weekend links: Simon & Schuster boycott, 1984, Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton, [John] (2017)
We’re late to the party, but Melville House’s Publishing During Wartime series is crucial reading when it comes to asking what role publishers are playing in disseminating hatred and legitimizing fascist voices. Some good news on this front: Roxane Gay has pulled out of her book contract with Simon & Schuster, due to the company’s contract to publish hate-peddler Milo Yiannopoulos’s book. We stand with Roxane, and will no longer be reviewing Simon & Schuster’s books. [Melville House]
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has become the go-to book to explain our dystopian fears: It was a bestseller this week on Amazon (an autocratic system of its own). But Josephine Livingston argues it’s the wrong dystopian novel for our times—there’s not a shred of globalized capitalism or “alternative facts” in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.She offers an alternative novel instead. [New Republic]
Twenty years and $15 million dollars later, Christo is abandoning “Over the River”—a project to drape 42 miles of fabric over the Arkansas River. His decision is in reaction to the new administration: “I can’t do a work that benefits this landlord.” [The New York Times]
Part of a series of conversations on the subject of violence, poet Malcolm London talks about getting an education on the Number 66 Chicago Avenue bus, appropriating language while others are coding it, and how his art is informed by black queer feminism and its functionality. [Los Angeles Review of Books]
If you haven’t checked out francine j. harris’s play dead yet, you really should. Maybe this review will convince you, if our interview in issue 6 left you on the fence. [Boston Review]
The New York Review of Books examines two books that explore the history of profanity, its benefit in social contexts, and its waning taboo in the U.S. [New York Review of Books]
Ann Hamilton has created a new public artwork for the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. Her largest project to-date features portraits of 500 individuals taken around the city. O N E E V E R Y O N E visualizes touch as a medium and the role it plays in health care-patient relationships as well as photographer-subject relationships. Seventy-one of the portraits will hung around the medical school complex; others will be published alongside essays about health-care in a book, newspaper and online archive. [The Austin Chronicle]
And while we’d love for signs from Saturday’s Women’s March to stay in front of Trump Towers indefinitely, they are being collected and archived in museums and libraries across the U.S. (Texas folks: our signs still need a home!) [Huffington Post]
Bonus link: dogs love reggae. [Pitchfork]
—Katie Lauren Bruton and Sean Redmond