Dilettante Army

21/01/2026

BRIEF PAUSE: announcing Dilettante Army’s next act

Like the backstage rustling that broadcasts a change of scenery, or the low intake of breath between stanzas, for the next several months DA will be working behind the scenes on a transition.

This project has worn several hats already. We started as a running blog in 2013, and over the last dozen years we have started a Tumblr, held many events, cooked public dinners, and opened a conceptual online store. Since 2018, we have published quasi-quarterly themed magazine issues, but that part of our project has now come to an end.

We, your team of volunteer editors, are quite proud of the work we’ve done as a little magazine. We’ve been able to foster newer voices and give emerging writers the experience of an edited publication, and we’ve also been able to work with veteran writers and thinkers, including some that (to us, at least) are famous. We’re grateful to have learned so much from all these brilliant contributors. DA has given a home to things that we can’t find elsewhere, and through that we have developed a wry critical sensibility that isn’t quite like anything else.

We are interested in carrying this sensibility forward and seeing how we can grow it in new ways, and we will be on hiatus while we figure out what that next phase looks like. There are a lot of closings in the news these days—publications, educational institutions, ethical horizons—and we want to be clear that this is not one of those closings. This is a thoughtful transition to a new kind of publication.

For now, the website will remain as it is, and we will be back in touch later this year, when we have something new to report. We’re so thankful for the community of smart, kind, fascinating people that has sprung up around this project and we’re eager to bring you our next idea. With our gratitude for your support and patience: please stay tuned during this BRIEF PAUSE.

Image: Franck Bohbot, “Le Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique de Paris, France,” 2011

12/09/2025

On Tuesday, ’s new issue, “Ekphrasis,” came out, with Krushna Dande’s essay “Mass Murder as Memetic Warfare.” On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Dande offers a compelling framework for understanding the paranoid over-reading of memes and inside jokes performed by politically radical online communities, a “vertiginous swell of context,” that finds meaning in every scrap of terrorist content. While terrorist killings often do not have politically coherent goals, they do have, as Dande says. “memetic, symbolic goals.”

The scope of a shooter’s aims makes it difficult for journalists to cover them responsibly, because any attention paid to them furthers those aims. To refuse to discuss them, however, also gives them something they want—it make us fear their names. How can we make terrorism legible?

Link to “Ekphrasis” in bio.

09/09/2025

Our Fall 2025 issue, “Ekphrasis,” is out now!

Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy.

The breadth of this issue points to anxiety about a climate that pushes for fast action and immediate certainty, making interpretation seem a rare luxury. Something is wrong with judgment, and this wrongness seems fundamentally linked to the murky quality of the information environment and the tyrannical primacy of the image.

By shifting registers, ekphrasis requires a type of aesthetic judgment not always accomplished through the visual. It is a machine for realizing that we are all capable of misreadings, and it also reminds us of our own capacity to read well, despite a world drowned in images and over-conviction. Your reading may or may not be better than the last one, but it also isn’t the final one (which is both an admonition and a comfort).

The words of “Ekphrasis” have been turned back into images by 🫟🖌️

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Kate Nesin writes the image description as “disability ekphrasis”

• Emily Singeisen contextualizes AI’s exploitation of language within a very old fantasy: the death drive

• Andrew McInnes asks: does John Keats want to f**k that Grecian urn?

• Julia Alekseyeva looks at filmic ekphrasis in Isaac Julien’s “Once Again… (Statues Never Die)” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey.”

• Lauren Camp plots the ocean with mapmaker Marie Tharp

• Krushna Dande investigates white supremacy’s paranoiac overreading of memes and videos

• Louis Shankar reframes David Wojnarowicz’s writing about his own art work

• Robby Bishop contemplates the photobook through Alec Soth’s guided YouTube readings

• Bruce M. King hears the Shield of Achilles, ekphrasis’s mythic origin, through Achilles’s wordless scream

10/06/2025

Call for Submissions! Fall 2025, “Ekphrasis”

How do you know when you’ve really seen something? Beleaguered by the 24-hour news cycle and endless scrolling, we are overwhelmed with images, so many that we see each one only for a moment, flashing by but never captured. The latest AI nightmare, the sketchily provenanced war photograph, the doctored image of “gang tattoos” that seem to prove someone’s allegiances—we’ve all seen these things, but only some of us (or perhaps none of us) have understood them.

