Updated PME-ART website

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I’ve updated the PME-ART website just in time for the holidays: www.pme-art.ca


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Some favourite things from my 2023

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[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. As well, there should really be more performances and exhibitions on the list, but since the pandemic I'm still not seeing nearly as many of either and therefore this is where things currently stand.]



Music
MIKE – Beware of the Monkey
B. Cool-Aid – Leather Blvd
Jockstrap - I Love You Jennifer B
Noname – Sundial
Aldous Harding – Warm Chris
Kari Faux – Lowkey Superstar (Deluxe)
HOUSE Of ALL – HOUSE Of ALL
Dreamer Isioma – Princess Forever
nutrients – Different Bridges
Melenas – Ahora
H31R – HeadSpace
Just A Touch: Underground UK Soul Compiled by Sam Don
Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan


Books
Ordinary Notes – Christina Sharpe
Hospicing Modernity – Vanessa Machado De Oliveira
The Nutmeg’s Curse – Amitav Ghosh
Francisco – Alison Mills Newman
The Fifth Wound – Aurora Mattia
A Rock, A River, A Street – Steffani Jemison
The Women’s House of Detention – Hugh Ryan
Baby Book – Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun – Jackie Wang
The Rage Letters – Valérie Bah (Translated by Kama La Mackerel)
Easily Slip into Another World – Henry Threadgill with Brent Hayes Edwards
For Sure – France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)
Catastrophe Time! – Gary Zhexi Zhang (Editor)


Performances & Visual Art
BLACK MOON – FATHERMOTHER (Kezia Waters & Jordan Brown)
Nehanda – nora chipaumire
Reminiscencia – Malicho Vaca Valenzuela
Quantum Choir – Michèle Pearson Clarke
The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval – Marion Lessard




Plus:
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)
A short text I wrote about HOUSE OF ALL

La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres / updated French translations from Le Quartanier

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I'm happy to announce that Le Quartanier is publishing updated French translations of my books La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres:

https://lequartanier.com/auteur/95/jacob-wren

Read an excerpt of La famille se crée en copulant. Read an excerpt of Le génie des autres.

This is the first in a series of translations Le Quartanier will be doing of my books. Stay tuned.

Also, in English, you can read an excerpt of Families Are Formed Through Copulation here. And read an excerpt of Unrehearsed Beauty (the orginal version of Le génie des autres) here.

Finally, in French, people have stared to write about it:
Yvon Paré in Quebec literature
Ariane Gagnon on Insagram

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Kevin Coval Excerpt

[I heard this read last night at Paroles de résistance pour une Palestine libre. This is an excerpt.]



"i will tell my jewish kids
we have long story. more than what is seen
now. we are a people who wander and wonder
who have a bag prepared in the corner. i will
tell them israel is not a jewish state. it is
an empire state, a state against people
and a state against G-d. a G-d that is
borderless and nationless, a G-d that is
certainly without drone missiles and air
raids. in a jewish state no tank stands
between people seeking water or medicine.
israel is a farce, the guilt of the western world.
a christian admission of the holocaust.
a watchdog over oil. a stepchild power mad.
a baby country raging against everything
i know to be jewish. i will tell them, help dis-
mantle israel. Zion is yet to be, it is in the struggle
of becoming. this is the truth. it will venerate us
it will exodus, the truth will set us, free!"

- Kevin Coval, what will i tell my jewish kids (for the 5771)




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Audre Lorde Quote

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“I went through a period once when I felt like I was dying. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write I would split. I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life.

The next year, I went back to my journal, and here were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of it. Many of them are in The Black Unicorn. “Harriet” is one of them; “Sequelae” and “A Litany for Survival” are others. These poems came right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems then.” 

– Audre Lorde

[As quoted in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate]



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I Need Music by Anaïs Duplan

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Perhaps now would be a good time for everyone to read Anaïs Duplan's exceptional book I Need Music:

"When I first come into contact with an image, I say,
what is an image? I begin to believe paradoxically one failed picture
is the total picture. I can tell there’s an art to staying
either inside or outside the lines."
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music

Order it here.

