senses that words are really just names, shapes to be traced, designs with specificity if not meaning: a gymnast, her body will execute them perfectly. “FENDI,” her sunglasses whisper, “Glimmer! Wynn.” Sarah’s eyes say even less. They do not say much at all except “Sarah Fucking Snyder.”

When I read John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” alone in a rented white pickup truck, I wanted to copy it. When I wrote about Sarah Snyder “after Ashbery” the next day, I was on an airplane. Several days earlier I had freaked out and booked a ticket to Vegas and the first result for “Airbnb Death Valley,” which turned out to be in a Nevadan exurb called Pahrump just over the border from California. This is an essay about copies and citation, so to describe my weekend there I’ll quote Lisa Carver’s Pahrump Report: “It feels like a bowl of endless time.” Ashbery’s poem (1975) is itself a copy/description of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), a painting depicting a distortion, a kind of fisheye lens skate-video effect reminiscent, psychologically, of that bubble-like Valley. His themes: surfaces; the soul; and the space between them, which can be an image. The poem is also about Death—but, as Ashbery writes, “more on that later.” The background of Parmigianino’s painting is the opposite of a hotel, airplane, or Death Valley: a studio or study, space for living and thinking that, Ashbery imagines, shapes the subjectivity that is trying to bubble to the surface of Self-Portrait.

Sarah, however, has no subjectivity! And I loved my Airbnb because it was not a place I’d be able to live or think; it was a sunlight-flooded box in a dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence surrounded by mountains. Outside, the sky was flat and empty; so were the roads, except some horses; so was my mind. Upon moving to Pahrump, Carver wrote: “None of us can predict what forbidden desire will rear its head in total isolation. I was about to find out.” But what I found out wasn’t a forbidden desire; it was nothing. Nothing seemed forbidden, except the neighbors’ dirt lot, which was identical to mine. Nothing was desirable, except staying in my own lot. Forever. For forever seemed like it had already come. At the end of the street, the asphalt ended; from there, I just walked out into the desert. The dispensary weed in Nevada was dirt cheap, so cheap that I got confused and took so many edibles that I almost died. Watching the moonlight plus the fluorescence from the trailer park play over the silver polka dots on the window curtains, I concentrated on my breathing, trying to stay awake. The walls were made of honey-colored wood in which concentric knots and whorls repeated infinitely; I knew I would fall asleep (and die) because it was nighttime, and there was the pattern above me, coming closer, ever softer and more infinite, looking like the fake wood on a 70s TV set. I’d ingested fake THC probably synthesized at the nearby nuclear test sites and I was already in the type of place you go to die anyways. So it all made sense—I faded to black.

Then I woke up. I had to drive back to Vegas. There, I stayed alone in the Luxor, a pyramid-shaped hotel covered with black glass on the outside and permeated by horrible carpets, nicotine, and sparkly slot-machine sounds on the inside. It was like the afterlife—unsurprising, as it was modeled on a tomb.

Girls and Guns

As Richard Kern has them do it: in the bathtub or in bed, in cotton camis instead of shell-like spandex, with their own accessories instead of ones they have been airdropped to advertise, and often with their phones. Kern Girls, in other words, are real: the opposite of Sarah. Then again, aren’t all photos of hot girls are the same? Sarah, too, owns a phone—and the fact that Kern’s girls have different faces, different favorite songs to which they dance very naturally, only makes them more identical. This is why they’re so appealing. Our pleasure is in their repetition. And in their themes, which play out in patterns: in the series Medicated, Kern shoots girls naked showing us their pills; in Contact High, they’re naked too, smoking weed. In Cellphones, they’re spreadeagled underneath their phonescreens, a selfie beaming up at Kern’s camera from straight between their breasts. If you look down their eyes, they might be saying “hi!” “hey” or “:)”—then again, maybe that’s just their tits. In Guns, the eyes say nothing at all. Except maybe “Guns.” Guns is my favorite theme because there is nothing natural about a model in cute cotton panties holding one. The photo only makes the girl look more like what she really is—a Girl—and the gun more like what it is—a Gun. In this sense, though they are unrealistic, the photos are real.

The original Gun might be a photo of Richard Kern himself in which he is holding a revolver. Kern did the music video for Sonic Youth’s Death Valley ’69 (1984), which was actually not shot in Death Valley. But here, he is for real in Death Valley. In the realistically 2D backdrop of the desert, dirt scrolls up to a strip of mountains below a white sky and behind the silhouette of Kern’s American jeans and cut-off T-shirt. The shadow of the barrel falls accurately across his hollow jaw. The revolver is the same color as his eyes (dark), because the photo is black and white, making it all very natural. At the time the photo was taken, Kern was doing “Cinema of Transgression,” a movement with a manifesto that says things like “Any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at” and “There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.” Indeed, like an Ingres, these films had nothing to do with Imagination and everything to do with special effects (Surface). Sometimes the sex was real; sometimes the blood was fake; the difference only made them more identical. What can be less realistic and more real than Oddballs dancing, leering at camera, guy shaving a nontraditional part of his body and man ripping his own throat out, woman stabbing herself to death (an online description of Submit to Me, 1985)? An interviewer for Videowave wondered: did Kern really shot up on stage that one time? He did, “with fake drugs.” When things happened back then for the camera, for real or for fake, it was shocking. Now, nothing is forbidden and everything is merely realistic. Kern’s dark eyes drop back deep in his silver face, implying something like history—a backstory, maybe, too transgressive for words? No… “I am not making a statement,” Kern says flatly on Videowave. “It’s pure entertainment.” Shooting is of course like shooting. His eyes aren’t saying “Guns” because they don’t have to; they are just doing it.

