Belatedly...

.


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


.

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

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


*

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

—What do you think about on your walks?

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

—That sounds almost fatalist. Or nihilist.

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

—Why is that damaging?

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

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

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

—If you like I can stop recording.

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

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

—What is it you want to say?

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

—I’m sorry to hear that.

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

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

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

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

—Why not?

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

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

—That’s certainly true.

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

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

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

—Yes, you should leave.

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

—I understand what you’re saying.

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

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

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

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

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

—But do you want to leave?

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

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



.

Meet The Bug

.


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


.

still be structurally entangled

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

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

.

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


*


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think we have different ideas of success.”


*


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

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

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

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

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



.

Floppy Haircut

.


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

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

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



.

end of year lists

.

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

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

addictive entertainment

.


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


.

Rum Music

.


I've been listening to a lot of music end of the year lists and, so far, Rum Music: The Best of 2025 Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan is my hands down favourite.


.

just finished / just starting

.

The perfect holiday gifts: Rich and Poor & Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some favourite things from my 2025

.

[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. (However, it seems I do rearrange the list a little to make it look nice.) This years list is also a little bit longer then some previous years, and I believe one of the reasons is that this year I did two mid-year lists, so I felt I had to add more things to make this end of the year list different.]


Music
Moses Sumney – Sophcore
Adrián de Alfonso – Viator
Qur’an Shaheed – Pulse
keiyaA – hooke’s law
Destroyer – Dan’s Boogie
Quinton Barnes – Code Noir
Quinton Barnes – Black Noise
Elle Barbara’s Black Space – Word on the Street
Nourished By Time – The Passionate Ones
Eddie Marcon – Carpet of Fallen Leaves
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky
Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes
Katy Pinke – Strange Behaviour
CV Vision – Release The Beast
DJ K – Radio Libertadora !
Pink Siifu – BLACK’!ANTIQUE
MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
Frog Eyes – The Open Up

As well, as previously mentioned, for much of the past year or two, I’ve been listening a lot to the same four exceptional records by Jeff Parker: The New Breed, Suite for Max Brown, Forfolks and The Way Out of Easy.


Books
Vivian Blaxell – Worthy of the Event: An Essay
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Touching the Art
Cody Caetano – Half-Bads in White Regalia
Saeed Teebi – You Will Not Kill Our Imagination
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Noopiming
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Water
Sarah Schulman – The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi – Everything for Everyone
Raja Shehadeh – We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
Fabio Morábito – The Shadow of the Mammoth (Translated by Curtis Bauer)
Lawrence Burney – No Sense in Wishing
Anna Swanson – The Garbage Poems
Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony
Emily Witt – Health and Safety
Nathanael Jones – Aqueous
Sasha Frere-Jones – Earlier
Caren Beilin – Sea, Poison


Performances
Martine Delvaux + Bureau de l’APA – Pompières et pyromanes
Dorothée Munyaneza – Toi, moi, Tituba…
Jo Fong, Sonia Hughes, Marilou Craft & Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé – Nettles: How to disagree?
Anne-Marie Ouellet, Thomas Sinou, Jeanne Sinou, Inès Sinou – Refaire la Marguerite
Sasha Kleinplatz – MAKING TIME
Public Recordings – The Chains
Su PinWen 蘇品文 – Leftover Market 剩女經濟


Plus:
Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert
Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell
Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore


Also:
I haven’t done this previously, but a few other things from my year I want to mention:
– I wrote about the twentieth anniversary of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality
– I made an Inventory of novels I recently started writing but couldn't finish
– I was part of an exceptional lineup at the Montreal edition of Oral Method where, in response to the prompt EXCUSEZ-MOI, I wrote a short text I think turned out quite well called I Make and Watch Performances



.

Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison

.


Idea for a novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money.

Working title: Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison



*



The first few pages:


For years I couldn’t stop writing about the oncoming fascism and then the fascism was here and I couldn’t seem to write about it anymore. Keep that in mind with everything that follows.

Most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis didn’t know that capitalism was already over. I knew. Which might have been one of the reasons I chose to enact such a foolish plan. There were many contradictory and confused reasons.

I don’t drink any more. Sable still drinks, but for her it was never really a problem. Sable always stopped just before that fatal last drink, while for me the fatal last drink was an almost daily occurrence. So the memory was somewhat unclear, except for the fact that we both must have been drinking, me noticeably more so than her. I remember her saying: “I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement.” And I remember thinking: Why just a game, why not actually make an art movement in real life. And then, as if reading my mind, she followed up: “I mean, art movements were a thing that happened last century. I don’t think they’re really a thing that can still happen now.” And I thought to myself: “But why not try? Attempt the impossible. Rise to the challenge.”

That was maybe the night I first had the idea. But I’m not sure if I told her then, or some other night. And I know she never told me. I had to find out through other sources. But then, much later, when I asked her about it, she said I could stop by some time to watch her work. It was more specific than that: she said he’d be interested in having me there, in sensing my reactions. By then we were both in what one might refer to as deep, deep trouble. I’m not sure if she knew it more than I did, or if I knew it more than her, or if we both knew so on equal footing. There was also a sense in which neither of us knew, our activities were too seductive, the experience that you could have your cake and eat it too. (The French version of this expression is to have both the butter and the money for the butter. The reference to money brings us closer to the point.)

