PositiveArt AgendaWriting at the pace of life, sometimes through the haze of booze or hash, Mayer captures the sensibility of the early 1970s—part hippie, part intellectual, part ennui ... My copy of Memory arrived as Covid-19 social distancing took effect, when New York itself became mostly a picture seen through a pane of apartment window glass. In the uncertain days that followed I slowed my reading pace to real time, one or two daily entries at a go. I felt the hiccupping momentum of Mayer’s run-on sentences and casual capitalization, the passages of free-association wordplay, and her lists of shitty meals or all the people (first names only, some now famous) she saw in a given day ... a continuous record of living ... In her intensive chronicling of her life, most of the language is descriptive, object-like. From this emotional distance, she searches for an audience, much as we shout into the electronic void.
Nancy Princenthal
MixedBookforum... a gripping history ... When Unspeakable Acts ventures into the present, the tone shifts—becoming both breezy and skeptical—as if current artwork about rape is somehow suspect ... the reader can also sense a generational divide in these passages. Although Princenthal never criticizes younger artists directly, there are hints of deeper discontent. At the beginning of the book, Princenthal warns that recent uprisings such as #MeToo suggest that \'we’re all equally victims,\' writing that the hashtag is \'unfortunately childish.\'