Trying to fall asleep in the Luxor against the bouncy coin sounds being simulated outside my room, I started Remainder, Tom McCarthy’s novel about a man who, following a terrible accident, becomes obsessed with “reenacting” near-death experiences in order to feel “real—to become fluent, natural.”

One month later, I too would again “almost die,” in the ER. Like in my Airbnb, I was concentrating on breathing. This time, most breaths felt like being knifed in my ribcage. There was “blood and pain the likes of which [I’d] never imagined.” Stars would burst in my vision. I pictured the white eyes of a horse rolling backwards right before you take mercy and shoot it. The ultrasounds of my torso were blurry—from lots of blood, as it would turn out, which obscured the image—but finally it was discovered that I had been pregnant at the time of my trip through Death Valley, and still was now. Except it was “ectopic,” a rare case where the embryo grows in a bubble outside of the uterus and then, always, bursts. I consented via signature to the risk of being operated on—Death!—which wasn’t actually a risk in the Vegas sense, since I would definitely die, soon, if I didn’t. Then, the “operating theater” was flat and white. Because I was on my back looking up, it seemed shallow, but potentially expanding infinitely around my bed. My yellow lace thong from Urban Outfitters was removed and put in a skull-stickered bag because there was blood coming all the way up the crotch like a waterline. Although the drunken appearance of the anesthesiologist and his Monica-Lewinsky-looking assistant made me certain that I was about to die, I felt amazingly lucid, calm, and at peace. I remembered Remainder. Soon, I’d be a simple surface. The doctors would inflate my organs in order to see them better. The thing now was to play the hand I was dealt. I knew I’d execute my role perfectly; after all, I’d rehearsed it.

I didn’t die, of course. Lying awake at night I now often picture a big white truck driving through sand, or a small silver pinball silently running downwards through a series of corners in a corkboard maze that is covered in a sheet of plexiglass like a cross-section, hovering over a mirror of water at the bottom, brushing lightly over its surface, sending a ripple, and then, somehow, through the operation of various flippers or levers, being propelled all the way back up. The ball when it rolls out onto the surface does not know the twists and turns that it took, unlike the cameras that were surgically inserted into my stomach.

One month later, I took another trip, to an Airbnb on a rural back road near Rhinecliff, NY, in order to be photographed by Richard Kern. This Airbnb was a wood house painted black from the outside and stuffed with deer heads, novelty shot glasses, and fake Warhols on the inside. Kern wore a camo-print baseball hat and a black hoodie. I’d be wearing a pink string bikini and skin-colored band-aids over the stitches from my surgery, both of which I’d soon take off, and a shotgun.

Richard Kern Heaven Reenactment

In my memory of the photos we took in Rhinecliff my eyes are looking into Kern’s camera and watching the Airbnb unfold around me like wrapping paper: curtains; Home Sweet Home coffee cups; whorls of wood of the same cream color. Things already look like an exact reproduction of the photo they are right now becoming. And the obvious fakeness of this faux-rustic Home only heightens for me the reality of what I am doing—taking my top off—as the scene decomposes into a sensation of surfaces: thin mesh underwear; hard wood banister; big black flatscreen, reflecting me topless, on my hands and knees on a sheepskin rug from IKEA. I see myself smiling. It’s not forbidden or transgressive to take my top off anymore. Thankfully, I have no interest in meaningful statements anyways, so taking my top off feels even better (pure entertainment). “Since there is no afterlife,” as the Cinema of Transgression manifesto goes, “the only heaven is […] having fun.”

When I am led outside to reenact Richard Kern in Death Valley (except topless), pressing the revolver (except fake) against my cheek, I remember who that photo reminds me of: a friend/ex, now dead, who liked both girls and guns, and whom I thought of often while driving through Death Valley because my rental car was the same model as the truck he once owned. My love of reflecting all things (and men) like a mirror is probably why I was so sure I was going to die. Of course, I was right; I totally will. I shiver, but that’s just from the cold. This Airbnb comes with snow on the ground and a river nearby. And I remember, now, how, upon feeling the pain being replaced with something oddly-familiarly-fake, (fentanyl), I had, in those last seconds, not been calm at all; already fading under, I had started thrashing on the table; I was looking up into this awful bright light and trying to rip the oxygen mask off my face. But my arm didn’t work. It was like being mummified alive. There are many perfectly meaningless, fake, and futureless forms of reproduction, like a baby that cannot develop, that are nevertheless quite dangerous. Which is why even fake guns are cool. The Polaroids we are using for this shoot are also cool, because they are no longer being produced. Back in the Airbnb, we wait for the image of our reenactment to develop.

