Trophies Are the First to Go: A fiction

.



[This story was originally published in Raphaëlle de Groot: Rencontres au sommet / The Summit Meetings]




There are things I still have and things I have given away. Of the things I still have I also have lists of the things I still have. Of the things I have given away I now only have the lists. The lists were created with an absolute attention to detail. An attention to detail more detailed than my extremely accurate attention to my own ongoing thoughts. There are thoughts I still have and thoughts I have given away. The border between my thoughts and the objects, the thoughts I still have and the objects I still have, and the thoughts I have given away and the objects I have given away, is a hazy one. A hazy ever-shifting border that gives me little information I am able to make use of. I am beginning to realize that the objects are also thoughts. I understand what is needed and what is needed is wisdom and the objects have wisdom and the objects have thoughts.

The weight of objects is also of the people they belonged to. The objects belonged to me but they also belonged to others. Some of them belonged to others before me and others will belong to others after they are gone. But across this belonging is the freedom of these objects to move, meet and gather both in reality and in a space that is nothing like reality that I am here calling thought. Here we might wish to speak of a certain solidarity between objects, how objects alone can more easily be moved, disassembled or reorganized in a manner that could also be stated as a sort of ongoing misunderstanding between the objects and the world. But when the objects are experienced as concurrent, are allowed to meet, to work together, they also know that now they must be reckoned with. A new complexity develops and it is no longer as unthinkingly possible to do only as we wish. Each object on each list is no longer a single, isolated line but is joined towards some larger, perhaps ungraspable, statement and whole. At times even when things and objects meet it is as if they haven’t quite yet met. Various elements, various subtle and not so subtle conditions, remain necessary in order for the meeting to become more than a meeting that has simply taken place. These conditions might be classified as vibrations or thoughts.

Objects do not die and neither do thoughts. When objects are insecure they become more solid, more themselves. It is difficult to know how to record this additional stability, how to submit it, towards the careful logic of the lists. It is the same object, whether here or gone, but it is also no longer quite the same. It is more, and this more must be recorded along a register of insecurity. This insecurity belongs to each of the individual objects but also belongs to the resonances that occur and refract when they meet. We might understand each object, not only the objects that I know about, that I still have or that have left me, but in fact all things we wish to consider, as having gone through any number of stages. I could be one of these stages or my involvement might be too superficial to merit specific mention. Having been recorded on a list might be yet another stage. Rusting, having been buried, having been loved or stolen or set aflame or given as a gift – all of these occurrences might be considered as stages within the ongoing life of the object.

Most objects consist of varying materials. Each material has a specific origin and when all the materials come together they create a space that might be described as yet another origin. The relationship between the different senses embedded within each of these origins is complex. It might be described as akin to a body that has a home, or many homes, yet within this body there is also a spirit that comes from elsewhere. When the body dies the spirit returns to this elsewhere. But the object, like a thought, never dies, and therefore the materials must find other ways of returning to the place from which they came, chipping off particle by particle, spreading themselves out across an expanse as collaborative and ongoing as the seasons.

We also cannot ignore the fact that each of these materials has been extracted from its connection with other materials using a certain degree of violence. The history of this violence holds itself within the composition of each object. Things change and things stay the same. Holding a given object in your hand, you might feel a resonance or vibration. I am currently, as part of the lists, working on a theory, a sort of poetic spectrum along which it might be possible to map the various qualities of these resonances, both for the holder and for the object. Insecurity and violence might both be seen as specific points or areas along this spectrum. This theorized spectrum will of course be subjective, but it will also express itself as a desire to be universal. At the beginning, the spectrum will only explore an object in the palm of your hand, but I see no reason why from that basic starting point it might not continue outward towards other points of connection both physical and psychic.

It is most productive when the objects choose to work together. The added solidity of their collaboration is a phenomena that I can observe, but it is also a phenomena that significantly changes me in my observation of it. The precise ways in which I am changed are perhaps the point. At first I thought the point was mainly that some objects remained here while other objects have been given away, but now I suspect that this is merely a detail. The objects might find themselves working together either here or elsewhere, at any stage in time, and also in ways that have little to do with time. What is most important is that these things do not need me in order to meet, do not need my observation or categorization. They need only to come together within the thought of solidarity, only to find a certain realm of vibration that adds solidity to each of the objects in dialog with the solidity added to each of the other objects. Once the strengthening has begun there is no reason for the objects to abandon the constellation they have so recently discovered. Over time this constellation also solidifies, and once this has occurred, if the objects are to be moved, it is far more likely that they will be moved all together, as an entirety, and far less likely that any of the individual things will be separated, by me or of their own initiative, from the larger group.

There are many categories of lists and many contradictions between categories. There are lists that clearly undermine the tentative conclusions of other lists, and lists that summarize the findings of several lists in ways in which it is difficult to correlate the overall findings with the specific findings of each of the lists that have been aggregated. When put all together, the lists do not resemble any sort of useful entirety. They are more like thoughts. Nonetheless, compiling the lists is an act that gives meaning. I also suspect, in my more generous moments, that the objects intuit the existence of the many lists, that the lists provide information, information released into a continuum, that creates sympathetic conditions for potential object solidarity and coming together. The lists do not touch the objects but the objects entwine with a world in which the lists are now one additional thing that exist.

