3:22:23

My conversation with the writer and critic Emmalea Russo, “Recovering the Cosmic”

“Masha Tupitsyn and I began corresponding during the first months of lockdown. Our emails, which have continued on and off since those first bizarre pandemic days, circle around the celestial and the cinematic. They are often a source of cosmic solace, a space to look around at the now in order to connect it to larger patterns: to digest, disagree, and divulge. We often send photos of the sky around sunrise and sunset and screenshots from movies, freeze-framing light-life toward passage and portal. Masha’s most recent book Time Tells, Vol. 1, came out in early 2023, a gorgeous and divinatory chronicle of how digital culture kills time. It uses cinematic time jumps and hundreds of screenshots from films that work like Tarot cards or tunnels. My most recent book of poetry, Confetti, came out late last year and also deals with the marking and melting of time. And so, the conversation below is one screenshot in an ongoing conversation. This one hovers around our recent books and those originary events of sunrise and sunset.”

— Emmalea Russo