Beauty Talk & Monsters

Beauty Talk is in part a meditation on the symbiotic pleasures and impositions of intellectual exileat once an indictment and a celebrationa poetic expression of voluntary solitude which questions what it means to hole up inside yourself, to resist the roles you’ve been assigned and the thoughts you”re conditioned to accept as your own, and to willfully separate from the disappointment of other people without losing your engagement in and appraisal of the world around you…. The one thin line Tupitsyn maintains is that between on-screen and off-screen. Pop culture is subject, theme, character, and plot in her work, which takes American media as a narrative foundation.

In her debut collection, Masha Tupitsyn is at her best when recalling emotional disaster, and when she aligns herself to this end, with strategies of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.

Masha Tupitsyn’s debut collection is a breathtaking mixture of tall tale and autobiography, film theory and lover’s lament, traveler’s diary and gender treatise. A novel-in-parts disguised as a bootleg memoir crossed with a Hollywood tell-all, Beauty Talk & Monsters dares us to ask if there is a point to reliability when a shifty narrator can provide so much obsessive insight…. Beauty Talk & Monsters has a shimmering intimacy.

The experience of reading Beauty Talk & Monsters is humid, intimate, and juicy; like spying through a window at a neighbor’s television set, it provides both the voyeuristic pleasure of watching a stranger’s activity and the familiar flicker of a well-known film, now playing in a stranger’s psyche.

Masha Tupitsyn, a writer, critic, and multimedia artist, teaches film and literature at the New School. She is the author of Like Someone in Love- An Addendum to Love Dog, Love Dog, LACONIA- 1,200 Tweets on Film, and Beauty Talk & Monsters (Semiotext(e)e), and coeditor of the anthology Life As We Show It- Writing on Film. Her 24-hour film Love Sounds is an audio-essay and history of love in English-speaking cinema. Her ongoing essay film DECADES is a history of cinematic sound and scores organized by decade.

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