Perverse Curating

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Perverse curating / rainbow or darkness / dressing up and acting normal / boring lecture on a fascinating topic / failures come alive / the meta-questions play free bird / I’m a failure here myself / bestseller on the topic of spectacular sexual failure / guitar solos of spectacular width and brevity / the meta-questions play startled stallion / how to photograph inedible food attractively so that people will actually want to eat it / mansions emptied for foreclosure / like a mirror carried along a road / the economy of unwanted attentions / boredom is different nowadays, maybe we’re excessively unbored / experiments in community theater / the something that already exists / over-budget for a video of a video of hell / the economy of unwanted attentions / a few honest paragraphs about each of the performances I have been involved in over the last fifteen years / visual art can now be anything, but how often does anything become something? / no double life for the weekend / momus versus jay-z / the great discovery of the 21st century is that what is local is also most sophisticated / the international artist is a capitalist fantasy / Monsanto, alternative energies and depression / sickly prima donna / it must be strange to be that much of a rock star without actually being a rock star / when attitudes become farms / whipping a disco ball / we come from Montreal, please invite us somewhere warm in february / the words in a sentence / the mice know the device / sickly prima donna, powerless ideologue / famous hostile takeovers / propaganda still works, now more than ever / narrative for the point of narrative plus lesbian cannibals / on not quite fitting in / the year of barely traveling / when bands get sick of performing the same songs over and over / brazil, russia, india, china and south africa / the purgatory between success and failure / the secret world of wrestling choreographers / the absolute amateurs of all time playing in the World Series / posthumous fame / when the cover version sounds better than the original / brand loyalty is the heart and soul of capitalism / the way toys train us to be consumers / aliens and anorexia by chris kraus / no real success is possible within the ephemeral world of performance / soap in the fountain / the resistance of being to purity / neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital / monsanto is the Lysenko of neoliberalism / fugitive cannibal porn star arrested in Berlin internet café looking at news stories about himself / awkwardness is collaborative / a sigh can become a novel / ingenious dilettantes / how to glamorously navigate a hostile world / my work is not for the overly literal / the process of editing by consensus can sometimes lead to bias, inconsistency or homogenization of content / artists have little talent for solidarity / art versus sport / only in Canada could we have a dictator with so little charisma / when our contentiously paid taxes are used to pay for wars / suicides outpacing war deaths for troops / you can’t turn your fans into friends / I don’t like writing when I know what’s going to happen next / the latest in anti-terrorist style / both nothing, and slightly better than nothing / would there be pornography if masturbation didn’t exist? / back when hip hop was strictly an upper class affair / monopolies are bad for art / your musical idols can barely make a living from the music you idolize / encores are out of fashion / in the 1890s most of America had never heard of chocolate / some studies show candy is actively good for you / a sentence comprised of many words / the friendly misanthropist / I have an overwhelming feeling of career failure, but then again, what did I expect? what might feel like actual success? / defeating death because they ask so little of life / the demand for free education / politics, politics, politics, art and politics / exceptional exceptionalism / building a culture of no compromise / stop chasing success, there will always be someone more successful than you / there is nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one / panel discussions don’t work / my whole life I’ve dreamt of having a coat that would repel the rain / when the video ruins the song / the more untenable one’s position, the more tenaciously one clings to it / I still think killing billionaires is a good revolutionary strategy, if you manage to kill enough something would eventually change / the only absolutes are uncertain absolutes / the only sincere reasons for action are personal / the accidental quality of reality / tenured poetry professors who want to kill cops / when I am reading the newspaper I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind / personal, warm, alive to itself, indifferent to effect or appreciation, vividly unreal / I stopped listening to depressing music, started listening to joyous music, hoping for less depression and more joy / people who freely share their opinions as if their opinions were both interesting and important / the art of the future is not connoisseurship, but labour itself transfigured / mediocre cowards / every rule has a thousand exceptions / they found themselves questioning ambiguity and its presumed neutrality in their work / a life of only lies / in my dream last night, the last thing I remember saying just before I woke up was: ‘alain badiou says the most nihilistic song is all you need is love’ / parents are punching bags, children are tyrants / lepers are leopards, perverts are panthers / of all the things anyone has ever said to me about being an artist, perhaps what made me most angry: “I’ve made my cage, now let me fly in it” / solidarity is hard / each in a different way, life turns us into bad actors / evil rich people caught in moments of fake compassion / the more people there are in the world, the more easily they can be exploited / soccer players instructed to play up their injuries for the camera / five blind men feeling an envelope / I have such an overwhelming feeling of failure, but from your perspective I’m probably doing alright / artificial respiration by ricardo piglia / the people holding the words can’t see the entire sentence / I close the windows when it is about to rain, thinking this makes me eccentric, only later realizing it is in fact completely normal / do not blame poetry for the crimes of bad poets / if you’re sincere, you’re abject / I feel sad that they’re alive, so maybe I’ll feel sad when they die as well / ayn rand was an atheist, but not to the religious free-marketers who today often claim her / never underestimate the brutality of fascists / conversations that give the stubborn the feeling that changing one’s mind remains possible / a good carpet will retain its color for a century / I was thinking of calling my new book ‘failure, failure and more failure’ but, upon further reflection, have realized that people are more interested in books with a positive title / because we use death to make life worse / tactical pretension / biodegradable plastic bags / I fear my stubbornness is not always in my own best interest / I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment / there is no such thing as absolute failure / has anyone done a fully functional urinal in a museum context, one that you can actually pee into / would it be possible to write a novel about ayn rand that would be read by her followers and, over the course of three hundred pages, gradually undermine their core assumptions / sleeping around, creeping around / the devil is insecure / anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can happen / feelings / elections solve nothing / solutions aren’t satisfying / a book is a slow, unavoidable catastrophe / I made my first performance in 1990, published my first book in 1992 / for the instrumental parts, I learned how to time it so I could drink an entire beer before the vocals came in again / the transformation by juliana spahr / I’m not above a little honest groveling when necessary / while still in art school, all artists should take mandatory courses in humility / the idea that we know art is in many ways fundamentally reactionary and conservative but still want to believe that it is radical and revolutionary and within the space of this paradox there is room for much to happen / when you know exactly how the magician does every aspect of the trick, but somehow it seems like magic anyways / the crypto-fascism of everyday life, the micro-politics of desire / could there be a term for some very extreme form of passive-aggressive behavior, something like: passive-psychotic / writing can be more than good / whisky drunk from a series of inappropriate glasses / when they write the history of the early 21st century, it will be written: they were all really tired / the novelty act of fact / what I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart / hip hop and weak thought / I think those films are propaganda for fear and propaganda for a very violent view of human nature / sometimes memories can feel almost like dreams / you are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation / self is a mutable currency / the most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth / every lie creates a world in which it is true / in business, the most profitable situation is often pure monopoly / a place where actions have only unexamined consequences / the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor / poetry only changes if we refuse it, just as the world is only changed by those who refuse it / the children are the children of the children / republicans want less government for the same reason criminals want less cops / a barely truthful story / where there is no desire there can’t be politics either / startled stallions, discrete divorces / as the flames closed in on him he started to sing ‘life has two doors’ / the manuscript found in saragossa by jan potocki was written between 1805 and 1815 (and feels more contemporary to me than most books written today) / literature stays alive by expanding into non-literature / everybody go disco from moscow to san francisco / teach me to like the things I don’t like and to not like the things I do / a staircase that did not ascend or descend but lay sideways on the floor / to live in mediocre times, to be born in mediocre times / I convinced myself I was dying and lived out the rest of my days accordingly / my blood on your hands / can a person whose feelings are so many and so lovely be at the same time so unfeeling / the nonfiction novel / is it sexist when I feel attracted to women on the subway, women I will most likely never meet or see again / a monotonous male reality, which seems just sort of staid and old, tapped out / there’s probably nothing more moving in a man’s life than the accidental discovery of his own perversion / middle aged in the middle ages / you should try a real job one day and see its affect on your writing / we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers / do you believe, or fear, that the world is a mirage or hoax / arrest of a middle aged white man wearing a balaclava and pajamas / complaining is one of life’s great pleasures / I have the feeling that affects don’t exist, that affects are just emotions viewed through the distorting lens of critical distance / like wanting to have wild sex right after someone dies / an extreme and sometimes uncomfortable tenderness / one potential fantasy among many / the perfect revenge will be if someone is still reading our books long after all of the mediocre, but currently much more popular, writers are forgotten / we know the problem but what is the solution / the only thing that works is persistence / strange gratitude / you reach a point where you have to start making good decisions or you die / writers without publishers / how much of this is perverse and how much only negative / altruistic lies versus selfish lies / the neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it / internet failure / the adventures and misadventures of maqroll by alvaro mutis / the bombs we plant in each other are ticking away / listening to music you don’t like as a cure for depression / a writer without a publisher is a desperate animal / betrayed by reality / the fact that air and water are still sometimes free is a deep pain in the hearts of capitalists everywhere / arguing about whether a world without horses could even exist / meaning to say I haven't read everything Kafka wrote, I instead said: I didn't write everything Kafka read / a statement that is difficult to argue with / police and people together against the regime / a writer is someone who spends a great deal of time trying to get others to read his or her books / american democracy is like one of those modern hotel rooms: you can turn on the air conditioning, or you can turn off the air conditioning, but you can’t open a window / sarcasm versus irony versus god / the subtlety and delicate brilliance of the questions you are currently asking / until I see everything clearly I want to hunt myself down / one of the most cowardly wars ever fought / I don’t enjoy success, it’s basically just another mild form of torture, like being born / everything more as an idea than a reality / this confusion of writing and thinking with the internet / construction sites are beautiful / writing books because you can’t stand children, yet still there’s this vain and futile desire to leave something behind / success without money / wood is the fire that has not yet learned to burn / the undeceived are mistaken / I didn't write everything Kafka read / curating failure / a mediocre documentary about the year I died / sentimentality is cruelty by other means / constantly worried that my output is too depressing / how many characters make up one page of a book / coptic cleric Zakaria Botros Henein / the way that anything popular gives a distorted view of the culture from which it emerges / strobe light epileptics / death of a failure / when you accuse the other of the precise thing you yourself are guilty of / improvisation is also composition / david antin meets spinal tap / the golden rule of activism is keep going / I can’t have you up in here diluting this quality experience / it has power because we allow it to / I think control freaks are the true improvisers / art school peacocks / anxiety in the age of the internet / they wouldn’t call themselves musicians or artists but they have ideas / people behave differently in different situations / progress is bunk / we obviously have been going fascist for awhile now, it appears / 2012 was the year of Frank Ocean / email triage / third factory by viktor shklovsky / I found this record but it will not play in my system / take your songs and make conceptual art from them / the cultivation of recreational bitterness / hysterically circling through a maze of false solutions / projection-based attack / hypocrisy-based attack / afraid of making money / the promise to never make art again / have human emotions been the same since the beginning of time or, in different ages, are there new emotions that arise alongside new structures of social organization and technological innovation / I’m depressed but at least I’m productive / cinema versus hollywood war propaganda / a love letter to the cinema of today / we wrote ‘no illuminati’ on the door because we thought they were trying to get in / if you were starting an army you would definitely not want me in: I’m frail, sickly and have no combat skills / I can’t even win at chess / if money is involved you admit to behaving differently, but maybe you don’t behave as differently as you think or secretly hope / for as long as I can remember I’ve sat in cafes to write / the radical potential of the unconscious is that it is impossible to completely know or predict / make sure no one jumps on the mattress as this will damage the springs / my love is eternal and my train leaves in fifteen minutes / the ambition-depression cocktail / my horse has more style and more class in its hoof than they do in their whole deal / the place you put your money makes a pretty clear indication of where your heart is / better false modesty than no modesty / there is something convincing about a complete liar / the body is a temple and temples must be desecrated / a) you exist, b) you don’t exist, c) you may or may not exist, d) all of the above / conceptual poetry is the new L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E poetry / there is no other poetry than real agency / having a cult following just means that not very many people like you, but those few like you a lot / frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power / I am often more excited by a rumor or an inspired viewer’s description of a piece, place, or event than I am by the thing itself / desire is undiluted by an object, romance is undisturbed by love and tragedy is distilled from humanity / it’s just he’s learned something about hooks since he wrote it, and he realizes now it doesn’t have too many / distraction is at war with politics, infinity is at war with the finite, and all roads lead to either moderation or collapse / feeling powerless is the most effective siphon / the great fire of london by jacques roubaud / not all artists are artists / radical betrayal: the moment in which one refuses to read the situation in the terms it sets out for itself and, through an act of treachery, reveals those terms to be self-perpetuating / spatial fix: the idea that capitalism gets bigger and badder every time it wriggles out of a crisis / there are many different ways to be honest / okrent's law: the pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true / ‘I’m lonely’ is rarely a good pick up line / survival of the most caring and most cared for / a tsunami of conflicting paradoxes / the work is full of bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent; it is also full of a struggle with bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent / historically, artists have not necessarily been the most astute political commentators; perhaps the mental agility required for making art and the mental agility required for useful political analysis are fundamentally at odds / how is it possible, how is it ethical, to feel such joy in a world constantly spiraling downwards into greater and greater catastrophe, greater and more excruciating comedy / what should I do with my violence / contemporary art that looks like contemporary art / and you know how closely cynicism is related to vulnerability / anti-capitalist spendthrift / selling out is hard to do / stop the glorification of busy / paranoia is the only religion left that’s still inspiring masterpieces / a syllabus against teaching / this is reductive, and perhaps even misguided, but it really got to me nonetheless / it all comes from a single place, which I can only call dissatisfaction / lepers are leprechauns, panthers are particularities / I like listening to the radio / I dream of wagering the rest of my fortune at a casino, I would bet on a single number, but I’m afraid, too afraid of winning / would it be possible to write a biography in which you also include all the things that didn’t happen / failure and charm / the biography would be entitled failure and charm / you have to over-produce to succeed / tomb of the unknown drone pilot / when something is clearly not better than nothing / when individuals pursue an unthinking identification with power and sentimental ideals, terror and catastrophe ensue / and we must remember the recommendation that the occupiers of the Sorbonne in May of 68 gave to the philosopher who had turned up to support their cause: Sartre, be brief / playful anger / open source control freak / after all, guilt and innocence are terms that tell nothing of evil / I’ve always thought of getting business cards printed that say: your guess is as good as mine / I never knew that Hanoi Rocks were from Finland / you are fakes and we are forgers / organized religion and its perpetually twisted relationship with morality and ethics / she feels all the writers in the world are chasing her, like an army, single-minded in their pursuit, their only goal to be published / I’m not there versus I’m still here / ghostly matters by avery f. gordon / maybe the first song you ever heard was the wrong one / lust is not art / counter-intuitive management techniques / a show to show that a show is not just a show / you can’t bear my already having said what you want to say / you cannot find peace by avoiding life / the demon of weaponry / sometimes a mid-life crisis is like a marathon that lasts a hundred years / radicality means taking the risk of being invisible, of not being seen at all, of being despised / red dots on student works / a vampire must believe in the truth of his miracle, he must believe in directors and subjects / I would think this is one of my friends playing a practical joke on me, except I don’t really have any friends like that / love is not a game / more social, more collaborative, more real than art / in order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism / what life is like for other people / useless but not malicious / there was an economic crisis therefore people wanted dance / nice guy orgasms / your bad art versus my bad art / canada dry, canada try / collector invective / how not to be irrelevant / art is the corner in which transgression and questioning are allowed, and making art is like volunteering to go stand in that corner / sad, empty bookstore / a poem is a world without poetry / during the winter, I always wish I lived in Lisbon / is it about something or is it only empty formalism / how to effectively use your own children in a work of contemporary art / the awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons / is lust sexist / we must try not to understand / it is good to disagree, the question is how to disagree productively / there is so much capitalism inside of me / it was a strange laugh, distant, as if he laughed in English / stories I started but couldn’t finish / get off your pulpit and come have a drink / perhaps, in the end, it answers more questions than it raises / crying like a very quiet baby / when I over-indulge my own cynicism the writing