essayist + critic



Some favorites are highlighted.

Coming Soon:

An essay for Inside the Castle Press on Mandelstam, John Trefry’s Massive, and wanting a new form for the novel in the age of atrocity

A review of the medieval city-builder computer game Manor Lords in the light of Annaliste historical scope, an ox named Bartholmes, and Dürer’s  ‘Monument to the Vanquished Peasants’ (New York Review of Architecture)

Selected Recent Work:

11 September 2024-- For the Berlin Review, “Pure Paint, Dead in the Air” -- (free with email registration)-- Some notes on Late Monet, the MiG-29 fighter jet, Rilke, stick jockeys, brushstrokes, lily ponds, stalling out, opening to the world, dogfights, delicate weapons, non refusals, and other risks of sensibility at the limit.  (unpaywalled as plain text)

August 2024-- Appearence on the Ancillary Review Podcast (A Meal of Thorns, Episode 05) discussing Olga Ravn’s The Employees

21 May 2024-- Panel with Matthew Spencer at UW-Bothell MFA program

18 April 2024-- For the Cleveland Review of Books, “A Cut-Crease For Richard Serra” On the death of Richard Serra, Eyeshadow, Writing Feminine Trauma, and COR-TEN Steel (unpaywalled as plain text)

18 April 2024-- On Medium “Hephaestus Contra The It Girl: A Manifesto”

26 Feburary 2024-- For the Poetry Foundation, “But There Are Other Geometries” on being Auden’s “The More Loving One”, cube poems by Rimma Gerlovina, Descartes, failures of reason, dice, fate, and love:

22 February 2024-- For the New York Review of Architecture “Good Bones”, on plastic surgery, always contemporaries, and Ed Ruscha at MoMA between New York and LA.

30 August 2023-- For the Cleveland Review of Books, American Returns: A Collage-- on Ansel Adams, Lana Del Rey, digital postphotography, desperation capital, and Americana
(spolighted on LitHub’s roundup, Bookforum’s Paper Trail, and in Vol 1 Brooklyn)

12 April 2023-- For the Verso Blog. “The Mutilated World”-- on AI images and fascist aesthetics and neoclassicisms, cryptostates, urbanisms, and Pasolini

December 2022-- Grid-Pharos-Blockchain: Technologies of Inscription, lecture at the Warburg Institute

Introductory essay for Gen2GAN catalogue by Dmitri Cherniak and Helena Sarin

October 2022-- On Prokofiev and generative art for Outland

13 September 2022 — For Hyperallergic “Marina Abramović, Mobs, and the Cult of the Hero” – on Marat/Sade, The Hero 25 FPS, internet mobs, and reading useful impurity in Abramović’s body of work

July 2022 — For Firmament, Vol.3 Issue 2 — “Crusader Kings”– experimental short fiction on the non-player character (NPC) in computer games as phenomenological experience for Firmament

7 July 2022 — for Arebyte Gallery, L’ Inconnue/L’avatar — commissioned exhibition essay on La Turbo Avedon’s ‘Club Zero’— about Rilke, avatars, Seine drownings, faces, and the Bildungsroman of the digital self– starting on page ten of the linked exhibition booklet

16 June 2022 — for Artforum, Ethereal Presence: NFTs and the Theater Of Risk — on Fried’s Art & Objecthood, theatricality, capital, and grace, using John Donne, Shl0ms’ $CAR and Folia’s Kudzu.

10 February 2022– for Right Click Save, On The New Evolution Of Generative Art, about the digital work of Michaël Zancan and Matt DesLauriers,

31 January 2021 — for Hyperallegic, Waiting for the ‘Drop’: Crypto-Art and Speed, a theoretical-historical piece defining crypto-art as catatachtics

13 December 2021– for Softpunk Magagine, The Built Environment Makes Me Horny— On Bachelard, The Internet Space, And Ruin

30 November 2021– for Outland.art, Betting on Babel, On Pak’s Lost Poets participatory conceptual art as NFT, and Borgesian resonances of market as form

5 October 2021– For Dirt, Only Knitters Left Alive On virtual architecture, the aesthetics of “Cottagecore”, and accidental vampirism. October 2021.

8 September 2021– For the LARB’s Avidly, Twenty-Five Thoughts On The Method Wars, a bloodbath of the current state of criticism as parafictional numbered essay

Summer 2021 (July). For Sublunary Editions‘ new quarterly magazine Firmament, a regular column on ‘Object Crushes’ — material cultural crushes in the literary mode– No. 2 ‘Murex’ on deep classical pasts, Procopian histories, and strange futures.

July 2021– Give Me Difficulty-– a review/critique of the British Museum’s Nero exhibition with a focus on historiography and the ‘new classics’ of postcolonial theory and praxis for Review31.

Late June 2021. For BOMB Magazine:Duvet Theories‘; an experimental piece on softness, bedding, certainty, Fra Angelico, and Caravaggio. Issue 156 (in print late June, online later).