As you might already know, Anaïs Duplan has been removed from the exhibition "We is Future" by the Museum Folkwang:

Anaïs Duplan's Instagram Post

Article in The Art Insider




“While I do, of course, feel a sense of accomplishment, growth, belonging, great
fortune, ‘n’ vitality, I also feel a deep ‘n’ abiding sadness.
I try to make space for this sadness here, by I feel there’s a sense to it.
I feel it’s talking to me ‘n’ I need to listen.
I’d rather not.”
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music

An Open Letter in Support of the Scotiabank Protestors at the Giller Prize Ceremony

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As writers and publishers, we express our support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on November 13th, 2023. The protest called attention to Scotiabank's $500 million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer; Scotiabank is Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder.

During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.

We stand with the protestors, and we urge that the charges against them be dropped. And we join our voices with hundreds of thousands of protestors across Canada who are decrying the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine.

In the past five weeks, Israel has cut off water, electricity, and communication to Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority civilians and non-combatants. There are no more universities standing in Gaza. This week, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, was bombed until it could no longer be used. Among those who have died are more than 4000 children, many of them infants. This has been the deadliest attack for children in recent times. Many of our government officials and institutions swiftly condemned the October 7th deadly attack on 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of 220 hostages. We ask that our institutions treat Palestinian civilians with the same concern and humanity.

We are writers and publishers who have been proud and grateful to receive invitations, nominations, grant funding, and prizes from literary institutions including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Toronto Book Awards, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Evergreen Award, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. As working artists, we are reliant on these institutions for our livelihood.

We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.

If you'd like to add your name to this statement, please do so here.


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Paroles de résistance pour une Palestine libre

 

Motivated by the urgent need to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine, the Decolonial Love Circle is inviting artists and activists whose communities are united in their struggle for liberation, to lend their voice to the words that fuel resistance.

Animé·e·s par l’urgence d’exprimer nos solidarités au peuple palestinien, Le cercle d’amour décolonial invite des artistes et activistes membres de communautés unies dans leurs luttes pour la libération à se faire porte-voix des mots qui nourrissent la resistance.

Avec-With Hoda Adra, Bengi Akbulut, Yassin Alsalman, Marilou Craft, Karla Etienne, Oula Hajjar, Brintha Koneshachandra, Ehab Lotayef, Qiz7a, Sanna Mansouri, Leila Marshy, Charlie Prince, Lucine Serhan, Nour Symon, les Tisseuses, Amel Zaazaa, Marya Zarif, Jad Orphée Chami, Mohamed Masmoudi, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- حركة الشباب الفلسطيني (d'autres noms s'ajouteront)

La Sotterenea
November 19
6 pm, doors at 5h30

More information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/334250685963000/



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Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan and Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Just discovered the work of Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan. This is her website: https://www.amnaelhassan.com

I don't know nearly enough about what's currently happening in Sudan to write anything about it. But you can read the Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin speaking about it here: https://qantara.de/en/article/sudanese-artists-speak-out-its-not-our-war

That's all I can think to write for now.

EDIT: I felt there should be at least something else. Here's an article: In Sudan, a genocide unfolds — again — and the world does little

"Don’t forget that the Palestinian, Sudanese and Congolese genocides are all connected and the common threads are the economic and military interests of the West."
https://twitter.com/THISisLULE/status/1718441909130068366



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Rashid Khalidi Quote

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“The erasure of the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “vision for peace” might have been an unusually blatant act of disregard, but it was in no way new. The omission is the essence of the conflict. I was reminded of this back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Jerusalem for several months at a time, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families, including my own. I spent over a year going through dusty worm-eaten books, documents, and letters belonging to generations of Khalidis, among them my great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi.

Through his papers, I discovered a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was the heir to a long line of Jerusalemite Islamic scholars and legal functionaries, but at a young age, Yusuf Diya sought a different path for himself. After absorbing the fundamentals of a traditional Islamic education, he left Palestine at the age of 18 — without his father’s approval, we are told — to spend two years at a British Church Mission Society school in Malta. From there, he went to study at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul, after which he attended the city’s Robert College, recently founded by American Protestant missionaries. For five years during the 1860s, Yusuf Diya attended some of the first institutions in the Middle East that provided a modern, Western-style education, learning English, French, German, and much else.

