Bookforum has a short excerpt from the book on its website. It’s about Pagan America, the book that Hickey tried and failed to write in 2000s and early 2010s.
For a number of years in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Dave Hickey’s byline in magazines said that he was working on a book called Pagan America. There’s even a ghostly record of the title on Google Books, with a precise page count and ISBN, as though the manuscript were finished, paginated, and catalogued, but then withdrawn and locked away in the writer’s desk, left to be published, if ever, posthumously.
For those of us who were Hickey fans during those years of uncertainty, it was a shimmering promise. After the cold brilliance of his first book, The Invisible Dragon, and the warm love song of his next, Air Guitar, he was going to bring it all together into one grand synthesis, a story of America that would elevate us and explain us to ourselves.
Also:
I had a great conversation about Hickey, politics, art, America, Foucault, etc. with Geoff Shullenberger on his podcast Outsider Theory.
Travis Diehl wrote a substantive, if luke-warm, review of my book for Art in America.
I loved writing this piece on Haiti-born, Houston-based photographer Sebastien Boncy. Totally fascinating dude, and wonderful photographer. An excerpt:
Seeing Houston clearly has been a project for photographer Sebastien Boncy since he arrived in the city from Haiti, in 1994, to attend the University of Houston. “My parents told me I could go to college in the States, but it had to be somewhere where we had family,” says Boncy. “That meant New York, Chicago, or Houston. New York was too expensive. Chicago was too cold. So I came to Houston.”
The American cities of his imagination, growing up in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétion-Ville, were landscapes familiar from TV and the movies. He thought of the gritty streets of New York and Chicago, or the sun-drenched beaches of Southern California. “I watched a lot of HBO,” he says. Houston was only in the picture because he had an uncle who lived there. “It’s not really on most Haitians’ itinerary.”