Favourite Political Novels

Someone on social media asked for people's favourite political novels (their recommendation was Comrade Papa by GauZ, which I now need to read.) It got me thinking, and I came up with this list (since, as everyone knows, I really do love lists):

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 – Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien
Diego Garcia – Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
American Abductions – Mauro Javier Cárdenas
ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines – Sesshu Foster & Arturo Ernesto Romo
I Hotel – Karen Tei Yamashita
M Archive – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History – Diana Block
The Unseen – Nanni Balestrini (translated by Liz Heron)
The Vanquished – César Andreu Iglesias (translated by Sidney W. Mintz)
Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow – Michiko Ishimure (translated by Livia Monnet)
American War – Omar El Akkad



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Whistle Blower

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"There is a Whistle Blower that wanders with us, sleeps alongside us in the great outdoors. Perhaps we are here to protect them but, either way, I often fear for their life. The corporation they exposed to criticism would certainly like to see them dead. We, on the other hand, want them to continue living."

I’m currently serializing my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever. The above lines are from the fifth instalment.

Faithful Unbeliever is the final book of an in-progress trilogy in which all three books are loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.

All posts are free so there's no reason not to follow (and receive a new installment in your inbox every two weeks.) You can do so here.



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Belatedly...

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I have a book title I’ve been thinking about for many years for a book I will probably never write (an in joke for people who knew about me in the eighties or nineties): Belatedly Announcing that Death Waits has Changed his Name to Jacob Wren


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Excerpt from Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (to end the year)

This is a passage from my book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim that a few different people have posted online over the past year. From this I gather it might be something of a reader favourite. So, to end the year, I thought I’d post it as well. (Also, if you don't already know, this book got some really nice reviews.)


*

I remember how at this moment we both stopped. We had come to a plateau and the view was particularly stunning. From here you could look over the entire forest. Within the forest there had been a great deal of fighting. And you could even spot a few craters where stray bombs had felled the trees. But the forest was still thick, those trees would grow back, and listening to the silence on the tape crackle with background wildlife I remembered us standing side by side, taking in the landscape as fully as possible. It would be nice to be back there now.

—What do you think about on your walks?

—I try not to think too much. Mostly just take in my surroundings. To see every tree and pebble and insect. To feel how it all interrelates. How all these things need each other and none of them actually need us. How all of it would thrive so much more fully if we were gone.

—That sounds almost fatalist. Or nihilist.

—I don’t think so. There is a kind of humility I find so important. Knowing human beings aren’t actually the centre of anything. We’ve done considerable damage thinking we’re the centre of the world.

—Why is that damaging?

—Because when you’re the centre of the world, you can do whatever you want. The world revolves around you. And we’re not the centre of anything. We’re just full of ourselves.

As we stood there quietly inhaling the view, I tried to have some thoughts about the landscape that spread out in front of us. There was a forest and a river. At least, when you looked in this direction there was a forest and a river. I knew if we snaked our way around to the other side of the mountain the view would be rocks and hills and ridges. Dirt and sand. I didn’t know enough about geology to hazard a guess as to why one side was so lush and green and the other was not. I was about to ask a question along these lines when my thoughts were interrupted.

—I don’t know if I want this on the record. But since you’re recording me anyway, I guess I won’t object.

—If you like I can stop recording.

—No, it’s all right. Maybe it’s good that you have a record of what I’m about to say.

There is a long pause. So long that I wonder if the tape recorder had stopped working, but the background sounds of the mountain assure me the tape is still rolling.

—What is it you want to say?

—What I want to say is that I simply don’t like the fact that you’re here. It doesn’t sit well with me.

—I’m sorry to hear that.

I remember the tension in my body as I braced myself for whatever she was about to say. Whatever it was, I was sure there would be a great deal of truth to it, that I would largely agree with her arguments. I was there to learn, and unfortunately that also included learning more of the reasons why I should have never ended up there in the first place.

—You’re going to write about us, but you’re never going to get it right. I can feel that just from the way you are in the world. But that’s not it, that’s not quite what I mean. Whatever you write might not do us much good, but from what I can tell, you’re sincere enough, so it probably also won’t do much harm. It’s really something else, I’m not even sure I can fully articulate it.

—I’m listening. Don’t worry, I can take it.

—I’m definitely not worried about hurting your feelings.

—Why not?

—Any of us here, all of us, we might be killed any day now, any minute. Our lives are what matters. In this context your feelings definitely don’t matter.

—The criticism I’ve already received is that I’m only a tourist here, I have no real commitment to this place. I’m not invested enough.

—That’s certainly true.

—But that’s not what you’re trying to tell me. You want to say something else.

—You want to learn from us but you can’t because it’s always going to be about you. I don’t know why exactly. And I don’t even want to know why. But that’s the way that I see it. That’s what I see.

—You’re probably right. So what I should do is leave?

—Yes, you should leave.