With this broad training, Yusuf Diya filled various roles as an Ottoman government official: translator in the Foreign Ministry, consult in the Russian Black Sea port of Poti, governor of districts from Kurdistan to Syria, and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the short-lived Ottoman parliament established in 1876, and he did stints teaching at the Royal Imperial University in Vienna.

As a result of his wide reading, as well as his time in Vienna and other European countries, and from his encounters with Christian missionaries, Yusuf Diya was fully conscious of the pervasiveness and virulence of European anti-Semitism. He had also gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, and he was undoubtedly familiar with “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” by the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, published in 1896, and was aware of the first two Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. Moreover, as mayor of Jerusalem, he had witnessed the friction with the local population prompted by the first years of proto-Zionist activity, starting with the arrival of the first European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Yusuf Diya would have been more aware than most of his compatriots in Palestine of the ambition of the nascent Zionist movement, as well as its strength, resources, and appeal. He knew perfectly well that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention that it be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism.

The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he esteemed “as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot,” and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, whom he said were “our cousins.” He understood the motivations for Zionism, just as he deplored the persecution to which Jews were subject in Europe. In light of this, he wrote, Zionism in principle was “natural, beautiful, and just.” He added, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”

But the former mayor of Jerusalem went on to warn of the dangers he foresaw as a consequence of the implementation of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. Whatever the merits of Zionism, Yusuf Diya wrote, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” Palestine “is inhabited by others.” It had an Indigenous population that would never accept being superseded, making it “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take Palestine over. “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere, but, he concluded, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

Herzl replied—and quickly, in a letter on March 19. His letter was probably the first response by a leader of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl simply ignored the letter’s basic thesis, that Palestine was already inhabited by a population that would not agree to be supplanted. Although Herzl had visited Palestine once, in an 1898 visit timed to coincide with that of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, he (like most early European Zionists) had not much knowledge of or contact with its native inhabitants.

Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to Jewish control of Palestine, Herzl deployed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. “It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own,” Herzl wrote, adding that “no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”

Herzl’s letter addressed a consideration that Yusuf Diya had not even raised: “You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”

But Herzl had underestimated his correspondent. From Yusuf Diya’s letter, it is clear that he understood perfectly well that at issue was not the immigration of (as Herzl put it) “a number of Jews” into Palestine, but rather the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. Instead, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement that the colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. Herzl’s reply to Yusuf Diya appears to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.

This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day. As for the Jewish state that was ultimately created by the movement that Herzl founded, as Yusuf Diya foresaw, there was to be room for only one people, the Jewish people. As for the others, “sending them away” was indeed what happened, despite Herzl’s disingenuous remark.

Herzl’s letter referred to Palestinian Arabs, then roughly 95% of Palestine’s inhabitants, merely as its “non-Jewish population.” The Jewish state, Herzl wrote in “Der Judenstaat,” would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl’s imperious disregard of the Palestinians has been replicated over the decades in much discourse in the United States, Europe, and Israel; indeed, it was clearly audible from the White House as recently as this past week.”

- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance



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One day...

"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

https://twitter.com/omarelakkad/status/1717082321445421056

Free Palestine spotted in the NYC subway 

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“The best comparator for what Israel is doing now in Gaza is not anything previous in Palestine. It’s Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

There, as here, Israel engaged in a bloody long-term attack with the purported goal of ending Palestinian resistance from Lebanon once and for all and establishing a Lebanese government that would give Israel “forty years of peace.”

The result? Israel lost any global sympathy quickly, especially after the Sabra and Shatila act of genocide. Israel’s puppet government fell almost immediately. Israel occupied a portion of Southern Lebanon for 20 years, at the end of which it withdrew with nothing gained. In the wake of its occupation came Hizballah, one of Israel’s most potent consistent enemies. On the way to gaining nothing, Israel killed tens of thousands, mostly civilians.”

- @leibowitzadak

* * * 

"When I’m asked why I’m a self-hating Jew, I like to say I’m someone who values the Jewish principles of tzedek (the pursuit of justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world), & derekh eretz (treating all with dignity/respect), NOT an alliance with a genocidal global superpower."

https://twitter.com/Dr_mauraf/status/1718818317241085989

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PME-ART in Lisbon

I'm extremely excited to be travelling to Lisbon to perform A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling at Teatro do Bairro Alto on October 13 & 14:

https://teatrodobairroalto.pt/en/event/a-users-guide-to-authencity-is-a-feeling

It will be my first time on tour since February 2020. (And I used to travel constantly.) Very curious to see what it's like to head back out on the road.