The relationship between the actual stages each object must pass through and the poetic spectrum I am gradually conceiving is both essential and under-theorized. Many of the same terms (insecurity, violence, solidity, contentment) appear within both of these speculations. The object has its particular life, a life that is never entirely available to my understanding of it, and within this life there are sections I am here referring to as stages. Some of these stages are fairly dramatic while most are not. A stage might last a single moment or a thousand years but for the object this way of measuring time will likely not affect either the quality or quantity of any particular stage. A stage might most be considered a stage if it in some way alters one or more registers of the object. In this sense it might be said that it tilts against or within a given point along the spectrum. If, when holding an object in your hand, you sense its spectrum-value resonate with what we are currently calling ‘contentment’, it is likely that at some point in either the past or future the object developed through a stage that drew contentment towards it, or generated contentment in some other way. I don’t wish to be vague. But in order to further theorize this dynamic between a given stage and a given moment along the spectrum I would require either thoughts or information not currently in my possession. It might also be possible for the objects themselves to theorize this relationship, and perhaps the manner in which they often form and hold themselves in constellation could even be seen as some form of theorization along these lines.

There is a special list, hidden away, for objects that have caused death. On this list I have also included objects that saved lives. There is no inescapable reason for this list to remain hidden, since the objects take on these experiences, these particular stages, without differentiating them from any of the others. The qualities these more dramatic events evoke or generate become non-dramatic as they are gradually reduced towards the level of vibration, as they are weaved into a region of the object’s poetic spectrum over time. The objects are not traumatized since they themselves do not die. It would be reasonable to assume that this special list might represent intensities of violence, but it also might just as easily evoke something else: for example, intensities of desire or warmth. Nonetheless, this hidden away list represents for me a noticeable, at times troubling, aspect of both the objects that remain here and the objects that have since gone elsewhere. Apart from the lists and my thoughts, there is little evidence or hearsay as to what may or may not have occurred at any given stage. You might hold an object in your hand and sense a certain contentment, or be surrounded by a constellation of objects and feel influenced by the striking echo of their increased solidity, but neither of these experiences provide anything resembling clear information as to the historical source of this contentment or solidity, or as to why it at first emerged. But with the lists at my disposal, working backwards from moments along the spectrum towards past or future stages, I can begin to formulate certain thoughts that merge with the objects themselves towards an ever-increasing understanding of what they are and, more importantly, how they themselves understand the interconnected histories we might in some sense be said to be co-composing. Most of this history, however strongly felt, would be of little interest to anyone other than the objects and myself within the thoughts that circulate freely between us. But when matters of life and death are brought to bear on the situation, it is possible but not inevitable that evidence might alert the curiosity of certain authorities. In keeping this life and death list hidden I worry I’m becoming paranoid, while at the same time reassuring myself that I’m simply exercising a reasonable degree of normal caution.

All of these things didn’t make themselves, but I didn’t make myself either. The materials of which I am made for the most part remain invisible to me, but might be drawn into the realm of visibility through certain forms of analysis. The materials the objects consist of can be subjected to analysis, but can also be felt as vibrations, or registered through co-felt insecurity. This dynamic might also be understood as an unresolved conflict, and over time my understanding of it has also considerably shifted. In trying to understand the importance of the objects and of the constellations they come together and self-organize within – trying to understand through thoughts, through composition of many contradictory lists, through lending myself to the resonances that contemplation of these things so readily concocts – what becomes most clear is that the objects have no particular desires they wish to enact upon me, do not want me to behave more in this way or more in that, do not mind if I continue to experience them or instead some day choose to put my energies elsewhere. The ways I change through them are procured only through my own commitment and contemplation. And, at the same time, it increasingly seems to me that the opposite is also true, that the objects do in some sense have plans for me, if only in the sense that my ongoing engagement with their spectrum brings a certain clarity to my own actions and trajectory. By keeping the objects and letting them go, by letting my thoughts bleed and blur with their ever-changing intensities, I find myself doing things that I suspect I would not have otherwise done, and am therefore forced to realize that the person doing these things is also no longer the same. The objects skilfully wear their wisdom through their solidity and vibrations, and when faced with wisdom one would be a simple fool not to listen and not to learn.

At the moment I am sitting at my desk surrounded by a constellation of objects that formed overnight as if by magic. But, of course, I know that it was not magic. That the objects found each other, and in finding each other became something else, a world that raises almost as many questions as it answers. I can pick up an object in order to feel its weight and examine it, but when I put it back down I already know I will place it more or less within its given place in the larger grouping. These things would not have it any other way. There is a kind of music to these choices. I am tempted to count how many lists I have already completed but know there would be little point. The lists are only lists. It is in the act of making them that certain epiphanies or correlations will occur. Perhaps all of this could have happened without the lists, but the lists were the particular tool I chose. I’m sure I had my reasons and these reasons seemed particularly sufficient at the time. Surrounded by this constellation, I was tempted to write ‘enveloped’ by it, I feel there is at least something in this world that supports me. I might, at times, become lonely but I am certainly not alone. Someone examining the situation from afar might say I have collected these things but I know, to the contrary, that they have collected themselves. They are gifts that have been caught in the act of giving and they are lessons that do not need to be taught in order to be felt. None of these objects have a price.



.

First draft of the Authenticity is a Feeling short description

.



Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory. It tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavor to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of “being yourself in a performance situation.” Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary, the book begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, moves from Toronto to Montreal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining co-artistic director of a French-speaking performance group, about the Spinal Tap-like adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mold and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A novel about PME-ART. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.



.

"And whose work has no impact on their lives or the lives of the people around them."

.