But of course I didn’t leave right away. I think that mountainside conversation was maybe five or six weeks before I went out on my first patrol, which as we now know resulted in my capture and interrogation. And I remember how I spent those five or six weeks thinking she was right, that I should leave now. That now was really the time to go—what was I waiting for? I often say that when I don’t know what to do I become paralyzed, but here was a situation where even when I did know what to do I found myself paralyzed. I knew I couldn’t stay but neither could I get myself to start leaving. It went on like that for week after week after week. The tape continued.

—I understand what you’re saying.

—That’s the thing. You understand. You can leave. But do you also understand that I can’t?

—You can’t leave because this is your home. This is your home and you have to stay here and fight for it?

—You really have a romantic idea of us, don’t you?

—I’m sorry. Tell me. Why can’t you leave?

—I can’t leave because I have no money. No passport. No way to get anywhere. No other country that would take me in.

—But do you want to leave?

—I want the freedom you take for granted. All the freedoms. The freedom to walk up this mountain and know it’s my home, to know it will survive, and also the freedom to tomorrow be on a tropical beach and forget this war for as long as I choose, until I recover, until I’m ready to come back to it. It’s not that I would actually get on a plane and go anywhere. Perhaps quietly walking up this mountain once a week is enough for me. But why can’t I have that freedom? Just to know it’s possible, just to know that I can. And then it sounds like this is about me, or about you, but it has nothing to do with me or you. Some people can go wherever they want, and others can’t, and it’s the worst bullshit I’ve ever heard. Maybe that’s really what I’m getting at. Some people can go wherever they want, meaning you can also pick up and come here, no one will stop you, we even welcome you with open arms. Because we’re not stupid. We also know you have access that we don’t so easily have. More of a voice on the world stage. But what we have to say, what we’re actually living, is so clearly more important than anything you will ever write. And it fucking sucks that you have more of a voice than us. It’s bullshit and it fucking sucks, but that’s the way the world is, for now at least, and therefore the only thing me telling you all this actually does is give me a chance to vent and complain.

I remember the feeling of standing there on the mountainside, looking over the endless expanse of forest, her voice as she told me: “You’re going to write about us but you’re never going to get it right.” And once again it makes me realize how never in my life as a writer have I genuinely tried to get anything “right,” if getting it right means an accurate portrayal of reality, or even if it means providing access to something we might call truth or wisdom. In fact, it now seems to me, I have attempted to do almost the opposite, a search for how to “get it wrong” as evocatively as possible. Or to fully engage in the struggle between getting it right and getting it wrong. Of course, I’m always considering ethics, so I would never want to be ethically wrong, or to harm anyone with my words, but nonetheless there is the desire to be artistically off-kilter in ways that create the possibility of seeing things anew. To fully admit that I don’t know. But now I’m not so sure. Rethinking all such assumptions might be one of the many ways I find myself trying to change.



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Meet The Bug

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I just discovered the music of Meet The Bug and now want everyone else to discover it too: meetthebug.bandcamp.com


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still be structurally entangled

These Goodreads reviews of my book - that give me a sense some readers fully get what I'm working on - feel more and more helpful the longer I continue to be a writer. "What it means to care, to oppose, and still be structurally entangled in the systems you’re resisting."

Two long passages from David Velasco's How Gaza Broke the Art World

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Two long passages from How Gaza Broke the Art World by David Velasco:


*


On the day that I am fired, I am offered a choice. It’s a little before noon on 26 October when I meet with Jay Penske, the youthful CEO of Penske Media. We are at the company’s New York headquarters, an airless sepulchre of corporate banality in a prewar office building on Fifth Avenue. Jay is friendly as we speak, a practised inquisitor. “You have good friends,” he says with some amusement, referring to a letter, composed by the filmmaker Laura Poitras and signed by some big names, petitioning to keep me on board.

He asks me to walk him through my decision, which I do, carefully. I tell him that I felt, and still feel, that the magazine needed to respond to the moment. I had consulted the editorial staff and had reached out to contributors. No one felt they had the authority to write about 7 October and its aftermath. I had watched the agile responses of several magazines that I trusted, and the clumsy nonresponses of nearly every other publication. I contemplated various savvy “art world” takes, all of which seemed specious. In Paris, one of our contributors brought the letter to my attention, and I told them we would publish it, which, as editor-in-chief, is literally my prerogative. I did this swiftly, in consultation with the web team and our international reviews editor, who were entirely on board.

Jay asks me why I signed the letter, and I explain that we’re not a newspaper, but a leftist art publication. People should know where we stand on genocide, and why not? What kind of interest are we protecting? He tells me about the tricky situation the publishers are in. We’ve all been spammed with threatening calls and emails, many from people we’ve never heard of. (“The artists and other persons whose names appear as signatories and supporters of this shameless letter have no soul in their hearts,” preaches Gil Brandes from Tel Aviv.) The art dealer Marianne Boesky writes a letter: “This is appalling to me as a Jew and I need Artforum to remove all Boesky ads from Artforum’s platforms immediately.” I am told that the Chanel Culture Fund has demanded that we stop the presses in order to pull their ad from our November issue. (We didn’t comply.) The gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan has written a rebuttal, which I agree to publish online because it seems worth having a public record of the surreal moral universe it represents.

