“Your shit is apart, and it’s rather unbecoming of a cop and a human being. It’s supposed to be the opposite of that: together.” So says the diegetically ambiguous voice…
Contemporaries Essays
Reading Games
In Kogonada’s debut feature film, Columbus (2017), two librarians take a brief moment away from the Dewey Decimal system to talk about reading and gaming. Considering their bookish nature, one…
Bad Reading / Bad Gaming
Disco Elysium is one of those RPGs that it feels like you alone have played. I knew so many people playing at the same time as me, but I didn’t…
Disco Elysium and Narrative Superposition
Early in Disco Elysium, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi arrives at the Whirling-in-Rags, the hostel where the player character, Harry Du Bois, has just emerged from an alcoholic spiral so intense as…
Introduction to Reading Disco Elysium
Inland Empire: DETECTIVEEsprit-De-Corps: ARRIVINGAuthority: ON THE SCENE Disco Elysium (2019) is an open-world roleplaying video game that opens with a familiar premise: the player character wakes up in a motel room with no…
Cleaning Women: Occupational Health and Broken Solidarities
For almost seven years, from February 1, 1957 until her marriage in 1963, Lorine Niedecker worked as a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital. She was 53 years old…
Rueful Proximities: Lorine Niedecker, Queer Affection, and Lyric Drag
Lorine is not Bette nor Billie nor Marlene nor Lena nor Joan nor Judy. But, she is a queer icon. Niedecker’s iconicity stems from the distinctiveness of her habitus and…
The Marsh
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Niedecker’s New Goose: Settler Colonialism on the Cusp of the Great Acceleration
In the opening poem of her 1946 collection New Goose, Lorine Niedecker pulls her readers into the marsh and situates us in a very specific position — that of the…
Pumps and Plovers: Lorine Niedecker and the Critique of Cybernetic Ecology
In 1962, after more than fifteen years of living without running water, Lorine Niedecker finally got plumbing.1 The installation of pipes, toilet, and sink was a major event in the…