Earlier this year we had the opportunity to host a reading/performance by New York-based writer and performer J. P. Slote of extracts from three plays from the recently published collection Loretta Auditorium Presents The Body of Loretta from Fly by Night press. The collection marks the culmination of more than 20 years of work in… Keep Reading
“Teeth,” WebMD informs me, “are the hardest substances [sic] in the human body”. WebMD, to be fair, is not renowned for its semantic precision. Nor its grammatical prowess. Nor its utility as a diagnostic tool. Indeed, WebMD is borderline infamous (albeit endearingly so) for inviting the bored and mildly infirmed to abduce that the cause… Keep Reading
I When we were very young, in 1990, a brilliant Polish translator named Stanislaw Barańczak wrote this brilliant essay about translation. Paradoxically, the text itself resists translation, that is, unless one is prepared to follow a rather twisted scenario worthy of a Borgesian imagination. Untranslated, the essay remains largely unknown abroad and even in Poland… Keep Reading
It’s money month on the Ark Review, so what could be better than making a quick and dirty introduction to some of the frequently used but often undefined concepts that are thrown around when we talk about the politics of money and cultural productions. First a few caveats. The outlines of these concepts given here… Keep Reading
1. In the first stages of starting a dissertation, or any sort of large project, there’s a sense that you need to read everything related to your topic. Or, more correctly, that you should already have read everything related to your topic. This, especially for those dealing with more literary topics, often results in a… Keep Reading
Oh the moments, how they slip through our fingers, seemingly lost to fading memory before we can even claim to have felt them. This month on the Ark Review, we are exploring ephemera; those things so tied to the present that simply cannot come with you into the future. Today, Macon Holt explores the ephemeral… Keep Reading
“‘Art and nothing but art’, said Nietzsche, ‘we have art in order not to die from the truth’” The Myth of Sisyphus Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 cinematic tour de force Solaris (based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel of the same name) boasts a reputation of being no less than one of the greatest science-fiction films… Keep Reading
(An edited translation of this text has been published in the Danish publication Atlas.) This month on the Ark Review, taking inspiration from Mark Grief’s recent book “Against Everything”, we are going to try and write against everything. Collectively though, and one subject at a time. So really more like Against ________. As in, fill… Keep Reading
I want to talk about theory-fiction, an obscure practice that has been around for a while but has recently reared itself back into view. While we could take this to mean theory heavy pieces of auto-fiction such as I Love Dick or, according to the unflattering assessment of the critic James Woods, the hysterical realists1 (works… Keep Reading
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – HERMAN MELVILLE Writing this, I am up in the air, on my way to New York, going on a holiday to a place I know so well since I’ve been so many times before. Yet, as I fill out my US customs form… Keep Reading