Blinking up into Richard Kern’s camera from a blue-checkered polyester bedspread, his boots on either side of my stitched-up stomach, really stoned from the weed I really just smoked for the purpose of shooting me smoking weed, spread out on my back under the lights and the circular silver reflectors erected around my bed, I see the operating theater arch above me and feel the desert expand below me. It is like a bowl of endless time. A white star bursts in my vision!—and I have an acute sense of chronological collapse; of themes, patterns, and figures being folded together into a single moment (an image). Death Valley ’69 is recorded in ’84, one year after my boyfriend is born, which is, interestingly or not, thirty years after Richard Kern and thirteen years before I am, and in-between then, my dad. In 2013, “Girls and Guns” is just a Tumblr I follow that belongs to Petra Collins. Her photos are clearly inspired by Kern, for whom she once did casting. girlsandguns is probably where I first saw one of Kern’s Guns; since then, I have always wanted to copy him, too. In 2023, in the afterlife, I do.

Turns out heaven (or hell) is like a hotel; I now know that all words are really just shapes to be traced and that thankfully my body can still execute them perfectly—and, thankfully, moreover, I am in a pink bikini bralette. Spread on the present of the blue-and-white bed, I feel the photograph pool around me. Without meaning, it is still developing, with me inside. So I sink down into it. Like Sarah like Ashbery. “Everything was already written, I’m just living it.”

I wrote this for Viscose Journal 6: Text (2024). The designed pdf of the article is here.

“Do you think in languages or in images?”

For Spring/Summer 2021, Prada designed a collection of questions to accompany their ready-to-wear. The advertising campaign for that season, “Dialogues,” consists of a series of minimal diptychs. In print, these appear as two shots of a single model—one Prada outfit, one pensive face—split across two white pages and accessorized by two sentences of text in Prada’s black serif. The verso of the spread is always an enigmatic question; the recto, a simple injunction: “Answer at prada.com.” These open-ended questions might ask us to express a preference between a pair of vague alternatives or to define the difference between two concepts; all either implicitly or explicitly invite us, the reader, to reflect on our selves—our ways of thinking, our points-of-view. According to a press release, the responses submitted to prada.com “will become components of the campaign’s continued rollout, vital parts of a dialogue that will continue.” But really these campaign questions are, of course, rhetorical ones, meant less to provide an avenue for us to tell Prada who we are, than for Prada to tell us who it is.

What, then, is Prada? Well, Prada might say, that’s the question! Branding is usually about sending a message; Prada, we learn, is an inquiry. Countless other Prada campaigns tell—or ask—us the same thing: one perfume is “an invitation to open new possibilities to play and question convention” that is (dis)embodied by the “ethereal” Candy, a digitally rendered “virtual muse” born from the brand’s “DNA of curiosity” and “driven by a continuous quest to question.” The conventions being questioned are often equally ethereal: idealized dichotomies that are, as in “Dialogues,” proposed by Prada only to be dismantled in the same slogan. The Spring/Summer 2022 collection “collided actuality and fantasy, the physical and the cerebral.” A series of pop-up stores manifests the brand’s “aesthetic codes” in an architectural style somewhere “between modernism and classicism, embellishment and purism.” Pradaness is always emerging from this space of instability that both links and divides terms—what, in Pradaspeak, might be called a “Paradoxe,” the name of another perfume, embodied, this time, by Emma Watson, a woman “breaking the mould of the muse to be both in front of and behind the lens.” Deconstruction, by whatever name, has never smelled so sweet.

Prada, like most luxury fashion houses, likes to advertise itself as in a state of continuous “re-interpretation.” At Gucci, a handbag originally released in 1991, the Diana, “speaking to the narrative of evolution and reinvention that runs through Gucci’s designs,” is “reimagined by Alessandro Michele in three different sizes.” The archetypal Miss Dior is regularly reincarnated in a fresh face and stale 1950s frock. Prada’s recent Symbole handbag expresses this insistently recursive branding quite concisely: in a nicely fractalline visual tautology, the shape of the whole bag is inspired by the triangular logo that has marked their brand since 1919. These gestures towards historical continuity are not only reminders of each house’s storied pasts, they’re also meant to make us feel like each is the expression of a kind of personality or spirit. A luxury fashion brand is a little like an immortal undergoing psychoanalysis.

