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I’m still doing this Patreon, though not promoting it very much (it seems like the wrong time). Nonetheless, if you sign up you can read posts like this one.
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March 30, 2025
March 26, 2025
Voting
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Now we have fascism. But there were tyrants long before the invention of fascism. One of the things that makes fascism different is this situation in which large numbers of people vote the tyrants into power. It is difficult to know to what extent these voters get what they want, since it all takes place awash in endless propaganda. Nonetheless, the dispiriting feeling that not only are so many evil things being done, but that so many people voted for them, is perhaps at the heart of why it is so difficult to know, with any certainty, what are the best strategies and tactics to bring about positive change. How to harness mass desires in ways that bring about greater fairness, kindness and care?
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Now we have fascism. But there were tyrants long before the invention of fascism. One of the things that makes fascism different is this situation in which large numbers of people vote the tyrants into power. It is difficult to know to what extent these voters get what they want, since it all takes place awash in endless propaganda. Nonetheless, the dispiriting feeling that not only are so many evil things being done, but that so many people voted for them, is perhaps at the heart of why it is so difficult to know, with any certainty, what are the best strategies and tactics to bring about positive change. How to harness mass desires in ways that bring about greater fairness, kindness and care?
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March 16, 2025
Soha Bechara Quote
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"For my friends and I, there was life after Khiam. For a time, with the great joy of the liberation of the South, life even became beautiful. It was a rare moment of unity for the Lebanese. For fifteen years, with guns in hand, they had torn each other to shreds, and after a peace that refused to deal with the damage they had done each other, they remained deeply divided, too irresponsible to heal such painful wounds. The liberation showed how our civil war had been, like any fratricidal conflict, a vain illusion when compared with the strength of our resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Khiam grudgingly returned to life so many damaged human beings, cracked and broken. Like all camps of its kind, its goal was to humiliate, to crush, to deny the existence of those it fed upon.
There remains the basic cause for which I fought: a free Lebanon, a country at peace. This is above all a question of memory. If the people of Lebanon let themselves forget, then this hope will be lost and the spirit of the Resistance vanish.
I accepted the idea of dying for my country. I feel connected to the whole planet, to all of humanity, but Lebanon was where I was born and where I grew up. For me, the idea of my country is as simple as the air I breathe. I belong to this piece of earth, and it was from this piece of earth that they tried to banish me. I became a child of war. We never appreciate what it means to live in peace until that peace is no more. It must be understood what it is to grow up under an occupation, to live at the mercy of checkpoints and curfews, stripped of liberty and identity. At some point, with all the massacres, with all the killings, my own blood began to beat in rhythm with the blood around me. I decided to join the struggle. No amount of indoctrination can drive someone to act if that person does not believe in the cause, has not understood it, has not decided to live or even die for it. I knew what was in store, but this knowledge had no power to stop me. When I joined the Resistance, after four years of searching, I did not go alone. My family, my friends, my people—everything that made me who I am—all of it went with me. In the same way, I did not act in my own name as an isolated individual. I felt like all the Lebanese were at my side. My act, the operation itself, was a letter sent to them. In the face of the madness of civil war, it was a message of resistance directed again the real enemy.
In Khiam, I tried to keep resisting. It was the same struggle fought with different weapons, still against the same occupying power. Now the struggle became constant, a matter of holding your own at every moment. Those who broke down, or became informers, were those who did not understand the reality of occupation and resistance, those who could not grasp the radicality of freedom. To have stopped fighting would have been to turn my back on what it means, for all of us, to be human.
Every day, every minute, you hold yourself together—you try not to end up in that other prison, horrible and definitive, the mental hospital. You hear voices of men screaming, of women pleading, you see a mother whose son is torn from her, a grandmother dragged into the torture room, you try to tell the girl in the next cell not to scratch the eczema that devours her body. You don't give in, you don't give away any emotion, or the enemy has won. The prison locks you inside your thoughts, time washes away your memories, your loves, your childhood. Fear is always there. You know that in yourself you have found your ultimate adversary, and that you must once again go beyond yourself to find your freedom, once more, you must resist.
Sometimes in the camp, a laugh, a little improvised scene was enough to overcome the horror. Today, some innocuous things can take me back for a moment to my solitary cell with its floor of beaten earth. But only for a moment. It is not this memory which fills me now, but that of a whole people and its future—the spirit of resistance. Because what I did, I did for tomorrow's children, for that fragile time when they will play in the shade of trees, and the air will echo with their shouts of joy."
