Real Life is on winter break. We’ve put together eight SPECIAL ISSUES for your consideration. We’ll publish one a day, each selected by an editor and based on a thematic topic. Click the image below for a pdf. And please enjoy these mid-season reruns until we return to our usual scheduled program.
Repetition has a way of meting out time; in recollection I have a way of meeting myself again, and giving me, as I do, the time of day. Restatements of a theme hold immense sway in figuring out why things, happening as they did, ever induced rapture or heartbreak, turning a lifelong project into a more digestible course. Histories demand, with tools or states altered, indulgence in reprisal, recasting, remembrance and riff. Music wouldn’t be without memory; a record reviewed later can overtake olfaction in its talent for association; looped images can live somewhere between fact and déjà vu. In setting oneself on repeat it’s intensity we’re after; as years click by, housework seems more real that is never adequately put to rest. “No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first,” writes Adrienne Rich in “Transcendental Etude.” A more seasoned tail-devourer than I might attest that segments are always found changed under skin already consumed, split or shed. —Soraya King, Editor
Featuring:
“Against the Clock” by Maya Binyam
“Time Capsules,” by Fuck Theory
“Watch Again,” by Lydia Kiesling
“Instant Replay,” by Monica Torres