A lack of time and space to interpret images factors into our vulnerability to misinformation and a decline in media literacy, conditions with profound social consequences. If we see the same things but cannot agree on a shared reality, where has the visual mechanism failed?

We believe that ekphrasis can mitigate this crisis. Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly contributions about ekphrasis. Topics might include: words after pictures, words in pictures, words instead of pictures, Ways of Seeing, the Shield of Achilles, AI, disruption, the grindset, imagination, distraction, misreading, (historic) revisionism, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” displays of academic prowess, media literacy, performative yearning, lost originals, fashion do’s and dont’s, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the long now, immediacy, the death of painting, the death of photography, visibility mandates, Glissant’s “opacity,” abstraction, platform capitalism, common sense, mediation.

Pitches are due Monday, June 23. For more information on how and what to submit, please see the full call for submissions (link in bio).

Image: Sir James Thornhill, “Thetis Accepting the Shield of Achilles from Vulcan,” c. 1710.

06/05/2025

Spring 2025, “Rebuilding Year,” is out now!

After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild.

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change.

Picking our way across the damp sand, we are looking for flotsam and jetsam we can use.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Dania Rajendra learns from American football and coaches the Left on updating its playbook.

• Kate Thomas celebrates gay soup and community building at .

• peers into a supremely evil object, the Trump-Netanyahu handbuzzer joke, and its fallout.

• Sam Thompson recuperates the radical potential of EXTREME cleaning videos on YouTube and foments the social strike.

• excavates layers of glitter and imperialism in the Itaewon, the “international neighborhood” that Seoul rebuilt.

The physics-defying constructions in “Rebuilding Year” illustrations have been salvaged and remade by

28/01/2025

Call for Submissions for Spring 2025: “Rebuilding Year.” Pitches due Feb. 10! Link to full call in bio.

After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild. 

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly writing on rest, reorientation, and Rettung. Topics might include: tanking, resting your starters, grassroots organizing, Syria, the future of Gaza, disaster recovery, mutual aid, collective projects, the ground game, strategy vs. tactics, media cycles, buying time, incremental gains, post-revolutionary fervor, obstructionism, left-wing melancholia, messages in bottles, the Vasa, flotsam and jetsam, quiet quitting, reinvention, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Donne’s “The Storm,” radical roots, building blocks, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

06/12/2024

This holiday party season, Dilettante Army and PRAKSIS: Presents () are pleased to present a joint special issue, “Party as Form.”

“Party” is an emulsion of feelings whipped up in the air between bodies in motion: intoxicating (even if technically sober), disorderly, fun. Time moves slower in revelry, or seems to pass in a moment of exaltation. But when a group of individuals fails to emulsify, hell is once again other people. The party as a one-night event is a microcosm of what we risk in coming together in community, in movements or political parties. Walking into a party means committing yourself to be a part of a project that exceeds you.

This issue comes out of the 2024 “Party as Form” residency at , which considered parties as an artistic medium. It is jointly edited by PRAKSIS, Dilettante Army, and guest editor Matilda Moors. Glamorous party images (tempting, intimate, with a hint of risk) by Jen Monroe.

At Dilettante Army—

• Shannon Stratton historicizes “Party as Form” through the hospitality work of arts administrators
• Sara Clugage, Matilda Moors, and Maike Statz stake a claim for shifting relationality in the architecture of vampire clubs , , and
• A translated excerpt from Leo Felipe’s
“A Universal History of the Afterparty” calls up Brazil’s vibrant, ketamine-soaked heterotopias
• Kelly Lloyd presents a new scientific study on holi-delay, “a condition where people only get excited about holidays after they happen”
• Banu Çiçek Tülü’s video essay explores the marked and unmarked spaces of Kına gecesi (henna night)

At PRAKSIS: Presents—

• McKenzie Wark deserts the world for the rave, for enlustment and xeno-euphoria
• Brandon LaBelle on the party as the wrecked body, an impossible community, and erotic knowledge
• Lexie Owen lives the grammatical rhythms of a Year in Party City, where parties serve as punctuation
• Tor Lukasik-Foss with four party scenarios: a steam jacket agitated kettle, a sequence of t-shirts, a coalescing storm, and a wellness app

17/06/2024

A call to poets and the poetry-affiliated! Submissions are open for our Fall 2024 issue, “Critical Constellations.”