- Soha Bechara, imprisoned in 1988 at the age of 21 for attempting to assassinate Antoine Lahad, leader of the Israeli-proxy South Lebanese Army. She was held in the Israeli-linked Khiam camp until 1998. Khiam was liberated on May 24, 2000 as Israel pulled out of South Lebanon.
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"For my friends and I, there was life after Khiam. For a time, with the great joy of the liberation of the South, life even became beautiful. It was a rare moment of unity for the Lebanese. For fifteen years, with guns in hand, they had torn each other to shreds, and after a peace that refused to deal with the damage they had done each other, they remained deeply divided, too irresponsible to heal such painful wounds. The liberation showed how our civil war had been, like any fratricidal conflict, a vain illusion when compared with the strength of our resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Khiam grudgingly returned to life so many damaged human beings, cracked and broken. Like all camps of its kind, its goal was to humiliate, to crush, to deny the existence of those it fed upon.
There remains the basic cause for which I fought: a free Lebanon, a country at peace. This is above all a question of memory. If the people of Lebanon let themselves forget, then this hope will be lost and the spirit of the Resistance vanish.
I accepted the idea of dying for my country. I feel connected to the whole planet, to all of humanity, but Lebanon was where I was born and where I grew up. For me, the idea of my country is as simple as the air I breathe. I belong to this piece of earth, and it was from this piece of earth that they tried to banish me. I became a child of war. We never appreciate what it means to live in peace until that peace is no more. It must be understood what it is to grow up under an occupation, to live at the mercy of checkpoints and curfews, stripped of liberty and identity. At some point, with all the massacres, with all the killings, my own blood began to beat in rhythm with the blood around me. I decided to join the struggle. No amount of indoctrination can drive someone to act if that person does not believe in the cause, has not understood it, has not decided to live or even die for it. I knew what was in store, but this knowledge had no power to stop me. When I joined the Resistance, after four years of searching, I did not go alone. My family, my friends, my people—everything that made me who I am—all of it went with me. In the same way, I did not act in my own name as an isolated individual. I felt like all the Lebanese were at my side. My act, the operation itself, was a letter sent to them. In the face of the madness of civil war, it was a message of resistance directed again the real enemy.
In Khiam, I tried to keep resisting. It was the same struggle fought with different weapons, still against the same occupying power. Now the struggle became constant, a matter of holding your own at every moment. Those who broke down, or became informers, were those who did not understand the reality of occupation and resistance, those who could not grasp the radicality of freedom. To have stopped fighting would have been to turn my back on what it means, for all of us, to be human.
Every day, every minute, you hold yourself together—you try not to end up in that other prison, horrible and definitive, the mental hospital. You hear voices of men screaming, of women pleading, you see a mother whose son is torn from her, a grandmother dragged into the torture room, you try to tell the girl in the next cell not to scratch the eczema that devours her body. You don't give in, you don't give away any emotion, or the enemy has won. The prison locks you inside your thoughts, time washes away your memories, your loves, your childhood. Fear is always there. You know that in yourself you have found your ultimate adversary, and that you must once again go beyond yourself to find your freedom, once more, you must resist.
Sometimes in the camp, a laugh, a little improvised scene was enough to overcome the horror. Today, some innocuous things can take me back for a moment to my solitary cell with its floor of beaten earth. But only for a moment. It is not this memory which fills me now, but that of a whole people and its future—the spirit of resistance. Because what I did, I did for tomorrow's children, for that fragile time when they will play in the shade of trees, and the air will echo with their shouts of joy."
- Soha Bechara, imprisoned in 1988 at the age of 21 for attempting to assassinate Antoine Lahad, leader of the Israeli-proxy South Lebanese Army. She was held in the Israeli-linked Khiam camp until 1998. Khiam was liberated on May 24, 2000 as Israel pulled out of South Lebanon.
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March 9, 2025
Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone)
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[This text was originally published in French translation in the book Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement.]
Over the past thirty years I have written a great deal about artistic collaboration but I worry that, despite my attempts to be completely honest on the topic, I have often ended up being less than completely honest. When I started making collaborative group performances I was a teenager, that was over thirty years ago, and I desperately wanted to believe that working together we could make something so much better than any of us could make on our own. I still have a strong desire to believe this. And perhaps belief gets me a little bit closer to the heart of the matter. The desire for a belief. To believe in something. I’m remembering a line from the Czech poet Vladimír Holan: “But we who do not believe are always expecting something…“ I find that I’m still expecting something and sometimes the name I give to this sense of expectation is collaboration.
