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July 12, 2023
“Not Really Disciplined About Disciplines” | An Interview with Cathy Park Hong
The Drift
In her Dispatch for this issue, the scholar Marta Figlerowicz steers readers to Cathy Park Hong’s 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” a lyrical and polemical piece that concludes with a rousing call to other poets of color: “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.” Hong’s essay appeared in Lana Turner, which calls itself a “Journal of Poetry & Opinion,” and in the near-decade since,...
July 12, 2023
Revelation | Poetry
Zaynab Bobi
When the doctor said to your mother, She walked out of the clock I painted three scenes: First, your breath went anti-clockwise: the hour hand walking backwards until it was swallowed by time. Second, you crossed out of time with the minute hand stuck between your teeth — night had slipped into your mouth. Third, you drained your mother’s chest and poured yourself into it; swinging back and forth...
July 12, 2023
This Means Nothing to Me | Fiction
Vivian Z. Hu
The roots of the American Nuclear Tree have reached China. Root one of five is poking up in a gnarled spike through the left bank of the Yangtze River. By next week the second root will have not only reached crust but also made its way fully through and then past the observation deck of the Shanghai Tower — the tallest building in China and third tallest in the world....
July 11, 2023
Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists | What Happened to the Avant-Garde?
Alphonse Pierre, Becca Rothfeld, Dean Kissick, Eugene Lim, Frank Guan, Gabriel Kuri, hannah baer, Jamie Hood, Liza Batkin, Lucy Sante, Marta Figlerowicz, Melissa Anderson, Timo Andres
It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even...
July 10, 2023
The Angelines Chan of Pokfulam Road | Fiction
Rosemarie Ho
1. Angeline wakes up on a blustery spring morning and, thereafter, discovers herself sitting by the kitchen table eating a banana. More precisely: Angeline jolts awake, rolls out of bed in one practiced movement so as to not wake the man she calls her fuck buddy, pulls on said man’s (Marco’s) shirt, goes out her distressingly unlocked bedroom door and toward the living room/kitchen, upon which she encounters herself stoically...
July 10, 2023
Dream of Antonoffication | Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet
Mitch Therieau
Nearly two centuries into the history of recorded sound, there is still no neat place for the producer in the mythology of pop music. He — as an ideal type, he is nearly always a he — is both a major and a minor character. He is at once a visionary creator and a bland executor of technical procedures, a name brand with star power and an anonymous functionary. He...
July 10, 2023
Dinner with Jack | Poetry
Megan Fernandes
A couple goes scuba diving and by accident, gets left behind in the water. The boat roars off. And there they float, in full gear and disbelief, tanks low on air, stranded in a seamless blue, deciding if they can survive until the next day, which, of course, they cannot, because the average person can only tread four hours without a life jacket. The couple bickers: Why did we...
July 12, 2023
Editors’ Note | Extremely Online
The Editors
We launched The Drift three years ago by posting a link to Twitter. At the time, people half-joked that social media was the only conduit to the outside world; certainly, it was the only way we could have presented our work to anything resembling a public. That was a singular season, a summer of protest that came on the heels of a spring indoors — a period when it still...
July 11, 2023
Dark Forces at Work
Becca Rothfeld
The iron law of cultural production is that everything is always getting worse. Pick a moment — any moment — and there is sure to be a catastrophist in tow, waving her arms and warning that a crisis is upon us. The death of the novel or the poem is declared with dependable regularity, and criticism has been crumbling since its inception. New Critic John Crowe Ransom bemoaned the state...
July 11, 2023
Uncommon Sights
Melissa Anderson
On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was one of nearly a hundred spectators at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater taking in a program of shorts by the protean Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Less than two hours later, I was downtown at Anthology Film Archives for a sold-out screening that played as part of the third edition of Prismatic Ground, a festival devoted to (mostly) new experimental work of...