(Also, Lisbon is one of my all-time favourite cities. Also, I just realized - due mostly to the pandemic - that the last time I performed in Europe was five years ago.)

Facebook Event.

You can still order the book in either English or French:
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART

There's also this video of a short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.

And of course, if you're interested, you can find out more about PME-ART here.

Steffani Jemison Quote

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“I used to think that time is just one thing, the way a ruler is always the same length, twelve inches or twenty-four inches or even a yard.

Then I started to run and learned that time is only like distance if we measure distance with taffy or rubber bands or chewing gum or pleats, anything that can expand wide like an accordion or shrink small enough to swallow.

I found that the twenty or thirty minutes of a run could feel like the longest twenty minutes of your life. The final block, the final leg, the final lap, the final half mile – they could feel like the longest hundred feet in the world.

Even when I ran every day, when I felt I could never imagine being more accustomed to something than I was accustomed to running, even then, I sometimes felt I would never reach the end.

There are things you do because they’re easy and there are other things you do.”

– Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street


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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist...

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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist. To imagine my life being opposite. And the first thing that comes to mind is myself as an eccentric. That without the release valve of making art, my artistic impulses instead become behaviors. That I would have become a somewhat stranger person than I currently am.



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Quotations on pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and failure (an ongoing list)

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Six quotations on pessimism

Sixteen quotations on fame

Six quotations on individualism

Thirteen quotations on loneliness

Four quotations on sex

Eight quotations on suicide

Twenty-seven quotations on failure



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Francisco Goldman Quote

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“Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more. But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.”

– Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy



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Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quote

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“On the populist left, the then favored model of the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual”: someone who participated in and was part of the community he would uplift. And yet James Baldwin’s basic conception of himself was formed by the familiar, and still well-entrenched, idea of the alienated artist or intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension between these two models – he would do so in his fiction – be he was never to resolve it.”
– Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Welcome Table



[From the anthology: Lure and Loathing: Twenty black intellectuals address W.E.B. Du Bois’s dilemma of the double-consciousness of African Americans. Edited by Gerald Early.]



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Michael Wolff Quote

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I could call up Arianna and confirm the best story I know about these dinner parties. But I don’t want it not to be true. I tell my children this story as an example of savvy and pluck. (I have heard it from three different people.)

Arianna set about having dinner parties, inviting the most prestigious New Yorkers who would come and, at an appointed hour, she would deliver an impromptu toast, fifteen minutes or more of sweeping, seamless, knowing, witty observations, the likes of which no awkward table in New York had ever heard before. Grown men, those attracted to ambitious women anyway, swooned. When, ultimately, it got out that these toasts were written and rehearsed, that only added to the allure. Indeed, this is what I tell my children: it’s not the effortlessness but the effort that goes into making it effortless. In praise of artifice, if you will.

– Michael Wolff, Too Famous



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Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)

Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels):


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The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”


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Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.


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Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.


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Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.


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Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.


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To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.


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A project in continuum with The Fall

I have so much to say about this record that I don’t even know where to begin.

Made by members of The Fall who, over the years, Mark E. Smith fired or who quite due to his erratic and abusive behavior. Made by many of the musical architects of the classic Fall sound. And now that Mark E. Smith is gone they come together and make a record in continuum with the work of The Fall that’s almost as good as any Fall record and, for this reason, in some ways all that much better.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Living well is the best revenge.

How to take past resentments and turn them into gold. How to have a final, unexpected fourth act that turns everything on its head.

For some reason listening to this record gives me some small hope for my artistic future. (Even though I’m probably Mark E. Smith in this story, so the hope comes after I die.)

https://houseofall.bandcamp.com/album/house-of-all



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Three videos from The Air Contains Honey

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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations

The Air Contains Honey - Sexuality 

“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes

The Air Contains Honey - Everything

“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin

The Air Contains Honey - Best Moments 

The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.

In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.