In the Jewish education of my youth, most of which I’ve almost completely disowned, the name given to people who helped the Nazis was “collaborators.” When I think of the word “politics” my first immediate associations are leftist politics and activism. When I think of the word “collaboration” my first immediate associations are intriguing artistic collectives. But fascism is also politics. “Collaborators” are also engaged in collaboration. (Every word is a double-edged sword.) I often think of artistic collaboration as a difficult friend, a friend I’m happy to have but who at any moment might do something that would make me extremely unhappy. Sometimes even friendship can be like this, and you need to put in the hard work to find the best way to remain friends.
In these matters, as with so many things, it is less about method and more about something else. But what exactly? A sense of ethical reflection? Letting an artistic reality of “not knowing” be one’s guide? A realization that we’ve all had different life experiences and within the space created by such differences we might might find something closer to truth? Letting experiences evolve into wisdom, though it is extremely unfashionable today to speak in these terms. And, whatever terms one might use, such ethical reflections, experiences and wisdom must somehow be embodied within the method. Also, open to change over time. Also, it will always be less than perfect and imperfection should be its guide. I am still searching for all of these things.
Then there is practical matter of what I’ve actually experienced during such collaborations. The chasm between theory and practice is noticeable. Sometimes I think: if I want to move my practice closer to my ideals, I need to change the goals. Perhaps the goal is to make something I don’t like. Because then I’ll truly know I wasn’t the one who made it. That it’s not overly based on my own idiosyncratic tastes. That it was something made by all of us. By the same logic the goal could be to make something equally loved by all of us. However, this seems rather difficult to do. Perhaps the heart of the matter is not belief but compromise. What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? Such thoughts might be alalogous to discourses that value process over product, but I fear I’m too much of an artist (for my own good) not to be overly focused on the end result. On the other hand, perhaps many of the works I’ve been involved in do in fact look more like process than they do like product, with aspects of collaboration foregrounded and embodied. The differences between the collaborating artists become the visible cornerstone of the work, which is one way of understanding what process is.
With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.
As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.
So I return to collaboration over and over again. Trying to learn from my mistakes and making every new kind of mistake in the process. Sometimes I feel mentally trapped in the previous century: the battle between communism and capitalism, between collectivity and individualism. (Though, for me, the Soviet Union was often little more than a form of state capitalism, and technological breakthroughs in the West were made possible through state funded research and the collectivity of taxation.) But if I try to move my thinking a little bit more into our current century, I feel all sorts of new energies continuously forming. A new emphasis on care as the most politically radical position. Activists working on Transformative Justice, which has to do with addressing harm within community without ever calling the police. When I read about Transformative Justice I find it incredibly inspiring and also clearly see how difficult the work can be. The logic of Eurocentric-derived cultures are completely tied up in notions of punishment. Searching for different ways of dealing with harm, for methods of accountability and healing that sidestep the logic of punishment, is counterintuitive for so many people, and therefore has to be learned (or learned again) almost as if from scratch. Often there is frustration around situations where a Transformative Justice process was attempted and it simply doesn’t work. These activists are pushing forward toward a time in the future when hopefully more people will have found ways to reduce harm within community, or where experiments in that direction have led to other kinds of transformative discoveries, and therefore cannot allow themselves to be overly discouraged.
Reading about Transformative Justice, I very much recognize the description of a certain very specific kind of frustration, of a process where sometimes it “simply doesn’t work,” from my long history of making collaborative performances. In Transformative Justice movements they are working toward a world without police and without prisons. A great deal of the time I don’t entirely know what I’m working toward. Just to be a different kind of artist, to collaboratively make one really good show, not to worry so much about pushing my name. My name is at the top of the first page of this text. I could have tried to write it collaboratively with someone, but I don’t actually have anyone in my life I’m able to do that with. (Once again, the chasm between theory and practice.) Perhaps it’s about belief. And perhaps it’s about compromise. And perhaps it’s about loneliness.
What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.
When I put my name on the cover of a book, I also think of it as being in dialog with all the other books that have been written, one node in the interrelated web of books. As Italo Calvino writes: “Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it.” I have often written about how I live a double life, one half spent writing novels, the other half spent making collaborative performances. Books are the activity I do (mostly) alone and performances are the activity I do with other people. I find writing books much, much easier than making collaborative performances. So often I find myself wondering if, for this reason, I should give up making performances and only write books. There is much about me that fits the cliché of the melancholy writer, the dandy, the flâneur, wandering alone amongst the city within my melancholy thoughts which I will later write down in an attempt to communicate something that goes far beyond my own narrow experience.