But Prada’s self-interpretations read as especially neurotic, not least for their emphases on language. The Spring/Summer 2020 campaign, for example, revolved around a series of invented acronyms for “P.R.A.D.A.”—the name converted, here, into a potentially infinite set of sentences. What did Prada (want to) mean, by way of this solipsistic semiotic game, in the spring or summer of 2020? “People Rarely Accept Difficult Answers,” says one ad. Several models are filmed engaging in abstracted forms of play: deep in concentration, stacking a column of dice; hiding an orange under a paper cup; tugging on a rope. Play of signifiers, indeed!? Prada’s real message finds its medium neither in a triangle nor even in a single, five-letter word, but in the linguistic pastime “P.R.A.D.A.” Consistently redundant, P.R.A.D.A. always uses five words where one would suffice, like a thesaurus-happy freshman trying to hit a word count. From the SS20 campaign:

The multitude characterizes Prada, an ever-shifting landscape of meaning, endlessly reinterpreted… Like the identity of women today, the identity of Prada too is fluid, fluctuating, open to interpretation—confounding explanation, eschewing rhetoric, refuting definition. The paradox and contradiction inherent to Prada make easy categorization or summarization impossible: Prada is simultaneously complex and simple, singular yet multi-faceted…

There is a power to the word as a tool to define, and in Prada’s case, to challenge definitions, to re-define, de-contextualize and recalibrate, to evoke an imaginary narrative and hence change our eye as we examine the picture plane. An attempt at an impossible definition becomes a manifesto for the impossibility of definition itself.

The Prada campaign evolves around a series of written acronyms, spelling out the word PRADA. Like the images they are placed alongside, each of these acronyms offers a possible interpretation of the idea of Prada, but only one of many. Ironic, surreal, ambivalent, dichotomic, these many attempts at definition ultimately only prove the indefinability of Prada as a single concept or idea.

The prose style is a perfect example of what we’ve come to know as “International Art English,” that bastardization of (mostly French, 20th century) theory commonly found in art world press releases: an unedited moodboard of abstract nouns connected, technically if not sensibly, by commas. Theory has a couple of diffusion lines in the realm of commodities; art and fashion are two of its most expensive down-market products. It’s no coincidence, surely, that Prada has always been particularly proximate to the art world—Miuccia Prada’s OMA-designed museum in Milan is only one of the brand’s countless collaborations with artists and architects.

Obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with an air of intellect. It’s easy to condemn the Prada Group’s arts patronage as a cynical gesture that shows the total capture of art by capitalism; it is more interesting to consider the potential artfulness and intelligence of dressing and living fashionably. This is what Miuccia Prada asks us to do when she stages her models against monochrome backdrops that recall the blankness of gallery walls, or gives contemporary artists shoes, handbags, and her permission to install a Prada storefront in the Texan desert as a “pop architectural land art project.” Similarly, instead of dismissing P.R.A.D.A. as an overwritten, under-thought theory knockoff, I would rather take seriously the specificity of this genre of language, this appropriation of theory-as-style. What does it mean to read Prada’s texts on their own terms? What mode of reading does P.R.A.D.A. call for?

Despite P.R.A.D.A.’s loquaciousness, words almost never appear on the brand’s clothing, shoes, and bags themselves. Everywhere else in luxury fashion, words are in: Dior, Fendi, Louis, and Gucci’s bestsellers are plastered with typographical prints that abstract their brand names into illiterate patterns of interlocking initials. In the context of these ubiquitous condensations of language, P.R.A.D.A.’s acronymic expansions of its name read as almost subversive. As a 2018 Vogue article on logomania put it: “The written word is one of the most valuable commodities in fashion at the moment . . . logos have sold more clothes in the past couple years than any single trend.” By way of explaining this trend, the article goes on to quote graphic designer Mathias Augustyniak: “Now more than ever, clothes need to express their origin right away… To nurture a tridimensional language takes a lifetime.” Apparently, fashion designers no longer have time to write in their own sartorial language, to create clothes that are recognizably their own, without the shorthand of writing. Or maybe it’s that consumers no longer have time to read them. Either way, according to Vogue, it’s because of the speed of our society, phones, and social media.

An interesting example here is Gucci, whose recently-departed Alessandro Michele was known for collections that combined a kaleidoscope of historical and cultural references—including theory—into a symbolically maximalist aesthetic privileging story, character, and world-building. His Gucci show notes were known for namedropping multiple B.A.s’ worth of theorists —Baudrillard, Benjamin, Butler, Debord, Deleuze, Derrida—in a bibliographical logomania that mirrored Michele’s visual citational practice. In addition to the classic double-G logo and the red-green Gucci stripe, under Michele, bags, belts, and tees were increasingly ornamented by a whole menagerie of non-linguistic emblems: bumblebees, snakes, tigers, and butterflies, each representing some aspect of the polyvalent “Gucci.” This inflation of the brand’s symbolic economy correlated with skyrocketing sales; less than two years into Michele’s tenure, Gucci saw its sharpest revenue increase in twenty years—49 percent.

Michele’s passion for iconography extended to other kinds of statements as well: Gucci’s 2020 Cruise collection, which included a purple jacket emblazoned with “My Body, My Choice” and a dress embroidered with a flowery pink uterus, is just one of many instances of fashion-world political signaling in recent years. Positions must be made legible, as must origins or inspirations. Looking at fashion recently can feel like skimming a syllabus. Michele’s theory-inspired collections, too, expressed his references quite literally. The FW18 collection, apparently inspired by Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” was staged in an operating room and accessorized by prostheses. The SS20 collection, inspired by Foucault, was set in a mental asylum and features straitjackets, leather, and other “discipline and punish” gear. If, in Michele’s designs, animals and colors became word-like—visual data flattened into hieroglyphs—the work of “theory” happened similarly: names and books found visually encoded representation, like appliqué patches (also beloved of Michele) advertising allegiances: Pro-Choice, Elizabeth II, Sonic Youth, Post-Structuralism.