becomes weak / that which is absent from reality is that which is truly important / one man on another man’s back / if you have money you don’t need love / wanting everything to be different / disappointment as the driving force behind the aesthetic / liberation didn’t invent sex / syphilis is not the goal of making love / in any act of erudition, intelligence risks it’s life / paint my portrait and make the future love me / the bomb is calm / my desire to be famous had brought never ending troubles into my life / the black square, the blank stare / there comes a time to flee / the artist as effective liar / old books, new covers / back when I still had friends / a replica of a reconstruction / using difficult words in order to say nothing / organizing your thoughts in alphabetical order / copies are memories / I knew I had to decide whether I would edit some parts out or leave everything in / we had to decide whether to fall asleep or complain / did stalin get the russia he wanted / the fantasy that some day academics will pore over every detail / life without desire / turning the microphone around / how to make something happen now / your novel consists of seventy-five thousand pages / the feeling that one can, at least partly, re-invent oneself at any time is based on the premise that reality is highly malleable / it was a stupid idea but it worked / what do I actually mean when I say I want art to be more about life / my students will not defeat me / with the consistency of muted sludge / voices from the plains by gianni celati / our understanding of reality is reality / take your charm and use it for strictly criminal ends / they took our comedy and make comedy out of it / in our short attention span culture are you confident that a readership exists for your seventy-five thousand page novel / confidence is like a flu / the accurate analysis of my practice is not the analysis that most excites me / what we need here is a misunderstanding / when everyone has been speaking french I feel ashamed to start speaking english / sometimes everything is so contradictory that I laugh in spite of myself / insisting keeps time alive / conceptual history / each participant is allowed one big lie / dynamics and antagonisms / such as the prison or, in our case, the art institution / those who do know history are doomed to endlessly dissect it / the politics of misdiagnosis / could art matter in a larger number of peoples lives and what would this look or feel like / you have no more currency than your last exhibition / not interested in rebalancing history / we believe something should be done about it, soon and by all concerned / the barometers that are always late / this preoccupation with endlessness / a kind of knotting together of problems / often my notes are rather nasty / more rigorous versus less rigorous / the high heel is a genre of a shoe; the kitten heel, for instance, is a sub-genre / when I write for art catalogs I often feel like I am writing ad copy that is only apparently more sophisticated / this sickness to express oneself, what is it / why I like the first half of most books considerably more than the second / third wave coffee is a scam / talent without technique is just a bad habit / an overwhelming feeling of complete failure / it’s difficult to fight the military: they’re so organized, armed and sadistic / clever is not wise / how to be honest without being cruel / how to be cruel / when all the band names have been taken / torture is always the greater evil / ghost sexuality / I wish I hadn’t wasted my life making-hating theatre / the structural complexity of ignorance / when I read the newspaper I often cry / infighting among the left / fierce competition among artists / live with your century but do not be its creature / parafiction / I struggle to be normal and dream of being extraordinary / school of the americas more commonly known as the school of the assassins / letters from the future / the diplomat and the plutocrat / the peculiar combination of consumerism, despair, visibility and immaturity that characterizes postwar life in its later stages / death to corporate rock / does anyone today criticize art for being too bourgeois / the roll of a tennis ball through the moral world / attractive heterosexual couples standing in line to watch the new hot band / there is a great deal of self-sabotage in my life / theatre with microphones, you know, like Jacob used to do / a book able to reverse time / defend the right of art, and actually of every one of us, to be eccentric, odd and even boring / I eat your hate up like love / novels without plots / books without readers / a man should not dedicate his life to writing about feminism / in entertainment culture, superheroes become dominant during times of war / agent provocateurs promoted violence, which was in turn used to justify greater state repression / I feel extremely alienated by the dominant discourse, but I also feel somewhat alienated by a long series of other, less dominant discourses / a man should dedicate his life to writing about feminism / like planting a flag on an artificial moon whose purpose is to host flags, and now it’s all just covered in flags / can you kill someone with a book / there is something more populist about my recent work, and I fear its basis is economic: I am making a living from it and therefore want more audience / but, anyway, I suppose I have always wanted more audience / I’m thinking of re-reading all of kathy acker’s books in chronological order / on the performing arts circuit, the work I like most is the least successful and the work I like least is the most successful / it occurred to me that maybe this overwhelming feeling of failure is because I’m canadian, because all the good artists come from the u.s., from europe, or from latin america / the world is too big and too small / I don’t even know what kind of writer I am / maybe I’m the kind that doesn’t know / I want to start again / you’re always a work in progress / when the world is going to hell, there is always a market for work that doesn’t mention it / capitalism without war / I always want to start again / the ship by hans henny jahn / not organizing a movement around suffering / to have a political life is, often, to have a broken life / when the market is glutted, labor is cheap / rich people giving money to support art that is mainly about the political fight against rich people / telephone elephant / violent winter / both movies and war look more and more like video games / new technologies begin as military desires / how to escape canada / be the tears you wish to see in the world / winter violence / even my ideas have ideas / meaningless quality / what is and is not a compromise / I often can’t remember my correct age / american prisons are the soviet work camps of the future / sweetness, too, does not respond / three german books that have not been translated into either french or english / subjectivity is not a synonym of humanity / a permanent decolonization of thought / the belief that there is only one god is not as central to monotheism as the refusal to worship other gods, who may very well exist / atheism is the continuation of monotheism with other means / like one page can’t remember what is on the page before / business strategies of the ontologically perverse / when your hype man starts believing the hype / halfway through the film the subtitles switch from english to german / all sorts of dangerous sparks in my brain-pan / is it amusing or disturbing that human beings arguably can be accused equally of having a prejudice for things that exist and a prejudice against them / someone stole my coat / courting the unknown, making something out of nothing / prolific writers, profligate killers / good art is the enemy of great art / I didn’t write these sentences, I curated them / some I curated from within myself, while others came from others / curated versus plagiarized / success and failure are greatly overrated, but failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about / a distinct idea is an idea without a future / naïve on purpose / until the sun burns out or we are able to figure out how to build a new one / a certain kind of fantasy about lost authenticity / complaint is consent / pregnant peacock / the flattened mind / profligate writers, prolific killers / the man who used less / imagination, cognition and memory / there is no room for genuinely different opinions on the festival or biennale circuit / going out dancing versus watching a contemporary dance performance / past, present, future, etc. / slander is fun / I am the only topic left / law-biting citizen / you can never be a prophet in your own century / thinking as the opposite of knowing / thinking as the shadow of feeling / listening as the opposite of thinking / complicity with contingency / being mediocre in a world of the mediocre / loveless marriages / poetic gluttony / so I began to imitate sanctity / you remind me of other people I don’t know very well / the Reichstag fire (1933) was an inside job / just because your cause is righteous, doesn’t give you the right to be a jerk / tragic magic / you give up all hope of a political language if that’s the political language you’re given / the meticulously name-checked fruits of bourgeois existence—parties, nightclubs, careers, and even much of contemporary art—are underwritten by exploitation, militarism, and a more nebulous brand of postmodern unfreedom / to see without distortion by one’s social position, without limitations by one’s artistic milieu / write what you don’t know, tell don’t show, using a multiplicity of ever-shifting voices / corporate publishing is an endless history of a complete failure to find an audience / you keep trying all the pens until you find one that works / we have never been modern by bruno latour / the pleasures of being marginal / hipster with a pineapple / far more moving to believe in unbelievable things / to be coherent is to form enemies / questionnaire on the contemporary / store-bought spools of white thread / a live performer can appear in a film and a film can appear in a live performance / squeaky boot entrance / only mild success / most people have no idea that this video is about the american excesses in iraq / to act the idea of a loop / the aesthetics of error / this bullet is this button / regret that what is happening now didn’t happen ten years ago / the present’s diminishing presence / wild success / is it an annoyance or a moment of wonder / the selective destruction of keepsakes belonging to those no longer alive / small details of a world off-kilter / the future of nostalgia / you will outlive the one you are used to loving / what comes after oil / the death of the death of the death of theatre / feline cats / the enemy of my ambition / both then and now / the various discourses fail to connect / anything goes and nothing succeeds like success / why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves / objections to confessing / alcohol is not a good substitute for sleep / everything has not yet been done / it ain’t necessarily so that it ain’t necessarily so / you must hate life in order to live forever / I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to ‘like’ / why were there so few people at the parenthetical girls show last night / he prefers puppies to children because puppies don’t grow up to become people the way children do / beyond the rule becomes the rule in an endless becoming-totalitarianism / Q: what is the title of this book? A: what is the title of this book? / a contract to break the law each day for the following year / smuggling ipads out of hong kong / the faith of the faithless / the scottish proportional government system is completely radical when compared with the north american one / why is government based on competition / the scary thing about those games is they really do work / intense experience of pleasure has never moved me as much as expectation of an end to it / the waste books by georg christophe lichtenberg / we need a counter-literature / my situation is desperate and yet I’m in a good mood / not seeing rivers is also another way of dying / it is not a problem, only a hypothesis / institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are a solution / imagine that as a dating strategy: I deserve to be desired by you / my privacy is more famous than your privacy / complicated language used to say relatively simple things / we know the way back to tahrir square / the ability to ask a clear, pertinent question is not at an all time high / when I went to New York in September 2001 and all the headlines were about ‘terror sex’ / we must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation / prisoners of addiction, prisoners of envy / jealousy is a normal part of being an artist / whether it was true there were cemeteries on the new ocean liners / in contrast poetry, like crime, feels like refusing / creepy is the new cute / always felt estranged from just about anything I was part of, more so the older I get / a railway station after the abolition of trains / does the curator work for the artist, or does the artist work for the curator / gossip is a false mystery that must be solved / literature has something to do with changing the nature and experience of time / he is currently working on a book he has decided beforehand will take ten years to complete / syllabus for a canadian literature that does not yet exist / different styles of diva / making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy / all the artists I admire are such a strange combination of completely open and completely stubborn / with intellectuals like these, who needs philistines / does everything feel like failure / the only genuine way to practice futurism is to put it off for later / self-promotion versus art / theatre for one audience member at a time / the individual is a western myth / books and records / I make a lot of bad decisions due to my hatred for theatre / one orgasm away from death / it doesn’t exist if you can prove it / language in repair / a bank teller who doesn’t know whether or not he’s a genius / it’s my nature to be dissatisfied / we have to do these things at these times / collapse of spaces / we are trying to be non-expert / but I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold / emerging logic / getting into trouble with the context / the vulnerability that you’re working on needs to reside in the right space / working between statements that create space and statements that become opinion / a noise that’s about listening / the denial of the pleasure of staying with these things longer / I thought I would just write what I was thinking about, and it was so much easier than writing what I wasn’t thinking about / no inside no outside in this network of relations / is fiction only an insecurity around fact / far more of a shared conceptual framework / I didn’t feel invited / interest as restraint / like two lovers playing not cat and mouse, but cat and cat / imagine that the first men on the moon were actually women / a bank teller who doesn’t know whether or not to pretend he’s a genius / bitterness makes bad decisions / if everyone in you coalition agrees, than your coalition is to small / someone becomes an artist because at some point in their life someone, implicitly or explicitly, gave them permission to do so / the seven different kinds of applause / expectations so low they barely qualify as expectations / the exhaustion that collapses / as dogmatic as charisma / what if, as if by magic, we woke up tomorrow and the world population was cut in half / the secret of cheating at roulette / we need an accurate analysis of the situation to proceed, but the road to an accurate analysis leads only to further debate / the violence of quips / pathos without praxis / audiences heckling in languages you don’t understand / money transforms the value of art / is money only an analogy for sex / after your presentation, during the questions, at the end of each question, simply admit that you don’t know / monsieur teste by paul valéry / training yourself to no longer be a real person / the portuguese mermaids union / over time, artists develop artistic habits / I so often get dates wrong, for example saying 1984 when I mean 1994, or 2002 when I mean 2012 / does one technology replace the one before / sometimes when I make compromises I make stronger work than when I don’t compromise / a book for people who find television too slow / the internet is extremely addictive / don’t become bitter / as an artist, how much of your practice is actually intentional / theatre is artifice / when you’re born it’s real, when you die it’s real, everything in between is a mix of reality and convention / artists who constantly make breakthroughs but fail to recognize them / the tradition of the stupidly misnamed anti-novel which should really be acknowledged as the tradition of the ultra-novel, the essential novel, the novel for the novel’s sake and not for the story’s sake / solidarity isn’t simple; it is always divided, full of arguments and doubts; but simplifying the basic goals makes certain things possible / how often does one media completely replace the one that came before / I always have the feeling that, if I let it, my nihilism will destroy everything / to live with such an overwhelming degree of guilt / movies before television, movies before the internet / first thought, last thought / to live in a city that will finally love you / in art, 1+1=3 is not a mistake, it’s a provocation / in what situations are we drenched in bureaucracy and in what situations is bureaucracy kept at a reasonable level / crimes of verisimilitude / sometimes it’s the one who saw the work who doesn’t want to support it / tears of madness are rarely mistaken for words of authority / the gatekeepers can’t even find the gate / like we’re fighting for our lives and all we get in return is really boring answers / children on trial tried by a jury of children / we all take turns being in charge / the autodidact is often marked by a fondness for quotations / the feeling that the poor weather is a direct result of environmental calamity mixed with the feeling that one is in a bad mood because of the poor weather / trying not to repeat history is a repetition of others who have tried not to repeat history in the past / he bought the typewriter on which Ted Kaczynski (otherwise known as the Unabomber) wrote his manifesto ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’ / anti-capitalist artist seeks wealthy patron / in a pop song, you can sing 'la la la la' over and over again, and it can still be good, but in other art forms this seems more difficult / when I was slow dancing with the performer, I accidentally stepped on her foot / a writer who wrote only the things he intended would be a very poor writer / the tendency in conceptual art to foreground intention / when nothing is finished, everything is possible / trying to imagine the things I am not yet able to imagine / when I was a teenager, some of my first experiences of leftist discourse came in the songs of Billy Bragg / it is precisely this distaste for the freedom and richness of life, its color and variation, which one calls good taste / capitalism didn’t invent cruelty, merely reified it / sometimes I think ambition is just another form of bitterness / banal desires / it reminded me of a lot of things I’ve done over the years, and being reminded of one’s own work is not a particularly generous space in which to watch something / you do something extremely vibrant, lively, dynamic, something done for all the right reasons, then go bankrupt / we wouldn’t be here unless people were nervous / sense of location in flux / life is too long to hold a grudge / the very specific pleasure of sleeping with someone you can’t stand / the difference between a community and a network / how can a show not be a product / an openness and curiosity that’s generous / the man who cried I am by john a. williams / we need to re-think our relation to money / it’s a feature of any kind of acclaim that it eventually leads to depression, disappointment, even to something rather like a hangover / what complicates everything is that what doesn’t exist devotes itself to convincing us otherwise / the intimate was the place for authenticity, now that it has become public, what is the space for truth / secrets ←→ representation ←→ myth / if there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them / we know in general what your thoughts are on worrying / the sex-appeal of the inorganic / structure is just a reified apprehension of play, its fossilized remains / money is a band-aid on the fact that people have so much difficulty getting along; previous band-aids include: social convention, ritual, taboo / wondering if the people one meets in life are arbitrary, if one might just as easily have met different people, made a different set of friends / there’s always someone out there more bourgeois than you / the scandinavian institute for comparative vandalism / the very specific pleasure of speaking with someone you can’t stand / learning that power only corrupts when we fear losing it / why are so many people annoying and how can I be sure that I’m not one of them / unthinking adherence to the law versus skeptical adherence to the law / the misery of form / implicate me in my own loss of integrity / chance insights / horizontal cross-connections, ordinary cross-connections / they weren’t good artists, and they weren’t bad artists, but oh my god they were artists / miles upon miles of organized nowhere / philosophy begins in disappointment / sandor ferenczi / dancing is not an ecosystem / affective computing authors tend to identify emotion with positive emotions and forget that all affects are not affects of joy / a search for meaning where the lack of meaning arises not from the event itself but from a lack of engagement with it / a dissertation on the present / I can’t think of contemporary art museums without also thinking of contemporary art museum guards ensuring that I don’t touch anything / and some police play the protesters while other police play the police / in heat I make such bad decisions / the love that remains after the beloved