This manual encourages us to find out what happens if we don't deliver. If we don't give students the standard slide show, but instead make them take off their socks and rub their feet with mustard.

We know that spicy feet will not be an instant salvation, but we believe in going outside, in using our bodies and not only our brains, in absurd interventions, in silly jokes, in creating atmospheres, in learning in the gap, in destabilizing our position, in talking about money. We believe in letting things go so wrong that thinking about them ten years later still makes our stomachs hurt.

Because this experimentation is more relevant to us than mindlessly repeating what doesn't work: breeding generations of artists, who religiously believe in self-expression and individualism but look the same, think the same, act the same. And whose work has no impact on their lives or the lives of the people around them.

- Teaching for people who prefer not to teach



.

Rich and Poor - The Single

Rich and Poor: The Single

Chaos & Star Records

Why Toronto publisher BookThug is getting into the record business in The Globe and Mail

Toronto publisher BookThug launches a record label in Now Magazine

And, of course, not to be forgotten: Rich and Poor: The Book




.

Three Montreal Events in September

.



I will be doing three events in Montreal in September as follows: 



Tuesday, September 5th at 8:30pm:
Resonance Reading Series: September
with Stephanie Bolster, Kelly Norah Drukker, Dean Garlick, Christine McNair & Jacob Wren
Resonance Café - 5175A Ave du Parc
Facebook Event
 


Saturday, September 9th at 8pm:
The Desire that Crosses You / Le Désir qui Te Traverse
Presented by the QUIMERAS collective
with Sophia Dacy-Cole, Camille Käse, Csenge Kolozsvari, Mayra Morales, Mariana Marcassa, Eugene Park, Claire Skahan, Ludmila Steckelberg de Santana, Anique Vered & Jacob Wren
Eastern Bloc - 7240 Clark St
Facebook Event



Saturday, Sept 16th at 2pm:
Hard to Read: Process/processus
A bilingual event presented by Art Pop/POP Montreal Symposium
with Michele Nox, Alix Ferrand, Jacob Wren, Monique Palma Whittaker, Durga Chew-Bose, Trevor Gould / curated by Fiona Duncan
Ancienne École des beaux-arts - 3450, rue Saint-Urbain
Facebook Event




.

Stuart Hall Quote

.



“Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.”

- Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger 



.

“If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why not the United States?”

.



In this spirit Cherríe Moraga remains “passionately committed to an art of resistance to domination by Anglo-America.” And what is her vision for the future? She says the words few people utter aloud: “If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why not the United States?” Why not, indeed? And why not a new confederacy of equal, mutually respectful cultures and peoples? “The road to our future is the road from our past.”

- Elizabeth Martínez, The Third Eye of Cherríe Moraga



.

The music of Jenifa Mayanja

I just discovered the music of Jenifa Mayanja who is playing tonight in Montreal. Above are a few of my favourite tracks. Better yet, check out all her albums on Bandcamp.



.

“It might be nice to be a girl, ‘cause then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless.”

.



"One avenue into understanding men’s loneliness is to consider how children are socialized. In an interview, Niobe Way, a lecturer at New York University who has worked with adolescent boys for over two decades, talked about how we are failing boys. “The social and emotional skills necessary for boys to thrive are just not being fostered,” she said in an interview. Indeed, when you look at the research, men do not start life as the stereotypes we become. Six-month-old boys are likely to “cry more than girls,” more likely to express joy at the sight of our mother’s faces, and more likely to match our expressions to theirs. In general, before the age of four or five, research shows that boys are more emotive than girls.

The change begins around the time we start school: at that age—about five—boys become worse than girls at “changing our facial expressions to foster social relationships.” This is the beginning of a socialization process in “a culture that supports emotional development for girls and discourages it for boys,” according to Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. This begins to affect our friendships early—in a study in New Haven, Connecticut, boys aged 10-18 were significantly worse than girls at knowing who their friends were: “over a two-week period, the boys changed their nomination of who their best friend was more frequently than girls, and their nomination was less likely to be reciprocated.”

Still, there’ll never be better soil than school in which to grow friendships, and most boys do find good friends as children. Way, who summarized her findings in her book Deep Secrets, found that, up until early adolescence, boys are not shy about how much they love their friends. Way quotes one boy named Justin in his first year of high school: “[My best friend and I] love each other… That’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. … I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect, and love for each other.” Another high school freshman, Jason, told Way friendships were important because then “you are not lonely … you need someone to turn to when things are bad.”

However, for many boys—Way calls it “near-universal”—a shift occurs in late adolescence, roughly from the ages of 15-20. In a phase of life we often think of in optimistic terms—self-discovery, coming of age—boys’ trust in each other shatters like glass. Three years after his first interview, Jason, asked if he had any close friends, said no, “and immediately adds that while he has nothing against gay people, he himself is not gay.” Another boy interviewed by Way in the eleventh grade who up until the year before had maintained a best friendship for ten years said he now had no friends because “you can’t trust nobody these days.” In interviews with thousands of boys, Way saw a tight correlation between confiding in close friends and mental health, and she observed that, across all ethnic groups and income brackets, three quarters of the boys she spoke to “grow fearful of betrayal by and distrustful of their male peers” in late adolescence, and “begin to speak increasingly of feeling lonely and depressed.”

