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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

            Zut, zut, zut, zut             – Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu   Sostène Zanzibar was not feeling himself that day; someone else was A journalist from an English paper Name of Phyllidia Or possibly Petronella Something along those lines The interview had gone remarkably well Such probing questions Very stimulating, very in-depth There was no denying that Sienna – or possibly Serena – was thoroughly a young woman Hang on, cross that out Was a thorough young woman Very thorough indeed   In a bid to impress her host, she had taken up gesticulation with all the fervour of a new convert It was a joy to behold Her impeccably-manicured hands would suddenly flutter away from the warmth of her lap, describing graceful ellipses as if trying to conjure up words that could not possibly exist Ever In any language Even French   When the ink ran out of her biro, Zanzibar produced a pencil from his inside pocket with a little flourish ‘Men,’ he said, ‘alwez ave two penceuls’ He almost winked, but thought better of it ‘Women,’ she said a little later, sitting on his face, wearing nothing but her high-heeled boots, ‘always have two pairs of lips’ She almost added Try these on for size, big boy, but thought better of it too   Allegra – or possibly Anushka – had struggled to fully comprehend the answers to some (if not most) of her questions The fact that the former usually bore little (if any) relation to the latter did not help Neither did Zanzibar’s scattergun delivery nor his baffling habit of peppering his sentences with arcane references to Heidegger and Blanchot Whenever he switched to pigeon English, he sounded like Jacques Derrida dubbed by Inspector Clouseau, which proved an even greater source of confusion Of course, now that she was grinding her crotch against his salient features, that his nose kept popping in and out of her prize orifices, Zanzibar’s discourse was largely inaudible anyway This was as it should be She wanted to move beyond surface meaning, to experience his words at

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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Art

December 2011

James Richards: Not Blacking Out...

Chris Newlove Horton

Art

December 2011

Artist James Richards appropriates audio-visual material gathered from a range of sources, which he then edits into elaborate, fragmented...

Art

May 2013

On the Margins

Sean Smith

Art

May 2013

feature

December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

feature

December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

 

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