Scott Malcomson

Scott Malcomson is a senior editor on VLS, the literary supplement of the Village Voice. A post-modern travel book, Empire’s Edge, is to be published by Faber in July.

It’s all just history

Scott Malcomson, 9 June 1994

People who can find the world in a grain of sand are not necessarily people one wants to spend a lot of time with. At a recent conference held in a SoHo gallery in New York, the moderator spoke of interventions and discursive spaces, of enacting positions in a performative way, of avoiding both essentialism and relativism. He spoke of crucial theoretical work. To a person of my generation, this rap is utterly familiar, even homey; one has to struggle to imagine a time when things were différent. Nevertheless, the idea of crucial theoretical work appears to me laughably pretentious. Crucial to whom? How? Why?

Damn all

Scott Malcomson, 23 September 1993

‘I must unbend sometimes,’ Hazlitt told his readers in 1821:

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