Making matters worse, in the middle of this estrangement from other boys, as we’re becoming young men, we’re governed more than ever by a new set of rules about what behaviour we’re allowed to show. Psychologists call them display rules. “Expressions of hurt and worry and of care and concern for others,” according to white high schools boys, are “gay” or “girly.” Black and Hispanic boys, according to Way’s interviews, feel pressure to conform to even stricter rules. Men who break the rules, and express “sadness, depression, fear, and dysphoric self-conscious emotions such as shame and embarrassment” are viewed as “unmanly” and are comforted less than women. Way told me when she speaks in public, she often quotes a 16-year-old boy who said, “It might be nice to be a girl, ‘cause then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless.”

- Stephen Thomas, from The Legion Lonely



.

Excerpt from a Tori Kudo interview

.



Keith Connolly: What then, would you say, is the state of Maher Shalal Hash Baz today?

Tori Kudo: That’s a difficult question. It’s very difficult to run, though I am trying. In a way it could be said that Maher does not exist anymore. All the original members are gone, so now I accept whoever comes to Maher, and they are more like participants. I can continue that way, and I can create songs, so if you want to call that Maher, it’s okay. In some ways it is becoming more of a theatrical undertaking, akin maybe to Pasolini with all his actors being like a theater group, or the same actors playing in different films. I have worked with the Montreal-based playwright Jacob Wren in creating the play “No Double Life for the Wicked,” about the members of Maher and their daily lives. For example, in the play I am making pottery. It’s an attempt to show how Maher has become Maher, a kind of meta-Maher.




[You can read the full interview here.]


[And you can read a Moone Records Exclusive Interview with Tori Kudo here.]




.

Do you know the work of the Montreal writer Jacob Wren?

.



Luther Konadu: So knowing that as a writer, how do you carry on and continue to sustain a writing career knowing that maybe no one might read your book?

Chris Kraus: Well, it’s not one. You can find people to read your book, even if it doesn’t have that corporate media support. Do you know the work of the Montreal writer Jacob Wren?

Luther Konadu: No, I don’t.

Chris Kraus: He hasn’t been commercially published, but he’s prolific, persistent and important, and he puts his work online all the time. He’s built a tremendous following in the last ten years. He started at a point where no one knew his work, and now pretty much everyone in the alt-lit world, where the real readers are, knows his work and takes it seriously. And touring helps. When I Love Dick came out in 1997, I toured a lot. Maybe fifteen people would show up, and then they’d talk about it to their friends. And often, a book will mean more when people discover it themselves than when they order it on Amazon because it’s all over the internet.


[From In Conversation With Chris Kraus.]

.

Dr. Ahmet Yusuf Quote

.



The world experienced a revolution in 1492. In 1498 it experienced another. The results were hardly beneficial but they have come to be remembered as revolutions. Let us accept them and assess them as such. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. In 1498 Vasco da Gama was exploring Africa and passing behind Africa was able to reach India. Following these two encounters a period of savagery and oppression begins on earth. The wealth of the locals whose land had been “discovered” were seized. The foundations of the capitalist nation-state were being laid in the flows of Mercantilism. The nation-state, whose foundations had been laid in this period, became much stronger during its classical period in the 19th Century. The savagery which emerged with this development was of its own creation. It also had the name of capitalism. It looked upon life, communities, societies, and nature only with the eyes of the colonialist. Externally it developed through oppression, colonialism, and pillage, while internally it did not recognize the right to life of the poorer classes. Representatives of the church also played a role in these developments, for example Robert Malthus. Economic developments in the world grew along this first course.

The second course began with the publication of the Communist Manifesto developed under the leadership of Karl Marx in the 1840s. Existing savagery and oppression in the market was to be taken from the capitalists and transferred to the state. The second course developed in opposition to the first. The 20th Century saw a little development in this direction but it was not able to produce a solution for the social or economic problems of humanity. Nor could it solve the problems of freedom for communities, peoples and cultures. Communities were only considered with respect to economic factors. For that reason the problems of freedom, equality, and justice could not be solved. This [second] course was shaped by Marxist-Leninism. It became concrete in the guise of the Soviet Union. It saw some development. However it was also organized as a dictatorship of the Proletariat. Capitalist countries closed themselves against it in fear. They were seized with fear that communism would spread from Eastern to Western Europe. For this reason certain social and economic schools of thought founded in the West came out with a third course. This was a new course. Its goal was to obstruct the spread of Communism in Europe, to prevent it. They planned to accomplish this by returning some of the rights seized from the poor and from workers during capitalism’s development. This third course became stronger through the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This course created a beautiful life for the workers of Germany, France and Switzerland. Workers became the bearers of other rights than just labor rights. In the Scandinavian countries workers achieved this at a very high level.

In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, this course disappeared. Capitalism took back the rights which it had recognized for workers out of fear of communism one by one.

The course set out by the Kurdish People’s leader Abdullah Öcalan emerges in the 1990s after this collapse. It strengthened as it went forward. For that reason I don’t think that calling it a third course quite fits. In fact it sounds as if it is an attempt to identify it with the third course that has collapsed and is disappearing [in the West.] This course, whose foundations were laid in the 1990s, became laid in more general terms after 1999. The details became clearer after 2007. Because in these years a crisis of capitalism was emerging. In my opinion this course is a fourth course as regards the economy. Not the third course. It is a course that rests on society, social development, life, and the organization of life. It is a course which comments on and evaluates Capitalism, Marxism, and the opinions of Rosa Luxembourg. It is a course which is against a monopoly economy. It is a course that will protect the existence of communities in so much that it is a course that pays attention to ecology to the upmost. It is a course that will find a solution for the social and economic problems of the people of the region and the world. Of course for this course to develop it must be well-presented. We cannot keep it to ourselves. We need to familiarize [others] with it through practical steps.

