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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of this past year I remember at first, the two times I was out in public afterwards, both times at the Whitney, I was nervous to take my breast out, because Leo was crying and people were staring, I felt panicky and self-conscious, which I think made the baby more agitated I became used to taking my breast out in art spaces, and began to savour it with sometimes a fatigued perversity and other times something more sacred, like the installation at the Lygia Pape show at the Met Breuer, in the corner of the nearly pitch-black room where gold thread made geometric curtains like beams of light, or recently on a bench in front of the El Greco ‘Holy Family’ at the Met, the way in which Mary presses down on her breast and points the nipple towards baby Jesus, both her and Joseph gazing downwards at the central point of the baby, the baby’s little hand on his mother’s hand I nursed Leo outside the bubblegum phallic Franz West sculpture at MASS MoCA, amidst the industrial landscape and grey cool light, her straddling me, downy head bobbing back and forth between each breast, and this fall in front of a Harry Dodge video at the New Museum’s gender show, because there was a bench to sit on I figured if there were so many penises in that room it was okay to have my breast peek out through my leather jacket, like a floppy blue-veined sac of a sculpture, scratched and sad At the MoMA it is difficult to find a place to breastfeed I didn’t get to see all of the Louise Lawler show because it had taken all of our energy to get there on the subway, and it was almost closing time, and I couldn’t find anywhere I felt comfortable to nurse, as Leo was still quite young and I still felt shaky and strange occupying public space in the city with a baby

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

fiction

September 2015

The Afternoon

Wolfgang Hilbig

TR. Isabel Fargo Cole

fiction

September 2015

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word...

fiction

January 2014

To Kill a Dog

Samanta Schweblin

TR. Brendan Lanctot

fiction

January 2014

The Mole says: name, and I answer. I waited for him at the indicated location and he picked me...

fiction

January 2014

Leg over Leg

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

TR. Humphrey Davies

fiction

January 2014

First published in 1855, Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fāriyāq,’ alter ego of...

 

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