Image and editing by Nina Vroemen

For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.



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Diachroneity Books: "What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre."

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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).

Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.

What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.

If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.

What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.

If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.

Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?



More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT



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Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:


*


I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.


*


There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.


*


Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.

Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.


*


Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.

I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.


*

Six sentences concerning art and jealousy

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Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.


Artists should have honest discussions about ambition (and about money.)


Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.


The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.


The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity.


There are no individual solutions to collective problems.



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My apartment is just piles of books

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The video recording of My apartment is just piles of books was online only until April 30th, 2023 and therefore is no longer available.

"In this online performance, Jacob Wren reflects on the fact that he used to travel constantly for art and yet during the pandemic spent more time in his apartment than ever before. And the travel has not yet resumed. Through a short tour of his bookshelf, questions are raised about what it means to make art when you find yourself no longer in constant motion."

However, you can still watch the conversation between Anyse Ducharme and Jacob Wren as part of the Virtual Encounters series: https://vimeo.com/815412881

Presented by LOMAA.



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99,430 words

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When you finish a first draft of a book, do a word count, and learn that the manuscript is 99,430 words long.



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How many times have I gone online and posted a paragraph entitled “possible opening for a new novel?”

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How many times have I gone online and posted a paragraph entitled “possible opening for a new novel?” That feeling of starting something new, starting over. The feeling or idea that it’s possible to start from scratch, a feeling most easily obtained in the land of fiction. The fiction that it’s possible to start again. Everything comes from somewhere, nothing is pure invention. The beginning of a new work is the beginning of a new day. And yesterday was also once a new day. Wondering if I should leave but no idea where to go.



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Can an art of collective struggle really be made by an individual artist?

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Can an art of collective struggle really be made by an individual artist? My secret, if I have one, is that I honestly hate being alive. What is your secret? What is the secret of some larger collectivity? A secret shared by everyone, a secret that everyone can work toward together? But of course not exactly everyone, just those within a certain specific circle of solidarity. What secret might be large enough to hold this solidarity together? My secret, if I have one, is that I can endlessly write about how miserable I am, but most often choose not to. Some other people are as miserable but, for the most part, most other people don’t seem to be. Illusions.



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There is a genre of scene I believe I had read several times in a certain kind of nonfiction book...

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There is a genre of scene I believe I have read several times in a certain kind of nonfiction book. In this type of scene, the author of the book shows an earlier draft of said book – the very book you are holding in your hands – to a character in the book, or more precisely to a person in the author’s life upon whom one of the characters is based. And this person reacts extremely badly to the manner in which they’ve been portrayed. Which creates a sort of ethical dilemma on the part of the author. Do they remove this character from their book? Or rewrite the character in order to make it more to the liking of the person on whom it is based? Or fictionalize the character even further so as to make it unrecognizable? I have seen different author’s deal with this dilemma in different ways, and it always strikes me as somehow getting to the very heart of the ethical problem of the relationship between fiction and reality.



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And things started to happen, but none of them were the things we said were going to happen...

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And things started to happen, but none of them were the things we said were going to happen, and none of them were the things anyone else expected either. But at least something had begun. Or so we thought. Were we willing to classify whatever it was that seemed to be happening as “something”? We had no choice: we couldn’t go back and the only way forward was to go with what was happening. What was starting. What we thought. It had something to do with the way one thing followed the next. If we didn’t intervene. All we had done is open the door. It was exhausting.



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Virtual Coffee Chat with Jacob Wren and Julia Lee Barclay-Morton

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On Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 5pm EST I will be having a Virtual Coffee Chat with Julia Lee Barclay-Morton about her book The Mortality Shot and my book Polyamorous Love Song. Discussing what we share as authors: the crossover between words for performance and for the page and not falling neatly into categories.

The event is online and free but you have to register for it here.

If you haven't already you should definitely check out The Mortality Shot. This is what I had to say about it:

"These stories and essays (plus a stage text) push up against heartfelt questions of life and death in ways that are complex, counter-intuitive, humorous and striking. Writing against the grain, in varying styles and intensities, The Morality Shot goes places that so much current literature wouldn’t dare, demonstrating that real writing is always a risk and a gamble, and that only through taking such risks can we get at the things which truly matter."