- Dr. Ahmet Yusuf, from A Small Key Can Open A Large Door



.

Barbara Browning Quote

.



Maybe you're thinking I should take everything my friend Lun-Yu tells me with a grain of salt. She also told me that day one of her favorite psychoanalytic theorists was Wilfred Bion. I'd never read Bion before, so after she left I read a bit about him, and I found online the complete text of a seminar he held in Paris in 1978. The beginning of this seminar is very interesting. At least it was to me. Bion says that he wants his listeners to imagine a scenario: they're seeing a new patient, a twenty-five-year-old man who comes in complaining of some dissatisfaction in his family life. Bion says he's not sure what family the man is referring to, and asks his age, which the man gives as forty-five. Bion is confused. He just said the man was twenty-five, and then he notices that the patient has wrinkles, and appears in his sixties. He asks his listeners to consider this confusing state of affairs and to determine whether they would, under the circumstances, take on such a patient.

He says the question is much like the question of what you would do if you walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and read the scenario he just described. He asks you if you would continue reading this book. Then he says, imagine it's not a book, but a piece of music. Or a building you're in, and you see the way the light falls, you see the colors coming through the window. Do you want to think about the window some more?

I imagine these questions were somewhat perplexing to some of the participants in the seminar. At one point in the transcript, someone in the audience makes an "inaudible reference" to "psychotic experience." Bion calls that a very "cerebral" question, not a practical one to the analyst. He says that analysts shouldn't be blinded by labels like manic-depressive or schizophrenic. Rather, they should be asking themselves what kinds of artists they are and whether there's an interesting spark that occurs with a potential analysand that might lead to something productive in the consulting room or, as he puts it, the "atelier." Somebody asks what an analyst is supposed to do if he's not really the artistic type, and Bion says that if that's the case, then the person's in the wrong line of work. In fact, he says, he doesn't even really know what would be the right line of work, since a person needs to be an artist in everyday life.

Then he throws out the term artist, which has obviously become meaningless. The point is, he tells them, that reducing things to "scientific" diagnoses or narrow definitions is really the death of things. "You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable."

Obviously I loved that. I wrote Lun-Yu and told her about the seminar I'd read and how it had moved me. She said, "Oh, that's the 'bad' Bion, from his mystical phase. That's also the part I love best." Apparently sometimes he wasn't quite so wacky.

- Barbara Browning, The Gift



.

J. C. Sutcliffe review of Rich and Poor in The Times Literary Supplement

.



Jacob Wren explores the boundaries and overlap between art, politics and fiction in his writing and filmmaking. On his blog, “A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality”, he returns repeatedly to ideas of activism and, in particular, ending, subverting or re­organizing capitalism. But Wren never fully inhabits a fixed ideology: wherever his work takes a position, it also questions that position.

Wren’s previous works include Polyamorous Love Song (2014), a multi-narrative novel about resistance and identity in both artistic and political movements, and the fragmentary Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007), by turns paranoid and cynical. His new novel, Rich and Poor, is perhaps more accessible than his earlier fiction, being told through a straightforward alternating narrative, but is equally replete with ideas. As the title suggests, one narrative follows the story of a poor person, a former concert pianist and current restaurant dishwasher who decides to kill the CEO of a massive corporation; the other narrative is the perspective of this billionaire CEO. In the first half, the poor character fails to kill the CEO despite having got a job with his company for this precise purpose. In the second half, he tries a rather different approach.

There are subtle echoes of each story in the other – confirmations, elaborations and contradictions. Both extreme positions are tempered by each character having experienced the other’s situation to a degree, and by their ability to understand, although not agree with, the other’s position. The rich man is presented not as some kind of unknowable, sociopathic enemy but as someone who makes compromises and accommodations like everyone else:

You drive your car knowing it is disastrous for the environment, and yet continue to drive anyway... You think it is terrible but not so terrible you are ready to drop everything and take action. Myself, I would prefer to run my business without any recourse to violence, but also, I have to admit, I don’t feel so strongly about it. And if I were to do so, it would be impossible to remain competitive. Profits would suffer.

In Rich and Poor form and content are an intriguing blend. It might seem odd to praise a writer known for surrealism and experimental forms for creating complex, believable characters, but Wren’s ability to do this allows him more leeway with some slightly improbable plot twists and a formal style that packs in a great deal of political argument. This is writing that campaigns against complacency while avoiding self-righteousness. Like Wren’s other work, this book is essentially not so much a call to action as a call for the reader to step away from apathy and to take seriously, however briefly, the most radical of positions.




[You can also find the above review here.]



.

Permaculture

.



Last night I went to see the documentary Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective and for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I really felt: this is a solution. I knew about permaculture before, and always thought highly of it, but watching the documentary it suddenly seemed to be so much more. As a way of thinking, a way of understanding our lives, a way of regenerating soil, earth, land, ecosystems and everything that lives on them, a way of producing healthy food and maximizing clear water, it seems to me to create endless possibilities and therefore to effectively replace despair. I don't know particularly what to do with this information. I don't think I'm ever going to get involved with farming, so for the time being my only thought is to learn more about permaculture and encourage others to do the same.



.

Book

.



I feel a perverse desire to try to write a book that every single person will hate. (I believe it has something to do with feeling imagined reader expectations before one even starts writing.)



.

Ten years

.



Facebook has just informed me that I joined Facebook exactly ten years ago.



.

“neoliberalism” and “global warming”

.