has gone / everything divides into itself / conceptual sex / hot conceptual sex / while denouncing its violence and inequity, Marx could still love capital’s productivity, which the revolution would deliver to the proletariat as its rightful inheritance / courage has no morals: you can be a courageous fire fighter, a courageous teacher, a courageous nazi or a courageous activist; the basic precepts of your courage remain the same / be the elephant you wish to see in the room / and free love made a non-alignment pact with jealousy / an erection in search of a reason / the purpose of a provocation is to make people think / it’s a film that makes people feel bad but in ways that get them talking about subjects they normally avoid / a light switch goes on and off, there is no twilight / artists love politics / the men always talk more than the women / disengaged, misanthropic and bored / we’ve got everyone to blame but ourselves / mediocre love / great divorcers / music and theatre must learn to disassociate / if it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist / how the heartbreaking tragedies of elsewhere put our own mild difficulties in perspective / politics is when you stop feeling bored / to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy / chapel road by louis paul boon / unanimous praise from disparate sources / half way through the karaoke song realizing there is no possible way you can sing so fast / one of those disillusioned nihilists who have said no to success / to smash the world to pieces and pieces and pieces / just another band that started well then quickly lost the plot / a rhyme is a device to help remember language / he’s really into drugs, and really into sex, and that makes him powerful / graffiti on the door of an abandoned storefront: no excuse / proposed advertising slogan for solar cars: oil is evil, sunshine is beautiful / I was in other times a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, a silent fish in the sea / sometimes old school feels like another universe / a Japanese legend says that if you can’t sleep at night it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream / in your absence you polished me into the enemy / one’s own depression is unbearable, but another person’s depression is merely ridiculous / on the one side there was exploitation, oppression, Hitler and death; on the other, the movement / how do you get from the teachings of christ to the vatican / I knew nothing, and persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past / when inhuman things become legal, commonplace and generally accepted, there is no limit to the hell we are capable of / the knight who comes to slay your dragon turns out to be another dragon / people are unwilling to believe in a freedom that always seems to be accompanied by cuts and more cuts / there are already so many books and movies and songs and wars: why make more / Balzac carried a cane inscribed I smash all obstacles; Kafka noted that he himself should have a cane inscribed all obstacles smash me / time against progress / fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface; it’s their way of falling / all systems of domination create stories of their own benevolence / home is a museum / work that comes out at you versus work you have to enter / the revolution of rising expectations / because living is very much like having a plan and doing your best to keep it from succeeding / those who don’t know history are doomed to think that things are worse now than they were in the past / the idea of progress, the idea of growth, is essentially a lie / arriving at the hotel and being told your room is not ready yet / growth is theft / ça passe ou ça casse / I think I always dreamed that fame would rescue me from reality / sometimes my sweat smells a bit like glue / a collection of turns / a confusion of the geographic with the historical / I used to have the idea of myself as someone who could get along with anyone but I don’t have that idea anymore / ambition fueled by dissatisfaction merging with the average / if artists live precarious lives, is art the residue on the tightrope / we have nothing against bodies, we really love bodies / when you’re young, you think your life will go one way, but it turns out differently / in a movement that discourages all creativity even as it demands creativity, and imposes it as the only form of life / I like artifice when it’s really sincere / in the airplane, screens all around me, surrounded by an endless montage of things exploding, fake blood and people firing guns / weak thought: pluralistic, incomplete, yet not without a certain fidelity / being that can be understood is language / our teachers did not have a full grasp on the material they were teaching us; this led to a feeling that truth was highly subjective / bribesville / in the end the true world becomes a fable / continuing to dream knowing one is dreaming / nothing resembles mythical thought more than political ideology / dull nihilism / un pessimiste c’est un optimiste avec beaucoup d’expérience / I don’t see what sex and love have to do with each other; they seem like two completely different things / feel the fear and do it anyway / the people who most need to examine their lives are people my work will never reach / difficult to imagine the world still being here in 300 years and also difficult to imagine it vanishing / warmth mixed with “emotional” suffering, that irreducible nexus of potential-within-attachment that gets called love / guy smoking a cigarette, coughing fit after every drag / a revolutionary writer without wanting to be / the road to fame is made up of assent / post-adolescent idealism as a psychological condition / a plot is something connecting things one happens to like / sadness makes no one intelligent / ethics of luxury: materialism and imagination by jeanne randolph / secret societies of canada and quebec / to transgress is to suspend the rule such that it is heightened in its dissolution / quartier des anti-spectacles / philosophy complicated by experience / a short history of anti-theatre, non-music, counter-philosophy, semi-specific art and unpolitics / mass consensual hallucination / commodity <> money <> commodity / the secret lives of rapacious assholes / vulnerable accumulation / the oppression of compassion / is it possible to penetrate someone else’s incongruity / a self-defeating prophesy / too odious for this brave new world / there is no causal relation between drama and change / philosophy is never where you expect to find it / the true aim of a drive is not to reach its goal, but to circulate endlessly / decentralized technologies / amazing books written by difficult people / songs have so much to do with the fact that the people most often writing them are so fucking young / consciousness has no climax / treat everyone with respect, even (especially) the people you hate / I confuse music with happiness / men are over: not in terms of power but in terms of meaning / as is america / because I love art, I want art to be different / we are given an abstraction from the problem itself as if it were the solution / revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed / what pieter once said to me: cynics are hard like a rock but you are a river of tears / and I cried because the movie was so bad but also because of the sentiment / marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history, but perhaps it is quite otherwise, perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake / a universal symbol of a humanity locked in a struggle to emancipate itself from itself / when I’m in heat I make bad decisions / vengeance through anonymity, with a little help from plagiarism / capitalists just want to exploit sung to the tune of girls just want to have fun / graffiti in the sala rosa toilet: find your style before you sell out / there is no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel / life is passing me by: another tepid cliché more effective as self-fulfilling prophecy / did you ever try to hide bullets in the lining of your scripts / can I still be a visual artist even if I never sell anything / performance is the new video / the sedentary artist versus the travelling artist / how can the performers also be informers / the people who really wanted to change things left art for community organizing / I feel the most important task for politics today is to re-think our sense and experience of time / tears cried moisten even the driest eyes / to be an informer is to exclude yourself from life / I haven’t had a lot of sex in my life and therefore don’t quite have a handle on what it does to me emotionally / if the absurdity within which we currently live results in our full or partial extinction does that make it less or more absurd / there are limits within the limit but are there also limits outside of it / why don’t I have any books with me / monsieur ravel has refused the legion d'honneur, but all his music accepts it / hell is other billionaires / the modern state is characterized as a reified entity, lusting in its spirited magnificence, hungry for soul-stuff / participating in madness is always the same: from the bubonic plague to the inquisition to fracking / a nothing that doesn’t feel like emptiness / we need an effective left wing populism / sometimes the way curators talk about artists reminds me of the way film directors talk about actors / I don’t think the artist is god, I think the artist has an ethical responsibility / the need to double down on the fight / contemplation of public drunkenness / students at the lecture staring down at their phones / cheap alcohol / charlie chaplin playing leopold bloom / wanting sex / perfection made easy / how budget constraints define various artistic histories / a sense of incompleteness through life / an artist is someone who must speak english / reading every word of an unreadable text / the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things / there is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects / I am writing the first letter from the future / trying to deal with our emotions as if they had mathematical veracity / the lacanian real of IRL / underwhelming overlapping sensations / history seen from behind, history seen as if in a reflection / the good drugs invite the bad drugs out for tea / risk is always a question of perspective / the family as metaphor for the state / I hate being called commercial but my work is unquestionably more accessible than it was in the past / james joyce in a rolls royce proclaiming free choice in a fey voice / the two women beside me on the airplane were so american they couldn’t possible turn it down if they were on television / the americans will be televised / when your collaborator proposes basing the project on a book that hasn’t been translated and was written in a language you cannot read / how could I begin to conceptualize the task of making something I could sell to rich people / a catastrophe with the flavor of an orgasm / an excess of artistic desires complicated by an excess of self-destructive emotions / does the artist know the difference between desire and discourse / the catastrophe of not enough sleep / how can my ambition be closer to something real / a dentist who has never heard of cavities / prior convictions that describe future utopias / inheritance blues / carrying around loose cash in a clear plastic bag / using your notebook to hide the genitals and therefore perfect the composition / whoever wrote genesis might have found a more subtle metaphor than the serpent / how could rich people conceptualize me travelling from where I currently am to a place where I might make something they would buy / amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself / a thorn in the side of the reader / I like their old work better / but I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live / like everything, all we can do is build communities around the art (and criticism) that we love / the agency for spiritual guesswork / one of the things that critique is, after all, is a test of love / can sex be art / loneliness is solitude with a problem / it is so sickeningly easy for art to be a cliché of art / capitalism thrives on feelings of failure, trying to fill stacked up insatiable lacks with money, shopping or some other kind of cake icing that cannot fill any hole for long / a truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge / freud and cocaine / a whisper that contaminates even the loudest scream / the key terms change but the drive remains the same / the state is to its map as its citizens are to their passports: no map = no existence / feminism begins when women begin to describe their experience and discover such descriptions require change of themselves and change of the world / philosophy evolves alongside commerce / the deplorable thing is that the people who were tortured yesterday, torture today / a philosophy that privileges vision over choice / I suspect that my answers to this question might be disappointing / just response might well involve a radical shift in self-understanding / description versus analysis / writing is thinking or as thinking / a failure in branding is a failure in essence / the phrase ‘language is shaped by power’ has become a banality / is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one / after the talk people often ask where is your theory of power, no one ever asks where is your theory of love / language is failure / a non-sovereign theory of power / the differences between affect and the unconscious / I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief / why are so many modes of thinking so much more about what they are against than about what they are for / the type of philosophy that thinks it values above all clarity and directness / ordinary experience was able to bear up under the weight of skepticism / reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure / the philosophy of the ordinary / how to keep our philosophy philosophical and at the same time keep the real world in the same room with it / a stylized repetition of acts / styles have history, styles of history, styles as history / workroom for optimism and critique / neuro-sexism / walking marriages / when we act we of course cannot foretell the consequences of our actions / its something you do when you feel lost / no cure for my reckless wandering, forever misguided and destructive, forever alien to my true vocation / 1998 was the year when everything changed / what does toto’s hit song africa have to do with the country africa? / one librarian against the library / the beautiful philosopher / critique comes from the description / some theories have a certain charm / there are extraordinary events in life / what the poem would be without the words that are not in the poem, the poem would be a popular one / the poets only want to talk about poetry / I often feel unfeminist when I’m experiencing lust / at the airport when no planes are leaving or landing, you realize what a commercial and unpleasant holding cell the airport actually is / philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution made once to look naively at the world in and around oneself / of all the things that fit into the suitcase, the suitcase itself is not one of them / exceptions are the installations of life / event factory by renee gladman / sweet reflection of stale technology / cuddling and coming / contamination that can be understood as language / in movies, monsters, aliens, demons, criminals, etc. are the things we are allowed to kill without consideration or regret / art is the sexualization of survival or, equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of excessiveness, of nature / can hieronymus merkin ever forget mercy hummpe and find true happiness? / there is no perception which is not full of memory / inorganic sympathy / honey, I rearranged the collection using artists whom we know virtually nothing about / the list is a story / the great fire of slander / sometimes architecture will have to be protected from its architect / 1000-year-old brown, grey from the ear of a mouse / we won the cold war and this is our prize, absolute proof that capitalism lies / why shouldn’t we, when we’re speaking, have the right to remain silent on this or that point put forth by our partner / society might well be a series of social constructs, but in attempting to undo these constructs we also produce an anxiety that we are losing our connectedness to the world / laying bare the device / that we lived in the here and now only to work on the remainder of the there and then / bringing into sharp relief the ambiguity of the line between the everyday and the philosophical / I had not learned that it is okay, even advisable, to fuck multiple people at the same time, boys and girls, even perhaps in the same place / fighting makes you paranoid / adventures can be found anywhere / yet parody is an act of dependency as well as of disavowal / and those without a critical eye to history are doomed to swallow modernist mythologies of progress / I came there and there was no art too add / disassociation is an anti-ideological move / there was nobody besides farmers, fields of corn / no, I don’t think I’m really acting my life; I’m simply making the best of a difficult situation / not so many places in communist china where you can gather secretly and openly at the same time / I’ve forgotten what the word perfold means / what kind of people would be invited to frequent these theme parks / people living together can have greater secrets between each other that those who live far apart, indeed the proximity can lead to a virtuoso performance in concealment / the vicious tears of pure comedy / not meant as an excuse for the method I used / I would prefer some emotion, vulnerability or humor / trying to enjoy something, out of desperation, beyond the banal / so little in our environment that is delightful / do we get the architecture we deserve / a sadist who does not realize he is a sadist / and so the point of the whole performance is to demonstrate a process of deceptive discourse deceiving itself / 1) trying not to take out my depression on others, to protect them from it; 2) how afraid I am of people; 3) trying to find an audience for my work / crumbs on the gallery floor / she began to read, she began to re-read, aloud / was that bed a specific bed that we should recognize or know / we start to get her hands in the frame / an awake subject and a sleeping subject / the police shoot an innocent man, are acquitted, followed by riots / its not shocking that things are the way they are, its shocking that they’re arranged as such / a turning point from pure form to something that comes after / we could profit from a catastrophe theory of the novel, one that accounts for its appearance of linearity, but notices that novels are marked with caesuras, holes, pauses, shifts onto different ground / film as film / I think having an affair is a good way to get to know someone / rain and shadow / people say you shouldn’t run away from your problems but they’re wrong, its great to run away from your problems, get out of there / as a straight white male there are times, I believe, when I have a responsibility to remain silent / never mess with the petit-bourgeoisie / I’m an artist on the rise, you’re a curator in decline, lets see who wins in the long run / a true film about a false prophet / fabulation, the notions of fabulation / the two sources of religion and morality / these representations may be false, but what do they create, how can the false actually be productive and vitalizing / the plan, for now, is to build a shopping mall there / quick survey: if you have ever had a bad experience working with or for the darling foundry please like this post (only three people did, plus one who said they in fact had a good experience) / since '98 I have found some amazing hypocrisies myself, which tend to be more than common abuse of power / ethics and dependability are not the highest commodity in this town / a line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins / everyone knows but no one wants to denounce them / style is only interesting as far as it does not rely on the market / one publishes to find comrades / she just wants the freedom to be crooked in peace / the margins are much more fun, people help each other more, less ego competition; the center is over-rated real-estate speculation / the universe says nothing / the most gratifying reading is the one that also entails the risk of producing a text of one’s own / why does everyone want to tell their story / regrets are just another form of failure: you sir live an artistic life of regret and a life of artistic failure / you can only partly judge a book by its cover / I regret successfully / you know, it’s strange more people don’t ask to sleep / life is full of unpleasant contemporary setbacks / for me it was a real life moral fable: the perfect example of bad people getting what they want while good people get kicked into the dirt / after I kill myself, all the years of despair will suddenly become consequent / without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery or any progress / authority does not automatically imply a hierarchical position, but a permanent questioning of an ethical task / sometimes I feel like I’m jack smith and you’re uncle fishhook / fear ritual of lucky landlord paradise / mediocrity exists / less production, more hypocrisy / she vows not to write any more poems until she can prove to herself ‘that it was for fun and only for fun’ / we (as those working with representations) should always have anxieties about what we do / primates that rely more on vision rely less on smell / a criminal scientist will always get farther than a criminal artist / why are neurotypicals so busy chunking all the time / allowing for the complexity of experience / malina by ingeborg bachmann / many lost projects / there are also lots of things we can learn if we want / tired panic, timid anger / the title of the book was ‘the interpersonal world of the infant’ but I thought she said ‘the interpersonal life of the infinite’ / german babies cry differently from french ones / conflicts with people where I don’t