I stopped drinking because of the plan, to fulfil the plan, to enact the plan. It would require waking up extremely early, with a clear head, or staying up extremely late, working away when all normal type people were fast asleep. It required finding places that resisted surveillance, never slipping up, one false move or decision might cost me my freedom. At least, that’s how I thought of the matter in the months leading up to the plan. Later I must have thought of it a bit differently.

The dilemma that most concerned me before beginning was as follows: I hated money and I wanted money. Money isn’t real. It’s a fiction, a story. But money can do things that nothing else can do. So in that sense – at the level of power – it has some sort of greater reality.

I wear gloves because I’m worried about fingerprints. I of course don’t wear the gloves all the time. And try not to wear them at times when many people will see me doing so. In that sense they are secret gloves, for when I’m working alone. But I also wear them when I’m transporting the cases. I feel if I’m caught out wearing these gloves during times when one isn’t normally expected to be seen wearing gloves it might generate suspicion. But having my fingerprints on the paper before there are any other fingerprints to lend cover would be worse.

The art movement became a code name for our respective activities. Or different art movements at different times. “How is your Situationist thing going?” Sable might ask me, and then a few weeks later she’s instead ask about my Cubist undertaking and I’d respond by asking her about the Stuckists. (If you don’t know about the Stuckists I’ll probably find my way back around to the topic a bit later on.) There have been a lot of art movements in human history so we tried to keep it all spread out. I didn’t know all that much about the topic when we began, so I had to keep reading up. I was often looking for things to read that didn’t add any extra stress to my already stressful life. My stress most often focused on the idea that I would be caught, tried, and send to jail. I tried to calm my nerves with the counter-idea that there were worse things in this world then being sent to jail. I wasn’t certain exactly what it would be like, and didn’t do any research into the eventual reality of the experience, but I imagined there might be things I could learn there. Conversations with people I would never otherwise meet, exercise I would never otherwise do, reading and writing. It might be a dangerous place, I certainly intended to avoid that outcome if at all possible, but anything that happened would also be an experience. At the same time, jails are getting worse, fascist jails are obviously even worse than previous ones, which were already unbearably cruel. And if I had a choice I would choose to live in a world without prisons. But we don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for. So many of my ideas about the world, what it’s like, were from what things were like before, before this sudden, sharp increase in fascism, and I often have to think long and hard when it came to understanding or describing what things are like now.

Many artists feel their work does not get all the attention it deserves. Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the one of the most natural parts of being an artist. Sable responded to this common impasse in a unique way. She had a theory that the more she hid away, the more general interest in the work would increase. That hiding a success were, for her at least, intertwined. It began on a whim with her not attending one of her own openings, then later announcing in advance she would not be in attendance. Already there were relatively few photographs of her in circulation, and she then made a certain effort to scrub as many of the remaining ones from the internet, and to avoid having her picture taken whenever possible. Her work had a certain modest following, but she was far from being famous, and there was certainly no one chasing after her to take her picture. That she no longer made public appearances merited a certain degree of curiosity, and if someone decided to write about her work they would often mention it in the first or second paragraph. In fact, it seemed there were now slightly more articles than before, and sales slightly increased over time, leading her to believe that her theory was correct. Many still knew what she looked like, she hadn’t magically transformed into Thomas Pynchon or Elena Ferrante overnight, but there was, nonetheless, some new sense of mystery surrounding the work. And when I thought about this aspect of it I was always intrigued. How it was possible to be both public and secret at the same time. How your art was directly connected to your physical appearance and biographical details, and interest in it could be influenced by how many of these biographical details you chose to release or not release. How when people looked at your art they were also considering it in relation to your life.

I saw Sable only about a dozen times in the years during which we were both fully immersed in our respective art movements. Most of these encounters took place during my visits to her secret studio, across vast swathes of silence while I watched her paint. Watching someone paint is almost like an artform unto itself. At least that’s how I considered my own approach to the activity, giving it all my space and concentration. Sometimes we spoke while she painted, but most of the time it was pure silence, and then when she was done for the day we would eat together, not have a drink together (since I had already quit by that point), and speak of the things we didn’t allow ourselves to speak about with anyone else, the secrecy lending intensity to every word.

I first acquired the printing press under the assumption I would use it to publish literature. Maybe there was some part of me that even believed this lie. In retrospect, that lie was also the first of many, all the small and big untruths I had to perpetrate once my art movement was well under way. Before this undertaking I didn’t have much experience with lying. And what was surprising was how many of those lies were told at the spur of the moment, without forethought, because the situation required a quick explanation, and the actual explanation involved information it would endanger me to divulge. I don’t know if I’m lying to myself when I state that I still think of myself as an honest person.

I don’t believe I would have bought the printing press if I hadn’t discovered the secret room. The secret room was the discovery that set off the first domino leading onto my current path. I had just rented an apartment that was slightly too expensive for me. All my belongings were still packed in boxes in the far corner of the main room. I was carefully exploring the apartment, wondering how I was going to set it up and also wondering how I was going to afford it. There were bookshelves built into the entirety of one of the walls, perhaps the main reason I had chosen to sign the lease, since over the years I had accumulated a large quantity of books. For some reason I was pressing my weight down on each of the shelves, I suppose to ensure they were sturdy enough before filling them with books. I also ran my palm across each shelf, difficult to know what I was hoping to find, but to my great surprise I did make a discovery. A kind of hidden switch in the back corner of the very top shelf closest to the window. I was standing on a chair when I made the discovery. The entirety of the shelf swung inward on well-concealed hinges, and behind this section of shelving was a room about half the size of the main room. The hidden room was entirely cleared out, so it was impossible to guess what it had been used for, yet it had clearly served some secret purpose. I brought in a chair from my freshly moved belongings, placed it directly in the middle, sat down, and gave my mind over to a single question: what use might I have for a secret room?