3 June 2021– Dirt: I’m a Sims interior decorator– a humorous take on the Late Capitalist suburban Mid-Mod smash-up aesthetics of The Sims 4 architecture and design, and the inexplicable fun/torment of the new game pack, Dream Interior Decorator.

2 June 2021– Old Cages, New Bodies, New Scrutiny— a review of Paul B. Preciado’s Can The Monster Speak? and attendant issues in queer theory, for Review31.

1 April 2021– For Sublunary Editions‘ quarterly magazine Firmament, a regular column on ‘Object Crushes’ — material cultural crushes in the literary mode– No.1 ‘Sword’ on Mishima, Iaido, doubt, and hesitation.

19 March 2021– A Personal Anthology-– my thoughts on collected short fiction and things that are definitely not collected short fiction, in a literary-critical list as part of a curated series run by Jonathan Gill

10 March 2021. Intimacy At the End of the World. For Review 31. A review of the Anselm Kiefer’s Field of the Cloth of Gold show at the Gagosian Le Bourget.

February 2021 My interview for the Royal College of Art MA Writing Programme Podcast— Scrawl

26 November 2020. Plop, plop, plop, plop. For Review 31, on Laura Waddell for Object Lessons: ‘EXIT’.

17 November 2020. Lend Me Your Geometries for Dilettante Army: On Christopher Wren, Restoration London, city planning, fires, Riemann curvatures, the persistence of history, Japanese Metabolist architecture, Agnes Martin, grids, and other things that are or are not a torus.

Edited newsletter for the UK Independent press community, ongoing: IndieRecs Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3, Issue 4, and Issue 5.

19 October 2020 “Consider The Pigeon” on London city churches, animal studies, and pigeons as a baroque on the Bilderfahrzeuge research project blog

8 October 2020 Guest seminar on criticism, aesthetics, and erotics in the MA Writing Course at the Royal College of Art.

19 September 2020 for the LA Review of Books (LARB): Mordew and The New Leftist Imaginary (on Alex Pheby’s Mordew and the political implications of British spec fic and fantasy in America)

28 July 2020: Avian Histories for Review 31 (on Richard Smyth’s An Indifference Of Birds and the pandemic anthropocene).

Coronavirus special online seminars on Twitch– summaries and more here.

Coronavirus shortform work, Spring 2020, and reprise in Spring 2021:

for the Indoor Voices blog:

+ Coffeecore: The Goodbye (a reprise piece written in 2021 to commemorate one year from first lockdown on the Indoor Voices blog, should be read last in the series)

+ Coffeecore: The Winter Garden(#coffeecore, clavichord, foliage, ice skating, longing, ornament, winter gardens

+ Coffeecore: Exercises In Style (#coffeecore, aesthetic, alternate universe Oulipo, cafes, Exercices de Style, probabilities, Queneau, tulips)

+ Coffeecore: On The City (#coffeecore, aesthetic, bonsai, cities, gachapon machines, little worlds, nested realities, pixel flâneur, swimming pools)

+ Coffeecore: The Rainy Day (#coffeecore, aesthetics, Chopin, metropolitan fictions, rainy day, Satie, the nights they pass slowly here– another GIF essay in the ‘Coffeecore’ world)

+ Rilke In Neon (a labyrinth, GIF essay, on Rilke, on the aesthetic of feeling, on plague thinkpieces, on permutations of uncertainty)

+ Consider The Arcologies (fictional histories, pixel flâneur, SimCity 2000, structures as lives, Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius)

+ The Coffeecore Extended Universe (90’s nostalgia, aesthetic, coffee, coffeecore, cosseting, office life, soft world, turned into a surreal weird story by accident, but also an essay in GIFS)

+ on soothing 90’s anime-style Coffeecore .gifs

+ Illness As Simile (on Coronavirus, Homeric simile, time, Jerome Robbins’ ballet ‘Glass Pieces’, and Félix González-Torres’ AIDS installations)

27 April 2020: a para-academic review of Wellnow.wtf online exhibition for the Bilderfahrzeuge research blog, considering netart evolving as the “New New Media” in the age of lockdown

17 February 2020 at UAL: Central Saint Martins, a guest lecture on critical practise for the Art Programme entitled “On Criticism, Parasitism, and Desire”.

14 February 2020, cover piece in the TLS: “Jack In Black: Reading Our New John Donnes”

For the Bilderfahrzeuge Project’s research blog, a para-academic essay on Rosalind Krauss, Derrida, and Twombly’s Commodus series as queer.

For Review31, on Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment On Uranus: ‘How To Fuck With Your Desires

For the LARB blog, on reading and tweeting Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport: ‘Ducks, Summer’

For the TLS, longform review-essay on the possibilities of new speculative fiction: ‘Tenderly Entangled’

For the TLS, on Ursula K. LeGuin: Language of the Making

Essays For The Brixton Review Of Books:
  •             On Small Press Poets, and the nature of poetic riskiness. Fall 2019.
  •            On James Brookes’ Spoils (the pastoral, the baroque in modern poetry). Fall 2018.