My impulse was to write the last black play ever for myself. I really believed if I put it all into one play, people would leave me alone.
—
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
- Mamma Andersson by Christian Hawkey
- Béla Tarr by Fionn Meade
- Péter Nádas by Davis Kovacs
- Joe Zucker by Chuck Close
- Benedict Mason by George Steel
- Kate Valk by David Salle & Sarah French
- Kara Walker by Matthea Harvey
- Howard Norman by Susan Shreve
Interviews
- Dorchie by Ed Park
- In My Yoke Skirt by Diane Williams
- More Zeus Bits by Anne Carson
- What Happened Between Us by Rivka Galchen
- Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Ambar Past
- The Life Room by Jill Bialosky
First Proof
- Pam Lins by Rochelle Feinstein
- Robbie Conal by Steve Earle
- Nicola López by Trevor Paglen
Artists On Artists
- Bas Jan Ader’s Please Don’t Leave Me & In Search of the Miraculous: Bas Jan Ader Discovery File by Nato Thompson
- Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk! by Steve Holtje
- Visible Language, Fluxus Issues by Saul Ostrow
- Fred Willman’s Why Mascots Have Tales: The Illinois High School Mascot Manual by Brian McMullen
- CAConrad’s Deviant Propulsion by Kendall Grady
- Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk & Monsters by Jeanine Herman
- Chris Marker: Staring Back by Lucy Raven
- Museum of Bad Art Rejection Collection Auction by Kerry Folan
- David Levine’s Bauerntheater by Aaron Cedolia & Geoffrey Scott
- The Cats of Mirikitani by Nell McClister
Editor's Choice
Zeusbalm
Ruling his life had been many
Fears
Organize them
Darling says his therapist Zeus decides to call
Moss his enemy
River nymphs groan (mossy
Banks) Zeus has all the river nymphs put
In a milk bottle
Zeusbalm 2
Can you enforce laws against
Moss people ask Zeus
Smiles he
Will free these simple folk on his stocking
Feet he slides down ramps made of thunder
Bolts
Zeusbalm 3
That’s the interesting part of being Zeus Zeus
Says
When asked about a sudden disappearance of all
The rivers in the
World I
Don’t need to explain stuff
Off
Zeus’s tigers lay
Cold and golden amid their lawyers a welcome
Day off from the war on moss except
For the
Women who
Scream down their knives as they clean the blood off the
Trees
Zeus and Research Funding
Hard to get a doctor anymore in town most of them are
Keeping torture victims alive down by the lake you
See separated hemispheres walking around down there people
Without skin science by leaps and bounds a barn
Of crotches twelve
Fridges of shrieks a
Fairly good cafeteria does this
Sound like a Xmas carol? what do you
Want for Xmas? cries as
Of people swimming when the rain starts
Afterzeus
The
guest is always there let
Us be
Polite soon we will need his heat to survive the night
Zeusgas
Immigration to Olympos is not allowed but who
Will clean the blood off etc? Zeus
Consults Apollo Fool
Children with knucklebones men with oaths the usual
legal angle from Apollo
Zeus consults his own
Viscera Ah from then on when
Ever the women are
Crossing the border Zeus farts a big blue
Blizzard boughs go wild FBI stays home most of the women
Die in the passes but any who don’t
are keen
To work they
Work noiselessly
Anne Carson is the author of Decreation (Knopf, 2005). She was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; was honored with the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry; and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2001 she received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry—the first woman to do so; the Griffin Poetry Prize; and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan.
Related
A pose recurs in Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come From the Sea: one character after another finds themselves on their knees, waiting. For the dawn, for mercy, for love.
Re-imagining antiquity and complicating gender binaries for the modern reader.
“Hippias Minor is such a handy introduction to Socrates as a personality, to this method of argumentation, to the culture of Athens where you have all these hot-shot foreign speakers like Hippias coming in and making the intellectual fermentation even stronger.”
Originally published in
BOMB 100,
Summer 2007
Featuring interviews with Chuck Close, Kara Walker, Mamma Andersson, Howard Norman, Peter Nadas, Bela Tarr, Benedict Mason, and Kate Valk.
