Meghan Forbes

Meghan Forbes is the founder and co-editor of harlequin creature, an arts & literary imprint. She is also the sole editor of the volume International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019). She has published her essays, reviews, and translations in venues such as as Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Meghan holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and beginning in September 2019 will join the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum as a postdoctoral fellow in order to complete her first book manuscript, on the interwar Czech avant-garde and technologies of print.

On (a lack of) Diversity

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Susan Bernofsky described recently the “disheartening” numbers, when it comes to the percentage of female authors in translation. Across twenty-five presses evaluated by Women in Translation, only twenty-five percent of books in English translation were by women, and some of Bernofsky’s favorite presses (some of mine, too), like New Directions and Archipelago, were among the worst perpetrators, publishing sixteen percent and thirteen percent female authors, respectively.

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The 38-Year Old Frat Boy Is Just Not Funny

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Perhaps I am lacking in imagination, but I simply can’t think of a clearer signal of white male privilege than an instance in which an adult white male receives a highly competitive fellowship and uses his time on that fellowship to join a frat and gets so inebriated he ends up in the hospital, but instead of reprimand from the law or university, he gets to turn the ridiculous tale into a cover story for the country’s second largest circulating paper.

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Getting Back to All That

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For Didion, New York got old at twenty-eight, eight years after arriving. Not quite so young anymore, she discovered that ‘not all the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all.’ Back in her home state of California, she writes of how she had felt to be ‘on some indefinitely extended leave,’ never really ‘living a real life’ in New York. Maybe it’s simply that I don’t feel myself to be living a ‘real life’ anywhere, that I haven’t managed to live in one place for more than eight months let alone eight years. But I’m thirty-one, and ecstatic to be back in New York, despite the long time knowledge that my mistakes here always have counted.

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Majeed Cares: On Giving a Damn

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“It feels impossible to talk about race or other kinds of difference,” wrote Roxane Gay recently in the New York Times Sunday Review. “But if we don’t have difficult conversations, we will be able to reconcile neither this country’s racist past nor racist present.” This is a refrain we read and hear so often these days, and yet, the conversations remain hard in coming. Faheem Majeed, in his first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago this year, is a notable example of conversation between artist, curator, and museum institution that seeks to expand that conversation with a wider viewing public.

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Despite the Digital, Things We Still Carry

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There is a particular magnetism in things. I feel the way they cling to me especially now, as I travel from one country to another by train, wanting nothing (I tell myself) but to travel lightly, and instead weighted down by what I cannot throw away. Even as I am having an “experience” (travel), I am tethered to my objects. There are the essentials, or what must come with—my dog, for instance, a toothbrush, underwear, and some clothes—but a lot more of the inessentials: three dog toys, a pair of yellowed goggles, a cigar box full of art supplies that includes two pairs of scissors plus an X-Acto knife, a curved sewing needle and bits of ribbon, thoroughly read copies of the London Review of Books, and a board game with instructions only in Spanish, a language I do not read. The last item I managed to offload onto a friend I met up with in Croatia. A best friend, to be sure (who else takes on the burden of your things?), who begrudgingly agreed to bring this and a heavy, hardcover exhibition catalogue back to the United States ahead of me.

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Lucia in the Spring of Her Discontent

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But Lucia was everywhere in Dessau for me. I have spent time with her posthumously, reading her diaries and letters kept at the Bauhaus archive, and looking through her photographs, which include a series of nude self-portraits she took in 1930 after she was “liberated” from Dessau, the Bauhaus, and László. I have been the voyeur she never intended to be leafing through her life with white gloved hands. I don’t take this privilege (for which I never asked her permission) lightly. Her story is now folded into me as we walk through the streets of Dessau, where she is a ghost, haunting the place in which she longed for the city.

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Berlin, or Being in the Belly

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The Hamburger Bahnhof is not a train station now, and never was in Hamburg. It’s a museum of contemporary art in Berlin. It’s also a good metaphor—in name and in content—for this city where nothing is quite as advertised. Though a very fine layer of general German Ordnung covers everything here, it gives way easily to a jumble of rules without regulation, a mass of juxtaposed and unlikely objects of which I am also, and only, one.

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