quite realize that a conflict is happening / how reading the queer art of failure might result in experiencing my own failure differently / the refusal to write dialect / spoken thought against written thought / in 100,000 years from now some of our senses will have vanished completely / its dangerous to interpret secret criminal activity, government or otherwise, as a larger worldwide conspiracy / an awesome array of fragmenting and alienating technologies / money laundering / logics of territorial war / the anger that stops communication from happening / gentrified happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with injustice / its very important to disassociate the history of israel from the history of the jews / israel was a protestant idea / contemporary artists apparently have no personalities, in this sense they are the perfect office workers / a traumatic narrative / one of my ideas is that today, in general, artists over-produce, and I should do less in order to keep quality high / a byzantine system that disguises responsibility and accountability / to take a depressing book and make it happier by making it more experimental / the rapid increase in the size of the world’s teaching force dates from mid-century, increasing from 8 million in 1950 to 47 million in 1990, according to UNESCO data / the message that you can’t fight city hall is a rumor being spread by city hall / earnest devastating curiosity / sadness against melody / the golden age of mediocrity / he who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either / most of them never married, never had children / poetry needs time and love and we are nervous about both / just noticed that when his verse comes, nas switches jay-z’s I feel like a black republican, money got comin’ in to I feel like a black militant, takin’ over the government / I seem to be in more turmoil that other artists, or perhaps only less good at hiding it / what would it mean if we were to say god save the queen was a cover version of hey jude / the former Israeli pilot who refused to bomb the school in the city of his birth / uneasiness seemed to be the background of all ruminations belonging to the twentieth century, just as all its landscapes were presided over, somewhere in the distance, by an airplane / one has to accept one's fate, while at the same time fighting against it / I have this overwhelming feeling of failure is often a stand in for there is a great deal of self-sabotage in my life / melitta schmideberg / the fervour of the newly converted / there is a lot of work that I think is good but that doesn't mean so much to me and, at the same time, there are a few works that I suspect might not be good, but mean so much to me / the new wave mullet is different from the normal mullet / pressurized equipment conference / drunk people drawing you maps of how to get home in a foreign city / the james brown soul center of the universe bridge / psychoanalysis is not the means of making oneself popular / thinking about compassion / the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t / it may or may not be a good book, bit its definitely a good book to argue with / I can imagine a different work of art in which ‘a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money’ was instead an act of joyous transgression / if your moment is now, how do you prepare for its aftermath / an art is emancipated and emancipating when it stops wanting to emancipate us / the capitalist who cries over the poor working conditions of his employees (and if they want better conditions they simply should have refused the job) / I don’t fit / a lifetime is not so long, you cannot wait for a tool without blood on it / latitude, room to maneuver / festivalism / this is not a festival / inter is the new ism / messy work versus clean work / jack smith / a way of doing things, an attitude / quebec racism / things first happen in art, then later happen in the rest of society, seems like an outmoded and outdated teleology / can we respect the older generation while at the same time secretly wishing they were a little bit less present / for and against poetry / summer versus winter / community isn’t necessarily about liking, or even relating to, the other people in the community / can we speak about what differentiates good nationalism from bad nationalism / if we made a book who would read it / perfection made easy / I make art in order to give other people my problems / an artist cannot be someone who never makes mistakes / plagiarism is curating / interdisciplinary art and communism / confusion made easy / money for art, money against art / cryptic tweets / there is no such thing as contradiction, only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them / how to be effective without becoming military / violence and presence / what is the most pressing emergency / we will disappear / psychotic membership drive / changing your name doesn’t solve anything / the eyes can’t blink their way to salvation / criminal funding / urinating on the toilet seat of fate / notebooks of the devil / considered confusion of the intellect, utopianism of the will / the short, strict, and modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty / hell has frozen over (several times by now) / the way that awards are about institutions validating their own taste rather than honoring genuine, important achievements to mankind / the king of a rainy country by brigid brophy / any system that reduces a world is tragic / wind in the flags / in hollywood they worry too much about what the audience will think, in art they often worry too little / shame is the experience of being riveted to your being / andy warhol hired alan midgette to present himself as andy warhol / studies for motion / any search for an origin is hysterical / too late style / everything I write, of course, is an extended metaphor for something I never mention / avant-gardism of old men / a new revolution is possible only in the wake of a new crisis, but the one is as certain as the other / how to think, how to search for the true, how to experience the joy of realizing how it is / I am in a love story, or a story of love and fear and mirrors, all facing my favorite spy yet reflecting nothing / how can we communicate our ideas to a political subject who has about as much interest in being the new 1968 as guy debord has in being the new walt disney / how to lead a life that is not terrorized by the production of sense in the form of one’s activities and occupations, but one that opens up to non-sense, self-loss, expenditure and inactivity / do less with less, do more with more / all that glitters ain’t goals / the invention of tools as an act of translation / non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity / there lie hidden in language elements that, effectively combined, can utterly change the nature of man / an anthology of examples / intentions are bleak without results / artists shouldn’t be competing with others, they should be competing with themselves / some things are more true than others, at the same time, nothing is so true that there is not also a certain degree of truth to its opposite / the words he wanted on his tombstone were a disgrace to the community, but at his death this was ignored / sometimes visual art feels like putting on your best clothes, and pulling out the good china, because you have rich people coming over for dinner / idealism infects realism / sleeping my way to the bottom / curating is a way of speaking about art without ever really having to engage with art / no documentation yet the internet is full of photographs / artistic research with later commercial applications / even if the market cannot absorb everything, it can absorb practically everything that is desirable / while being able to exercise critical judgment is clearly important, it operates by providing a series of sign posts and warnings but does not actualize people’s inherent and often intuitive notions of how to produce criticality through inhabiting a problem rather than by analyzing it / the buyer has to burn the receipt / more and more people tell me I’m famous but I continue to not believe them / if the corporation is an individual, and the artist is a corporation, does that mean the artist is also an individual / the institution is the real context for the work / an object is just a slow event / alternating between critical and corporate strategies / violent despair / the audience is left to experience the performance as not too disruptive / the turning turn / the paradoxical turn / the collapsing turn / the economic collapse turn / the disposable turn / new pain with old money / we are the institution / sincerely ready to put the world on fire so that it shines brighter / it won’t sell is the censorship of capitalism / today my fortune cookie said: the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance, and after some consideration, I really don’t think this is true / I believe the record I’ve listened to most the past year is slow summits by the pastels / le chemin qui va de l’idée confuse à l’idée Claire n’est pas fait d’idées / the past and present so often collapse into brief moments and then immediately separate once again; I’m always thinking of things that don’t fit together, of the juxtapositions that resonate and the ones that don’t / part of the terror was finding the edges weren’t there / is there somewhere I can get this zipper fixed / permission is a material that changes the work’s consistency / today my taxi got caught behind a horse drawn cart / the feeling of failure increases in intensity the more disconnected it becomes from lived reality / in retrospect we should have proposed something considerably cheaper / there is too much art history in art / the fetish of research / rhetorical strategies of the recently deceased / la théorie c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister / is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat / there is no human individual; there is a psyche that is socialized and, in this socialization, in the final result, there is almost nothing individual in the true sense of the term / a good conversation is a conversation in which one might change one’s mind / when I’m angry, I'm always most angry at myself / capacious / as radical as reality itself / at what age must the child be politicized / too bad my children are not here / the family has different languages / ambition is a disease / I just realized that I’ve never actually recovered from kindergarten / when we do smaller projects, it always works beautifully, while when we attempt larger projects it is often difficult / was sick and exhausted, and perhaps did not speak as diplomatically as I might have in other circumstances / not all criminals are regents / a catastrophe disguised as pure pleasure / musical thoughts / with my own projects I really lead, but with collaboration I often take the passenger seat / the irresponsible adult / all killer, no thriller / when the peers don’t feel like peers / each of us is insane in our own special way / that people I don’t know also know other people I don’t know / it seems success is not so much about what you do, more about how you interact with power and hierarchy / generally speaking, I am a calculating person, but know that terrific things can arise out of miscalculations / the runner’s high, the flâneur’s low / insufficiently rigorous, an overwhelming bruise / men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them / sexual frustration versus sexual obsession / not believing in self-help books as a small part of being helpless / tears of mediocrity / the lusts of the young and the lusts of aging / don’t you know that tears are not enough / ineffective criticism / the sars crisis / african orgasm / perfectly bilingual citizens / a single panelist taking up all the time and space at a panel discussion / what new things they could come up with / isolated individuals struggle against isolated individuals and dream about other isolated individuals / you’re fire and I’m oil / short form violence / language is just games about language / criminal round tables / ice cream pain / the obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility / the difficulty of pronouncing icelandic family names / one off tight concept / making space for translation / all crammed in / primarily speculation, we haven’t actually done it yet / slaughtering the lottery / did you find out about the aliens / to find out whether there was a real need / a problem with the artistic ecology / you’re oil and I’m fire / emotional and political changes / losing touch with people now seems to be my main form of social interaction / for some reason the expression fair enough always makes me unbelievably angry / even when you don’t want to do what is conventional, what you do want to do can best be described in the language that comes from conventions / every community has their own clichés / olive leaf extract / remember that summer everyone was listening to frank ocean / the school for rock star humility / one cannot represent a thing as outrageous and multifaceted as war / when wolves go after sharks / it’s going to get worse before it gets even worse / emotional politics / remembering that neoliberalism began not with thatcher but with pinochet, and suspecting it will return to its roots / music, to be personally and socially valuable, must be out of time and out of tune / the best thing to do is apologize, but one should perhaps not already be planning one's apology before one does the bad thing / how do you produce a zone of incandescent intimacy / the intimacy of the common / it seems everyone needs an other against which to compare, but some of us find this other within / this is what students always do / being yourself in a performance situation is the most subtle form of drag / emotional and political transformations / chant I cry thru my corpus for the gorgeous / hoping that the will of my vanity will keep my hair from falling out as I get older / the city implodes with the prettiest prose / magic panic / realizing how young the black panthers were when they achieved so much / in china, the jibaozhai museum cost approximately 6.4 million gbp to build in 2010, but it was shut down in 2013 after the discovery that nearly all its 40,000 artifacts were knock-offs / the most profitable consumer is an addict, much like the most profitable business is a monopoly / I’m the tepid hipster the internet warned you about / do not raise your children the way your parents raised you, for they were born for a different time / when you like the mixtape better than the official release / louis de broglie and jean baptiste lamarck / pop culture is the art of capitalist democracy / why should elections be competitions? why should there be winners and losers? / first shut down Guantanamo, then maybe you can comment about the veil / everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation / charming like a con man / you will never feel adequately recognized / if at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style / as an artist, there is all of this economic pressure to be more conventional / what were once called enchanted tomorrows / the notion of the symptom was introduced, well before freud, by marx, insofar as he made of it the sign of something wrong in the real / fighting fights that were both won and lost a very long time ago / the roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable / I don’t know if I don’t know how things work or I don’t want to know how things work / the novella length memoir / to probe oneself is to realize one is incomplete / markets will self-regulate themselves into ever increasing, more volatile speculative bubbles that sporadically crash / during the final game of the world cup, the star player decides to score on his own team's goal as an act of treason / perhaps madame bovary’s disease is not boredom; it’s being trapped as the character in someone else’s novel / I am hopeless but not without hope / if there was really a free market it would collapse of its own accord / an imagined community is one way to describe heartbreak / in masculine hands logic is often a form of violence, a sly tyranny / the philosopher arms dealer / anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized / hypochondriac politics / the mid-life crisis that started in my early twenties is finally coming to fruition / a pessoa that travels and has love / a place where work and leisure meet / the girl in the road by monica byrne / it’s because we’re in another depression / gay penguin wedding / social time is itself a social process / I’m thinking of starting an artist residency at the bottom of the crater on the yamal peninsula / the road forward to neoliberal feudalism / the night has so many things to say to the day / sometimes it takes me a moment before I remember if the earth travels around the sun or the sun travels around the earth / is it better to be great or to be famous / a calamity masquerading as a joke / I want to start again, I always want to start again / a shrine that is open twenty-four hours / if ebola goes airborne seventy percent of the world population will die / I don’t know if I’m bored with montreal or bored with myself / the turtle trainer / mainstream media is owned by two corporations that are both pro-government / academics often have difficulty getting their computers to work / you vote where you sleep / how many people from france live in montreal / it is completely possible for an argument to be both brilliant and wrong / addiction to social media comes as no surprise / the notion of the symptom was introduced, well before freud, by marx, insofar as he made of it the sign of something wrong in the real / I dedicate every pore to what’s here / as you get older, the number of things you do for the very first time gradually decreases / desire without expectation / marriage is a bourgeois institution, the couple is a bourgeois institution, love must be set free / the artists I work with turn to emotion because this is where ideology does its most devastating work / in art, when you've done a certain number of things over a certain number of years, it's difficult to know why you should do more / I'm increasingly anxious about becoming a caricature or self-parody of my former or even current self / a certain quantity of wasps have appeared in my kitchen / to kill a human being in order to defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill a human being / this strangely intense feeling that my life is over, and has been over for a fairly long time / if money is our religion, than climate chaos is our apocalypse / bitter prima dona / art has its head up its ass, is like a snake eating its own tail, is too much about art / the nature of a caliphate / I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once / sometimes I wonder: if someone were to write a book about my life, what would they put in and what would they leave out / also: how might I live my life doing only the things that would be left out / wondering when the backlash will begin / the great age of people staring at their phones / making a list of ten favorite books I haven’t read: I feel I do have favorite books I haven't read, and that this might be a useful thought / a slight anxiety that the success of my most recent book has more to do with the fact that sex sells than it does with literary merit / when a thing goes viral it really, really feels like it has absolutely nothing to do with you / more success will not help at all, the question is how to be successful in more intriguing or compelling ways / the Internet is not a place. It’s a great void, a black hole, from which you can call up an incredible amount of disorganized information / and in further late breaking news: sex still sells / an extinction is at least an honest idea / the revolutionary must not neglect guile / everything I needed to know about America I learned on 9/11/73 / the air contains honey / the absolute is here, where else would it be; life is not somewhere else, it exists where we exist / we’re absolute complainers / reinventing the reinvention of the wheel / I don’t know how to dress / if buster keaton wasn’t genuinely trying to put up his house it wouldn’t be funny when it falls down on him / Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth / inversions of social darwinism, if someone still wished to rank animal species by ‘success’ then the cockroach reigns over the eagle / I often wonder if we flatter ourselves by thinking we’re more individual than we actually are / this picture is part of a whole philosophy, which today has, at most, thirty adherents / advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable / the assumptions that are in a discipline’s blind spot are in fact the same assumptions holding the discipline together / the importance of writing books that are compelling in such a way that they will never be nominated for any awards / skepticism is the elegance of anxiety / a life spent politely burning bridges / when attitudes become frames / culture moves faster than its critics / the rock star who couldn’t get laid / what’s the difference between a jerk and a creep / been wrong so long it feels like right to me / melancholy is the depression that says yes to life / I like that part in drunk in love where she sings surfboard several times in a row / on the internet, nobody knows you’re depressed / art is art when what is made unmakes itself in the making and realizes, in barely recognizable form, the discordant truth of living life / for Halloween I’m going as a slightly more mediocre version of myself / if you really want to understand something, try to change it / islands of decolonial love by leanne simpson / what strategies are most effective for trying to fight gentrification / why do I want to speak of love when the conversation turns to gentrification / stepping sideways into the light / pirating the others point of view / diversity in future space settlements / sun ra would often say he was the blackness of the cosmos / you’ve always had movements of people simply claiming their humanity / your feast is over / the dancers inherit the party / it is not that I have no past; rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now / mohammad mosaddegh, jacobo arbenz guzmán, patrice lumumba, salvador allende / having privilege also means not wanting to give up that privilege / public loneliness / predicting that the western system will collapse / unpredictable loneliness / violent tears / understanding systems of violence / a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on / yet what could curiosity possibly want with a dead cat / 48 million africans died crossing the middle passage / technical instruction as revolutions handmaid / an invisible organization / horse smashing its head through the window of a cable car / very mildly famous / a weird monogamy of the technical / what precisely does the government understand about art / it was a battle I couldn’t win in the end, since it is impossible to defeat dinosaurs / everyone is welcome / crying eyes tell the wisest lies / the counter-literature prize / the bureaucratic-capitalist project / we became nothing but a set of instances in the network of capital / to hand the plan elements it cannot swallow / cities are cartographies of attempts to revolt / we have finally learned how to work badly / the paradox of performing yourself / coffin ships / slow jobs means more jobs, more jobs means less unemployed / the fine thread of deviation / one walks the exact same paths as ones enemy / fighting-pessimism / cunning intelligence in greek society / shipwreckers have their name writ only on water / the day is a barricade / the fox is a trap / people got bonuses if they arrived ahead of time / small force, big impact / leadership through vulnerability / planned obsolescence in contemporary art / there are not millions of deaths, it happens millions of times that someone dies / how to be a character in someone else’s novel / when the only thing more painful than the present is the past and the only thing more painful than the past is the future / we are the ones for whom reflection does not inhibit action / the good artists quit and the bad artists keep going / I’m always looking for advice / whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it: a genius is the one most like himself / an allegory of the present / there has been so much self-sabotage in my life / environmental disco metal / in abstraction, sex reveals the intangible force of its own irreconcilability and becomes what it is in reality: a spell for togethering doubling as a boundary / four letters from an ongoing series / may ’68 and its afterlives by kristen ross / envers et contre tous / vulnerable paradoxes / the great lesson of the 20th century is that propaganda works / the great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nineteenth century was to think that by walking straight ahead one would rise into the air / just misread a corporation is now recognized as a person as a corruption is now recognized as a person / one small disappointment and I plunge into the abyss of complete despair / jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist / christmas is proof that the dominant culture is in fact dominant / I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision / and he feels happy because sailing here, on this sea, gives one the feeling that nations are unimportant / the feeling that I'm trying my best mixed with the feeling that my best isn't actually very good / if there was no capitalism I would still have desires, but what would they be / having the courage to be very briefly arrested for your artistic convictions / we’re in an emergency wishing it would go back to being in a crisis / if you're part of the problem you're part of the solution / in my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don't want people to know about my life / I wonder if the past 30 years (and the next 30) will be remembered by history as a generalized war on muslims / I get really busy and don't know what I'm doing and then, later when I'm less busy, I don't know what I did / technique in writing means: being aware of as many possibilities as possible / if tomorrow, every last penny of government subsidy given to oil was transferred to sustainable energies, things would change really fast / we often forget that food was once intimately and precariously tied to seasonal availability / freedom of speech is most often the freedom to be celebrated for saying things that support the status quo and to be ignored for saying things that challenge it / instead of freedom of speech, freedom to establish a more egalitarian alternative to capitalism / either you're with us or you're with someone or something else that might be equally worthwhile / I feel like other writers are trying to write the perfect book while I’m trying to write brilliantly imperfect ones / the nineties in the former yugoslavia / on normativity / the former canada / what’s been going on since 2000 / good habits / they said I should speak louder / europe has lost interest in me / young brides that got married that year / they are muslims meaning they are albanians / I dance, dance, dance / a sound can also sometimes be a criminal / the way morrissey sings I’m so tired / look at you, and look at us, all my lovers look rich as fuck / time and tears / migration as a question of choice / in public discussion with someone who thinks you’re an idiot, because you showed him your throat / a real choice always involves a denial and a leap into the void / fear of finishing / a big pile of ego heaped up in the middle of the room / instead of calling it a performance I will call it a caprice / racist tweets / when you have your headphones on and you’re away for a long walk on the countryside, you want to be controlled by Nina Simone – you don’t want to be controlled so much by beyoncé / when capitalism crashes fascism most often comes to the rescue / remembering times when I was younger, didn't know what I was talking about, and said some incredibly stupid things / being tired comes as no surprise / it’s one of my favorite stories because nothing violent happens in it / creating communities of co-resistance / we don’t even know what freedom feels like / in a way, we're all still victims of the cold war / it is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least / often think about the word caliphate / we will leave this world to rats and cockroaches / frogs, bats and bees / lee lozano: dropout piece by sarah lehrer-graiwer / in my dream last night, the name of my band was: this unstable honorarium / conversation is when you don’t know what the next thing the person you are with is going to say / torturing people until they tell you what you want to hear / how are artists different from politicians / kayne west really loves rushing the stage at music awards shows / citizens and activists / unlikely alliances / let art stars be art stars / why is the title like the other title / crimes take place inside of triangles / it’s most likely true that you can’t die of loneliness / lost genius / I did not want to want. I wanted, it seems to me, against myself, because I had no desire to want and nonetheless I wanted / wholesomely, hungrily ambitious – ambitious for life / I genuinely feel life is passing me by / instead of love: kindness, instead of ethics: respect / I’m under the mistaken impression that I’ve already retired / even in my own life there’s an enormous chasm between thought and action / kind narcissist / meta-chemistry / oil and water are time-based media / oil and fire don’t mix / thoughtless, never-ending production of art that makes almost no impact on anyone or anything / when I read heidegger I often feel that anyone who writes in such a difficult style must have something to hide / the main commercial partner of china is the british virgin islands / in 2014, google only paid 2.4% tax and registered 10 billion in the bermuda islands / its just a tunnel to allow corporations to circumvent their fiscal obligations / if a corporation wants to do something illegal it’s easy, they just have to create a subsidiary somewhere where that activity is legal / we’re facing a world in which the legal system has entirely failed with respect to multinational corporations / when we talk about economy in the newspaper we only talk about half of it / the love affair between academics and power point / it’s not a hyper-object / fish carry a different story in each one of their bones / hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years / the tax justice network / artic village / caribou fences / I gently feel life is passing me by / a more reasonable version would probably read: as part of love: kindness, as part of ethics: respect; but I always seem to gravitate toward the most provocative formulation / the enemy is our own question in the shape of a human being / in performance, it’s less a question of what you do and more a question of why and how / kayne west wanting to be a fashion designer reminds me of john malkovich wanting to be a puppeteer / crying eyes tell the kindest lies / I’m on line all the time but I’m not on line all the time / the true test of the experience will be if both are changed in a meaningful way / I want to live in a city with no cars / considered quitting facebook but instead have apparently decided to quit everything else and only do facebook / with me, irony is not a gesture of condescension but a form of struggle / ambition is a dialog between over-confidence and insecurity / I soon realized that I was not the one being followed, but the one following someone else / my sex life now mainly consists of occasionally wondering if I’ll ever have sex again / if our wealth is criminal then lets live with the criminal joy of pirates or fight to the death to bring a sliver more justice into being / describe a way to undermine capitalism using words and pictures / emotion isn't the opposite of logic, it's not the opposite of anything, it’s the substrate of everything / I don’t think I know anyone quite as depressed as me, but the people I know who are almost as depressed as me – I find them unbearable / every morning I wake up and think today I’m going to kill myself and then another day goes by in which I don’t – I’m my own boy who cried wolf / pushing juxtaposition / intersectionality / ana mendieta was an incredible artist, carl andre is not / I’ve been teetering on the edge for my entire life but I think I’ve finally fallen off / middle-aged shade / I think having a debate about the fall on the internet is somehow the perfect analogy for almost anything having to do with the fall / but are you absolutely certain that they don’t know where I am / we don’t have a responsibility, we have an opportunity / talking without listening is completely useless / can’t leave interdisciplinary performance alone the game needs me / when you spend 14 hours a day on facebook there’s not a lot of time to get other things done / success, organizational failure, co-option, repression, establishment within the mainstream / gang truce / angela davis studied with herbert marcuse / the line cut from the chronic / the source originally refused to run cigarette and alcohol ads / nas is ideologically all over the place / you’re not bitter; the speed of your mind and the want in your heart can’t be matched by the trudge of reality / put on lose control and I will lose control / youth against love / a poisoned mindlessness / only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core / on late style as a discursive factor in the fear of dying / the feeling when you’re reading a sentence out loud and half way through you’ve lost the meaning of it / today, when people see works they don’t fully understand, they simply think ‘that’s interesting’ and then move on to the next one / the feeling that there’s simply no way for me to continue being an artist / men promote themselves more / timid exhaustion / mistakes I made that cannot be unmade but can certainly be re-made / you need to accept the degree of success you currently have as being the correct degree of success you are meant to have / the degree of success that is most useful to your work / if you feel you have been denied a chance to speak your piece, you will work extraordinarily hard to get that chance / I wanted to reinvent myself as a novelist but then, as soon as I did, I felt: that was fun, I wonder what I can do next / I somehow became part of the dance world without ever developing any interest in dance / that’s part of hip-hop’s essence, of course – founded on sampling, it’s also appropriation art, which is to say salvage art, which is to say survival art / the ten years between unrehearsed beauty and families are formed through copulation / a partisan book, not a theoretical machine / hardcore midlife crisis / on the other hand and also on the other hand / difference implies hospitality / continuously trying not to repeat myself / the fourth world by diamela eltit / some of the silences were broken / the phrase false expectations actually suggest great expectations / attacking your own religion is very different from attacking someone else’s religion / continuously trying to repeat myself / if you make things worse that’s the only way to make things better / the only way out is through / a critique of the philosophy of affirmation / without negativity there’s no way not to be subsumed by capitalism / the term accelerationism was coined by benjamin noys in 2010 / the mutual ruin of the contending parties / something that could actually develop out of the current situation / potentiality is real but not actual / a situation where we can only become parasites on the monstrous body of capital / any kind of work that needs to be done can simply be made pleasurable / I can dig rapping, but a rapper with a ghostwriter, what the fuck happened / plenitude instead of scarcity / an alternative theory of desire / what does it mean to believe in the world / to completely renounce an example of one’s earlier work / to open up or to be opened / when I really, honestly think what should I do, I think I should kill myself, but I don’t, so then what / for the love of folk politics / self-reproduction is in fact transformation / we need the state to force competition where normally people would cooperate and do all sorts of other things / democracy is you don’t have dynasties / the petrochemical party and the hedge fund party / trans-individuality / fugitive planning, slowing down / I’m completely lost and when you’re lost you wander / I can dig poems, but a poet with a ghostwriter, who would have known / in a democracy, why do we vote in secret / capitalism is a kind of madness / manufacturing war for profit / understanding a film completely is conceptual imperialism which colonizes its objects; if I have understood everything then something has been emptied out / on the internet, everyone suspects that you’re a dog / I fear I’m more part of the problem than the solution, but hopefully on my deathbed I won’t be able to say this with quite as much certainty / self-hatred as the engine for ambition / the greater the success, the more closely it verges on failure / in trying to make something better, there is always the possibility you will end up making it worse / making a list of things to do as a way to ensure I will never actually do them / a pact to follow coincidences and find out where they lead / kropotkin tells, in his memoirs, of two occasions on which police agents came to him with money to help start anarchist papers that would advocate violence / despair and exhaustion / a promise that I would allow my writing to be more positive, a promise that I’m not exactly managing to keep / a swirling confusion that undermines its own delicate base / cut and paste art over different generations / waiting always implies the possibility of something good happening / what happened last week is completely forgotten / if you connect all the dots it says my parents are stupid / every kind of stupidity can return in any form / billions of people could die and the world would remain more or less the same / if the question is am I really just going to sit here and take it the answer is most often yes / department of angles / I’ve lost years and years of my life to this absolute despair / it’s still not real to me – what the sentences are for and how long they might go on / survival of the most violent dirty tricks / common goals and conflict / what would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken antigone rather than oedipus as its point of departure / saying something is difficult is often another way of saying that it’s worth doing / I want a literature that is not made from literature / wandering from cultural event to cultural event like a ghost / when I feel complete desire I also feel completely paralyzed / a tattoo that reads: I already regret this / my self-deprecating humour has stopped working because, when I make a self-deprecating joke, people now feel the need to correct me and tell me I’m actually successful now / sometimes I think that sex might have a politically emancipatory potential and at other times I think it simply does not, or at least no more or less than any other aspect of human life / open your joy, stay for a bit, I can find in your sorrow a rhythm / the writer who always wonders how or why to continue / a future in which you can go to jail for not being a good consumer / what is the relationship between failure and loneliness / freedom of speech is not simply a freedom to think and say what you wish, but to speak for yourself, to speak from the heart, and to be accountable for your words / a narcoleptic carrying a pillow / love is not a cure for loneliness / I’ve never met anyone I could really talk to / like few others, he was in love with the freedom to displease himself / when working on a new project, for me the hardest question is always when to fight and when to compromise / if you are currently working on a novel, post a line about it in the comments / a man who washes dishes for a living decides to kill a billionaire as a political act / bitter in small doses brings out character; it cleanses by helping us to wean off old dependencies: I’m in favour of this taste / what if marx had never met lenin / posting the same thing over and over again seems, to me, the more I consider the matter, to be the true essence of the internet / I hardly ever listen to any guitar music any more / people ask me to participate in events, and I say yes, then immediately feel anxiety I’m doing too many events / I arrive at something and almost immediately want to leave, the thing that happens most often when I arrive at something / when I was much younger I listened to a lot of music with keyboards, but when I was younger I listened mainly to music made on guitars / poets whose work supports the status quo often fail to acknowledge that their poems are just as political as poets whose work questions it / keith richards saying elton john is great but he’s a little bit showbiz, and elton coming back: the rolling stones have a fifty foot high inflatable naked woman on stage, what could be more showbiz than that / the catastrophe of going out and finding yourself at things / attacked by trauma / don’t tell me any secrets, I finally have to admit to myself I’m not able to keep them / best selling philosophy book / the perversity of the university / I now feel I’ve accomplished everything I’m going to accomplish but, who knows, maybe I’ll get a second wind / heaven and hell are two of the most intense lies ever told / what to do with the institutions when you notice they’ve become empty and corrupt / I feel surrounded by myself / a secondary narcissism come maturity / to learn from my own and from others mistakes / shouting the word now at a video monitor / how surprised she was to find her grandmother looking so pale / projects are the new handshakes / the end of my last video script / the paradoxical estrangement of sex / they are only ever here to love us / fabulate versus speculate / when the list of secondary sources is longer than a thousand years / perhaps it is the role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen / if there were no power imbalances would there still be s & m / if you were to read all the secondary material on deleuze would you understand more or less about deleuze / getting power out of dodging being in a position of power / an ethics of humour versus a morals of irony / having done something infrequently perhaps doesn’t tell us so much about the intensity of the experience / a poet without a poem is a poet free to roam / winter rain, summer sweat / narcoleptics r us / inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power / orgasm is the first wave of gentrification / just because they’re sincere doesn’t mean they’re right / whenever there’s good news my first thought is to wonder whether it’s actually bad news in disguise / a pact to follow coincidences and find out where they lead / every abyss is navigable by little paper boats / feeling desire is beautiful, but acting on it requires a certain degree of ethical reflection / not everything can go badly / I’m so famous you’ve probably never heard of me / if I look at the future I see: war, famine and plague, but if I look at the past I see the same / in five years it will be 2020 / just a small opening on the skull / this brain needs to come with a map / inter-individual variability / beyond the last, last stop / it validates for them that they had something that needed surgery / torrential bleeding / lots of blood in the brain / the brain is a very complicated space for pain / the idea of documentation didn’t exist at that time / lowlands south america / when you consume the energy of the other then you produce the past / stateless societies / only by eating the other do you enter into a kind of transformation and production of the self / I’m only interested in what isn’t mine / pamela: a novel by pamela lu / the permanent transformation of the taboo into the totem / there’s nothing you can show me from behind the wall / capital is always coopting difference / the pride and the honor with which you devour the other / happiness is the litmus test / with this you break the boundaries between the human and the divine / there was no state to the reaction was not that of other state societies / what kind of bodies