Dust is everywhere, a perennial presence in the corners of culture. Dust can be deathly (domestic dust is mostly desiccated human skin), deadly (poisonous dust is the product of industry and war) or beautiful (the dusty matte surface of make-up, a light dusting applied by the confectioner, glittering motes caught in a sunbeam). In British English, "dust" is another name for dirt, or matter in the wrong place, implying that it can be moved from one spot to another, but never--as with matter or metaphor--completely eradicated. Cabinet 35 examines dust's ubiquity. Features include Steven Connor on the manifold forms and patterns of magic dust; Brian Dillon on Proust's vacuum cleaner; and Valerie Smith and Matt Mullican on marble dust drawings. Elsewhere in the issue, Steve Reinke catalogues untimely deaths; Helen Polson muses over the fate of lost teeth; Jeff Dolven reviews Conlon Nancarrow's compositions for musical machines; and Margaret Wertheim takes on the mathematical structure known as E8.

Cabinet 35: Dust

Arts & Photography

Dolven, Jeff

History & Criticism

Cabinet

The fifth volume in Cabinet’s 24-Hour Book series, critic and poet Jeff Dolven’s Take Care is a meditation on care and caring in the form of a response to a found document: the 1986 catalog for Braintree Scientific, an American company that manufactures lab products used in experiments on rats and mice.

Take Care (Twenty Four Hour Book, 5)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Cabinet Books

Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” which is, wellsurreal, and features a decisively modern, entirely notional score, sung by an inventor and his invention, which (who?) turns out to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) somehow knows all the words to the song you never knew you had in you. The daring of this collection is not in replaying the fractured polyphony of our moment. Speculative Music gives us accessible lyrics that still manage to listen in on our echoing interiors. These are poems that promise Frost’s momentary stay against confusion” and, at the same time, provoke a deep, head-shaking wonder.

Speculative Music: Poems

Poetry

Sarabande Books

And so, beginning in September of 2020, and carrying on, with occasional interruptions and dilations, until the next April, we read from the first page of J.H. Prynne's PARKLAND to the last. After that first pass through the nineteen sections, we gathered all the emails and printed them out. In their raw form they told the story of an evolving, dialogic critical encounter, written not from the omniscient vantage of the reader who has got to the last page, but in real time and close to the ground--each linguistic event, as we encountered it, blocking our view of the pages ahead. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Essay. Literary Criticism.

The Parkland Mysteries

Kotin, Joshua

The Last Books

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Books by Dolven, Jeff