Let’s return to that night at the bar, back when I was still drinking, when drinking still felt like one of the many solutions to my many problems, problems both imagined and concrete, when I was more drunk than Sable, as was always the case. Now I’m unsure if I remember the timeline as clearly as I’d like. Was that night at the bar before or after my discovery of the secret room? It must have been after, because without the secret room I don’t see how I could have conceived, in practical terms, starting that specific kind of art movement. But I also think there might have been a different timeline: that night in the bar, ending with Sable deciding to start her art movement and me deciding to start mine, followed by a period when I put it all out of my mind, until the moment I was sitting alone in that hidden room and the idea returned to me. Now the art movement had a location and every art movement needs a location. Either way, what I do know is the secret room sat empty for almost a full year before I met someone who knew someone who was selling a printing press. I did some research. It seemed this model of printing press might be up for the job. The money to buy the printing press came from a relative who had just recently died. Intergenerational wealth seems to be the case behind the scenes of every art movement.

I have a clear memory of how, at that time, I was feeling something I’d never quite felt before: I was feeling bitter and washed up. I was also thinking a lot about how one could take new created money and give some of it to the people who needed it most. There were social problems that couldn’t be solved with money alone, but there were other social problems that perhaps could be. The money would have to be successfully laundered first. It would be very wrong to find people with difficulties, and add to their difficulties the danger of being caught red-handed with fake money in their pockets. The reality that I was about to be adding to my own difficulties in just this manner was not lost on me. But I wanted to take the risk, a leap into the danger of the unknown.



.

a month left to go

.


I'm starting to work on my 2025 list. So, with a month left to go, I thought I would post my 2024 list one last time: Some favourite things from my 2024.

As well, the last Bandcamp Friday of the year is this Friday (Dec 5th) so I thought I would once again share my mid-year list of favourite records, in case you want to support some of these amazing artists: Some favourite records of my 2025 (so far).


.

Two Mariame Kaba Quotes

.


“But most of us remain just ordinary humans. Not everyone is rising to the occasion because the times you live in do not immediately shape who you are and what you do. The other truth, I believe, is that you rise to the level of your training and practice, not to the level of your imagined self.”

– Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…


*


“Looking out at the current landscape, visionary leaders or guides are in short supply. Who are the people in our current moment who are focusing on the transformed worlds we could have? Those who are not settling for shrunken horizons under the guise of so-called realism and pragmatism. Who in public life regularly says: “Be realistic - demand the impossible?” The world as currently constituted can be changed. I don’t think enough people truly believe this though and we really need people who help us to see past the current moment towards something different and better.

My father often encouraged me to fail big because it was a guarantee that I would fail at certain things that I tried. And he said that since failure was built into living, it was best to do so boldly and audaciously. And by taking big risks, I would increase the likelihood that I might also sometimes exceed what I thought were my limits. Right now, I think we need public figures we respect telling us not to settle for crumbs and not to allow ourselves to be convinced that what’s on offer is the best that can be done. It isn’t.

We need leaders calling us to a standard in excess of the prescribed pragmatism of these times. We need to be encouraged to take some big swings with others, and that means we will make mistakes. The current construct seeks to limit our imaginations. Who will remind us to shoot for a place beyond the moon? The status quo is unrealistic and impractical. In fact, for most of the planet, it is oppressive and death-making. We want life; we want livingness for all.”

- Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…


.

quotations on failure

.


I’ve been gathering quotations on failure since 2014 and I’ve finally made it to thirty (a kind of success). You can find them here.


.

Metonymy Press anthologies and fundraiser

.


Metonymy Press is one of my all time favourite publishers. You can preorder their two new anthologies Sharp Pink Claws and at the same time help support them! Find out more here: https://gogetfunding.com/metonymy-press-needs-your-support/


.

Inventory of novels I recently started writing but couldn't finish

.


Over the past five years, while continuing to work on my final trilogy (including Faithful Unbeliever which I'm currently serializing on my Patreon), I've also started writing a number of new novels that I just as quickly abandoned. (Each time I posted sections of them on social media, which is perhaps the main point.) When this has happened in the past, certain aspects of these unwritten books eventually end up in the book I do write, in both explicit and implicit ways.

I thought I would make a brief inventory of these failed attempts to see if, by writing about them in order, there is anything useful for me to learn:

Jealous Friend
A novel about an artist who is jealous of another artist. This is as far as I got: "Most of the time I don’t think about it. A year will have gone by, two years, three, and I won’t have considered the matter even once. But then there are other years that don’t pass so smoothly. This was one of those other years. It wasn’t anything specific that set me back on this once again wrong path. And this wasn’t anywhere near the worst time. But I truly thought I had let it go. So I was disappointed with myself, disappointed to find myself back in this particular mental space. I had escaped it before and would escape it again. But not quite yet. Then again, maybe there was something that had brought me here. A thought. Something that had occurred to me in a flash. Something I’d done to myself."

Jacob’s in a State of Decimation
Another attempt in a long line of attempts to write a fragmentary, autobiographical novel. An excerpt: "I chose the title Jacob’s in a State of Decimation because I thought it could be some kind of commercial suicide. It is a line from a Destroyer song. Because it is a line from a Destroyer song it seems only reasonable that the theme of this book becomes music. I really love music. In the past I have loved it so much I could barely bring myself to write about it. However, when I find myself in a state of decimation, music is where I go to help myself through." I was also thinking this could be a book imagining what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Toronto and never moved to Montreal.