of their enemies, never the bodies of their families / the configuration of political affinity / but did not know he was naming his album brother-in-law and not brother / in seven years it will be 2022 / live among his hosts and captors as a pet / kill me, yes, kill me because after my relatives will come to avenge me / everything including the eyes, hair and the nails / the soul or the double, this double of the victim / gain his victims soul as a sort of spiritual helper / what really mattered was the culture of others and not my own / copies and then reproduced / I am only interested in what is not mine / it is better to end in the stomach of others than to rot in the ground / we the future food of the gods / waiting for an afterlife more interesting than this life / feathered, sorry, feared / in two hundred and seven years it will be 2222 / to avoid pleasure during the ritual / the bones were placed in baskets of different sizes / the dead are another / the transformation of the dead into mountains and stones / westerners equate civilization with monuments / the dead might be tempted to stay among the living / am I being a bad gatekeeper / body-owner / the fractal person is never a unit standing in relation to an entity / the outside world exists like an actor on a stage: it’s there but it’s pretending to be something else / a form of complexification / the knowledge will always be a kind of extended body of the previous owners / a smell problem which is a big problem / a moment of ontological indeterminacy / social, cosmopolitical space / everything is alive and everything has agency / predation: this is the key concept / a progression towards another realm of physicality / what you eat is a position / looking for lost things, things that have been lost / the room seems to shake and vibrate with motion / I’m the other and everything I do is adding others / snakes are leaving and entering your body / people love to be tied to trees to stop themselves from hurting others / a nightmarish repetition that doesn’t seem to have any purpose to it / possibly the difference is the lack of an explicit reference to healing / young people who can injure themselves and then just get up and walk away from the injury / I don’t know whose poking the wound to check if its real / fearlessness related to violence which is the price of entry / the reparative / and we talk about compassion / kant was addicted to coffee, sartre was addicted to amphetamines / vibrational communication in animals / an impetuous will / the most sublime with the most carnal / a cosmopolitics of erotic inbetweeness / technology does not take on its full meaning until it is integrated into the human body / how can I maintain my freedom in the face of the freedom of the other / there is a hallucinatory quality to so called normal life / the inter-bleeding of genre, myth and real politics / one move, which is consciously moving towards death / my dna has two different performances / when dreams become tears / suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone – intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating / amazon knows the books you’re going to like before you do / computational capital / capitalism itself as a digital culture / general antagonism / believers in the celebrity form / the computational unconscious / to keep your freedom you need to be prepared to walk away from any opportunity / do the people in charge open up the dialog to the obvious realities of structural inequality in which we are all complicit, or are the troublemakers isolated and shut down / there really are a lot of hypocrites in the world / the social conditions in which the technologies are formed are sedimented in the machines / creating a scarcity and selling it back / these are expropriated commons / the computer is now in our language / very sincere and very difficult / I’m still hoping I can surprise myself at least a few more times but so far there’s not evidence one way or the other / yelling smoke into the air / saying there’s a right way and a wrong way of making things prevents new possibilities from emerging / belief is not a state of mind but a result of relationships between people / to agree with everything a thinker says or writes is to do their thinking a disservice / when the video ruins the song / I have always been interested in what it means to stand in front of a room full of people, often strangers, who are watching you, and to do so with as little armoring as possible, not hiding the fact that the situation is unnerving or even nerve-racking, being as vulnerable as possible without turning vulnerability into any kind of drama or crutch / the first time I ever heard the word genocide in a song / the importance of non-formal and informal learning during the course of activist struggles / I had ever intention of being there promptly at 10am but my hangover had other ideas / songs of love and activism / its very frustrating and interesting / you write a book exposing corruption and the corrupt respond by hiring two writers for a book claiming the opposite / an unromantic view towards organizing and activism / snitch-jacketing / you learn a lot about the state from being in confrontation with it / some of us didn’t even know this was a democracy in the first place / how do you do intergenerational learning in activist spaces / solidarity as strategy / questions about why particular kinds of knowledge are given higher value / the insatiable greed of the addict / combative syndicalism / popular education techniques being used in the corporate world / struggles are very context specific / solidarity is a necessary tactic to get somewhere / one hundred and thirty-one students saying we were not paid by any political party / songs of love and capitalism / bringing the festival to the protest / lacking in jouissance / why is mainstream literature so psychotically apolitical / revolutionary institutional party / killer charm / ethical spectacle / all crime, no time / to make the protests open to people who have never participated in politics / there were so many different ways to manipulate an election / they don’t really have a voice despite being the majority of the population / the state relies on a great deal of theatrics / who killed the bishop / who can erase the traces / the heart beating without rest / sacred inflammation / many never got buried or they got buried in mass graves / very alive ongoing structures of power / my father won’t talk about certain things / only looks to activate the memory / a choral piece where they only repeat the word guilty / desire knows nothing of exchange, it knows only theft and gift / the other children were mean to me and in some sense I never really got over it / the working title for marguerite duras’s novel l’amant (the lover) was la photo absolue (the absolute photograph) / the number of people I don’t really know anymore appears to be increasing exponentially / artists should have honest discussions about ambition / the technology bends the curve of the possible / a feeling that the things I'm most interested in generally don’t exist / structures of rationality live by what escapes them / it’s perhaps true that I think I can escape artistic death by constantly reinventing myself / calling something into existence / there might be other books / each form of energy capture must hit a hard ceiling, past which expansion is impossible; people must either die out or convert to a new system and a new set of values, often after a great collapse that has involved the same five factors: uncontrolled migration, state failure, food shortages, epidemic disease, and always in the mix, though contributing in unpredictable ways – climate change / writers are often sickly / today I saw the most incredible hail storm I’ve ever seen in my life – august in calgary / calling something into existence / derrida ruined my life / everybody has to do their failure / art fiction illustrated / everything becomes an option, all work is equally valuable, in some sense we’re all doing the right thing / the black cat calling the kettle black / the easterlin paradox / not famous like kayne, famous like kafka / the instinct to create a language within a language, to play with speech, to embellish, to obfuscate are among my most precious inheritances / episodes / loneliness, failure, bitterness, desire and art / dignity / the other is me, we are all the other / a world in which many worlds fit / episodes / tears like rain / though I am of course a wonderful dancer, I am also really, really not a dancer / if there wasn’t a heaven why would anyone bother dying / social interaction is so exhausting because of the effort required to pretend I have thoughts in my head other than wanting to kill myself / men emotionally recounting how when they were younger they were repeatedly told not to cry / drunken new yorkers / patient passion / whenever I’m in a relationship the main thing I learn from the experience is how little interest I have in being in a relationship / keeping art boring in the name of artistic excellence / perhaps consideration of the histories of anti-colonial struggle and slave uprisings, to give two cases where acts of transformative resistance happened without any meaningful top-down recognition of autonomy, privacy, or even personhood, might complicate this understanding of enclosure / I don’t know what the point is of publishing books after you die but I know there is often an increase in demand / when posthumous demand decreases we might think of it as a different kind of success / I am trying to figure things out but in the grip of a terrible unfiguring / before I had no readership but now I have only the readership that will hate these words / there are so many of us who all agree, who want to replace literature with telepathy / and if we can agree on that I am certain we can agree on so many wonderful things / each fork in the road is a devastating lie regarding the nature of choice / but keep going, we keep going, as each step demands and falls in love with yet another step. This is the true nature of time / different shades of waiting and different calamities of time / when you turn against things they turn towards you, and again, turn into step after delicate step / crying as you write the word tears / making visible without making public /critical thinkers insist in wishing race away, instead of trying to dismantle the apparatus that renders it such an effective, because productive, political tool / the music I listened to fifteen years ago no longer seems very good to me / of course, but sooner or later we all die / last night in my dream I googled: how do you fight capitalism / my life is such a violent loneliness / quotations on loneliness, sex, suicide and failure / I sell out to the moment / new idea for an epitaph: if it is possible to die of loneliness, I have done so / my position is that I’m not consequent / people pay to see others believe in themselves / this feeling that I’ve never been in more intense despair, a feeling I’ve certainly had before / I don’t think depression is that interesting, but apparently I think it’s interesting enough for a tweet / the mid-career blues / letting things not work / it’s the nature of addiction that it confuses ones desires / I write as a mode of penance for the arrogance inherent in my despair / channeling voices from the other world / compulsively looking around to check you’re not leaving stains / vulnerable paradoxes / the long 1970s / every artistic strategy is a double-edged sword / I think Richard Serra’s work is complete bullshit / black and non-black / I love to make people say capitalism / the concept of queerface / it’s almost a definition of art that what we think is the important art of our time will not necessarily be what people in the future think of as the important art of our time / just want to make it clear that we’re not taking questions at all / so much white art is about almost nothing / can we deal with hope the same way we’ve been dealing with radicality / a different concept of what the centre is / everything comes from somewhere / burned all my angst out in my twenties, don’t have any left / most churches now are in fact LBGTQ affirming churches / the music itself engaged the community / to include more people and have this compassion and love / grant them freedom from revenge / more often than not I’m obsessed with Harry Nilsson / A happens then B happens then C happens / multiple entry points / if you give me enough language, I’m going to understand what you’re saying to me – I don’t need it to be expressed correctly / poetry off the page / the title’s at the wrong place / you have something to do in dance, do it / really going against the idea of the other who is coming from somewhere else / really ignoring northern africa / darkness between dawn / dreams are the place we request / he dreams what he does, he’s really haunted by it / haunted and hunted / not every angel can be an ice cream cone / art is one thing you can do with your pain / religious music with new modern orchestration / jet lag dreams / not power, sharing / I’ve started reading poetry before bed to guard against getting caught up in the plot and reading all night / last two books in the next seven years and then I’m out / drugs and rugs and thugs and pugs / dreams between dawn / different questions about the beards / tunisia / trying to write for one hour / a cast of two questions / the time when arabs danced / now in egyptian cinema women wear the veil and they didn’t before / truthfully I think about the ritual of the moment / my aesthetics are hyper-visceral: I don’t trust art that doesn’t sweat or bleed or cry / joy is a radical concept / a kind of happiness that is beyond happiness and that doesn’t have to have a reason / black lives matter is primarily driven by queer black women / specifically soccer / I have no energy to waste / culture precedes policy / a really handsome brown man is now the face of imperialism / you present yourself as a person from the future that you want to see / biter is someone who will take a chunk of your style and represent as if it were there own / getting influenced and flipping it / the amusement park / to show that humans are really trying things / dragons are solitary / I feel I really need to think about my life and make some hard decisions / you can never be a prophet in your own village / sometimes it’s bad to wait for the support, you lose your project / condescending moderators / secret images of melancholy / love and research / one small thought at the beginning of the process / the title so often comes before the work / there’s absolutely no misinterpretations because if I have a point it’s to allow for all possible interpretations and the conversations they inspire / a mega-afterthought / stereotypes of a black male misunderstood / how it met or didn’t meet my desires / the need to buy toothpaste / watching love as if it were on a screen / coming from all directions and all senses of time / clearly channeling the disenfranchised / a sense of crippledness / I feel like I kind of made a utopia for myself / I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy – a claustrophobia inside your skin / I have a pretty deep belief in apologizing / writing is something I seek refuge in when I'm feeling too miserable to do anything else / mort kilométrique / the need for a national enquiry / lone wolf dying of loneliness / the difficulty of knowing how marginal or not-marginal my work is / the never-ending search for a band aid to put on the violence of loneliness / hell is for the living / the things I do to try to lessen my loneliness always end up making me feel more lonely / chaos and violence and ambiguous relationships and constant travel can be paths to redemption / because trying to deal with people is always violently sad, alienating, lonely and painful and I can’t cope / I’ve never experienced interest in another person and wonder what it would feel like / self-awareness without change / the secret is both that we’re all having versions of the same conversation and that culture provides few ways for us to know and encounter this fact / sometimes I have the strangest feeling that what I actually do is feel bad for a living / that we are at all times drowning in every kind of propaganda / a cover version of bas jan ader’s I'm too sad to tell you entitled I’m too tired to tell you / she thought of money as if it were blood; you needed just enough to circulate / bodymap by leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha / conjoined terms / the happy book of suicides / dizzy violence / to the success of our hopeless mission / apocalypse is a genre / the feeling that all of my books are about the same thing and therefore the titles are interchangeable / they’re good at something but that thing is not necessarily art / affluence curates poverty / you should never give anyone a megaphone / one must not believe that something must be said correctly in order that it be correctly understood, and therein lies the secret of the living language / there are no individual solutions to collective problems / I don’t have to drink in order to not have a good time / my position is that I’m not consequent / taking notes while watching a talk in a language you don’t understand / classic works that not very many people actually saw / public feelings / cocaine cartesians / violence within kindness / I don’t need to drink in order to not have a good time / love is warmer than breath / the good leg and the bad leg / kindness within violence / an artist unable to monetize their practice / come in and burn out / I just want to work myself to death, is that so wrong / you put six opinions in a room and you get six opinions / retro-activism / no tears for the creatures of the night / vulnerability can be the foundation for connection / things stolen from other artists / axes are meant for chopping / we know the problem but what is the solution / will the internet learn how to love / nothing is clear / how I learned it was time to stop drinking / and your teeth will never be clean enough / kindle for tinder / how the room tenses up when someone asks just the wrong question / a man in a hoodie versus a woman in a hoodie / speaking more slowly to save time / the men always talk so much more than the women / if their first album isn’t their best than their second album stands a fighting chance / paying money as a way to ensure minimal attention / the question period was mainly bad vibes / taking credit for things you didn’t say or do / cash for trash / man with a microphone versus man with a megaphone / like you could just reach up and tear off their aura / where does an artist learn how to stop / don’t worry about the internet / the sweater vest of hopeless situations / will this grave be my masterpiece / post-hospitality / how can we work the art system to our best advantage / this video is not available in your country / everywhere and nowhere / the curator of pure evil / did the philosophy lecture on depression result in you feeling more or less depressed / what doesn’t help but doesn’t hurt / the one year anniversary of something that didn’t quite happen / and the auteurs all became television directors / watch me fail / the delicacy of pure exhaustion / short thoughts / the crime of speaking only one language / google search for erotic death / music is a short cut past collapse / were you in quebec when it became its own nation / becoming president because your father was president / were you awake for the best parts of the dream / the people who want to be famous doing their best to converse with people who have absolutely no power to make them famous / once when I was in the hospital I heard the trees were innocent / I have started saying I’m semi-retired / ridicule is nothing to be scared of / games without frontiers / what would decisions be like if we followed our hearts: messy and fast / depressed and repressed / what we’re watching has been edited badly on purpose / they’re remaking everything / mad director / that language is already parodying itself so you don’t need to do a parody of it / unable to remember if it happened yesterday or two days ago / how should a performance be / it’s hard to be curious about something without revealing your ignorance / white fragility / hypocrites of the golden age / the ministry of assimilation / being suicidal and criticizing bullfighting / cruel care / the bullfighter is fined if he takes longer than twenty minutes to kill the bull / the liverpool care plan / dry your tears to improve your aim / 7 years are the years in which I make major life decisions / commentary on futility / rapping at triple speed / caught in the act of being yourself / and I dropped down into a black hole of near absolute failure / notes from the afterward that contradict some of the books main points / singing traditional english and irish songs / rehearsal and joan jonas / the oral sedition / rock ‘n’ roll at 7pm / if lies were possible, there would be no reason to write fiction / I seem to be overproducing / but that was before I started aging / projects emerge from other projects / frontiers without games / last night I dreamt I was an arsonist: as I headed to set one last fire, I got a text saying it’s a trap, turned around, and decided to go see art instead / but one could also say that what appears as scientific objectivity is always made of finely congealed subjectivity / the ongoing sense that I'm more part of the problem than I am part of the solution / de sade is a patriarch who hates patriarchy and has nowhere else to go / sisterhood of our lady of the good death / who am I most afraid of (never) meeting / I somehow feel the year is over already / how tv didn’t replace cinema but also how it did / unclear situations / scenario du film passion / curators are politicians in that they never give you a straight answer / open rehearsal / visual art cannibalizes film, dance, poetry and finally theatre / sometimes I now think I’m just a social media addiction masquerading as a person / children of the internet, please click harder / I feel therefore I think / pippi longstocking represents my own childish longing to meet a person who has power but does not