“Neoliberalism” and “global warming” are two terms specifically designed to make things that are absolutely horrible sound not that bad. (“Turbo-capitalism” and “climate chaos” are, in my humble opinion, two of the more accurate terms.)



.

Alicia Garza Quote

.



Intersectional politics (and practice) is not just theoretical – it is the lifeline upon which we depend for our collective liberation.

- Alicia Garza



.

A few actual dreams from the past six years

.



In my dream last night, the last thing I remember saying just before I woke up was: ‘Alain Badiou says the most nihilistic song is All You Need Is Love.’



In my dream last night, the name of my band was: This Unstable Honorarium.



Last night in my dream I googled: how do you fight capitalism.



Last night I dreamt I was an arsonist: as I headed to set one last fire, I got a text saying it’s a trap, turned around, and decided to go see art instead.



Last night I dreamt the telescope was invented by aliens, who sent it to us telepathically, to put us on the wrong track.



Last night I dreamed I had writer’s block.



In my dream last night I read an essay that began: “We’re sick of reading books that are only men writing about their loneliness. We want to read books by women writing about their ________.” But I couldn’t make out the last word. (I had a sense that the last word might be rage.)



.

A politics of caring for one another.

.



"And then I wonder if the way to fight requires some extremely long term thinking, to lay the mental groundwork for changes that might very well bear no fruit for many generations to come. Because, it seems to me, what we need now is a completely different way of thinking about what it means to live in the present and work towards the future. A different way of thinking time and accumulation. A present and future with breakthroughs but without linear progress, with commerce but without endless growth, with politics but against winner-take-all. A politics of caring for one another. I remember an indigenous saying I heard once: there is enough for everyone but there’s not enough for everyone’s greed. All of these goals seem so far in the future that I’m not even sure where to begin."

- Jacob Wren, The Year 2017: A Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations



.

A Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations

.



The Year 2017: A Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations



.

Story number one...

.



Story number one takes place ten million years ago and story number two takes place ten million years in the future. The problem is how to tell these two stories apart, how to know which is which. Story number three takes place now.



.

I spend all my time reading fiction but in so many ways I’m against fiction.

.



I come across a paragraph I wrote several years ago. I read it with fascination, as if it is written by someone else:

“I spend all my time reading fiction but in so many ways I’m against fiction. I’m against fiction that imagines itself as crafted and seamless. I’m against characters that the reader is supposed to imagine as fully formed real people. I’m against fully formed people, believe we are all a series of fragments, that our business is a perpetually unfinished one. I have nothing against a story that playfully knows it is a story, with characters that are simultaneously people, ideas and fragments of the author, with truth that is stranger than fiction and fiction that keeps asking itself difficult questions about fiction (and life) it knows it will never be able to answer. Working within literature, this counter-position feels excessively lonely. The road less travelled is often filled with devastatingly empty moments that threaten to stretch out into a lifetime, or worse a career.”



.

Long Live THEESatisfaction

.



THEESatisfaction broke up this year. With all the talk about Prince, Bowie, Cohen and Phife Dawg (and I now also want to add Prince Buster, David Mancuso and Pauline Oliveros), I think the musical news that actually hit me hardest is that there won't be many, many new THEESatisfaction records to listen to in the years to come. Their two records awE NaturalE (2012) and EarthEE (2015) were two of the records I listened to most often over the past five years. They are records I feel I will listen to for the rest of my life and never get tired of. I feel they are also, in so many ways, musical landmarks for the moment we are currently living in.

I think I'm writing this because, based only on a quick internet search, it seems to me that no one else did. No one else celebrated what an awesome and important band they were, or at least not nearly enough people wrote about the significance of their breakup. When I think of awE NaturalE, I think of something I once read (attributed to Brian Eno), that "The Velvet Underground's first album only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band." I try to never predict the future, but I have the strange feeling that in the years and decades to come THEESatisfaction might take on a similar importance. At the very least, they already have for me.

It has something to do with music and politics. This music that is so political and finds such a deeply honest and pleasurable way to be so. Music that experiments with such verve and joy and speaks about the things that hurt and heal and are so fucked up in this world, but always with a sense of community and possibility. An avant-garde that is also completely pop and finds ways to take risks on both sides of the outmoded divide. Actually, I'm not sure what else there is to say. Just listen...






.

Two end of year mentions for Rich and Poor

.



"Jacob Wren’s Rich and Poor (BookThug) is political fiction at its sharpest. An aspiring concert pianist, reduced to working as an under-the-table dishwasher, becomes obsessed with taking violent revenge on the man he considers responsible for his plight: a billionaire oligarch who gets his kicks by, among other things, watching children fight.

Wren alternates in first-person between the two, effectively dramatizing the 99-per-cent vs. one-per-cent divide. In lesser hands it might have read as clumsy allegory, but because the two voices are equally compelling, what we get is something like an intellectual thriller.

Rich and Poor is essential and bracing reading, especially at a time when millions of poor Americans can convince themselves that a rich man is their champion."

- Ian McGillis, Madeleine Thien heads class of 2016, but don't stop reading there




"Wren’s novel opens with a poor man planning to kill a rich one, but, with a crisis at the halfway mark, things get messy and the greater violence, the brutality of the economic system, reveals itself. Rich and Poor reminds us that art can be resistance, and our love, revolutionary."

- Jade Colbert’s Favourite Canadian Small Press Books of 2016
 


.

Limits

.