And, if you missed it, the Virtual Author Coffee Chat is now online and you can watch it here:





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My life is entangled in theatre but I now know almost no one else who works in theatre...

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My life is entangled in theatre but I now know almost no one else who works in theatre. It is like a place I have almost completely left as that place continues to almost completely rule my inner life. Be careful what you decide to be against. I find myself feeling like I’m stuck in a tunnel of things I don’t want to do. But what exactly is the tunnel? An inability to usefully think what other sorts of things I could be doing. Doing things in reaction to what I’ve previously done, rather than thinking toward what might interest me in the future. This has something to do with the idea of a diary.



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They warned me the soup was extremely hot and I might burn myself...

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They warned me the soup was extremely hot and I might burn myself. I didn’t heed the warning and did indeed burn myself. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t been warned. I retaliated by writing the experience down, an account you are currently reading. A rather boring and predictable account. It has happened before and will happen again.



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To not start from a theme but from an activity...

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To not start from a theme but from an activity. A theme can lead anywhere. An activity can also lead anywhere but not quite in the same way. How open is a theme? How open an activity? Can it all be thought of as some kind of music? The question of how to start and the question of where you’re going seem to be the same question. Where to start? Where are we going? Most people aren’t dancing but there is one person in the audience who is absolutely dancing their face off. Is that person a stand in for the thing we’re searching for? Never a good idea to use anyone as a stand in for something else. The very best thing about that dancing person is they are not doing it for anyone but themselves. To start not from a theme but an activity. I know what I’m addicted to but what is it exactly I’m addicted to? What is the exact thing, the exact moment.



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A photo of three of my books

 

“On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

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“If I’m the enemy then really let me have it. If moral outrage about the state of the world is consuming your life, paralyzing you, taking over your world, then set fire to the reader in an act of revenge. Instead you leave the reader, or this reader at least, indifferent, watching your ineffective life unravel ineffectually. If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates or fight to the death to bring a sliver more of justice into being. Not the passive slither forward you are attempting to pass off as literature.”
― Jacob Wren, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates

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“The most effective lie is always the closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song


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Photo by Khashayar Mohammadi



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Gundega Laiviņa Quote

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Actually, I am for going. Yet I have to question again and again – who goes, how and why. I am for a different kind of going than the conventional touring routine: taxi, plane, hotel, venue, hotel, plane, taxi… I am for going slowly, going with care, going to stay, explore, connect, going to create conditions for the artwork to live longer, not going, going with dignity, letting someone else go. What are alternatives to travel fatigue – a condition discussed frequently within the “bubble” of Western theatre makers? To stop and find well-articulated reasons for not travelling anymore as we are privileged to do so? But we could as well give chance to new approaches to emerge, we could keep exploring and connecting things, places, people and ideas without necessarily going or – if going – then differently.

- Gundega Laiviņa, as cited in Showing Without Going: Interview with Ant Hampton



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Samson Young's Goodreads Review of Authenticity is a Feeling

It somehow caught me at exactly the right moment to read Samson Young's Goodreads Review of Authenticity is a Feeling:


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This is a beautiful and thoughtful book about being fully yourself in collaborative work. This is not a guide book, nor does it have very many nice to say about collaboration, actually; rather, it shows just how truly scary, complicated, difficult and humiliating a true collaboration could be.

It is also a book about generosity, persistence and courage. Wren and his collaborators are rough with each other on stage. Yet Wren's retelling of these moments of public-private confrontation are so gentle, observant, poetic, and full of love. So many moments in the book made me feel so uncomfortable. And I wondered: isn't Wren just romanticizing his own very specific, and very public brand of hedgehog personality complex? Is authentic theatre and authentic life for him some sort of torture chamber, where all involved are so relentlessly committed to calling each other's BSs that nobody is ever going to be real enough? (He asked this question himself at one point in the book).

The big take away for me though is that being authentic and truly collaborative expands the dynamic platter of life and of art by many, many fold. Insofar as a fuller range of dynamics is always a positive value in art, then one would be tempted to argue that collaboration makes for better art. For Wren and his collaborators, this is also a better way to live. People of a weaker constitution however might prefer to keep the world at arms-length.

Wren is a highly gifted and extremely generous storyteller. Highly recommended.