abuse it / how long will a ten pound bag of rice last for one person / I have come to Chicoutimi to find out where my depression ends / as it seems to me now, in my vacillation to play Hamlet, I may have succeeded at playing him after all / the titles of my books are always at least a little bit misleading / when is a feud not a feud / we came here and we stole their land, do we really need to steal their youtube videos as well / every time I have an argument about art and politics it strikes me anew: how weak I am at engaging with people I disagree with – and how little experience I actually have with the task / as if art was more important than our responsibility to one another / things just get more difficult and more difficult and more difficult and then just a little bit easier / in discussions I feel there is often little real understanding of structural inequality / the idea you can do whatever you want in the name of art is a particularly pure form of privilege / it’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind / something so deep and fucked up in my personality: that I can always walk away / bank machine that wouldn’t give me money / over-identifying with the zeitgeist / having time to kill and not knowing what to do / capitalism is racism is the potential extinction of life on earth / the truth of capitalism lies in the fact that when people fear for their survival, they are easy to buy / either you’ve got bars or you don’t / writing is the art of disorganizing an order and organizing a disorder / the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are not necessarily true / the stories we tell ourselves about truth are obviously about ourselves / war is, quite literally, a license to print money / addiction to the internet comes as no surprise / the romantics speak about beauty and nature / the artist figure alone / I actually felt extremely alone and terrible there, but also felt I couldn’t complain since I was getting so much writing done / all the things I don’t know about the history of literature are actually what give me the freedom to write the way I do / more thematically complex and linguistically direct / that you could not have just one truth / late periods often turn mystical / emotional ambivalence and linguistic versatility / you think you’re criticizing racism and colonization, but you haven’t spent enough time examining your role within it, so instead you end up reinforcing the very things you had meant to critique, in keep with your traditional historical role within the dynamic / a dialect is a language without an army / a family is made up of different generations / tattooed forever by dalia rosetti / every pun is awesome / I grew up in the eighties hearing the term postmodernism every fifteen seconds / I think I need a hobby / we don’t know what a skunk is / demythologized / a cold pillow / take your lumps like an artist / if it was meant to be it will happen and if it wasn’t meant to be it might not / one month in Chicoutimi / normally when I’m blocked I don’t try to force it but because I have one week left in my writing residency I somehow feel that I should / when the people you’re trying to empower are in fact disempowered by the work you’ve made to empower them / it takes four thousand dollars to recycle one ton of plastic and the resulting pellet can be sold for thirty-six dollars on the commodities market / art is a contract to generate empathy / addiction: any process that removes intolerable reality / recovery: growing up, grieving and facing reality / how can one make a living making anti-capitalist art / it’s okay to have bad experiences as long as you learn from them / a plethora of misunderstandings / the parallel is not exact, and perhaps not even obvious / we were being influenced by all the books we read, but these same books had all been written at least ten years before we discovered them, so that we were always playing catch-up, as all the new ideas expired before us / western culture is regurgitating itself to death / the loneliness feels like a more honest pain / all the people who want things to stay the way they are and all the people who want things to change / just about everyone is part of the secret conspiracy of everyday life to get what you can get out of it / troubled in many directions at once / I’ve never written so much in my life, it’s like I’ve been possessed by a demon / I’m gradually becoming more and more obsessed with the year 2022 / I realized that if I had stayed in film, I would face a relentless pressure to be more commercial, and that sooner or later it would break me / mom went to the wrong pool / when you’re trying to make anti-racist art, and you miss the mark, you might accidentally end up making racist art / depression is the thing I most understand / loneliness drives me endlessly towards bad decisions / today is january 9th, 2016 / the more I’m on the internet, the harder I find it to read books / I think the future will be a mash-up of the past: a kind of feudalist, totalitarian capitalism / not a mad scientist but a mad capitalist / evil scientist tries to make an evil robot dog but fails and instead makes a good robot dog who immediately takes the evil scientist to jail – it’s not fair, says the evil scientist, I made that dog / the last six years: 2016-2022 / even honesty can be manipulative / writing something down is permission to forget / abstraction is selective ignorance / when I’m alone I basically don’t think about other people; I think about wanting to kill myself and about art / it will be my last book if I finish it before I die / science is science because the military is interested in it – art is art because the military is generally not particularly interested in it / stop everything else around here (so we can start anew) / every scientist knows what hard work it is to get nature to obey the laws of nature / how the secretive must wonder what others actually know about them / so clearly don’t have the confidence of my convictions / so easily startled / unimpressive young people / I want to be able to think clearly again / my idea about being an author is that the less books you write the better it is / to hear peoples voices crack while they’re reading it / I had some success as a writer, but I think I managed to write my way out of it / but sometimes it’s a terrible mistake to not make a mistake / post-modernism is like the milk I was weaned on / even more often I have the feeling I’ve already died, a ghost wandering through a world that no longer concerns it / if artists can’t bite the hand that feeds them, who can / good faith and bad faith are entirely entangled / appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they’re partaking in / art that’s about something versus art that’s about nothing / it really does seem that now is my time of looking back, of the intensity of looking back / the tension of despair / criminal tears / in which memory and the city narrates itself / places free themselves from the present at night / as if she was actually a character in my film / I don’t see myself as something who should confirm what people already know / knowing everything versus searching for something / he is in a way every figure in the background / destruction is not just physical destruction, it’s also the destruction of time / cinematic justice / settler films / inside houses / losing my confidence / upside down dreaming / ofra haza / usually when people go to see a film they read the synopsis first / countless ancient cities which are being destroyed / pictures last longer than human beings / the ability of images to rescue history / gentrification is the heart of gentrification / is this what it means to be an artist / perhaps ‘I’ve started saying I’m semi-retired’ is just a euphemism for ‘I’m older and more tired than I was before’ / I work fast and don’t look back / when I saw adele rapping the nikki minaj verse from monster I suddenly got it: she’s so down to earth, she’s like the everywoman’s everywoman / it’s better to ask than to guess / the artist thinking himself great is the road to artistic death / the more often I talk to people the more I talk about wanting to kill myself / nobody told me being an artist would be so boring / science fiction is always about now / to be derivative of a more famous writer / had no idea so many people loved david bowie before he died / just finish a few more books and then quietly die in my sleep / some days it comes out in two waves, but today only one / putting way too much caffeine into my body / aires communs / you know me: always productive, always depressed / a photo of a photo of a photo, etc. / revolutionary tiredness / I almost don’t talk with anyone anymore / who are the collaborators who are willing to take greater artistic risks / freedom as a social form / you don’t understand, sharing is the law, the land owns itself / sound at night / settlers and their frontiers / roof life by svetlana alpers / I often don’t even know what I feel until months later, when I’ve had some time to reflect / midinette / we didn’t think the revolution would actually lead to revolution / the unfinished fragment: an unfinished fragment / a scathing timidity / imperfect love press / being woke/ songs for the nsa / searching for protest that’s effective and aimed directly at the systematic nature of the problems/ indeed, we need something against which the pristine can manifest itself, can create its artifice of pristineness / the fervor of the newly converted / the rockin’ gatekeepers / democracy is a corporate scam / sent the final edits to my publisher and the moment after I hit send felt an enormous sense of panic / let he who is without mediocrity cast the first stone / today I realized I don't have a solo performance practice, I only have a collaborative performance practice / artists today are like bureaucrats or factories / I feel a bit like I’m done: like I’ve said everything that I have to say / artist placement group / voice versus exit / threatened by her gallerist of being dropped / a lapsed interface designer / trolling means a fake or provisional openness / lulz are the sound of post-irony itself / hood rat is a good style / at different points in my life, especially when I was much younger, I’ve tried to sell out and it simply didn’t work / when normcore went viral / the gap lost thirty million dollars that year / elation and confusion / punching up versus punching down / a semi-public figure / I think there is much to be said for listening, realizing you are wrong about something, publicly admitting it, and changing your thinking / when you’re being tortured, and by this I mean literally tortured, there’s no shame in writing or saying whatever your torturers want you to write or say / pranks without cruelty / international council of museums code of ethics / tv hates you / it’s sort of an essay about how I don’t know what I’m talking about but the problem with it is that I don’t know what I’m talking about / the stopping number / how to feel that the things one had done have really been done / like most things in life I feel it’s a bad idea / there is much waiting in art / optimists arrive late / they’re always on their phones / waiting for the backlash to begin / what would it be like to be an artist who didn’t want to be famous / of course, however wild it pretends to be, this land is always inhabited only by employees / I feel my potential is mainly limited by self-sabotage and my goal is always to sabotage myself less / parades of the politically depressed / the political is ineloquent in the sense that it doesn’t address peoples desires / protect me from what I don’t know I want / how a security mentality took hold in a context in which everyone was dying / writing off my early years a juvenilia / thinking about the political realm as a site for strange encounters seems important to me / to be so surgically specific it becomes universal / productive misunderstandings / literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it / even to have a bad day as a human would have been a blessing / I’m just a guy, I’m not a neurodevelopmental optometrist / pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will to power / in the not yet / my plan is to stay calm / receipts from the nineties / a novel to be completed in the year 2022 / fifty minutes / the brain that changes itself / thinker without a thought / filmmakers who make instillations instead of films are afraid of the real / I feel absolutely terrible about everything but I don’t want to complain / bleeding hearts concealing art / I fear if I didn’t feel so lonely that I’d never want to have sex / I wanted to keep unfashionable experience alive / my life sometimes seems like little more than the residue of this ongoing gap between my thinking and living / I fear if I didn’t feel so lonely that I’d never want to have sex / the five thousand year old joke / an orgasm in the shape of a premonition / every work must be the last / panting pants / how the movement disappears in space / constructing and deleting / fragile parasite / some kind of surplus of performativity / fucked with jetlag / the time between the year 1234 and the year 2345 / choreography from within / what becomes a legends costs / short works / wearing your (outlaw) knowledge / everyone dies, nobody minds / uncontrollable outcomes / rendering the doubt / other narratives are kicking in / the composer who became a nasa engineer / that nsa means both no strings attached and national security agency / airy enough to give space for movement to breathe / I hate it when the music tells you what to feel / chewing on each others legs / careerist overdrive / with the delay there’s a certain feeling of navigation / hyper-listening / there appears to be no way for me to give my works any sense of being an event / the thunder games / givens / tin pan dictator / cinematic tweets / a day in the life of collective desperation / a nettle in a haystack / practice, practice, mattress / greasy species / the thunder years / art is nationalistic / power has been divided / the most powerful life is in fact life no more / flags flying backwards / humping the radio transmitter / so you want to write a fugue / this artist leaves no traces / sleepy praxis / canadian lover / the capitalist artist par excellence / history becomes effective to the extent that it introduces discontinuity into our very being / I’d prefer to / spill-proof / poetry versus the market / a t-shirt that says I’d prefer not to / the classics make me feel sick / nap time with drugs / anger sublimated towards pleasure / three thousand books / musical living / mice, wolf, mouse / animals have replaced cinema / the wildlife thrives in post meltdown chernobyl / all of his movies are three minutes long / boring babies to sleep / no I without a we / and I’ll dine in a poverty from which I will not awake / noon to four / informing consent / a small model airplane / the wonder that you can record and document life / the length of the slots has been calculated by a very peculiar formula / walter benjamin was probably a pretty conventional cinema goer / when movies seem almost like a religion / nervous jottings / we think of you as a dancer / what is the most likely creation myth / a light bulb turns on beneath the earth / grey weather / the sacrament of language / at the end the human is transformed into some other being / on creaturely life / protect me from what I don’t know I don’t want / a machine for producing meaninglessness / once you feel lack, you can’t go back / excessively unfamous / we’re not on the same page / I don’t like asking questions, because I so often feel the answer is already embedded in the question / always feeling lost, but feeling especially lost these days / artist opium den / depression nights / when I feel confused I often do nothing and wait for clarity / clarity didn’t come / the long sleeve shirt lobby protesting the right to bare arms / if you can't get nostalgic about a past that never actually existed then what can you get nostalgic about / the road to good reviews is paved with bad reviews / instant gratification takes too long / from one thing know ten things / I admire artists who do less / they thought taboo was a dirty word / last night I dreamt the telescope was invented by aliens, who sent it to us telepathically, to put us on the wrong track / like a moth to the internet / secret romance involved / fear of arriving somewhere and realizing you don't actually want to be there / possible titles for the book I haven’t started yet / for me, art is always something that happens for and between people / dorian gray author photo strategy: the older I get the younger my author photo gets ending with a baby picture on the back of my final book / corruption predates capitalism / living outside or after capitalism / it’s only sentience that makes life seem absurd / washed up but no one’s noticed yet / like building a maze as you go while at the same time getting lost in it / I’m on a mission to like every single post on facebook / the patience of a clam: a clam takes 100 years to make a pearl / the unfinished fragment: an unfinished fragment / learning to talk to musicians / a few delicate questions about exhaustion / being an artist just gets more difficult over time / I’m not drinking nearly enough water / drugs and tweezers / oil and apple and srri’s / an orgasm in the shape of the alcohol / I think my religion used to be ‘never look back’ and lately I seem to be renouncing it / and may every day one has not danced at least once be a wasted day – and may every truth that does not provoke a burst of laughter appear false / this catastrophe that we call progress / you broke it, you bought it / you broke into it, you have to live there / then again, why do I think the anti-spectacular always equals the humane / I have the overwhelming feeling that my life is over / the feeling that one is an especially miserable person / live tweeting your funeral / the eerie feeling that I’m not the only tourist in berlin / some future / almost all “terrorism” finds its origin in state sponsored agent provocateurs / often when I read about kafka I feel like I’m reading about myself / a six hour film with a six hour introduction / the slow cinema festival in newcastle / manila, in the claws of light / time was imposed by the west / time as having different speeds and different dimensions / time as spatial / the concentrationary / forced relocation of the population / to distinguish between concentration and extermination camps / a dictatorship of dictatorships / a radical engagement with your present / as I get older, my relation to the sentiment 'youth culture is a dead end' continues to intensify / I’m a creature of habit who is utterly afraid of falling too deep into routine / finding ways to make performances incapable / knowing is a direct material engagement / a sweet spot between the unbuildable and the unusable / disowned juvenilia / those were years of looking back that followed so many years of looking only forward / the untrained cannot effectively train the trained / we had genitals, we had alcohol, we didn’t know how to use either responsibly / unfinished: a novel / the squirrel that runs into my kitchen and steals the food / I don’t know what I like / devastating sadness / lover who does too much drugs / telling a child to stay young don’t grow up too fast / pink drinks / doing the opposite of what I think I should be doing / after america finished destroying the rest of the world it began destroying itself / recovering from jet lag while preparing to be jet lagged again / some really misguided relationships / definitely becoming more of a curmudgeon as I get older / I have no idea what people say about me behind my back, if anything at all / a religious demand to which there comes no religious reply / capitalism is the over-production of lack / you can only live in the present – but writing a book, because it takes so long, always feels a bit like living in the future / these moments of absolute certainty about something about which it later turns out I am completely wrong / this feeling of absolute failure / the tragedy of being a not particularly interesting person / an artists desire for autonomy / painful stories / polite baroque / I’m now quite possibly entering a period of not traveling / not traveling / to continue with the current disaster or embark boldly on a new, much worse disaster / the idea that travel is some sort of golden utopia / the novel that was only read by other novelists / it was then I started having premonitions / we no longer plan / monotheism sucks / dead phones / sending your spirit helpers away and they start crying / too old to push up to the front / there are disagreements on the classification of the guillotine – some associate the invention of the device with the development of mechanization, others with the growing influence of humanism / I’ve wasted my life on loneliness and depression and now it’s over and it’s only now I can look back and see the error of my ways / never having experienced jealousy / an ongoing list of possible titles / does the project seem sufficiently impossible to be desirable / I must remain full of doubt / let’s all become overrated together / the existence of madness responds to the historical demand to fence in the outside / Foucault says that his books are for him experiences in the full sense of the word, since from them he himself came out transformed / survival of the warmongers / to produce something that doesn’t exist yet, without being able to know what it will be / not due to a faith in the virtues of spontaneity, but rather to allow for his response to have a problematic character and let it be voluntarily uncertain / what I have said here is not ‘what I think’ but often rather what I wonder whether one couldn’t think / imaginary praxis / a small taste of what it might be like to be a young graphic designer in the early twentieth-century / two writer are writing the exact same book at the exact same moment / I’m always in crisis but at this precise moment I’m especially in crises / we don’t suffer from trolls / taste-mongering / statler and waldorf / a perfect memory is the enemy of thought / I had always assumed I would be a writer