What’s the use of contemporary literature? I ask the question as someone invested in contemporary literature, and someone whose teaching often is on, or includes, significant elements of what I…
Contemporaries Essays
Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
It feels like a precarious moment to be talking from the classroom. It has for a long time. When I originally wrote these words (January 2024) the politicization of the…
Further and Further Away
The most expensive thing you can buy in Disco Elysium is a streetlight. It sits in the corner of the pawn shop on Rue de Saint-Ghislaine and has been modified…
DISCO-ORIENTED HAUNTOLOGY
Psychiatrist Marie Rudden describes a private, internal space her patient would withdraw to whenever he became anxious and confused — when the interpersonal reality insisted upon by others in his…
Inebriation and Allegory
KIM KITSURAGI: “Not being hungover helps too.” I don’t drink anymore. Or at least I don’t drink with the apocalyptic fury I personified around a decade ago. No dramatic event…
Shivers
Shivers come when the temperature drops and you become more keenly aware of your surroundings. It enables you to hear the city itself, to truly belong to the streets. It…
Therapy Simulator 2019
“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…
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…