I’m not sure what kinds of personalities are most and least suited for working collaboratively but, if I were to make a list, the melancholy flâneur probably would rank rather high in the least suited column. And this must be yet another reason I do it, somehow going against my nature, trying to open up a world, the world of my own thoughts, that always suggests the best thing to do would be to shut everything down. The desire for artistic collaboration, at least for me, is a desire to find a third way between solitude and community, and it is less important that this third way actually exist then that I manage to keep alive the search for it. In this sense it truly is an impossible dramaturgy.
But it is not just a struggle within my thoughts. It is something I actually do with other people. Each time we start again we cannot fully rely on the maps we’ve made in the past. We have to concretely deal with the task at hand, in the moment, deciding from moment to moment when to fight and when to compromise, what aspects of the work are most important to us, what we think we are making and why, and how might it be possible for us to make it better together than any of us might be able to make it alone.
*
[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]
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[This text was originally published in French translation in the book Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement.]
“But part of it is that if you are really committed to working collectively you have to give up some of your preciousness around style.”
– Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
“I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.”
– David Graeber
Over the past thirty years I have written a great deal about artistic collaboration but I worry that, despite my attempts to be completely honest on the topic, I have often ended up being less than completely honest. When I started making collaborative group performances I was a teenager, that was over thirty years ago, and I desperately wanted to believe that working together we could make something so much better than any of us could make on our own. I still have a strong desire to believe this. And perhaps belief gets me a little bit closer to the heart of the matter. The desire for a belief. To believe in something. I’m remembering a line from the Czech poet Vladimír Holan: “But we who do not believe are always expecting something…“ I find that I’m still expecting something and sometimes the name I give to this sense of expectation is collaboration.
In the Jewish education of my youth, most of which I’ve almost completely disowned, the name given to people who helped the Nazis was “collaborators.” When I think of the word “politics” my first immediate associations are leftist politics and activism. When I think of the word “collaboration” my first immediate associations are intriguing artistic collectives. But fascism is also politics. “Collaborators” are also engaged in collaboration. (Every word is a double-edged sword.) I often think of artistic collaboration as a difficult friend, a friend I’m happy to have but who at any moment might do something that would make me extremely unhappy. Sometimes even friendship can be like this, and you need to put in the hard work to find the best way to remain friends.
In these matters, as with so many things, it is less about method and more about something else. But what exactly? A sense of ethical reflection? Letting an artistic reality of “not knowing” be one’s guide? A realization that we’ve all had different life experiences and within the space created by such differences we might might find something closer to truth? Letting experiences evolve into wisdom, though it is extremely unfashionable today to speak in these terms. And, whatever terms one might use, such ethical reflections, experiences and wisdom must somehow be embodied within the method. Also, open to change over time. Also, it will always be less than perfect and imperfection should be its guide. I am still searching for all of these things.
Then there is practical matter of what I’ve actually experienced during such collaborations. The chasm between theory and practice is noticeable. Sometimes I think: if I want to move my practice closer to my ideals, I need to change the goals. Perhaps the goal is to make something I don’t like. Because then I’ll truly know I wasn’t the one who made it. That it’s not overly based on my own idiosyncratic tastes. That it was something made by all of us. By the same logic the goal could be to make something equally loved by all of us. However, this seems rather difficult to do. Perhaps the heart of the matter is not belief but compromise. What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? Such thoughts might be alalogous to discourses that value process over product, but I fear I’m too much of an artist (for my own good) not to be overly focused on the end result. On the other hand, perhaps many of the works I’ve been involved in do in fact look more like process than they do like product, with aspects of collaboration foregrounded and embodied. The differences between the collaborating artists become the visible cornerstone of the work, which is one way of understanding what process is.
With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.
As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.
So I return to collaboration over and over again. Trying to learn from my mistakes and making every new kind of mistake in the process. Sometimes I feel mentally trapped in the previous century: the battle between communism and capitalism, between collectivity and individualism. (Though, for me, the Soviet Union was often little more than a form of state capitalism, and technological breakthroughs in the West were made possible through state funded research and the collectivity of taxation.) But if I try to move my thinking a little bit more into our current century, I feel all sorts of new energies continuously forming. A new emphasis on care as the most politically radical position. Activists working on Transformative Justice, which has to do with addressing harm within community without ever calling the police. When I read about Transformative Justice I find it incredibly inspiring and also clearly see how difficult the work can be. The logic of Eurocentric-derived cultures are completely tied up in notions of punishment. Searching for different ways of dealing with harm, for methods of accountability and healing that sidestep the logic of punishment, is counterintuitive for so many people, and therefore has to be learned (or learned again) almost as if from scratch. Often there is frustration around situations where a Transformative Justice process was attempted and it simply doesn’t work. These activists are pushing forward toward a time in the future when hopefully more people will have found ways to reduce harm within community, or where experiments in that direction have led to other kinds of transformative discoveries, and therefore cannot allow themselves to be overly discouraged.
