When the crazy tracers, the first time, went crazy-up over Baghdad, it was all so stunning (against the grainy green), and we were dying to giggle, and we did—just a bit of tittering. And then the buildings on video started exploding, it got sort of hard to keep from chortling. Astounding, shouted the naïve crowd […]
Kent Johnson
KENT JOHNSON is currently about to have a nervous breakdown, trying to put together three online courses for the Fall semester at his community college. Michael Theune discusses his work further in the current issue of Pleiades.
JOHNSON’S REPLY by Kent Johnson
Greetings to you over there, in the 5th or 7th arrondissement. You’d asked me some months back if I might wish to respond. I wrote you back, you’ll recall, and said I thought it best to let your review stand alone. But yesterday, the folks from MAYDAY wrote me and asked, as well, that I say something […]
A LETTER TO KENT JOHNSON by Nicholas Manning
Paris, 4th of October 2009 Dear Kent, I’ve decided to write this review of your book Homage to the Last Avant-Garde in the form of a letter to you, and this for several reasons. Firstly, it allows me to negate certain censorious aspects of normative critical discourse via recourse to the mode of tonally ambiguous epistolary, which […]
Contributor Bios for Issue 2 Winter 2010
Issue 2 Winter 2010 TAO AIMIN is known for her anthropological works made from the washboards of rural woman. Over the years she has collected thousands of these boards, recording the stories and faces of the women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Creating installations and experimental ink […]
MAYDAY Magazine: Issue 2 Winter 2010
ART curated by Maya Kóvskaya PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE: Dialogical Space & Multiple Modernities in Asian Contemporary Art ART NONFICTION Maya Kóvskaya Public Action Art and Performative Interventions in the Chinese Public Sphere ART NONFICTION William Hurst (performance photography by Han Bing) ORPHANS OF PROGRESS: Workers and Political Discourse in Post-Socialist China ART […]
SOME DARKER BOUQUETS: A ROUNDTABLE
Note: The following letter responds to an editorial comment and three reviews by Jason Guriel, published in the March, 2009 issue of Poetry. Because portions of this letter were initially posted at Poetry’s online version, it could not be included in the print version of the magazine. In any case, the issues broached here regarding practices of reviewing in […]
