J.w. McCormack

Jan 6, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Rodrigo Fresán |J.w. McCormack |Johannah King-Slutzky |Zachariah Webb

It’s like this: like one of those ships that, after dancing the night away with an iceberg to the rhythm of music disarranged by Mr. Stokowski, discovers it’s sinking amid dissonant passages of arctic wind. Sometimes I can even string together a full sentence with true grace, my words offering a discernible choreography, and, for a brief moment, I cease to be the person I am and become the person everyone else wants me to be.

Sep 4, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Lyn Hejinian |J.w. McCormack |Monica Byrne |Siddhartha Deb

Time past tumult-fodder getting wet by the ton plummets up the sky dispersing wild syllables an anarchy of storming signs into systems that can’t be understood for a simple reason that everything is participating loftily or low invading the public sphere with swaggering plasticity of wind swooping in like an eagle from the stratosphere and its buffeting thin soup and chardonnay brought out and down to confessional exaltations and propitious gossip and skeptical advancements over the situated...

Jun 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | J.w. McCormack |Kaila Philo |Tarence Ray |Sammy Feldblum

“Clouds passing over,” wrote Matsuo Bashō during the Edo period, “a dog peeing on the run / village winter shower.” Dogs guard the gates of Hades, weigh the discordant hearts of pharaohs, and accompany the Wild Hunt in Germanic mythology. Patient Argos crapped out at the homecoming of brave Ulysses, Virginia Woolf immortalized the Brownings’ cocker spaniel in Flush: A Biography, and Kenneth Koch wrote that a barking dog in the snow means good weather is coming.

May 23, 2024 | thebaffler.com | J.w. McCormack

“I don’t like books, they have too many notions. Why should I fork over real legal tender to be told what to think, when I can imagine things myself for free? And what’s with all of these descriptions of flowers and clothes? My problem with books is that they’re a one-way street. They definitely aren’t interactive. I want possibility, multiplicity, not dry prose about anemones.

Apr 1, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Jules Gill-Peterson |J.w. McCormack |Reece Sisto

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages. 2024. Last November, Pope Francis made headlines for sitting down to a spaghetti lunch with a group of trans women. The meal, held in the working-class Italian beach town of Torvaianica as part of the Church’s World Day of the Poor, was the signal of an abrupt policy change: under some circumstances, trans people could now be baptized Catholic, as well as serve as witnesses in weddings or as godparents.