Reading about Transformative Justice, I very much recognize the description of a certain very specific kind of frustration, of a process where sometimes it “simply doesn’t work,” from my long history of making collaborative performances. In Transformative Justice movements they are working toward a world without police and without prisons. A great deal of the time I don’t entirely know what I’m working toward. Just to be a different kind of artist, to collaboratively make one really good show, not to worry so much about pushing my name. My name is at the top of the first page of this text. I could have tried to write it collaboratively with someone, but I don’t actually have anyone in my life I’m able to do that with. (Once again, the chasm between theory and practice.) Perhaps it’s about belief. And perhaps it’s about compromise. And perhaps it’s about loneliness.
What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.
When I put my name on the cover of a book, I also think of it as being in dialog with all the other books that have been written, one node in the interrelated web of books. As Italo Calvino writes: “Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it.” I have often written about how I live a double life, one half spent writing novels, the other half spent making collaborative performances. Books are the activity I do (mostly) alone and performances are the activity I do with other people. I find writing books much, much easier than making collaborative performances. So often I find myself wondering if, for this reason, I should give up making performances and only write books. There is much about me that fits the cliché of the melancholy writer, the dandy, the flâneur, wandering alone amongst the city within my melancholy thoughts which I will later write down in an attempt to communicate something that goes far beyond my own narrow experience.
I’m not sure what kinds of personalities are most and least suited for working collaboratively but, if I were to make a list, the melancholy flâneur probably would rank rather high in the least suited column. And this must be yet another reason I do it, somehow going against my nature, trying to open up a world, the world of my own thoughts, that always suggests the best thing to do would be to shut everything down. The desire for artistic collaboration, at least for me, is a desire to find a third way between solitude and community, and it is less important that this third way actually exist then that I manage to keep alive the search for it. In this sense it truly is an impossible dramaturgy.
But it is not just a struggle within my thoughts. It is something I actually do with other people. Each time we start again we cannot fully rely on the maps we’ve made in the past. We have to concretely deal with the task at hand, in the moment, deciding from moment to moment when to fight and when to compromise, what aspects of the work are most important to us, what we think we are making and why, and how might it be possible for us to make it better together than any of us might be able to make it alone.
*
[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]
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March 5, 2025
18 performing arts organizations across Canada stand in solidarity with Palestine!
18 performing arts organizations across Canada (including PME-ART) stand in solidarity with Palestine! This group endorsement was organized by Theatre Artists for Palestinian Voices’ PACBI working group. TAPV is a coalition of Palestinian, Indigenous, Jewish and allied artists and arts workers committed to bringing a diversity of Palestinian voices to our stages, and to ongoing Indigenous land struggles against settler colonialism from Turtle Island to historic Palestine. To learn more about PACBI, endorse the call with your organization, or join us in advocating for PACBI in the Canadian performing arts sector and beyond, email: theatre4palestinianvoices@gmail.com
The organizations are: Alma Theatre (Edmonton), Aluna Theatre (Toronto), The Black Pledge Canada (Toronto), Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto), The Bus Stop Theatre (Halifax), Enable Arts Society (Vancouver), Generator (Toronto), manidoons collective (Toronto), MT Space Theatre (Kitchener-Waterloo), New Harlem Productions (Hamilton), Paprika Festival (Toronto), The Theatre Centre (Toronto), PME-ART (Montreal), rookies with friends (Toronto), Rumble Theatre (Vancouver), Shakespeare in the Ruff (Toronto), Teesri Duniya (Montreal), We Quit Theatre (Winnipeg).
The organizations are: Alma Theatre (Edmonton), Aluna Theatre (Toronto), The Black Pledge Canada (Toronto), Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto), The Bus Stop Theatre (Halifax), Enable Arts Society (Vancouver), Generator (Toronto), manidoons collective (Toronto), MT Space Theatre (Kitchener-Waterloo), New Harlem Productions (Hamilton), Paprika Festival (Toronto), The Theatre Centre (Toronto), PME-ART (Montreal), rookies with friends (Toronto), Rumble Theatre (Vancouver), Shakespeare in the Ruff (Toronto), Teesri Duniya (Montreal), We Quit Theatre (Winnipeg).