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You can find the review here. And of course you can find Authenticity is a Feeling here.



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Some passages from What Love Looks Like

Some passages from What Love Looks Like: A Conversation with Tim DeChristopher by Terry Tempest Williams:


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: A while back I was reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on historical Jesus. Do you see Jesus as a historical figure in terms of leadership?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I do view him as an example of a revolutionary leader.

TERRY: How?

TIM: Well, he was saying very challenging things both to the people who were following him and to the dominant culture at the time. And it led to some radical changes in the way people were living and the way people were structuring society.

TERRY: What would you view as the most radical of his teachings?

TIM: Turning the other cheek, I think, is one extremely radical thing. That, I think, is his powerful message about civil disobedience. And the other, which might be even more radical, is letting go of material wealth. That’s so radical that Christians today still can’t talk about it. I mean, he said it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. And he told his followers to drop what they had, to let go of their jobs, to let go of their material possessions. Even let go of their families. If they wanted to follow him, they had to let go of everything they were holding onto, all the things that brought them security in life. They had to be insecure. That’s pretty radical.


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.

TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s — but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future — of a career and a retirement and all that stuff — I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Here’s an idea that I want to know what you think of: Laurance Rockefeller, as you know, came from a family of great privilege, and he was a conservationist. And in his nineties, he informed his family that the JY Ranch — the piece of land in Grand Teton National Park that his father, John D. Rockefeller, set aside for his family — would be returned to the American people. This was a vow he had made to his father. And he was going to “rewild it” — remove the dozens of cabins from the land and place them elsewhere. Well, you can imagine the response from his family. Shocked. Heartsick. Not pleased. But he did it anyway, and he did it with great spiritual resolve and intention. He died shortly after. I was asked to write about this story, so I wanted to visit his office to see what he looked out at when he was working in New York. Everything had been cleared out, except for scales and Buddhas. That was all that was in there. I was so struck by that. And his secretary said, “I think you would be interested in this piece of writing.” And she disappeared and she came back, and this is what she handed me: [Reading] “I love the concept of unity and diversity. Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather. I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.” How would you respond to that? The key sentence, I think, is, “The difference was a feather.”

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, the difference is a feather. I guess that’s why I believe that we can be powerful as individuals. Why we actually can make a difference. The status quo is this balance that we have right now. And if we shift ourselves, we shift that scale. I remember one of the big things that pushed me over the edge before the auction was Naomi Klein’s speech that she gave at Bioneers in November of 2008. She was talking about Obama, and talking about where he was at with climate change, and the things he was throwing out there as campaign promises, you know, the best things he was offering. And she was talking about how that’s nowhere near enough. That even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough. And she talked about how, ultimately, Obama was a centrist. That he found the center and he went there. And that that’s where his power came from. She said, “And that’s not gonna change.” And so if the center is not good enough for our survival, and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center. And that’s what she ended the speech with: “Our job is to move the center.” And it was so powerful that we actually got the video as soon as we could and replayed it at the Unitarian church in Salt Lake, and had this event one evening where we played that speech and then broke up into groups and talked about what it meant to move the center. And what I came away from that with was the realization that you can’t move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance — if you want to tilt that scale — you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.


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Read the entire interview here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-love-looks-like



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I Love Dick meets All That Jazz

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For the author's questionnaire they always ask the question: describe your book as ___________ meets ___________.

And for my last book I think I came up with one that was pretty good: I Love Dick meets All That Jazz.

This is the book: http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/authenticy-is-a-feeling-my-life-in-pme-art-by-jacob-wren/






Also available in French (translated by Daniel Canty): https://www.leslibraires.ca/livres/un-sentiment-d-authenticite-ma-vie-jacob-wren-9782898011160.html



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I was at a dinner party a few years ago...

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I was at a dinner party a few years ago. Everyone there is an artist of some sort. And all the conversations are about TV series. And every time a new series is mentioned someone asks me if I’ve seen it and I say I haven’t. And, at some point, someone asks me: if I don’t watch any television than what do I do? And I say that I mostly read. And they then go around the table and everyone says that they can’t remember the last time they read a book. And I say: that’s what every writer loves to hear and everyone laughs.



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