The Fervour of the Newly Converted
An attempt to write a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. This idea has now appeared in many of my unfinished novels in one form or another. It has also had many different titles, including Desire Without Expectation (a title I've now used for many different unfinished books which will also be the title of my next published book forthcoming in 2027.). It often connects to the line: "To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning." I also wrote: "A detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons, a detective novel with a twist and the twist is: there is no crime and no detective. A cross between a detective novel and a book-length poem."

Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
To avoid confusion, I am now calling this unfinished novel Know Me Better Than I Know Myself (though it was also previously called Desire Without Expectation) The short description I wrote at the time was: "Know Me Better Than I Know Myself is nothing if not hybrid. A cross between a diary, an essay, a poem, and a novel. This is not the book Jacob Wren set out to write, but rather the book he wrote in spite of himself. As he writes: “The world is a mess. And so am I. And so is this book.” And yet there are so many themes and (unfinished) stories." I often start writing these fragmented, autobiographical novels and then give up. I find them interesting for about ten pages but then get bored writing about my own life. Excerpts of this work were published in atmospheric quarterly, the International Times and a chapbook published by above/ground press.

One Yes & Many Know
A novel about an artist who decides to sell out. It was mostly just this one paragraph: "It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it."

The Biography
Inspired by people writing to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminded them of my 2016 novel Rich and Poor, this was going to be a strange kind of sequel. In it there is an author who's written a novel about a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. He is approached by a real life billionaire and asked to write the billionaire's biography. (I did finish the first chapter, which I think would work well as a stand alone short story, so I should probably try to get it published somewhere.) At the end of the first chapter someone kills the biography-subject-billionaire, and in the second chapter I was planning to have the assassin show up on the author's doorstep seeking shelter. I was thinking the rest of the book could be the author and assassin on the run. It seemed to me that all of this would work well, but I also felt I was writing a book I had already written, and I always prefer to try writing something completely different. One other thing: I was thinking of naming the author in the book Wolfgang Wren.

Grand Meeting of Failures
A novel about a group of people who try to start an art movement. I recently posted excerpts of it here and here. But I quickly realized I had no idea what the art movement could be, and if it wasn't something convincing (or at least convincing to me) I felt the book wouldn't get very far. As well, I feel I write too much about art, and I find my books more interesting when art is only one aspect of the narrative (since in some way all my books are about the relation between art and politics.) There were also a series of art movements in my novel Polyamorous Love Song, and I don't really like repeating myself. Though there will likely be some kind of art movements in my future books, it's a topic I can't seem to stay away from.

Money Selling Poison
This was an idea from only yesterday. I posted the opening here. I suppose the idea was to write my own version of Catcher in the Rye. Two sentences from my notes: "The “phonies” don’t know that capitalism is already over." "Just to be clear, I know that “Jacob Wren rewriting Catcher in the Rye to make it more woke” is a completely bonkers idea." From the opening it doesn't seem much like Catcher in the Rye, more like a book about going back to school. I like the opening but, the more I think about it, the more I feel I don't really want to write about school. Yet I'm clearly not certain what it is I do want to write about.

Most of the above ideas lasted for at least a couple of weeks, but Money Selling Poison lasted for less than twenty-four hours, which is perhaps what inspired me to take this inventory. Try to figure out if there's any through-line running through all these different ideas, and if there's some way I can use this through-line as an arrow pointing me in the right direction.

This all reminds me of an earlier moment of my writing life, slightly over ten years ago, when I also began a series of novels that I started but couldn't finish. At the time I posted excerpts of them as follows:

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)
Excerpt from I Want To Start Again
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)
My Apologies

And yes, someday I am thinking of taking all of these unfinished fragments and putting them together as some kind of book of unfinished books. But for now, I feel I need to keep writing new books, since some days it seems to me that writing these novels is the only thing keeping me sane (though it obviously doesn't keep me all that sane.)

Two final thoughts, things I've posted in the past:

Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.

Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing. (Though for many of these ideas it ended up being a lot less than thirty pages.)




.

Money Selling Poison

.



"I was feeling bitter and washed up so I decided to go back to school. Many people I knew were going back to school around that time. One foot pressing down hard on the brakes while, at the exact same time, the other foot presses down hard on the gas. To employ a driving metaphor, that is what my life is like. But I don’t drive. In going back to school I was hoping to at least lighten my foot on the brake. I was older than the other students, but apparently came across younger than my age, so the generational divide often went unnoticed or at least unremarked. Nonetheless I felt it. Some days it was the only thing I felt while other days I set it aside. Each day I got up and went to class. I had decided to take all of the classes in the hope at least a few might interest me.

I was also trying to make friends. Trying to figure out how to access my charm. I knew, in certain situations in the past, I’d been charming, but could I do it here at school and on purpose? It was, in many ways, a time of starting over. The school itself was a rather unusual place. It prided itself on how few students were admitted, falsely aligning scarcity with value. Yet this falsehood had also worked on me, since the reason I applied for the scholarship was in the hope of spending time amongst people who were more brilliant than those I’d previously known. In the hopes that being accepted might mean I was also one of the brilliant ones. Since there was always some part of me that believed I already was (alongside some part of me that painfully doubted this fact.)