February 18, 2025
Onze organisations culturelles de Montréal ont officiellement endossé PACBI
Dans une forte déclaration de solidarité, onze organisations culturelles de Montréal ont officiellement endossé la Campagne palestinienne pour le boycott académique et culturel d'Israël (PACBI), soulignant ainsi leur engagement envers le mouvement mondial de Boycott, Désinvestissement et Sanctions (BDS).
Les organisations qui soutiennent cette initiative se joignent à un mouvement mondial croissant d'artistes, d'universitaires et de travailleur·euse·s culturel·le·s qui s'engagent à soutenir le peuple palestinien dans sa lutte pour la libération et l'autodétermination. Ces organisations espèrent que plus d'organismes voudront adopter PACBI partout au Québec et au Canada.
À ce jour, les organisations suivantes ont unies leurs forces pour appuyer ou réaffirmer leurs engagements à PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, OBORO, PME-ART et Vidéographe.
Pour en savoir plus sur le PACBI, consultez https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
_________________
In a strong statement of solidarity, eleven cultural organizations in Montreal have officially endorsed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), highlighting their commitment to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The organizations supporting this initiative are joining a growing global movement of artists, academics, and cultural workers committed to supporting the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and self-determination. These organizations hope that more groups will adopt PACBI across Quebec and Canada.
To date, the following organizations have united their efforts to support or reaffirm their commitments to PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, Oboro, PME-ART and Vidéographe.
To learn more about PACBI, see https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
Les organisations qui soutiennent cette initiative se joignent à un mouvement mondial croissant d'artistes, d'universitaires et de travailleur·euse·s culturel·le·s qui s'engagent à soutenir le peuple palestinien dans sa lutte pour la libération et l'autodétermination. Ces organisations espèrent que plus d'organismes voudront adopter PACBI partout au Québec et au Canada.
À ce jour, les organisations suivantes ont unies leurs forces pour appuyer ou réaffirmer leurs engagements à PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, OBORO, PME-ART et Vidéographe.
Pour en savoir plus sur le PACBI, consultez https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
_________________
In a strong statement of solidarity, eleven cultural organizations in Montreal have officially endorsed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), highlighting their commitment to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The organizations supporting this initiative are joining a growing global movement of artists, academics, and cultural workers committed to supporting the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and self-determination. These organizations hope that more groups will adopt PACBI across Quebec and Canada.
To date, the following organizations have united their efforts to support or reaffirm their commitments to PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, Oboro, PME-ART and Vidéographe.
To learn more about PACBI, see https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
February 11, 2025
For years...
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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.
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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.
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February 5, 2025
Five epigraphs for One Yes & Many Know
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So I started writing a novel about an artist who tries to sell out. Then I realized it was a mistake to drop the novel I was already writing, when I was in the middle of it (and it had been going well.) So I went back to writing my novel about an unbeliever who attempts to find god and realizes that the true name of god is treason. Which will be, when I finish it, the final part of some kind of trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia, a trilogy that has already begun with the publication of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim this past September. But back to the topic of trying to sell out. I wrote one chapter and a bit of that idea before setting it aside (for now.) And also compiled a page of epigraphs which you will find below.
*
At the age of forty the life I have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all my notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds I would perform, was somewhere else. I realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless I did something. Unless I took one last gamble.
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Vol. 2 (A Man in Love)
I had an unhealthy respect for the artist who sells out. Not everyone can sell out, even if they want to. Over the years, I have noticed that the strength of singers like Adam Ant and Billy Idol was their ability to sell their asses and still appear to be doing precisely what they wanted.
– Julian Cope, Repossessed
I hushed it, heard my conscience in a clear voice
“Don’t forsake us to make this a career choice”
– Ka, 30 Keys
Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.
– Bernadette Mayer, Experiments
Success is the ethical quagmire par excellence of commodity culture because it jeopardizes our relation to dissent, to resistance, to saying no, as fame is precisely about what one is willing to do, how far one is willing to go, and how much (low in the form of high. Going low in order to get high) one is willing to say yes to. The road to fame is made up of assent. This is what gets you to the literal and figurative top. And this is why fame is almost always a parable about losing (not finding one’s way). About being led astray. “Making it” is not the struggle to become, as it’s always been said, but the willingness to be made.
– Masha Tupitsyn, Becoming Object
.