I know my limitations
they are many
they are very, very, very many
unlike others who don’t have any

to live within them and go without
I’m done pretending there are other choices
done as ‘too much’ is done with ‘many’
other choices are just other voices

poems rhyme towards the nursery
written quickly, quickly unpublished
like my limitations, hurt me
in the background like a story

when I started as a poet
when I gave up on all poems
both moments like some search for power
neither one my finest hour

I know my limitations
more than ever
because I’m very, very, very clever
a bad poem is forever



.

A playlist for 2016

I said I wasn't going to do this anymore, because YouTube now has too many commercials, but it seems I can't stop. I've now made YouTube playlists in 2010, 2011, Japan, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The above playlist is 346 videos long. 

Usually, as part of these YouTube playlist posts, I reflect on my internet addiction, which I suppose is more or less as out-of-control as ever. But I think, for the time being, I've said all there is to say about it. Perhaps the number 346 says it all...



.

Unfinished Novels

.


[This story was originally published in Fence Spring/Summer 2014.]




I haven’t had a lot of sex in my life and therefore don’t quite have a handle on what it does to me emotionally. I was traveling, in a small, boring city in Europe, and I had what at first felt like a one night stand. After our night together we continued to hang out, to talk, and there was a feeling that if circumstances were different we might have had something more, also perhaps not, or at least I had that feeling. I don’t think we ever spoke about it. And writing this down now, remembering how basically, between age fifteen and twenty-eight, every single time I had sex with someone new I ended up trying to turn it into literature. There are six or eight early, unfinished attempts at novels that each begin with one or more new sexual encounters, yet at the time I didn’t see the pattern. I only see it now, looking back. As I write this I am waiting to meet her. This afternoon we are going to the museum to see an exhibition called ‘Only Sculpture.’ I’m doing it all over again, something I feel I haven’t done in ages. I had sex and immediately I’m starting to write a novel about it. I wonder if this one will remain unfinished like the rest.

At the same time, I have two requests for new short stories, one from a magazine (the very magazine you are currently reading) and the other from an online journal, and I have never written a short story in my life. Or, at least, I have never written one on purpose. Several times I have begun new novels, abandoned the attempt twenty or forty pages in, and then, much later, edited the aborted attempt down into something I eventually published as a story. I think the reason I never write stories is the same reason I claim to no longer write poems. (If you google me you will find all sorts of poems and stories online, some of them quite recent. Nonetheless, this is not how I view myself. This is not the story I tell.) Both poems and stories, as pubic forums, feel so marginal to me, and I desire that my writing reach as many as possible, even though, so far, this has mostly failed to be the case. I often ask myself what difference would it make in my life if my books were read by twice as many people? Or ten times as many? Or one hundred times? The few minimal brushes I’ve had with success haven’t been particularly enjoyable or illuminating. But, I suppose, for me writing is always connected to a certain hunger, a certain desire, to reach out, envelop the world. If I were to more fully accept the marginality of my position, it would also be like I was betraying this larger artistic desire. All of this is, of course, embarrassing to admit.

We are shifting, moving forward and back in time. Yesterday I went to a panel discussion at a music festival on the theme of when to say no. Now is a period of my life in which I feel extremely overbooked, overworked, in which I think I should have said no to at least a few things so I could feel less exhausted each morning. Being exhausted feels like such a terminal waste of time. Reflecting on my own current experience, I assumed it would be a panel about saying no because you were too busy, in order not to burn out from overwork. Instead it was more about ethical questions: saying no to having one’s music licensed for use in advertisements, used in movies, or to generate content for internet platforms that could then monetize their subsequent increase in traffic.

Some of it reminded me of this quote I’d read recently from Jeff Tweedy. (A quote I feel somewhat ambivalent about):

I think about telling my dad, who worked for 46 years on the railroad, ‘Somebody offered me $100,000 to put my song in a movie, and I said no because it’s a stupid movie.’ He would want to kill me. The idea of selling out is only understandable to people of privilege.

But the impression I got from the panel was almost the exact opposite as the one conveyed in this quote. There was one guy, he ran a local record label, arguing for a deeper integrity in how we live our artistic lives. He said it was not only about saying no to corrupt opportunities, but more importantly about forging other models for how we do things. It was a panel of four and the other three weren’t exactly getting it, not exactly arguing against him either. One of the younger guys, who also ran a record label, said that, for his artists who were still on their first albums, mainly he worried they wouldn’t even make it to a third, forth or fifth album. That some money for an ad might help them get there, keep them alive as they built a career. I thought about how little sense there was today of the value of sacrifice, that holding an ideal also meant having to give something up, most likely you will be less successful (in commercial terms) than you would if you didn’t hold and live by such ideals.

After the one night stand, a few weeks after I got home, there was some email correspondence. Not so much but a few. But before that, there was another night, my last in the small, boring European city. She had gone away then come back. And since she came back I felt the possibility we would sleep together again before I left the next morning. We smoothly ditched the rest of the group and went for a drink just the two of us, which I thought verified my sexual hopes, but then as hours and drinks passed I changed my mind, it seemed it wasn’t going that way and it was 3 a.m., I’d had way too much alcohol, and if I was going home alone I thought I might as well go home alone now. It took another hour before she told me the problem, her last relationship, nine years long and now one year past the break up. I said new romance, for me, was always about a fear of hurting and a fear of being hurt and she said it was, for her, at the moment, more about a fear of hurting. How, for the last few years of the nine year relationship she’d had many (or at least a few) affairs, he hadn’t suspected a thing, and when he found out he came at her with all the anger and sadness of a complete betrayal.