The acceptance email was formulaic yet meant I could afford to attend. Questions concerning money were the main reason many were deciding to go back to school, their decision contingent on funding. A dreamed of few years of respite from the harsh realities of low wages, of underpayment that subsidized a few more yachts and mansions for the ever-growing ruling class. Every year there were more mansions which meant more tent cities. I didn’t honestly think I’d end up in a tent, but I also wasn’t anticipating any great, undeniable success lying in wait for me along my future path. Like many people at the time, I found it difficult to imagine a future path. School would be a way to postpone the question, the inevitable, not indefinitely but for two full years. A band-aid solution I was hoping might unlock a more substantial one.

You might be surprised to hear that my charm did not immediately rise to the challenge. But everything in this life is a work-in-progress."

- From another attempt at an opening of a new novel, this one tentatively entitled Money Selling Poison



.

Faithful Unbeliever on Patreon

.


I've decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on Patreon. For the indefinite future all posts will be free content, so there's no reason not to follow (and receive a new installment in your inbox every two weeks): https://www.patreon.com/c/jacob_wren_writer

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


.

Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert

Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert:


*


“She quit solo shows at the age of forty, the point when, in recent decades, many artists’ profiles have dipped because they’re somewhat familiar, not the new kid on the block, exploring variation rather than innovation. The art world likes hot young artists and it likes reviving older ones after a few decades in the wilderness, but it doesn’t, as a rule, favor artists between about the ages of forty and sixty. Cady Noland, though, pointedly ceased production at the top of her game, which had the effect of ensuring a scarcity market for what she had already made.”


*


“Concerning those who don’t leave, what one longs for – or what this writer, who sees too many exhibitions that are blatantly products of the studio treadmill, which circularly pay for the assistants and the fair-booth acreage, longs for – is some tactical thinking. No artist needs to undertake a half-dozen solo shows per year, plus fairs, plus a continual side salad of group shows. Artists who do this, given the unassailable fact that most of them are not modern-day Picassos, will in most cases burn out and deliver diminishing returns in the meantime. One wishes, however vainly – one writes, at least in part, to accrue useful examples of such – for artists to make statements when necessary and be silent when not. We have no shortage of art, or of galleries, and, as Mark Twain once said, 'No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.'”


*

"men are reading less and less"

.


"According to a recent article in the New York Times, men are reading less and less. Yet fiction is one of life's greatest pleasures. Why not rediscover the joy of reading with this novel by a Canadian author?"

Wondering how my book made it into 15 idées cadeaux pour tous les hommes sur votre liste in French Elle. "From retro gadgets to stylish apparel, these undeniably cool gifts are sure to delight." EDIT: I just realized it is also in the English version 15 Gift Ideas For Every Man On Your List. (Which makes the entire thing only slightly less strange.)

Another page from the novel-in-progress Grand Meeting of Failures

.



The reason art movements were prevalent during the twentieth century is because political movements were prevalent during the same period. Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Fascism (and in a different way Capitalism and Libertarianism) each had millions of passionate, organized followers who often reformatted their lives around collective practices for bringing their chosen ideology into greater prominence. A battle as to how society should best be organized. Many of the same people who were organizing politically were also organizing artistically. Or knew the people who were organizing artistically. Avantgarde artistic forms were made and fought for in relation to avantgarde political formations. To get out ahead of current artistic practices, and to get out ahead of current political limitations, took place parallel to one another and intertwined. The removal of the Berlin Wall is often seen as a kind of marker, both in time and in relation to tail end of an ideological shift. A moment when capitalism won the so-called Cold War, and Communism was no longer generally seen as a viable option. And, it seems to me, art movements suffered a similar defeat.

At the same time, I have absolutely no belief in that way of framing these events. The former Soviet Union was never Communism, or at least wasn’t from the moment Stalin took control. And Capitalism won using only dirty tricks. The dirty trick of assassinating or overthrowing any leaders who didn’t tow the line and the dirty trick of giving certain people temporary “democratic freedoms” in order to dissuade them from amassing enough collective power toward Socialism and Communism, and then removing those freedoms when they were no longer required. Don’t go over to Socialism or Communism, they said, because we have these “democratic freedoms” that make our society so much better than any other, when such freedoms were only part of a temporary propaganda campaign for Capitalism that was never meant to last. Of course, it is Capitalism that is now in decline – perhaps a victim of its own success with no other world system to keep it in check. Unfortunately, Capitalism is now rapidly being replaced by Technofeudalism, or hopefully something better if we can summon the collective political will. Art movements might return if radical politics also returns. If we can once again believe in its possibilities. Those possibilities were once based in the idea of progress, and since progress is a lie, we will need to find another basis. Things do not progress, they go in circles like the seasons. These were all thoughts and questions I had sitting in the back corner of that very large bar, watching all the people who had absolutely no interest in any plans we might be hatching. And our disagreements were also connected to an underlying agreement that something had to be done. Yet we were always arguing about the what, the approach, the strategy, the tactics. Everything was like being up against impossible odds, where the house always wins. We were trying to convince each other to fight for something. We were trying to measure how much solidarity we might spark. How much we could trust and count on one another. It was extremely unclear what our art movement might become.



.

Coastal Lines Press

.


"Coastal Lines Press is a collective of writers in Gaza. Our goal is to turn words into life-saving supplies for our families. We thank the global network of creators and distributors who make this fundraising publication possible. Like vessels at sea, our zines travel from coast to coast, drawing lines of human connection and solidarity. Follow their journeys and our stories."

