Sarah Nicole Prickett
PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW the teachings of Wittgenstein, whether or not they do so wittingly, find nothing more frightening—or more potentiating—than a state of wordlessness: the end of the world. We can see this clearly in the time of live-streamed genocide, when the avowal that “there are no words” is often what passes for attunement to […] 
WHEN ANTONIO GRAMSCI wanted to talk to his comrades, he wrote to his friends. Captive in a fascist regime, he produced sentences and texts encrypted enough to bemuse not only Mussolini’s censors, but also, probably, anyone who did not know him very well. He was a party man, and he knew better than to either […] 
WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, 
FAYE HAS JUST BOARDED an airplane when Kudos, the third novel in a trilogy about her middle life, begins. She boarded, after lunch with a billionaire, another airplane at the start of the first novel, Outline. She was reading a spam e-mail from an astrology service predicting “a major transit . . . in [her] sky” when the second, Transit, began. Passenger flight explains these incredible novels. At first, for several pages, it’s hard to relax. Why must we be in this stifled, banal environment, with no room to think? How long do we have to sit here? The air 
Durga Chew-Bose. Photo by Carrie Cheek. “Should I try to change my pitch?” Durga wonders, in consideration of her natural speaking voice, in an essay called “Upspeak.” “Should I try to sound more staid?” She asks her father how she could learn to speak differently. Easy, he replies: “Stop reacting to everything.” But then there would be no book for an essay called “Upspeak” to be in, and happily there is a book, Too Much and Not the Mood, a first collection of fourteen prose pieces in which Durga reacts to, and is acted upon by, the whole of CAROL RAMA can’t help seeing red. Red are the tongues and the nails and the tips of men’s dicks in her dirty watercolors, painted in her native Turin from 1936, when she was a teenage autodidact, until 2006, when she became too senile to work. Red is her favorite color, she once told an interviewer, “because of something I have always wanted to have been: a bullfighter. To be male. Beautiful.” In the same interview, she compared herself to a mad cow instead (Madame Bovine, c’est moi). 
Heroin doesn’t sound like heroine by accident. The name for the drug derives from hero, or heroes, as in the late-nineteenth-century soldiers on morphine who fought through their injuries and floated home. The same then-legal morphine was popular among women of the upper classes, who used it to socialize where drinking was considered a man’s game and to survive what they felt to be either their boredom or their subjugation, depending how woke a lady can be while she’s nodding off. Pauline Manford, the rich and inchoate lead in a middling Edith Wharton book, Twilight Sleep, refuses to soldier through 
“Sometimes I joke, well, I must be really good,” says Gary Indiana, sweet and wry, lighting his third cigarette of the four he allows himself daily. “To have been such a fucked-up mess, and to still have a body of work that I think—I hope—will live after me, that means I must really have been good.” We are outside Lucien, the Lower East Side bistro, after our interview, during which he did not swear at all. I note this because in his memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, out last year, he complains that one young interviewer added JUNE 1967. While Valerie Solanas issues a list of grievances called the SCUM Manifesto, Dorothy Iannone makes a grocery list for a boat trip to Iceland, where she will fall in love with fellow artist Dieter Roth, leaving her first (and last) marriage for the muse. A new book of Iannone’s works on paper begins with a reprinting of the series“An Icelandic Saga,” 1978-86, which tells of the meet-cute as if it were myth and continues nonchronologically through the now octogenarian’s ouevre, collecting the more memorable proofs of her love for what she, like Tibetan Buddhists and Heideggerians, calls the People who write professionally about Mariah Carey are required to note her staggering five-octave range, her fourteen top-ten albums, and her insane number of number-one singles (eighteen and counting). But I’m not here to count or be professional. I’m here to talk about Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel (2009), Mariah’s novel-length album, which is the thing I listen to while I try and try to write about intimacy.