Third Known Nest by Tom Kalin

“We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave. I warn Dorothy every time I see her that if she doesn’t watch out, her life is going to be…

“But these meetings, these partings, finally destroy us.”—Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, 1978)“Since the release of his celebrated feature Swoon, Kalin has produced a number of…

Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The American Center in Paris as part of their international Trans Voices project, Nation flashes contradictory formulations of language,…

“It is curious that in the most important periods of one’s life, one never keeps a diary. There are some things that even a habitual diary-keeper shrinks from putting down in words—at the time, at…

“I fear nomads. I am afraid of them and afraid for them too.”—Jane Bowles, “Camp Cataract” in My Sister’s Hand in Mine (New York: Ecco Press, 1978)“Tom Kalin’s recent videos draw from literary…

“But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us death is stronger than life, it pulls like a…

“I am a mannish / Muff-diving / Size queen / With bad attitude / An arse-licking / Psychofag / Molesting the flies of privacy / Balling lesbian boys / A perverted heterodemon / Crossing purpose with…

“Criminality may present itself as a kind of saintly self-mastery, an absolute rejection of hypocrisy.”—Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon Books,…

“Ah! It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.”—Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)This title is…

I borrowed this absurd phrase from a sign posted on the conductor’s booth in the Washington, D.C. subway. The language of civil service here borders on unintentional parody, with its blankly polite…

“Where the robots can eat food, they eat chemicals instead—as one would expect. Where they can live and act, they sit in dark rooms and watch others do it for them. Where they can have faith, they…

“I hung back, held fire, danced and lied. I was not going to come crawling out of my ruined house, all bloody, no, baby, sing no sad songs for me.”—James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White…

"Look how the willow shoots its fine sprays into the air! Look how through them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with unconscious, with powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone;…

“His heart was a dark cave filled with sharp toothed, fierce clawed beasts that ran snapping and tearing through his blood. In pain he left the work table and prowled around the room, singing to…

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”—Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, 1978)This title is also available on Third Known Nest by Tom Kalin.

”But I—already an object, I do not struggle.”—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)This title is also available on Third…

Turn the lights down / Way down low / Turn up the music / Hi as fi can go / All the gang's here / Everyone you know / It's a crazy scene / Hey there, just look over your shoulder / Hoo hoo / Get the…

“The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore,…