So I started writing a novel about an artist who tries to sell out. Then I realized it was a mistake to drop the novel I was already writing, when I was in the middle of it (and it had been going well.) So I went back to writing my novel about an unbeliever who attempts to find god and realizes that the true name of god is treason. Which will be, when I finish it, the final part of some kind of trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia, a trilogy that has already begun with the publication of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim this past September. But back to the topic of trying to sell out. I wrote one chapter and a bit of that idea before setting it aside (for now.) And also compiled a page of epigraphs which you will find below.
*
At the age of forty the life I have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all my notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds I would perform, was somewhere else. I realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless I did something. Unless I took one last gamble.
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Vol. 2 (A Man in Love)
I had an unhealthy respect for the artist who sells out. Not everyone can sell out, even if they want to. Over the years, I have noticed that the strength of singers like Adam Ant and Billy Idol was their ability to sell their asses and still appear to be doing precisely what they wanted.
– Julian Cope, Repossessed
I hushed it, heard my conscience in a clear voice
“Don’t forsake us to make this a career choice”
– Ka, 30 Keys
Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.
– Bernadette Mayer, Experiments
Success is the ethical quagmire par excellence of commodity culture because it jeopardizes our relation to dissent, to resistance, to saying no, as fame is precisely about what one is willing to do, how far one is willing to go, and how much (low in the form of high. Going low in order to get high) one is willing to say yes to. The road to fame is made up of assent. This is what gets you to the literal and figurative top. And this is why fame is almost always a parable about losing (not finding one’s way). About being led astray. “Making it” is not the struggle to become, as it’s always been said, but the willingness to be made.
– Masha Tupitsyn, Becoming Object
.
February 2, 2025
Sam Kriss Quote
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“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Walter Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.”
- Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer
.
“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Walter Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.”
- Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer
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January 23, 2025
possible titles
.
I've been keeping this ongoing list of possible titles since 2016.
(As well, in case you don't already know, my last book, which has a really nice title, also got some really nice reviews.)
(Finally, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)
.
I've been keeping this ongoing list of possible titles since 2016.
(As well, in case you don't already know, my last book, which has a really nice title, also got some really nice reviews.)
(Finally, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)
.
January 20, 2025
PME-ART commits to PACBI
PME-ART commits to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) that was launched in 2004 as part of the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. PACBI advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, based on their continued complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law.
Solidarity with PACBI means that PME-ART will not collaborate, fund, or accept funding from the Israeli government or related funding bodies. We acknowledge that based on our organizational scale, these demands are not difficult to carry out. However we believe that it is important to consider such stances within the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
We strongly encourage Montreal-based artistic groups, cultural workers, and artists to publicly support these demands and share this commitment with their members.
To learn more about PACBI, see https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
This statement on the PME-ART website: https://www.pme-art.ca/en/about
January 16, 2025
Jacob Wren on Patreon
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I have been thinking of doing this for a while. I don't know to what extent it will work, but I've started a Patreon:
https://patreon.com/jacob_wren_writer
I've set it to the lowest monthly amount: $3 U.S. / $5 Canadian. I was trying to think of what kind of amount I could afford. I know money is tight for everyone.
I'm currently writing some kind trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia:
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy (2027)
Desire Without Expectation (2030)
This makes me realize I need more writing time then I've needed in the past.
If people were to sign up it would really help give me the extra time necessary to finish writing these books. For those who do so, they can read excerpts as I am writing them.
As well, as everyone knows, I'm very addicted to social media. So I'm wondering if this particular kind of addiction can help bring in any funds. (Also, a lot of people seem to be leaving social media at this moment. So Patreon could be a place for me to post things.)
In the long run I'm hoping to sign up 1,000 people. So far I'm at 8.
I know a lot of people like my books. I'm just wondering if any people like them enough to help out a bit. (My last book got some really nice reviews.)
Let's see what happens.
Jacob
.
I have been thinking of doing this for a while. I don't know to what extent it will work, but I've started a Patreon:
https://patreon.com/jacob_wren_writer
I've set it to the lowest monthly amount: $3 U.S. / $5 Canadian. I was trying to think of what kind of amount I could afford. I know money is tight for everyone.
I'm currently writing some kind trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia:
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy (2027)
Desire Without Expectation (2030)
This makes me realize I need more writing time then I've needed in the past.
If people were to sign up it would really help give me the extra time necessary to finish writing these books. For those who do so, they can read excerpts as I am writing them.
As well, as everyone knows, I'm very addicted to social media. So I'm wondering if this particular kind of addiction can help bring in any funds. (Also, a lot of people seem to be leaving social media at this moment. So Patreon could be a place for me to post things.)
