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Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.


Articles Available Online


On Marriage, Netflix, and Other Things I Hate

Book Review

June 2023

Orit Gat

Book Review

June 2023

1. ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband.’   Marriage falls into a...

Book Review

July 2022

It’s Personal: Writing and Reading Through Grief

Orit Gat

Book Review

July 2022

1. A spill  I’m drinking coffee in bed and reading The Reactor. I feel so close to everything Nick...

It was even worse in Prague [than in Cuba] The only reason they got upset with me — I was in Prague for a month, went to Moscow for a month, trained then to Poland for a month, and went to Prague to leave for New York I got back to Prague on April 26 — the same day I was put on the FBI Dangerous Security List — was elected King of May on May 1, was followed around Prague until May 7, arrested, kept incommunicado, and put on the next plane to London because the minister of culture and the minister of information disapproved of an American gay beatnik, pot-smoking, mantra-chanting Buddhist (or something) being a model for Czechoslovakian youths — Allen Ginsberg, interview   He’d been in Cuba sunning, fucking But he’d only hugged and kissed Fidel Reek of cigars! rum! In that embrace, two of the great beards of our time had grown into each other: Allen’s and Fidel’s, they became inseparable Grew intertwined, then knotted Uncomfortable for all involved Finally Castro had to call his chief executioner, the executioner came with his chief machete but instead of cutting off Allen Ginsberg’s head a hipsterheaded angel of Yahweh arrived in sunglasses and porkpie hat to redirect the blade to only sunder their beards   Fidel put Allen on the first flight to Czechoslovakia Allen brushed his smokestained suit before disembarking He still had Fidel’s hairs on his lapels, that’s what he declared to Customs   Students of the Polytechnic School, even a few faculty members, remember: the first sign they had of Allen’s coming was the beard It was edged out the window of the plane Out the window of the taxi from Ruzyně (airport), as if a flag for a new order, his novy kingdom But he was not yet King It was still April   Allen’s beard was not a religious beard, yet neither was it a beard of dereliction, of dissolution, a lazy facial hirsuteness — the mark of a man who did not care about appearance It fell under none of those categories, contra surveillance and Nomenklatura speculation Truth is, Allen’s beard had always been there, and his face grew from it

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.

Essay

September 2020

Three Finals

Orit Gat

Essay

September 2020

1998   In the summer of 2006, at a bar off Odéon, a girl I didn’t know drew a...

Anna Wiener’s ‘Uncanny Valley’

Book Review

February 2020

Orit Gat

Book Review

February 2020

1. SF vs NY   Anna Wiener found herself in the right place at the right time. That is, if that was what she...
James Bridle’s ‘New Dark Age’

Book Review

October 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

October 2018

Halfway through James Bridle’s foreboding, at times terrifying, but ultimately motivating account of our technological present, he recounts a scene from a magazine article...
Women and Technology: History is a Cautionary Tale

Book Review

April 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

April 2018

Few book reviews open with amateur rap, but: ‘back in the day when new media was new,’ goes the first line of a song...
Scroll, Skim, Stare

feature

Issue No. 16

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its subject – artists’ websites, their...
What Can an Art Magazine Be?

feature

Issue No. 10

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 10

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet, the pioneering art magazine Metronome provides...

READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 2

The End of Francophonie: The Politics of French Literature

Lauren Elkin

feature

Issue No. 2

I. We were a couple of minutes late for the panel we’d hoped to attend. The doors were closed...

Interview

October 2013

Interview with Nick Goss

James Cahill

Interview

October 2013

Nick Goss has emerged in recent years as one of the UK’s most feted young painters. Evoking indistinct places...

fiction

April 2013

The Taxidermist

Olivia Heal

fiction

April 2013

I did not want to walk. The day was dull. But imperative or impulsion pushed me out, onto the...

 

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