Knocking At The Gate

In The Paris Review , Rachel Cusk reviews Taryn Simon’s Sleep (2020-2021), which is composed of photographs of sleeping children: When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its realit...

One of the mental distractions I use when I'm trying to fall asleep at night is memory skittering: I just randomly seize on moments from conversations in my life and move on to the next random one as fast I possibly can. I find that I can skitter over about two different memories a second when I really get going. (It's bizarre to me that this is relaxing, but there it is.)   One of the memories I tripped over last night involved a friend named Griff I had in grade school. We played on the intergalactic space fort thingy on the Villas Elementary School playground because it was an intergalactic space fort and in those space race days most every kid was seriously into intergalactic space forts.   I remembered a particular morning when we went out to recess unusually early for some reason or another. Everything was still a little damp and the last of the morning fog was still visible. He was cross that the space fort was cold and wet but we decided it was space fort fuel that had...

I was maybe eight and staying for a few days with my grandparents, who then lived near Terry Park in Fort Myers. I had been given a dollar for “spending money” by my parents, and of course how to spend it was heavy on my mind as Granny drove up to a little market on Palm Beach Boulevard. Granny collected the bread or milk or whatever it was she really came here for, and I had not yet decided what to buy. There was an Icee machine at the register with CHERRY! This would certainly have been the prize, but right at the register there was also a small display of little foam airplanes. The way these worked was that they came unassembled, so you had to carefully separate the perforated wings and stabilizers and then slide the pieces together into precut slots. That was a fine thing by itself when it was just images of airplanes printed on the pieces, but THIS display had a selection of superheroes. I could get a glider that wasn’t just a jet fighter, but I could get a HUMAN TORCH glider! Of ...