More info here: https://www.coastallinespress.com


.

working title

.



I may or may not have started a new novel today. Possible working title: Grand Meeting of Failures

Possible opening paragraph: "I decided I would be the historian of the movement. No one gave me permission, it was something I had to decide for myself. That is, if there even was a movement. If it didn’t all just fizzle out. The rumor was that if the Night Manager likes your work, you don’t need to pay your tab. The rumor that started it all. We might imagine how. One of us had been drinking and when it comes time to pay they’re told they don’t have to. They inquire about the reason, are told some work they made was deeply moving to the Night Manager. Then it happens again, this time to a different artist. Word begins to spread. It might be seen as a form of curation. A way for artists most cherished to keep coming back. Musicians, performers, writers, image and object makers, filmmakers, and those of no fixed discipline. Most of the clientele continue to pay for their drinks, subsidizing a small number of artists who are no longer asked to. The place is large. A few hundred who pay each night and a few dozen who do not. It doesn’t take long to find each other. We gather in the back corner. Soon many of us are coming four or five nights a week. This was all before I arrived. I am repeating pure hearsay. But it was also around the same time I arrived. Somebody mentioned this back corner to me and I immediately knew I had to check it out. I introduced myself to the first likely candidate and soon into our conversation it occurred to me to ask if anyone was keeping a record. When the answer was no, I heard their reticence as an invitation."

Another sentence for somewhere later in the book: "I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement."


*


[I'm still working on my third trilogy (with all three books based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.) So if I manage to keep going with this Grand Meeting of Failures, I suppose it would be book number ten, which for some reason feels significant to me. But often there are a lot of false starts before I find one I want to continue with. So let's see...]



.

Boycott of the Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art

.

We, MFAs Against Genocide, are a collective of recent and prospective graduates in the Montreal arts community and are reaching out to you as you are a signatory to PACBI. As a collective, we are organizing an institutional and individual boycott of the Stephen and Claudine Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art Fellowship. We are asking for your support in order to increase our pressure, and to call on artists, cultural workers, academics, and institutions to refuse together to be complicit in artwashing.

The fellowship, which is awarded annually to Concordia and UQAM studio arts graduate students, is funded by Claridge Inc; Stephen Bronfman's Montreal-based private equity firm that, in 2015, opened a parallel firm in Tel Aviv focused on Israeli tech investments. These investments include Cyberbit, a a cyber security, warfare, and espionage company that lists the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as one of their key clients. Claridge Isreal is also invested in D-fend Solutions, which provides counter-drone technology to clients including the Israeli ministry of defense and the United States departments of War and Homeland Security. In August of this year La Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec announced that it is in the process of selling off its investments (valued between $400M - $600M CAD) in Claridge Israel; we believe it is long past time for our institutions to do the same and divest from the Isreali occupation and genocide. For more information about the award, the campaign, and our demands, please see our website: https://mfasagainstgenocide.cargo.site/

the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility

.


"Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?"

(From my 2011 manifesto: Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings.)



.

Some favourite records of my 2025 (so far)

.


Back in July I did a list of Some favourite books of my 2025 (so far). It occurs to me now that, around the same time, I could have also done a list of Some favourite records of my 2025. So this is coming a bit late (and a bit too close to my end of year list.) But I'm doing it now because Bandcamp Friday is in two days (Oct 3rd), so you might want to support some of these amazing artists. (Also, as is my habit, some of these records didn't come out during 2025.)

Moses Sumney – Sophcore
Adrián de Alfonso – Viator
Quinton Barnes – Code Noir
Quinton Barnes – Black Noise
Elle Barbara’s Black Space – Word on the Street
Nourished By Time – The Passionate Ones
DJ K – Radio Libertadora !
Pink Siifu – BLACK’!ANTIQUE
Qur'an Shaheed – Pulse
Destroyer – Dan’s Boogie
Frog Eyes – The Open Up
Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes


.

listening

.

For a lot of the past year or two, I've mostly been listening to the same four records by Jeff Parker over and over again: The New Breed, Suite for Max Brown, Forfolks and The Way Out of Easy.

.

One year of Dry Your Tears plus a review by Junction Reads

.

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim was published exactly one year ago. Thanks so much to everyone who read it. And everyone who wrote about it. It’s been really beautiful to receive so many different and insightful reactions. For example, Junction Reads has just written this very nice review. You can of course order it here.

.

PME-ART's Relay-Interview Party / Thursday October 2nd, 7pm-9pm

.


Relay-Interview Party
Thursday October 2nd, 7pm-9pm at the MAI Café Bar (3680 Rue Jeanne-Mance) / FREE ADMISSION

Beautiful changes are happening for Montréal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART, both internal and external. Beginning now, PME-ART will open each new season with a Relay-Interview Party. This is a chance for the community to meet us, meet each other, and get a taste for how the PME-ART process works. It’s also a chance to think alongside us about the theme for our upcoming cycle of creation: How Does Change Happen?

Relay-Interview is a ridiculously simple game for having unexpected conversations, like a relay race but for asking and answering questions. Please join us on Thursday October 2nd at the MAI Café Bar (3680 Rue Jeanne-Mance) from 7-9 PM for questions, answers, snacks, and drinks. Come to learn Relay-Interview (an open-source activity which anyone can use for their own artistic processes) and begin our season with us - which is also the official start of PME-ART's next evolution!