In the long run I'm hoping to sign up 1,000 people. So far I'm at 8.
I know a lot of people like my books. I'm just wondering if any people like them enough to help out a bit. (My last book got some really nice reviews.)
Let's see what happens.
Jacob
.
January 15, 2025
Camilla Townsend Quote
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“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant “year count” or “yearly account,” even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources “annals.” In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards located between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time. Such performances generally recounted stories that would be of interest to the larger group – the rise of chiefs and later their deaths (timely or untimely), the wars they fought and the reasons for them, remarkable natural phenomena, and major celebrations or horrifying executions. Although certain subjects were favored, the texts were hardly devoid of personality: different communities and different individuals included different details. Political schisms were illustrated via colorful dialogue between leaders of different schools of thought. The speakers would sometimes even slip into the present tense as they delivered such leaders’ lines, as if they were in a play. Occasionally they would shout questions that eager audience members were expected to answer.”
– Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
.
“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant “year count” or “yearly account,” even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources “annals.” In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards located between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time. Such performances generally recounted stories that would be of interest to the larger group – the rise of chiefs and later their deaths (timely or untimely), the wars they fought and the reasons for them, remarkable natural phenomena, and major celebrations or horrifying executions. Although certain subjects were favored, the texts were hardly devoid of personality: different communities and different individuals included different details. Political schisms were illustrated via colorful dialogue between leaders of different schools of thought. The speakers would sometimes even slip into the present tense as they delivered such leaders’ lines, as if they were in a play. Occasionally they would shout questions that eager audience members were expected to answer.”
– Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
.
January 13, 2025
Royalties
.
People often ask me how much I make from each of my books when they sell. And it's kind of a complicated calculation, so I'm never able to answer off the top of my head. But I just thought to look it up again, and thought I would share it here (if you've asked me in the past and I've given a vague answer, here is a more precise one):
PRINTED EDITIONS:
10% of List Sales from the sale of the first 3,000 copies of printed editions of the WORK;
12.5% of List Sales from the sale of 3,001-6,000 copies of the WORK;
15% of List Sales from 6,001 or more copies of the WORK.
ELECTRONIC EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all electronic editions of the WORK
AUDIO EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all audio editions of the WORK
(If I understand correctly, this is all after the book has sold out it's advance. As the contract clearly says the advance "will be deducted from the author’s Royalty Commissions." As well, just to be clear, this post was not meant as a criticism. It's just a question people frequently ask me.)
.
People often ask me how much I make from each of my books when they sell. And it's kind of a complicated calculation, so I'm never able to answer off the top of my head. But I just thought to look it up again, and thought I would share it here (if you've asked me in the past and I've given a vague answer, here is a more precise one):
PRINTED EDITIONS:
10% of List Sales from the sale of the first 3,000 copies of printed editions of the WORK;
12.5% of List Sales from the sale of 3,001-6,000 copies of the WORK;
15% of List Sales from 6,001 or more copies of the WORK.
ELECTRONIC EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all electronic editions of the WORK
AUDIO EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all audio editions of the WORK
(If I understand correctly, this is all after the book has sold out it's advance. As the contract clearly says the advance "will be deducted from the author’s Royalty Commissions." As well, just to be clear, this post was not meant as a criticism. It's just a question people frequently ask me.)
.
January 10, 2025
CODE NOIR by Quinton Barnes
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Quinton Barnes just put out a new record. It's called CODE NOIR and you should listen to it here: https://quintonbarnes.bandcamp.com/album/code-noir
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Quinton Barnes just put out a new record. It's called CODE NOIR and you should listen to it here: https://quintonbarnes.bandcamp.com/album/code-noir
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January 8, 2025
Francesca Polletta Quote
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“What comes across in the stories that Myles Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decision-making; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all of the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”
Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that this guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along… You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leadings questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective – the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.”
– Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
.
“What comes across in the stories that Myles Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decision-making; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all of the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”
Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that this guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along… You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leadings questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective – the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.”
– Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
.
"I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight."
.
“In some deep way, I feel I need to be an artist. But I don’t actually think what the world needs right now is art. I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight. I think art is probably more a reflection of the world than a driver of change.”
- Jacob Wren, from this interview with Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl
.
“In some deep way, I feel I need to be an artist. But I don’t actually think what the world needs right now is art. I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight. I think art is probably more a reflection of the world than a driver of change.”
- Jacob Wren, from this interview with Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl
.
January 2, 2025
Dry Your Tears Quote
.
“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.”
- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
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“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.”
- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
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