A critical constellation is a made-up term for an artistic phenomenon that’s happening all the time: poets talking to each other intimately and specifically about each other’s works outside of the public eye. These constellations form between living poets, but they also form between the living and the dead and even versions of the same person (à la “Borges and I”). They are letters to young poets and words in air. They are scribblings on submissions passed back across a workshop table that sometimes—often—grow into lifelong friendships.

If we are lucky, we receive these constellations through edited correspondences, but these treatments are reserved only for those luminaries whose works were already widely celebrated. Instead, what we see of these constellations are usually made for the market: through authors’ blurbs or judges’ citations and forewords that endorse a winner’s manuscript.

A poet may win a manuscript contest. Yet, along with publication, the real prize is a close reader who, perhaps, may have given their work a chance to be understood. But what if those readers are already among us? Who have we already won? More importantly, who already might understand, whether they like it or not?

Critical Constellations is guest edited by .docx. Pitches and submissions are due July 1. You can find the full call through the link in our profile.

Image: Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (National Book Company, 1898).

01/06/2024

You might think I’m crazy but I’m serious: Janet Jackson’s “The Pleasure Principle” is really about the reality principle. New podcast from the brilliant with DA editor Rebecca Ariel Porte!

• 🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 We’re joined by the brilliant Rebecca Ariel Porte to tackle a much-asked question: what’s the deal with the pleasure principle, and the reality principle too? We talk paradises lost, utopias, fantasies, daydreams, and much more!

06/07/2023

Our next issue will define the guide! (Against figures like the genius, magician, or guru.) Please tell us your expert ideas about mastery, thank you so much. 🙋

Posted • Submissions are open for our Fall 2023 issue, 'Definitive Guide"! Pitches are due July 20.

What defines a definitive guide? A definitive guide is correct and complete, demonstrating full comprehension and practical mastery. Guides are texts and people that disseminate knowledge: manuals, how-tos, and tour guides. A guide is only definitive, however, for a moment in time. Technology and fashion change, leaving experts on things like lace bonnets or JavaScript ES1 in the rubble of history. Any guide can fail. Every guide becomes obsolete.

Dilettante Army’s Fall 2023 issue, Definitive Guide, will examine the figure of the guide as a person or a text. We aim to unpack the “how-to’s” of a range of different subjects, from “low-skilled” work to esoteric career specialities to navigating different social milieus. What are the politics of the guide? What makes it timely?

Prompts might include: Baedeker’s Guides, Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker, YouTube tutorials, forgotten skills, docents, local tour guides, Bob Vila, Bob Ross, bildungsroman, Nate Silver, What Not to Wear, Michelin stars, forestry, IKEA instructions, novels of manners, Henry James, Anarchist’s Cookbook, reading group discussion guides, The Pickup Artist, and craft demonstrations.

Link to full call for submissions in our bio!

Image: Bob Ross, looking toward the camera, holds a palette in front of a painting in progress of a tree. Image courtesy of The Best of The Joy Painting with Bob Ross/PBS.

27/01/2023

Today, Dilettante Army is remembering DA co-founder Jeremy Shedd. Jeremy was an inspired artist, a true friend, and a quipster of the highest order. May his memory live on, and his work continue to resonate.

In late December of 2022 Dilettante Army co-founder Jeremy Shedd passed away. He the digital artist behind Glass Crayons.

24/01/2023

Open call for our Spring 2023 issue, "Wifey"!

We want your kinmaking, your marriage plots, your romance novels, your most despairing Foucauldian analyses of state-legitimized partnerships. 💍

Pitches due Jan. 31!

Call for Submissions for Dilettante Army’s Spring 2023 issue, “Wifey.”