If you have ever been interested in co-creating with us, auditioning, or proposing activities, this is the perfect space to tell us who you are, what drives your heart, and how we could walk together in the future. All disciplines, identities, and experience levels are welcome.

Facebook event

PME-ART now has an Instagram. And you can also subscribe to the PME-ART newsletter here.

.

Two Montreal events in September 2025

.

1) Saturday September 20th at 7pm - The Air Contains Honey at Douze Douze
2) Tuesday September 23rd, 7pm / doors at 6:30 - The Longest Way to Eat a Melon at Rocket Science Room


1)
The Air Contains Honey performs only once a year. This year it will be on Saturday September 20th at 7pm at Sanctuaire Saint-Jude (10120, av. d'Auteuil) as part of Douze Douze, presented by LA SERRE - arts vivants. (Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and hopeless situations, which I believe fits with our vibe.) The Air Contains Honey will start at 7 sharp, and we have to be finished by 7:45 so everyone can join the Burning BRASs Band on parade. This is your one Air Contains Honey chance in 2025 (and its free admission.) There are also many other amazing Douze Douze performances on September 20th - from noon to midnight - which you can find out about here. You can also watch some demos of an earlier version of The Air Contains Honey here. (Album coming in 2026.)

Facebook event

The Air Contains Honey―co-founded by Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren―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.

The Air Contains Honey’s lineup is ever shifting but the performance will likely feature some or all of the following members: Pietro Amato, Patrick Conan, Claudia Fancello, Michael Feuerstack, James Goddard, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O’Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu and Jacob Wren.


2)
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross launches The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
at Rocket Science Room (170 Rue Jean-Talon O #204)
Tuesday September 23rd, 7pm / doors at 6:30
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross will be in conversation with Carmen Faye Mathes
Plus an opening reading by Jacob Wren

Facebook event

Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist overwhelmed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity. Reader, you will want to savor every bite.

“The cats begin coming through her window. And she feeds them – of course she does – to please nature, to please all animals, to please the mystics, to please the menace, to please the gods. Two at first, then six, then ten, their tawny stripes blending with the dappled light through the waving blinds. Q is friendly with them, even if it is true that she does not know what they get up to in the night. She is learning about and cultivating this kind of acceptance. Violences, valences. They purr and are energetic, even if their company is not the same as friendship, not the same as romantic love. They do have a certain terrible unknowability about them. Q entertains this even while, deep down, she feels fear.”
― Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, The Longest Way To Eat A Melon

Booksaredeadly's favourite books of 2024

.


Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is one of Booksaredeadly's favourite books of 2024.


.

Jacob Wren reads from his books

.



Videos of me reading from and talking about my recent books:

Polyamorous Love Song Launch Reading
Polyamorous Love Song Interview
Rich and Poor Launch Reading
Rich and Poor Interview
Authenticity is a Feeling Launch Reading
Jacob Wren Introduces Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim


I recently posted on Instagram: "For the past few years I’ve been trying to figure out if there are ways for me to increase the readership of my books..." And one of the replies was: "I get it! What about videos? Your face talking to the camera? I can’t say what it would do for book sales, but you have a lot of followers already so reels could get good traction. When I go to your profile, I can see what kind of books you *read* but I don’t get a sense of what your books would be like or why I might need to get one. I think about this all the time for myself, so I’m just brainstorming out loud! Or pinning posts about your own books to the top row?" This is probably good advice regarding my use of Instagram. However, I would likely require technical assistance so instead I'm doing this. All of these videos, and much else, can also be found at: Jacob Wren Links



.

the reason I find easiest to understand

.



This is a chapbook written by me and published by above/ground press:

https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-from-aboveground-press-press-from.html

It came out last year. This is how it starts:

“Writing comes easily to me, while I find most other things in life exceedingly difficult. This is often a problem with writers. The truth of what they write is deeply shaded by a writerly distance from life which is also often connected to various forms of loneliness. Writers are often not the best people when it comes to understanding either community or solidarity. Maybe I should only speak for myself. Certain kinds of religious conversions bring one directly into community with others who are similarly converted. As you might have already guessed, I lean rather heavily into not wanting to be part of any club that might have me as a member. Religion has always been one of the places people look to for community. As has often been noted, in our current world, community can be rather hard to come by and even harder to maintain. One of the many reasons religion hasn’t disappeared, as was not so long ago predicted, is it allows its adherents to mainline a sense of community. This is the reason I find easiest to understand.

It is difficult to imagine how anything secular could generate the same intensities of community that religion does. Such intensities are also forms of power which are easily abused. Yet when certain kinds of atheists fail to understand how powerful a genuine sense of [spiritual] community can be, it is as if they are willing themselves to understand nothing. Nonetheless, I somehow know that religion will never be a solution for me. How exactly do I know this? I don’t think I’m writing a book about religion, but if I am it is about the furthest thing I can imagine from anything I previously thought I might someday do. And yet in various moments in my life I have felt that in order for the left to win it needs to find ways to connect to something one might call spirituality. A sense of the sacred. As an unbeliever I am not really the person best able to figure out how we might do this. Yet maybe it is the person who truly doesn’t know who is able to ask the most genuine and genuinely difficult questions. I am writing this book because I truly don’t know. (Here again we come back to the question of doubt.)”

Palestinian Poetry Fundraiser / Tuesday August 19th at Low Bar

.