I am aware that much of the sentiment is divided by class: the letters’ signatories are mostly artists, the letters’ detractors are mostly their dealers and collectors. This is not a new rift in the art world, but Palestine seems to have deepened it beyond repair. Jay tells me that the magazine’s publishers are putting together a statement, and he asks me to write something describing my missteps, something I could post on Artforum’s website and to my personal Instagram. “And if I say no?” I ask. “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” he tells me.

I walk downtown to clear my head. What can I say? I don’t like the barely veiled threat, and I’m not sorry. Two weeks earlier, I cringed watching Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, post an apology for an Instagram story stating that Israel cutting off Gazans’ access to water and power “is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life”. To me it’s simple: my job is to position the magazine correctly in the current of history. We have done the right thing.

My phone rings. It’s Jay. He sounds panicked. “Someone has tipped off The New York Times,” he says. “We need to accelerate your statement.”

“I can’t produce something on this timeline,” I reply.

“I’m very disappointed to hear that,” he says. “I had really hoped this would work out.” He hangs up.

A colleague at the magazine calls next. “Are you really going to throw everything away?” he asks. “Over this?”

“I’m not the one doing the throwing,” I say.

“The letter wasn’t even a success,” he says. “Look, it’s divided the art world.”

“I think we have different ideas of success.”


*


The past two years have given the lie to any wisdom that the art world constitutes the progressive avant-garde. I can count acts of bravery from less-visible artists, but a fog of silence continues to dominate the field: few expressions of solidarity forthcoming from institutions, and too few artists willing to speak out via social media, much less their own work. What do we make of this depressing amalgam of fear and apathy? How many will it take to break the art world’s attitude of mute acquiescence?

I am struck by the fact that major celebrities seem more likely than major contemporary artists to publicly express support for the Palestinian cause. The musician Lorde lights the stage at Madison Square Garden in red, white and green. The actress Jennifer Lawrence tells reporters: “What’s happening is no less than a genocide and it’s unacceptable”. Joaquin Phoenix, Olivia Coleman and thousands more sign a boycott of Israeli film groups “implicated in genocide”. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem make regular statements, and Hannah Einbinder shouts “Free Palestine” as she accepts her Emmy. These are not simply symbolic gestures, but meaningful demonstrations of solidarity.

“The more of us there are, the more of us there are,” Nan said at the end of her speech. She understands that we pierce repression with a surplus of reparative and disruptive actions. More voices, more collective, louder, riskier. She understands that we make change not through holding ideologically correct or coherent beliefs, but through an uneven accretion of strategic and local decisions. Not everyone has to make the same choices. Certainly not everyone has to agree. But we all have to act.

I have spent the past two years on unofficial hiatus from the official art world. Its ceremonial sound and fury feel remote to me. Speculation has been hollowing art out for decades, and we might simply have passed a threshold where price is the only measure of worth. But I’m alert enough to know that the era of unbridled conspicuous consumption might be ending. The proverbial bubble has burst. Collectors are disposing of their minions and concierges. Galleries are closing, or having less lavish parties. Artists at every level are feeling the burn. It’s only appropriate, now that the uneasy truce between the market and its playthings has been scuttled. Brute reality tore the mast from the boat.

None of this is “complicated”, as the boilerplate from strategic wafflers would have you believe. As I write this, dim leaders celebrate the supposed end to this “war”. Those who couldn’t admit to a genocide now begin to speak of it in the past tense. We’re roughly 11 weeks into a supposed ceasefire, which Israel breaks daily with routine barbarism. As I write this, IDF soldiers continue their enduring project of annexation and extermination in the West Bank. A politics of wilful ignorance and escalating stupidity keeps the killing machines going. The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation. It’s increasingly hard to care about the fate of an art world narcotised by money and self-regard. We had a chance to at least try and make a difference. We had a chance to not sell ourselves out. We had a chance, and we blew it. This did not end well, and still we can choose to begin again, tilting – collectively, contingently – toward the pitch of liberation.



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Floppy Haircut

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"There was New Romantic, who spent most of each dream explaining various genres of music, and the soundtrack of each dream would shift to correspond, like an in-progress personalized mixed tape. Other names considered: Adam Anti, Fade to Grey, Bron Area and Floppy Haircut."

I’m currently serializing my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. The above lines are from the fourth instalment.

All posts are free so there's no reason not to follow (and receive a new installment in your inbox every two weeks.) You can do so here.



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end of year lists

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So nice to see my book on these end of year lists from Michael DeForge and Jesse Eckerlin.

Made even nicer by the fact that Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell was also at the top of my favourite books list from this past year.

addictive entertainment

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There’s been a lot of talk about whether AI can make art, and I think this is beside the point. The people dumping in money to create AI don’t care about art. The question is whether AI can make cheap, addictive entertainment. And, it seems to me, there’s evidence that AI is very good at making things addictive.


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