Rather than transposing symbols culled from politics and other aesthetic spheres onto garments, Prada’s language speaks in manipulations of material. Raf Simons’s and Miuccia Prada’s clothes are no media, or vehicles, for meanings constructed via other means; their effects derive from their idiosyncratic articulations of qualities inherent to clothing. SS23, for example, featured lingerie-like garments fused with outerwear. This “blurring of distinct realities,” as the show notes put it, was achieved neither through a bricolage of subcultural signifiers, nor by, say, putting men in skirts. The realities being blurred were the functional and material features of garments themselves: a morning robe over a winter jacket. If the coat has value, it is reducible neither to its pricetag nor to a ‘principle’—say, a statement on woman’s role in the public realm—it is, like in painting, a question of shades and tones, the aesthetic impact of light and sheer with heavy and opaque.

Miuccia Prada, famously, could have gone into politics; instead, she chose fashion. She has often spoken of her interest in addressing contemporaneity, and her work engages many kinds of non-sartorial languages (film, art, architecture)—but these sources undergo a one-way translation, the unravelling of which isn’t very P.R.A.D.A. at all. Her garments aren’t statements; they’re fashion: an elevation of both form and function, and of living itself.

For clothing, in the end, is meant to be lived in! Miuccia Prada frequently insists that her work is not art. Her interventions into the fabric of everyday life are subtle ones. And this is, finally, how we must read Prada’s ad language: as something wearable. Although the exhibition press release and Prada’s theoryspeak blurbs are stylistically similar bits of copy, the goods they advertise occupy fundamentally different dimensions of our lives. Art is meant to be appreciated within the white-walled heterotopia of the gallery space. Even once it has been sold into the space of a living room, the art object always brings its own backdrop; it appears in a kind of permanent vacuum. The language that accompanies it is therefore fundamentally distant, objective—a material manifestation of critical distance being, in art, the actual product being advertised. But clothing, makeup, and perfume take place not only in our daily lives, but on our bodies. They confer an effect on our gestures, faces, gait—our entire character. The language used to advertise them, therefore, is less a critical language than a language to be lived in.

Or, rather, a language in which we are meant to dream of living in. If clothing creates a reality, advertising generates desire. P.R.A.D.A. is, of course, meant to put us “In the Mood for Prada,” as the SS22 campaign goes. The slogan seems to reference In the Mood for Love (2000), but there are otherwise no encodings of Wong Kar-Wai’s film. “Prada” becomes, then, the signifier that can stand in for any word—in this case, “love” itself. The campaign is a beautiful riff on one of Don Draper’s best aphorisms: “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” An ad campaign is distinguished from a clothing catalog because it does not operate 1:1, with definitions, with information, but with much more oblique strategies of making meaning: by routing desire through other objects, stories, and worlds. In this sense, P.R.A.D.A.’s insistence on instability of meaning is advertising in its purest—or, at least, in its most self-aware—form.

The question, then, becomes: what is it that P.R.A.D.A. is teaching us to desire?

It isn’t Studio 54, Renaissance Italy, or punk music. If Gucci’s campaigns are hyper-situational mise-en-scenes of garments, Prada’s texts and images are floating signifiers, unmoored from context, much less “story” or “world.” Let’s return to our reading of the SS20 ad copy above. It’s a text that might have been written by a GPT trained on the totality of postmodern philosophy books. Although clearly evocative of “theory,” there are no concrete citations here. In short, it means nothing. Removed from any real analytic context or specific philosopher’s vocabulary, the statements have the dizzying quality of cleverly mimicking concepts, but communicating little. They preserve only the form of theory, not its contents. What this text—and all the acronymic expansions; empty, halo’d signifiers we have encountered thus far—do betray is a love for writing in its purest form; for words in themselves, divorced from the information they might convey; for the texture of ideas; for the style of theory and the surface of its language. Rather than presenting us with a Paradoxe, Prada’s a-signifying minimalism vis-a-vis clothing design actually helps us to read the maximalism of their flowery written language. P.R.A.D.A. does not think in languages or in images, but writes—in fabric. Rather than being merely redundant, the many repetitions that embroider Prada’s ad copy become sensorial, coalescing into something like a pattern. (Because P.R.A.D.A. always functions via a play on words, we might note that the SS23 collection inverts this textilic ad copy by itself becoming paper: dresses are made from a paper-like fabric; sweaters are crumpled to resemble fine tissue paper; skirts are torn, as though out of a notebook; and bags are folded into neat, origami-like shapes.)

