LUCAS BLALOCK

in ,

2. I am ‘here’ because I read Moby-Dick in 2007 and then—as a middling young, near 30, white North Carolinian, at odds with my body, psychically askew, still working in a restaurant, and trying to get out of a situation I felt I was never really meant to be in—I almost immediately moved back to New York from the US South.

I am ‘here’ because I loved that book, which surprised me. And I warmed up to the coincidence that photography had been invented not long before Moby-Dick was written.

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TRAVIS DIEHL

in

The Dove of Criticism. At drinks after an off-off-Broadway play with the playwright and director, the conversation turned to the critics. So-and-so from New York Magazine had been in the audience that night. The New Yorker critic had canceled. The New York Times piece was out already. The playwright felt the review had been blasé, lukewarm at best—and since this was his first play produced after eighteen months in COVID-19’s grip, lukewarm felt downright icy.

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