Love Dog
Penny-Ante Editions, 2013
Buy on Amazon or Ebay
In 2011, Masha Tupitsyn published LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter. LACONIA experimented with new modes of writing and criticism, updating traditional literary forms and practices like the aphorism and the fragment. Re-imagining the wound-and-quest story, the love narrative, and the female subject in love in the digital age, Love Dog, published in 2013 (along with its addendum, Like Someone in Love that same year), is the second installment in Masha Tupitsyn’s trilogy of immaterial writing. Written as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Mourning Diary—a couple in Tupitsyn’s mind—Love Dog is an art book that is part love manifesto, part philosophical notebook, part digital liturgy. In 2015, the trilogy culminated with the 24-hour film, Love Sounds, an audio history of love in English-speaking cinema.
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Praise for Love Dog
"[Love Dog] reads like a reboot of Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, but instead of Goethe, Masha Tupitsyn uses the dense range of twentieth-century popular culture for part of its allegorical infrastructure…Love Dog is not only a gorgeous conceptual work on the self we construct virtually and serially, but also an important work on feminism and visual culture."
—Carmen Giménez Smith, BOMB
"MASHA TUPITSYN’S Love Dog, a book of film criticism, started out as a Tumblr, and was originally written publicly and in real time. Like a lot of good blogs, Tupitsyn’s entries sometimes veer into the diaristic, making reference to her life and personal history, and this may be why at their best, her observations about film crystalize into moments of disarming emotional lucidity…Reading this kind of work can feel instructive and also a little bit incriminating, like seeing someone naked by accident. Like all good criticism, Tupitsyn’s takes the esoteric or ineffable elements in art and renders them obvious, instinctive. What is so envy-making about her writing is that she does this with such graciousness that she makes it look easy. Love Dog reminded me of what the best critical writing can do for a reader, when she is willing to abandon her presumptions. It made me want to pay better attention.
—Moira Donegan, n+1
"Love Dog steers clear of any fairy-tale-like clichés about love and the romantic. True to her feminist vision, Tupitsyn challenges the constructs of masculinity and femininity in love, the roles expected to be performed by each gender respectively... Love Dog is a call to the arms of love. Love as ethics. Love as a way of being in the world."
—Bookslut
"Love Dog feels like (one version of) what a book should be right now—a print text that’s constantly in conversation with other texts and people and mediums. Masha Tupitsyn is both a serious intellectual and a passionate romantic; a critic who knows that criticism is a form of radical love. Ever serious but never dry, she fuses pop-culture critique, philosophy, and personal essay, and flits between different schools of feminist thought to ultimately offer a syncretistic, idiosyncratic feminism that feels hard won and very much her own."
—Bitch Magazine
-Wavelength: The Love Dog Tribute by Rebekah Weikel