P.R.A.D.A., in other words, is language as luxury. It figures theory as something that one can desire to live in, and therefore, of course, buy. What to make of this commodification, this materialization, of “theory”—by a luxury brand, no less? Surely one cannot buy the position of critique. But can one even wear it? The question reminds me of an old debate: over the piety produced in a girl—or not—by wearing a pretty gold cross, for example; over the spirituality destroyed or engendered by beautiful paintings of the Virgin. It returns us to the relationship between material, body, image, and thought. What is thinking, where does it come from, what form does it take? (You can’t buy knowledge, for sure, but who doesn’t know the appetite for learning produced by the look of new paper and pencils, back to school shopping at Staples?) I love P.R.A.D.A. because it opens up these questions for me, the real questions of philosophy.

P.R.A.D.A., at the very least, puts us in the mood for reading. For if these texts are accessories to, rather than explanations of, fashion, they are also elevations not only of clothing, but writing! The point of language isn’t merely to mean something, just as the point of a purse isn’t only to carry your keys. Theory is also an aesthetic form. Abstraction, like the clothes on your back, is a source of desire as much as it is an everyday, livable, necessary human function. And desire, like abstraction, operates playfully, by substituting one thing for another. All of this is written in P.R.A.D.A. These advertisements also know that real reading is always interpretation, an experience in the form of a question. And perhaps, for some, the desire to question might—who knows?—be roused by a purse in Pocono nylon.

Abercrombie & Fitch used to publish a magazine called A&F Quarterly, the Fall 2003 issue of which features a series of image captions written by Slavoj Žižek. This special Back-to-School issue is subtitled the “Sex Ed Edition” and consists of sixty-two sun-drenched spreads of tan, athletic youths frolicking beneath the surface of Žižek’s trademark Lacanian aphorisms, which are rendered in red, black, and white block letters, all-caps. “Back to school” time, Žižek announces, means that one must “forget the spontaneous pleasures of summer sports, of reading books, of watching movies, of listening to music. Pull yourself together and learn sex.” From page to page, the boys and girls of A&F progress from a state of edenic SoCal semi-nudity to moody gazes out of nouveau-Victorian villas to a series of black-and-white softcore schoolroom scenarios. The magazine climaxes in several spreads of Dionysian festivities that look like a frat party crossed with a Venetian carnival.

If the revelation of psychoanalytic theory was that desire is constituted by lack, the revelation of Abercrombie & Fitch was that desire for clothing works the exact same way. Mostly, the models in A&F Quarterly Back-to-School: Sex Ed Edition aren’t wearing Abercrombie & Fitch; in fact, they’re not wearing anything at all. One particularly naked page has a long-haired, square-jawed surfer-looking guy with a big cross tattoo on his muscular bicep shimmying out of his cargo cut-offs. His crotch is artfully concealed by his thigh. The text on top reads: “THE OBJECT OF DESIRE IS HIDDEN BEHIND THE THIGH BUT THE TRUE CAUSE OF DESIRE IS THE TATTOOED CROSS ON THE ARM. IS IT NOT CLEAR THAT WE REALLY MAKE LOVE WITH SIGNS, NOT WITH BODIES? THIS IS WHY ONE HAS TO GO TO SCHOOL TO LEARN SEX.”

I have tried my best to learn sex. In fact, I have even read What IS Sex?, a book by another Lacanian philosopher, Alenka Zupančič. Zupančič takes a properly philosophical approach to her titular question, moving beyond the prevailing discourse that reduces gender to a “social construct” (Judith Butler et al) in order to elevate sex (as in, ‘female,’ not as in ‘sexual intercourse’) to an ontological and epistemological problem. Unfortunately, at the time of my reading, I was no longer in school. In my classes, professors had often cautioned us against bad, improper readings of books like Zupančič’s or Žižek’s, full, as they are, with seductively polysemous terms, language that is promiscuously close to our everyday vocabulary. For example, when Lacan says “there is no sexual relation,” you’re not supposed to think of your romantic failures…

But, reading What IS Sex? the summer after college, I totally did. In fact, I graduated from bad reading to something not much like reading at all. Like in an Ed Ruscha painting, letters began to curl at the edges, lifting off the page or sinking beneath it, gaining substance, color, and a subtle, shimmering movement. A GAP around which REALITY curves, a CHAIN of signifiers, a NON-RELATION, KNOTS… As the summer deteriorated along with my analytic mind, these words, which once held terminological specificity for me, floated gradually away from their contexts, becoming both increasingly vague and auratically dense, like the stylized lettering on graphic t-shirts. The terms associated themselves freely with inappropriate partners, other words and images having little to do with problems either ontological or epistemological. I experienced the book as though there was something like a ring of half-naked models dancing just behind the words on every page, stripping themselves of their meanings, tearing me from their concepts, and pushing me into the pool…

But is it not clear that we really read with bodies, not with signs? There is a term for it: “figurative language.” Like the products sold by Abercrombie & Fitch, the figurative language suspending psychoanalytic theory is often textilic: “nets” of signification, “chains” of signifiers, “knots,” “rips,” and “tears.” The role of psychoanalysis, as Zupančič describes it, is to find the “right word” to unlock the “twisted logic” of the collection of linked meanings produced by the activity of free association. “The right word is not the right word by virtue of what it means, but by what it accomplishes.”