Join us on Tuesday August 19th at Low Bar in Toronto for a poetry fundraiser and celebration of the book launch of My Voice Cannot Be Bombed (available for pre-order through iskra books) by Yahya Al Hamarna. Yahya is a Palestinian writer from Gaza City who “documents the brutalities of war alongside the fragile rituals of everyday life—studying, walking to the park, reading poetry, preparing tea, mourning, surviving.”

Toronto writers will read from Yahya’s debut collection and share their own work. Signed book copies and other prizes will be auctioned off. All proceeds will go directly to Yahya and his family in Gaza.

Doors will open at 7:00pm, with the reading to begin at 7:30pm.

Organized by Independent Jewish Voices UofT and UofT English Graduate Students for Palestine

Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell

Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell:


*


“As is often the case with those who make disturbing art, he seems a person of integrity. Those in the public eye who go out of their way to seem benevolent, the supposedly squeaky-clean ones, are the ones to beware of. Nasty pretends to be nice, and vice versa.”


*


“Mainstream entertainment, like mainstream religion, is used to control people. But there are threads that run through all religions and I see music in similar terms. Both religion and music provide ways of seeing the unseeable and a necessary escape from the sometimes unbearable harshness of reality. Ideas can be communicated about death and the worlds beyond the one we inhabit.”


*


“Once I had been allowed to enter the movement, I decided it was rubbish, continuing a lifelong pattern of disowning my goals once they were achieved.”


*


“Not only did this represent champagne aspirations on a beer budget, but Nick and I were attempting it without our partners. There were lessons to be learned: break up a winning team at your peril. Never overlook the contributions of your collaborators.”


*


“Every artist who achieves longevity does so not just through the making of music, but the making of decisions, eventually thousands of decisions, starting with what to call themselves and who to play their demos to, through whether to sack their friend and go with a professional manager, which live agent to work with, and then on to the lifelong navigation of an endless series of suggested compromises.

The artists who thrive are not just the most musically talented but the most dedicated to their core values. There is a toughness required of this kind of work, but given that artistry is delicate, a dichotomous nature is necessary. That is the thread that has linked the artists I have worked most closely with. Extraordinary strength coupled with sensitivity that is so acute it is almost psychic.”


*


“I was starting to realise that a large part of the creation of success was about ignoring the reasons it might not happen. Blocking out reality and getting on with it. Focusing on what I wanted to happen and how to get there, not the reasons it was unlikely to work.”


*


“The process of songwriting and recording often involves wild oscillation between feeling immensely empowered – godlike is how some describe it – by one’s own abilities to make something out of nothing, and feeling like an idiot who is wandering around naked while everyone laughs. These extreme swings can occur in very short spaces of time and when they do you are fairly close to madness. The uncertainty of the creative process feels to me at times like chewing tin foil.

The manager of one huge artist proudly told me that he insists to the musicians he works with that they behave functionally. He said that he doesn’t buy into the idea that instability is intrinsically linked to creativity. Perhaps, I thought, he is just working with talent so mediocre that their behavior is as mundane as their music. Whatever abilities I possess feel like they are simply the flipside of the least functional parts of me. Dysfunctionality comes with gifts as a consolation prize. Whether a person is able to tap into these gifts is another question.

But no one whose art is really good tends to feel all that good for much of the time. Blissful happiness is an unlikely condition in any event and would certainly be an unusual place for a gifted person to inhabit, at least for long. The best a great talent can hope for is to reach some sort of an accommodation with themselves. An appreciation that they at least have something to show for their alienation.”


*


“John Peel was an influential tastemaker, but I wanted to diverge from his approach as much as emulate it. He was probably the greatest champion of independent music ever because the way he chose which records to play was so ideologically powerful. His position was not that he would play good music, regardless. It was more political than that. If he perceived something was too pop, he would not play it.

So while John Peel was a supporter of Scritti Politti’s early singles and debut album for Rough Trade, Songs to Remember, he never played anything from their masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite albums, Cupid & Psyche 85. This music was even better than their previous output but he did not support it. Green and co. had decamped to New York and made the music they dreamed of, which was R&B, with storied soul producer and arranger Arif Mardin. But Peel stopped playing them because he considered what they were doing too pop.

I didn’t wish to take this approach.

‘Indie’ to describe music was a term that was destined to become obsolete, and I didn’t want this type of ghettoization to happen to XL. I wanted to be able to back artists to be as ambitious as they saw fit. Equally, I wanted to discourage artists from being overly commercial if that meant their records would suffer. I wanted to work with the best artists and help them make the best music. I didn’t want to be tied down to an ideology that would get in the way of that. I didn’t want records to have to be commercial – like a major; equally, I didn’t want them to have to not to be – the way John Peel seemed to sometimes see it.”


*


“Her approach owed something to punk, perhaps best summed up as: If it ain’t broke, break it.”


*


“This book is not about sales figures or awards. Too many artists whose work is close to my heart have not achieved huge sales for me to think of units sold as what is important. Commercial success is a measure of something outer; not necessarily anything deeper. The record industry’s obsession with figures is limiting and stifles creativity. Music that reaches a lot of people but has no substance is of no interest. Music that has depth but only reaches a small audience is often the most important and long-lasting.”


*


“I just knew that whatever we did needed to be a celebration, and that I had to have faith that something special would manifest. The principle I tried to stick to was that the absence of doubt would lead to success. Commit to the process, don’t waste time thinking about whether it will or won’t work, and execute to the best of your ability. The rest will take care of itself.”


*


“Coincidences are ‘God’s way of staying anonymous.’ They are a reassurance that there is a flow and it’s useful to note and appreciate them when they occur.”


*