Strangle Your Idols
Postscript No. 7 | Will Diana on lunar nightmares, writing, faraway lands, and Covid psychosis
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Will Diana and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is supplement to Will’s essay “Experience is Psychosis,” a tale of Covid chaos, epiphany, and isolation on the University of Virginia’s diseased campus.
Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.
Postscript, our author interviews, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions.
Below we examine the origin and future of the author’s writing, the shadow world of Covid in 2020, Will’s fantasies of trekking across the globe, and his recurring dream about the moon of Ganymede.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
TESSA Tell us about your demonic Covid camera roll.
WILL We were all just pent up, and we really wanted to socialize, but it was impossible. My band of friends and I would be in massive group chats, just creating the most absurd, almost horrifying images. And we did this for a while. The ones that were really scary, that I sent you guys, called “selfie art,” we would spend hours editing these selfies and turning them into basically Francis Bacon portraits, making these monstrosities. We were all pent up and angsty, turning selfies into actual monstrous images.
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