How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

England’s prime minister Boris Johnson (a small horror film in five words)

Monumentalizing is already an act of editing (and censoring) the past;

At one point, Didion even uses the word “ante-bellum Hawaii,” making the parallels unmistakable, casting herself as a Scarlett O’Hara of the Islands: bemoaning a bygone paradise (for whom?), mourning the loss of our way of life. None of the other degenerate colonials remember the islands the way she does—the entire essay is essentially a “not like the other girls” argument about which type of rich white settler loves Hawai‘i best (her, of course). In fact, there is perhaps no description that captures Didion’s work better than to say that it is consummate pick-me writing.

Reality is all we have to love” has always been a complicated line for me to live with—though live with it I have.

Wong Kar-wai’s films always felt romantic to me, specifically in that they never really try to pretend that people don’t fall in love, eat food, or act weird, while also being inextricably part of the sociopolitical economy of their universes.

Representation Matters Art is late capitalism’s wet dream, because it sublimates the immense hunger and desire for wide-ranging racial, sexual, gender, and economic justice into the Pepsi commercial of that justice. Only the art that truly sees us will truly free us, representational politics says, mistaking visibility for liberation.