There are many ways of encountering words; not all of them involve reading meanings. There are many ways of making meanings, some of which are much like wearing clothing. This essay is a form-centric fan fiction for a body of thought that I love not only by virtue of what it means, but for how it looks and feels. And so, in the spirit of A&F Quarterly, here is a kind of non-linear and looping moodboard, a free associative lookbook for this, my favorite figure of language:

~ FABRIC OF REALITY* ~

*Because this is an attempt to invent a visual dream-logic around other people’s words, the connecting threads are “real” only in the sense of that phrase: of reality as something slippery, stylized, and easily torn.

In Chinatown last fall there was a billboard floating at the corner of Canal and Forsyth St: the words ONE OF THESE DAYS hanging in a baby-blue sky. It looked like a bad copy of certain Ed Ruscha paintings, in which words are often superimposed on landscapes of the American West. I think it was an advertisement for a streetwear brand by Matt McCormick, an artist who makes Ruscha-like Americana art (cars, cowboys, coca cola, etc).

Many of Ruscha’s paintings rip language from advertisements, so the looping image-recycling-structure that landed his aesthetic on a fashion billboard is apropos. The Ruscha above, in which the word “world” vanishes into the blindingly bright horizon situated above a supernaturally beautiful lake and below a bank of pastel clouds, reminds me of Ruscha’s longtime best friend and collaborator Joe Goode’s Torn Sky series, in which a rectangular surface of sky is ripped open to show a different reality-layer of sky beneath it.

Goode’s hyper-, or rather super-realistic holes look more like tears in paper than fabric of reality, similar-but-different substrates of reality-producing-media. On an unfamiliar substrate, like canvas, a word is a different kind of tear: in this case, a tear in media-specific conventions. All my favorite Ruschas are about language appearing out of the blue. In Desire (1969), the title is spelled out as though by seafoam on the golden gradient of an Abercrombie beach, like Aphrodite washing up on the shores of Cythera. Another favorite Ruscha is Self, a delicately shaded pencil drawing in which the eponymous word is formed by the one area of the page unmarked by graphite—a constitutive absence curving and determining the space in which it appears: in this case, a pretty white ribbon hovering above a background that, though empty, is not blank. Self is a visual, and physical, instantiation of the language Zupančič uses to describe Lacan’s concept of the non-relation: the gap, or missing link, the tear in the fabric of reality that “dictates the conditions of what ties us”—like a ribbon—“which is to say that it is not a simple, indifferent absence, but an absence that curves and determines the structure with which it appears.”

A looping ribbon also graces the cover of the third installment of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. The Twilight book covers all show hallucinogenically lustrous red objects on a pure black, void-like background; most infamously, a dusky apple held in a pale pair of hands. For commercial children’s literature, they’re intoxicatingly abstract images: highly suggestive yet revealing nothing concrete, hinting and teasing...but at what?

I remember when the most popular girl in fifth grade brought Twilight to school one day: we crowded cautiously around her desk, approaching the thick volume like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though we knew little of the plot, we immediately recognized that this was a dangerous story. After opening this book, there’d be no going back. So we didn’t read it. Not at first. We just touched the cover, leaving sweaty fingerprints all over its glossy surface.

The knots and signifying-chains of psychoanalytic theory have always reminded me of knitting. The summer I read What is Sex?, I lived with five other girls, all of whom studied either painting, fashion, or textile design. One of my then-roommates, Anna Armstrong, knits fabrics that often either incorporate literal holes, voids in the garment, or play with lesion-like swathes of lighter or darker-colored yarn: filaments of the same reality/medium as the rest of the pattern, forming a ground that both tears through and sinks beneath itself. The holes left behind are almost optically-illusionistic, like Goode’s Torn Sky. In her take on a pleated skirt—a staple of Abercrombie & Fitch prep-wear—the folds in the cloth become holes: highly tactile tears out of which spill a looping growth of ribbon.

This skirt reminds me of the iconic pleated miniskirt from the Spring/Summer 2022 Miu Miu collection, which features lots of Abercrombie-like country-club-wear: skirts and trousers in gray and white and navy and taupe, also cable-knit sweaters and button-downs, all of them severely cropped. Like Armstrong’s skirt, the hems are raw-edged, with threads hanging down, as though the fabric has been torn straight off.

Sex is a big word for Miu Miu. The brand’s clothes, according to the Prada Group’s website, are simultaneously “sensual and intellectual,” an effect they have achieved by “transforming fashion into a mental state.” And, based on the video that serves as a kind of prologue to the Spring/Summer 2022 runway show, the mental state of Miu Miu is quite strange. It goes something like this:

Through binocular lenses, we see a hallway; in it, a middle-aged woman. Her office worker ensemble is accentuated by strappy silver sandals. Colorful leaves of paper flutter out of her black Miu Miu briefcase. “Where are you going?” she says to the papers, in (I think) Moroccan Arabic (English captions are superimposed); we cut to an animation of what appears to be an anthropomorphized stethoscope dancing under strobe lights. The woman dances down the hallway to techno music, sits down, and takes a call: “My brain feels like a pressure cooker!” Her papers, most of which are covered with the words MIU MIU printed over and over in purple and blue ink, keep trying to walk off her desk… Now, a gleaming stethoscope, apparently naked, squeezes into a squeaky rubber casing—its clothes? Hordes of stethoscopes rush down a grand staircase, then down the runway. The audience is shocked! They sit in Eames chairs. iPhone cameras flash. Finally, a model materializes on the catwalk, which winds through the audience in a white ribbon shaped exactly like Ruscha’s Self. For the remaining ten minutes, the show proceeds more or less uninterrupted by stethoscopes or other non-models, except for a brief clip of some women discussing the Moroccan affinity for ass lifts. At the end, Miuccia Prada herself appears, like a fairy godmother, for only half a second, dressed all in red. Red is a color that wants, more than any other, to be interpreted; hence its use on the Twilight book covers.

