Issue 162 | May 2016 | Final Issue
"If you slam the door on the world you're saying the world is not as important as it likes to believe it it is. I mean Agnes Martin would get honorary degrees from schools but refuse to accept them because she said she was just an instrument. So how many people can really refuse she never spent the money -- she made millions off her work but it's not clear she ever spent any of it, she never bought a home. So it's a state of mind that's really inaccessible to most of us."
by
Jessa Crispin
But to the question of whether perfection is possible in this world of time and effort and whether an imperfect life is worth persisting in, Weil had delivered her tidy answer, the most brutal of RSVPs. In her last gesture, gruesomely articulate, she preached the identity of perfection and void. (Plath: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of accomplishment, / The illusion of a Greek necessity…”) The normal mind is repelled by these notions. The world is here, it says; happiness is here, even if drowned sometimes in oceans of pain. To look for perfection in death is like attempting to clean a house by burning it down -- says the mind.
by
Nicholas Vajifdar
"I'm all for the kind of state-supported security that actually provides service to communities of people of color, to protect their lives. But all too often, policing doesn't work that way: it turns against victims, it kills the people who've called for help, it uses brutal force against people who have mental illnesses and disabilities. So I'm totally opposed to the kind of surveillance that assumes criminal intent in every person pulling up his hoodie because he's trying to stay alive, in an environment that's pitted against him. I'm less afraid of crime, than of one of my neighbors being murdered by the state."
by
Margaret Howie
The Death card is: ending, transition, elimination, FORCE. It’s above my desk, above a picture my friend S. drew of wild horses. One of the best parts about being a writer, being a reader, is you go through ending after ending after transition and you are still a reader. Still a writer. Frankly I want to read more of Jessa’s books and she can’t write them if she’s editing us all the time. I want to be old with Jessa, I want to hobble into museums together, wearing sensible shoes and dresses with pockets and I want to cry in front of paintings, eat nachos afterwards. This is the constant. I am not being cute. There will still be words to read, don’t worry.
by
Mairead Case
"We have feelings and thoughts and inclinations and obsessions but then there is the shaping of those into a form, an object. And art is the two coming together. I think of Motherwell. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 when he was only 21 years old. But he spent the rest of his life trying to give form to his feelings about it, painting over 200 canvases titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic. There were his feelings and then the depth and tenacity of his desire to give them form. And that takes as long as it takes. And we may not get there. He wasn't sure he'd succeeded at all."
by
Cara Benson
"I also have complicated feelings about Universities, which I think I share with many of our generation. Universities are such traps but also refuges. When you’re young in university, thinking and learning can be intoxicating. You’re having your mind blown with ideas. But then, these are also places where hierarchies and violences are both justified and hardened. Your university can really set you on a path, and can also saddle you with debt and self-doubt. So I think of it as a kind of dangerous safe space."
by
Mairead Case
"there are so many wonderful nineteenth-century American women writers who deserve to be more widely known. I focused on Woolson because I believed her writing to be the best of those still in obscurity (and her life was simply fascinating). Others deserve renewed recognition for a variety of reasons. Fanny Fern, for instance, was the first newspaper columnist in America (not the first female newspaper columnist) and was the highest paid writer of the mid-nineteenth century (not female writer). Nathaniel Hawthorne said she wrote as if the devil was in her, and he was right. She skewered the conventions of her era, particularly those that relegated women to second-class citizenship. Zitkala-Sa, a Native American of the Sioux tribe, published powerful stories (autobiographical and fictional) in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's around the turn of the twentieth century that challenged American policies of assimilation and the supposed superiority of white culture. Sui Sin Far, Rose Terry Cooke, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stoddard are also remarkable writers who deserved renewed attention. I could go on and on."
by
Simone Wolff
"I made a conscious choice while writing this book not to label David's mental illness. He's not described at any point as having manic-depression or schizophrenia or whatever -- whatever afflicts him, the things that he calls "neuroses," are more ambiguous than that. The decision to keep him label-less was in part influenced by my own experiences with mental illness and mental health diagnoses; my diagnoses have shifted time and again, and while I think that psychiatric diagnoses can be useful, they're also a fallible human construct. Insanity is much more complex than the DSM gives it credit for."
by
Teri Vlassopoulos
"I do think the young people of my generation, who went to primary school in the '80s, heard these names flowing around all the time -- Trump, [Ivan Frederick] Boesky, [Michael] Milken. And there was this hero worship of these unscrupulous men who represented greed and wealth, and this worshipping of absurdly materialistic consumerism. (Marty McFly drove a DeLorean in Back to the Future.) It was totally in the air. Children at the time stopped wanting to be firemen or astronauts. They wanted to be rich. And I think these changing desires not only say something about the culture of that time, they also might inform us with some vital information about our horrendous current moment."
by
Terry Hong
"You asked what was most frustrating to me, and overall it is this: that in Isaiah's path, especially in the years directly before his crimes against Jennifer and Teresa, one sees over and over again opportunities for intervention that were missed because, in short, our public mental health systems are so fragmented, overwhelmed, and under-resourced. Ultimately, this all traces to the way we ignore, at great peril to our fellow citizens and to ourselves, how badly broken our country's mental health system has become. The consequences of this brokenness are not limited to disturbing crimes. In fact, as I note in the book, the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators."
by
Jill Talbot