without a readership / silent film stars learning to speak / instead of actually working on a book, I am producing an endless series of titles for said book / an endless series of possible titles for a book I will probably never write / for years now people have been telling me that I'm "good at titles" and it seems I'm finally choking under the pressure / title-shyness / the things I don’t understand I really don’t understand and there are so many / there is never ‘a’ lie but immediately a second lie – the one we tell ourselves that we’ve not told a lie / a reminder of how I think I'm different but in other ways fit so neatly into the status quo / the depressed saint / what kind of phoenix could rise from these ashes? / progress as an attempt to colonize the future / it sounded better yesterday / nervous heartbeat / when the game is over, the king and the pawn are put into the same box / colonization is not a metaphor / meaning is subjective / our whatever is more whatever than your whatever / I’m trying to travel less and see what it’s like – so far: I’m really bored / alina vitukhnovskaya / the true world has in the end become a fable / there is a noticeable gap between wanting something and being able to enjoy it / loneliness seeks fame / a failure with a following / I believe art is somehow always about taking maximum artistic freedom, but also about using that freedom ethically / life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels / washed up, burnt out, ashes without a phoenix / I've somehow never been able to follow a success with another success / often when you feel you really have something in common with someone is when you actually have the least in common / these ‘zombie ships’ may be the first sign of global economic collapse / a book is not *really* in the world until you've discovered a typo / buying records from sailors on the docks / in those days you had to work harder to get records / limitations are essential / the bigger the love the stronger the hate / belong to a world that’s destroying itself / a dry kind of cold / the time has come to become enormously strategic / nothing is ever perfect / push them back, push them back, waaaaaay back / nervous breakdown, nervous breakup / he was playing in an insane asylum, in those days people used to take whatever gigs they could get / I just tried everything once / if I had known I was going to live to 104 I would have taken better care of my health / what compelled you / a small nervous breakdown / are you going to lose the humanity in the music / the elephant in the room is over saturation / you can always be a phantom in your own village / capable of raising misery to a strange positivity / you don’t understand music: you hear it - so hear me with your whole body / where the bizarre and the banal are completely intertwined / new stories / residue of social media posts / when content comes from form in ways that don’t result in empty formalism / a full shelf of alice notley books / people afraid of people / strangers from myth / to be strategically optimistic in circumstances that are difficult / escapism and grief / books with the word “american” in the title / ‘I have no secrets’ is a good place to hide a few / imposing help without listening to people’s real needs / they become passive, not active / when one becomes just a little bit sick of life / the desire where art could be the center instead of social work / not that we are helping them, but we help each other / now is the right moment to stop / stop everything / they don’t discuss much, they work / all paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in / I wanted to stop at five but I suppose I’ll stop at six / communism is good in theory, but in practice it usually just ends up being destroyed in a military coup financed by the cia / something new is most likely to be a variation on something that came before / not of the ruins / last night I dreamed I had writer’s block / a cult leader without a cult / a con man without a con / trying to be the comic relief at the memorial concert / be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you / marcel duchamp’s epitaph reads: d’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent (By the way, it’s always the others who die) / prizes are also a kind of tombstone / and I was turning forty, I was turning forty and felt that my ideas were very potent / self care versus collective care / when a person dies for reasons that are social as well as personal / restorative and transformative justice / how do we cope with heightened and complex emotional states / on being not consequent / american imperialism doesn't seem to particularly notice who wins any given election / teaching became something that happens in a trance state, and semesters were one trance long / you can’t make art from art / text embossed on a photograph / I listen for her excess / formal qualities / the present body is multiple in various ways / visual artists making amateur film, visual artists making amateur dance, visual artists making amateur theatre / the ephemerality of life in song / maybe the members of all of our members / I had a kind of insane idea for the cover of this book: half the print run would feature the title unfinished love imperfect love and the other half would feature the title imperfect love unfinished love / personalized one-on-one performances for tax evaders / dystopian fictions as white guilt / I would like to rethink my practice but no longer know if its possible / loving divorces / the things about easy jokes is sometimes they’re genuinely funny / too much art is the enemy of art / like a magician where everyone knows how the tricks are done but he still guards their secrets with his life / that was a friend defending me from metatron / I feel montreal totally stole the scene / every time you do something everything is at stake / joyful transgression / unsettle, unlearn / searching for ways to deescalate my ego / I know we must not give up, we must protect each other against the onslaught of what is to come… but this morning I am in tears / I feel like I’m in the egomaniac phase of my work / I prefer the designation ‘tepid hipster’ / a neurotic’s lament / I imagine myself falling into a nervous breakdown of pure boredom / the insane thing is that now donald trump and leonard cohen will be forever joined in my memory / we were already on the road to hell but why mosey / and they say that times change – times will always change the same / anything I say about the work, I want to also say that it’s not completely true; I never want to paint the work into a corner / only individual life is short, the life of generations is long / magic is evoked when frustration threatens desire / a franz kafka that’s read toward a minor literature / prizewinning is a form of domestication / I am just trying to give myself space to fail / I know my limitations, they are many / I guess I have some sort of martyr complex / what would it take to fully disarm both the u.s. and russian nuclear arsenals / nervous breakdown, burnout, midlife crisis – or a little bit of each / the hundred year orgasm / culturally biased decisions / I don’t know what anyone else should do and I also don’t know what I should do / kkk took the white house away / I just felt completely unable to communicate in that situation / if someone in the house was unhappy that sort of cast a dark cloud over everyone in the family / move the controller too much and you’re out / the one year orgasm versus the hundred year orgasm / a hard time with time / our technologies all have a clock / drunken lust / drunken clock / has anyone written a book about gamergate / time-space melting / a game where you can only make one move per day / promiscuous bewilderment / the road to hell is paved with good intentions / under the good intentions, the beach / as I’ve moved forward, in some ways I’ve always attempted to erase and undo my past / on the left, I think there’s not enough distinction made between an enemy and someone on the same side as you who you have serious disagreements with / it has to do with how common it is to believe one thing but instead do the opposite / I have so much admiration for books that took a very long time to write. It seems to me that, within them, you can feel their struggle with time / I think there will be hope again when oil is no longer profitable / a dancing non-dancer in a world of dancing dancers / remembering things, I can't seem to figure out how long ago they were / a dancing non-dancer in a world of non-dancing dancers / the world is going to hell even faster than usual / a covert movement to convert the children of billionaires towards left wing causes / I feel I have to find new ways to trick myself into believing the work I’m doing is in some sense important to something outside myself / I feel completely unfocussed / I think what we're seeing now is the actual results of the cold war / if communism lost and capitalism won, we're now seeing the psychosis of the victory dance / w. e. b. dubois’ concept of double consciousness and multiple embodied identities / the night before she dreamed she had won the nobel prize for despair / falling into a coma of tepid boredom / we’re on an ultralight beam / jacob wren, what is pleasure / the terrors of painful honesty / where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one / how much time I've spent waiting for something to happen / from the beginning he held the tragic position that the only revolution was the eternal revolution – an inexhaustible struggle for something already lost / do you want post-punk or do you want the post-truth / when I’m writing it’s the closest I get to feeling a little bit sane / there’s enough for everyone but there’s not enough for everyone’s greed / I fear on my tombstone someone will one day write: he wrote too many books / the mushroom at the end of the world by anna lowenhaupt tsing / lie to me in a language I can understand / in this family, my brother would say whenever there was some kind of argument, the sane ones are the traitors / the unbearable tension between wanting to quit making art and being unable to / I often say that I'm not particularly consequent / you can never ban abortion, you can only ban safe abortions / a day is nothing: there is just time to become yourself, and then night is upon you / other people have it worse rarely makes anyone feel better / my work has always been predicated on the idea that I’m more part of the problem than I am of the solution – little did I know how right I was / I cry all the time / there is a long history of people voting against their own best interests / with most artists I like, I feel their old work was better and, not coincidentally, I seem to feel that way about my own work as well / I think about Trump’s wall, and then about the Berlin Wall, and realize, wow, the U.S. really wants to become Russia / the excitement of hip hop related to the fact that it has happened entirely in my lifetime / the totality of a catastrophe is the privilege of its spectators, not its protagonists / research and destroy / saying a work of art is political is of course very different from saying that it’s politically effective / i am not interested in metaphors for glitter only glitter itself / the most current incarnation is an unholy trinity consisting of ultra-wealthy oligarchs, religious right, and white nationalists-populists / how paralyzed I feel in life / under occupation I almost wrote: trying not to become obsessed with how evil Steve Bannon is / when we bomb it’s war, when they bomb it’s terrorism / I don’t know if I want to know, but I definitely think that I want to want to know / realizing I’d never even heard of Breitbart until last year / I love starting books and hate finishing them / actually it is the tenderness that is the revolution for me / the artist who never found his zeitgeist / I think I will keep making art but, as many have mentioned before, there are times (in history or in one's own life) when it feels even more futile than usual / I don’t believe in god, it’s a collective fantasy, but I do believe in the need for collective fantasies, in their warmth and power / the thing is, I am actually a snowflake / a way of asking another culture to do for me what I seem unable to do for myself / like the chickens voting for colonel sanders / a moment of consent in a world that ongoingly exploits / my youthful confidence long ago depleted / the golden rule as it applies to art criticism / the paradox of wanting to make things that are meaningful for others even though I myself am unable to experience meaning / the distinction between xenolalia and glossolalia / if the disease is capitalism then I’m sad to admit I now think art is more part of the disease then it is part of the cure; nonetheless, it’s still the part of the disease I’m closest to, most interested in / astonishment is a depravation of the sensual domain, an unhinging shock out of self-possession by way of bewilderment or terror / too tired to do enough things to make me tired enough to sleep / today I tweeted nothing / the repetitive quality of hope / the route between the human rights museum and where I was staying / it is me and it isn’t me at the same time / two pieces of balsa wood / when the grief piles up / poetry, poems, poets / I rely on them for words / in a way I see art as a kind of alchemy in which I can transform my misery into something of value for a reader or viewer / that feeling when your recently published novel about wanting to kill a billionaire is exponentially surpassed by the fascist billionaires taking over the White House / from a broken bottle traces of perfume still emanate by nathaniel mackey / my writing is getting more and more subjective / sometimes I have the feeling that the most interesting way to be an artist is not all the time / libertarians for fascism / still waiting for the jay electronica album / when a tear is juxtaposed with the sea, the tear becomes ashamed of itself / white people steal things / artisanal bombs / some sort of portrayal of the black body for white consumption / I know exactly who you are and this is the story of what you have done / trying to reclaim my great grandmother’s plant knowledge / we’re the seventh generation / how do I not succumb to the seductiveness of power / the exalted subject / to refuse the destructive / bravery is quotidian / what is wrong with being a victim / I don’t want to make hurt the whole thing that I am because I am many things / there’s so much denial / irresponsible art / I think the artist has an ethical responsibility but I don’t think there’s any fixed way of understanding exactly what that responsibility is / collective trauma requires collective healing / you’re stronger than that, why would you take that in / people seem to hate the word victim / to acknowledge that you’re experiencing injustice / to say ‘why look back at the past’ is a way of coping / the election cracked the wound / but I ain’t going down without a fight / it’s on / intergenerational activism / canadian exceptionalism / people just don’t visit anymore / my great grandparents are my great grandkids / moving slowly through space and time / the fiction of kindness and tolerance / the politeness of racism in canada / learning to use the they pronoun / it scares me that it is a groundbreaking gesture to do so / to let the pain of life paralyze me / the theoretically inclined, he realized, would argue that being held for questioning wasn’t the same as being invited to give a speech / a galaxy in pain / the similarities between chronic illness and global warming / the artist who didn’t know how to be an artist anymore / applauding after the solo / centering emotionality / do you have to know anything about the thinking behind the music to listen to the music / otherwise possibilities / buying more books than you could ever possibly read / buying more drugs than you could ever possible take / the inaccurate self-portrait / my taste has moved on / there must have been a year when jazz was basically the coolest thing out there and then a few years later when it was no longer exactly the case / a standard that’s degraded over time / the club that plays the same bangers every week / a five year plan stretched out to last an entire lifetime / to be extra-careful never to fully recover / plagiarism love / the band that took requests and ran far away with them / nothing is omnipotent, not even capitalism / it’s not true we can no longer imagine the world changing, we can easily imagine it changing for the worse / is it possible to write about my own death as if it were also the death of patriarchy and capitalism / like a project rising from the ashes of another project / I feel a perverse desire to try to write a book that every single person will hate / ellington’s reply to mingus’s proposal that the two of them make “a real avant-garde record” together: “charles, let’s not go back that far” / when you chase what you want you run past what you need / does it get more difficult as I get older or had it always been this difficult / we’d now like to open the floor to shorter speeches disguised as questions / if your research doesn’t change you, you’re not doing it right / the artist should go into the university and steal / the trouble with song is that it siphons off longing / when you step outside of the system, what you realize is that all the people you meet are trying to get into the system / the duster is a building that attracts dust in the environment / too late style / abu ammar is coming / foreign fighters in the palestinian armed struggle between 1971 and 1982 / I think this is the longest I’ve ever had writer’s block, then remember the seven years in which I barely wrote at all / finishing one book and immediately starting another / a stone learning about blood / he told me about the traditional Iroquois way, how parents and all adults were expected to win the favor and respect of the children rather and asking the children to blindly obey them / when the left hand knows all too well what the right hand is doing / if anyone ever gives you really good advice, listen carefully and have the wisdom to take it / I want to divert the river of french / I want to divert the river of american english / no national celebration of the anniversary of the end of the civil war / knowledge without meaning / human beings are the emotional animal / queering the epic / spirituality, politics, art – all attempts to find meaning in a world in which, to put it mildly, meaning isn’t obvious / so if I die in the middle of writing this book, publish it anyway / I have gathered about me people who understand how to translate fear into possibility / the willingness to still learn things from people you disagree with / desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe / brief observation of any personality proves that human existence cannot be reduced to science / to speak of culture is to foreshadow a battle / as a result those endlessly engaged in the quest for happiness, usually constitute the unhappiest lot / their theories to explain all manner of matter, though no theory to explain this thirst for theories / to finally admit that I compose my tweets longhand before eventually tweeting them / how many marxists does it take to change a light bulb – none, the light bulb contains the seeds of its own revolution / the kind of artist I’ve always been has a lot to do with a belief that art is primarily about questioning art at the same time as you’re questioning the world / if we had a hundred years to change the world / a failure’s failure / you’ve heard of a writer’s writer? well, he was a failure’s failure / dropping bombs is the purest form of capitalism / a nervous breakdown stretched out over your entire life so it’s always thin and never gets too intense / walking has a long and illustrious history / this was a very expensive and cowardly way to assassinate someone / preface to a never written book / abandoned preface / how insecurity leads to overcompensation / I spend a shocking amount of time wondering what people will say about me after I die / I must not look on reality as being like myself / I talked them into talking me into doing it / just because there’s no heaven on earth, doesn’t mean we should commit to making hell on earth our goal / one must never take advantage of an already acquired momentum / I work from informed intuition / the usa has invaded 70 countries since 1776 / for me, saying I want to be in a band is almost like saying I want to be in my twenties again / there is a certain joy in being wrong / art cannot be politically perfect / marvelous realism / I’ve become slightly obsessed with this video (despite the fact that it gives me a rather bad feeling watching it) / the middle class acts as a buffer between those who are most exploited and disenfranchised and those who are most exploiting and disenfranchising them – the buffer expresses itself through consumerism / a utopian community surrounded by war / you can’t actually to anything to make art better / a slightly more neurotic and considerably more american version of myself / ten years ago someone died / how many mayan languages are there / I’m not particularly optimistic about my potential for improvement / let he who is without neurosis cast the first stone / the desire that crosses you / when you buy new shoes, look down at your feet, and for a moment don’t recognize them / how to rule not with power but against power / it’s not enough to be a snake oil salesman, you also have to know exactly what kind of snake oil you’re selling / hyper-empathy / the future screaming backwards / the past is the future / being artistically blocked by the desire to be more successful / what’s the difference between ephemeral and disposable / fade in style / enacting the equivocation / who among us would turn down an invitation to speak in a museum / questions of capacity and social possibility / some sweet day / there are no wings / training the museum / only only only only / a demeritocracy / in literature, I have often noticed that when straight men write about sex it is not especially emancipatory and not particularly feminist...



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