Watching this video—created by artist Meriem Bennani, who also oversaw the installation of the runway show—is like being implanted in someone else’s dream: an idiosyncratic, highly personal collection of associations (in fact, the office worker at the beginning is Bennani’s mother). Like dreams, the images are disturbingly hypnotic; like dreams, they beg interpretation. The field of psychonalytic theory was in large part founded on interpretations of dreams; so was the Twilight franchise. The idea for the first book famously came to Stephanie Meyer at night, in a vision of a boy and a girl lying in a magical meadow carpeted with purple flowers: a landscape is reminiscent of Ruscha’s Not a Bad World, Is It?

Screenshot of the YouTube page of a fan video made for the score for Twilight

The unbreachable gap between human Bella and vampire Edward feels very Lacanian: Bella is the only person in the entire world whose thoughts Edward cannot “read” (he is telepathic), which is why he is obsessed with her. The best he can do is close looking—for example, by climbing through Bella’s window at night to watch her sleep. This kind of opacity to being-read is essential to sex. More recently, Žižek has ranted extensively on the dangers posed to love and fantasy by Neuralink, the nonexistent software envisioned by (curiously vampiric) Elon Musk that would enable telepathy, eliminating the gaps, tears, and missed connections caused by language. (Appropriately enough, Musk and his girlfriend, Grimes, are more or less separated.)

The fraying red ribbon twisting across the cover of Eclipse might symbolize not only the unraveling of protagonist’s Bella’s reality, which is populated by supernatural, violent creatures, but also the infinitely more distressing experience of romance (in book three, Bella must finally choose between werewolf Jacob and vampire Edward).

~ “There is no sexual relation…” ~

The most striking cinematic realization of a sexual non-relation manifesting as a rip or tear appears in Where the Heart Is (2000), another tale of innocence lost. Here, pregnant teen Natalie Portman is taken for a ride in her deadbeat boyfriend’s car. There’s a gaping hole in the floor of the vehicle, exposing naive Natalie to the cruel world racing by beneath her feet. She loses her flip-flops in the gap. While shopping to replace her shoes, her boyfriend abandons her at the Walmart. As with Twilight, non-reading plays a central role in the romance: in typical star-crossed fashion, Mr. Right turns out to be a brilliant, scholarly librarian, whereas Natalie’s character is near-illiterate. Because of this charming incompatibility, we know they will be married.

Where the Heart is (2000), dir. Matt Williams.

Because it was lockdown the summer I took it upon myself to learn about sex, living in the house with five girls was a lot like situation in The Virgin Suicides. In Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of that book, Lux writes the name of her crush on her underwear in Sharpie. This is revealed to us by the appearance of a momentary hole-like transparency in the cloth of her prairie dress. Like in a painting by Ruscha, the word has blazed not only through the floral fabric, but through the reality effect of the film itself.

The Virgin Suicides (1999), dir. Sofia Coppola

Such rips and tears in fabric are, of course, ubiquitous in fashion. Distressed denim is a favorite of sexually active teens.

The Spring/Summer 2022 Miu Miu collection is accessorized by an enigmatic description of the clothing that begins: “A reaction to and a reflection of reality, an economy, a freshness found in iterations of eternal, universal garments.” How to read this sentence, other than as a moodboard of dream-language and concepts, tenuously connected by commas? If Miu Miu is fashion as a mental state, this language is a mental dream-state as fashion. The purpose of advertising is ostensibly to create a fantasy world so desirable that the reader wants to live in it. But this copy doesn’t imply a world or a narrative at all; like the images considered here, it is devoid of characters, or even emotions. If the sentence evokes anything, it’s abstractness itself. If it makes me desire anything, it is language itself. The fabric of reality it conjures is very thin, very transparent: little more than a hazy aura of the romantic sublime, with the invisible pattern of a Platonic ideal. Perhaps this is what the Abercrombie boys were dressed in.

That clothing has a kind of invisible, immaterial dimension which functions as a vector for desire is a favorite adage of psychoanalysis (the stocking as fetish object, etc). In a 1909 paper given to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, one of his first investigations of clothing fetishism, Freud describes the case of a man pathologically obsessed with fabric, and the fashion choices of his lovers:

“In this patient something similar to what took place in the erotic domain occurred in the intellectual domain: he turned his interest away from things onto words which are, so to speak, the clothes of ideas; this accounts for his interest in philosophy.”