Laura Frost

A revealing study of the sensual tensions powering the period's formal and ideological innovations.

Modernism and Its Discontents

The Problem with Pleasure

How long can you stay friends with the person who keeps breaking your heart? Lacey Roberts is in love with her best friend, Gavin Malloy - the tattooed heartbreaker who refuses to settle down. Their friendship is intense, intimate, and everything she's ever wanted... except it isn't love. While Gavin chases other girls, Lacey keeps her feelings locked away, too afraid to risk what they already have, hoping one day he'll see what's been right in front of him. But every time his gaze follows someone else, her heart fractures a little more. Is it time to let go of the boy she loves? Or will Gavin finally realize that everything he's ever needed has been right beside him all along?

The Friend Zone

Garth Greenwell

Marie Hicks

Dominic Pettman

Natasha Lennard

David Parisi

Logic Magazine

Tilly Grove

Marta Figlerowicz

Cameron Glover

Logic Magazine's Sex issue explores technology and sexuality. How are people using new tools to fulfill, expand, or transform their sexuality? Is technology liberating users to pursue their true desires? Creating new pleasures, pressures? What even is sex?

Logic Magazine Issue #2

Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire. Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

Laura Frost

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