This removed, and slightly veiled, narrative condescension is a trademark of Ms. Davis’ writing in Can’t and Won’t, a collection which takes empty, circular bourgeois life as its subject, and then immediately seems to resent having done so. Ms. Davis writes as if she were forced to take on this subject, as if it were an assignment, and so many of her stories here read like transcriptions of (elegant) tantrums.
A: Please don’t eat me.
B: Listen, even after you’ve become a cadaver, you’re still retrievable. God is within us and he has different ways of showing it in our lives, and this is just one way of showing it.
A: Don’t eat—
B: —My friend sent you to me, assuring me that I can use you freely…
Abstract representations of space like Vignelli’s map might make the viewer imagine that she is lost in an overgrown circuit board, a geometry problem, a modern Arabesque designed to awe without representing life. Maps, after all, are always more than utilitarian schematics; at times they are expressions of faith.
A: She did not seem to understand we were talking about a comedy book and not the transcripts from the Nuremberg Trial.
B: That hamster was going to start appearing in press conferences.
A: Right? For selfish reasons, I wish she’d decided to spend more time being a genius.
B: Obviously. Efficiency is great for U.S. Steel, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense for books.
A: Right…
Why sad here? Why happy there? Wouldn’t it feel the same if they were switched?
A: I want a beautiful life but I’m stuck in this Garbage World with you people.
B: You’re the one who decided to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.
A: It was interesting giving my dark side the keys to the car. I went joyriding…
But isn’t there always an unspoken “I mean” before anything you say? Before every argument, every sentence, every word? You simply draw attention to your own attempt to communicate meaning. Props to you for speaking the unspoken, for meaning what you say, and saying that you mean.
GPS gives one an easier sense of location, but its power to do so depends on a network of moving satellites, determining location as they orbit with the earth. Whatever the illusions our iPhones, Garmins, and airplane screens provide, we are all seafarers now.
The painting, in this moment, needs you, exactly you. Nothing less.
The gears of capitalism create spaces in which behavior is prescribed and easily accounted for. Skateboarding’s opposition is thus a compositional process, partially of the individual body, which is recomposed against the “intense scopic determinations of modernist space,” and partially of a deeper critique of urban life: “production not as the production of things but of play, desires and actions”…
