Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels):
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The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”
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Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.
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Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.
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Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.
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Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.
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To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.
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May 23, 2023
A project in continuum with The Fall
I have so much to say about this record that I don’t even know where to begin.
Made by members of The Fall who, over the years, Mark E. Smith fired or who quite due to his erratic and abusive behavior. Made by many of the musical architects of the classic Fall sound. And now that Mark E. Smith is gone they come together and make a record in continuum with the work of The Fall that’s almost as good as any Fall record and, for this reason, in some ways all that much better.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Living well is the best revenge.
How to take past resentments and turn them into gold. How to have a final, unexpected fourth act that turns everything on its head.
For some reason listening to this record gives me some small hope for my artistic future. (Even though I’m probably Mark E. Smith in this story, so the hope comes after I die.)
https://houseofall.bandcamp.com/album/house-of-all
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May 13, 2023
Three videos from The Air Contains Honey
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
The Air Contains Honey - Sexuality
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
The Air Contains Honey - Everything
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey - Best Moments
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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May 11, 2023
Diachroneity Books: "What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre."
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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May 6, 2023
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:
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I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
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There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
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Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
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Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
*
I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
*
There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
*
Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
*
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
April 17, 2023
Six sentences concerning art and jealousy
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Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.
Artists should have honest discussions about ambition (and about money.)
Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.
The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.
The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity.
There are no individual solutions to collective problems.
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Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.
Artists should have honest discussions about ambition (and about money.)
Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.
The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.
The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity.
There are no individual solutions to collective problems.
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April 2, 2023
My apartment is just piles of books
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The video recording of My apartment is just piles of books was online only until April 30th, 2023 and therefore is no longer available.
"In this online performance, Jacob Wren reflects on the fact that he used to travel constantly for art and yet during the pandemic spent more time in his apartment than ever before. And the travel has not yet resumed. Through a short tour of his bookshelf, questions are raised about what it means to make art when you find yourself no longer in constant motion."
However, you can still watch the conversation between Anyse Ducharme and Jacob Wren as part of the Virtual Encounters series: https://vimeo.com/815412881
Presented by LOMAA.
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The video recording of My apartment is just piles of books was online only until April 30th, 2023 and therefore is no longer available.
"In this online performance, Jacob Wren reflects on the fact that he used to travel constantly for art and yet during the pandemic spent more time in his apartment than ever before. And the travel has not yet resumed. Through a short tour of his bookshelf, questions are raised about what it means to make art when you find yourself no longer in constant motion."
However, you can still watch the conversation between Anyse Ducharme and Jacob Wren as part of the Virtual Encounters series: https://vimeo.com/815412881
Presented by LOMAA.
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March 29, 2023
99,430 words
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When you finish a first draft of a book, do a word count, and learn that the manuscript is 99,430 words long.
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When you finish a first draft of a book, do a word count, and learn that the manuscript is 99,430 words long.
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March 17, 2023
How many times have I gone online and posted a paragraph entitled “possible opening for a new novel?”
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How many times have I gone online and posted a paragraph entitled “possible opening for a new novel?” That feeling of starting something new, starting over. The feeling or idea that it’s possible to start from scratch, a feeling most easily obtained in the land of fiction. The fiction that it’s possible to start again. Everything comes from somewhere, nothing is pure invention. The beginning of a new work is the beginning of a new day. And yesterday was also once a new day. Wondering if I should leave but no idea where to go.
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How many times have I gone online and posted a paragraph entitled “possible opening for a new novel?” That feeling of starting something new, starting over. The feeling or idea that it’s possible to start from scratch, a feeling most easily obtained in the land of fiction. The fiction that it’s possible to start again. Everything comes from somewhere, nothing is pure invention. The beginning of a new work is the beginning of a new day. And yesterday was also once a new day. Wondering if I should leave but no idea where to go.
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March 15, 2023
Can an art of collective struggle really be made by an individual artist?
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Can an art of collective struggle really be made by an individual artist? My secret, if I have one, is that I honestly hate being alive. What is your secret? What is the secret of some larger collectivity? A secret shared by everyone, a secret that everyone can work toward together? But of course not exactly everyone, just those within a certain specific circle of solidarity. What secret might be large enough to hold this solidarity together? My secret, if I have one, is that I can endlessly write about how miserable I am, but most often choose not to. Some other people are as miserable but, for the most part, most other people don’t seem to be. Illusions.
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Can an art of collective struggle really be made by an individual artist? My secret, if I have one, is that I honestly hate being alive. What is your secret? What is the secret of some larger collectivity? A secret shared by everyone, a secret that everyone can work toward together? But of course not exactly everyone, just those within a certain specific circle of solidarity. What secret might be large enough to hold this solidarity together? My secret, if I have one, is that I can endlessly write about how miserable I am, but most often choose not to. Some other people are as miserable but, for the most part, most other people don’t seem to be. Illusions.
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