The day we went to the museum, now I no longer remember what order it all happened in, I had been talking about something else, and I quoted Genet:

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

I often use that quote. It is one of the sentences that has stuck with me more tenaciously than any other. I still don’t completely understand what it might mean, why betrayal might be pleasurable, but it stays on top of me, a mystery and a question. I think, at the time, after the museum, I was talking about betraying literature, how literature must fight against literature, try to make something new. Reject good literary taste and good literary sense. But her reaction was almost mortified. Quite suddenly I knew I was brushing up against a painful story I may or may not ever hear. A painful story that was defining her current life and feelings about the world, as so many of our painful stories seem to do.

The guy on the saying no panel, who ran the local record label, and was arguing for a way of working that forged different, more idealistic, models for how we might live and form communities, went on a long tangent about how today, when you are young and have your first success in music, you suddenly feel you have to jump on it, push hard and fast at your career, do as many festivals as possible, that the window of youth culture opportunity is brief and you should make your money while you can. How no one ever feels they are making enough money, no one is satisfied with their current level of success, everyone wants more, and a musician wanting to make as much as possible during his or her brief window of flash-in-the-pan success is barely different from the kind of rapacious thinking that is sending our entire planet into arrears. The fact that there is no limit, it is never enough, we have to make and want more and more and more. Gobble up everything, no rest for the wicked. And I also feel no limit to my ambition, though it certainly hasn’t, so far, resulted in any kind of rapacious success. I’ve slept with relatively few women but also, often, find myself wanting to sleep with all of them, except the women most often say no, like Bartleby say they would prefer not to, and I don’t push, my feminist training having taught me that no means no, though in reality I know this is not always the case, nonetheless I search for, I wait for, enthusiastic consent, which is rare. If I’d had more affairs when I was younger, maybe I would also have more unfinished novels, and therefore more stories.

When she told me of her nine year relationship, of how it ended with him shutting down in a spasm of feeling completely betrayed, of her fear of hurting people because of the fallout from this story, after she told me, it was if an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. All that night, since returning to visit me, she had been preoccupied, full of stress and doubt, and suddenly she seemed light and happy again. The change occurred in a split second. I could barely believe that just telling someone something could result in such an instant, visible, positive change for the better. It almost made me believe in therapy. I thought about how secretive I am, how little I tell people about my life, and wondered if I were more forthcoming if I might have a lighter energy in this world. Then she came home with me a second time, it seemed too late to have sex, but we cuddled, which I also like, perhaps more so. Our bodies intertwined as we slept as if we were a couple that had been sleeping together for years. I got up early the next morning, completely exhausted, got on an airplane back to Canada. I barely remember saying goodbye.

After the saying no panel I kept thinking about how I lived and worked, kept wondering why I feel all this ambition, this overwhelming feeling of failure, why I want so much but instead feel only, completely, dissatisfied. The affair also made me feel dissatisfied, though it was great. But it was great because it was a meaningful encounter that made me reflect on my life, my history and how I interact with people while travelling, and I had this strange feeling that I would have preferred great sex. The encounter was not cheap and I was wondering if I would have preferred something that was. There is a kind of truism or cliché I’ve often heard, that one should take everything that happens in life and experience it as if it was the very thing that was meant to happen at that moment. That the things that happen to us are in no way accidents, but are all meaningful parts of our story. And if you can see your life in this way everything becomes easier. I, of course, cannot see my life in this way. My life seems arbitrary and aggravating. But it makes so much sense to me that if I could simply change my perspective, more often see the chance occurrences that fall into my path as meant to be and significant, my life would be so much easier, more consequent. A shift in perspective can change everything but I have never managed anything of the sort. I know most people are against writing as therapy, and perhaps I am verging on such bad taste here in these reflections, but I want to write about myself in ways that feel not allowed. Bad writing that doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better.

The other thing that struck me after the saying no panel was that so many musicians have this opportunity to sell out, while I have no such opportunity. I have no idea if I would actually have the integrity to say no to a lucrative advertisement offer and will most likely never know. Turing down money is never easy, however one wishes to live in the world, and I make, more or less, as many decisions motivated by financial worries as any other artist. Where do financial worries end and greed begin? Where is the line, since for the last few years I really haven’t been starving, though, like most artists today, I also feel little security around questions of money, especially if I try to think further into the future. Our entire system thrives from this fear of falling off the money trail and directly into the gutter. A sense of lightness might come from feeling the things that happen to us happen for a reason, but another feeling of lightness also might come from a feeling that a social safety net is in place to catch us when we fall.

It’s not only that a short story is a less hegemonic form, it’s also that it ends so quickly. And endings are hard. The aborted, unfinished novels of my youth had no endings, barely even trudged into the middle, and in this sense must have given me some sense of freedom. They remained open ended if only because they were abandoned. Turning them into short stories closed down a bit of that freedom, but also allowed me to publish them, put them out into the world. Because I got up so early, so exhausted, after only a few hours of sleep, and left so quickly, the rush to some innocuous airport, it was almost as if the small, boring city in Europe story had no end either, or at least a slapdash ending barely thought out and uncomposed. Or perhaps the night before was the real end, since it was in fact a fairly complex emotional climax, one I’m still grappling with, finding out so much about someone in so little time. An epiphany is learning something about oneself, or about the world, that one already knows, but learning it more suddenly, more sharply, with greater force or rush or impact. On the plane back home I was struck again by how dissatisfaction is the engine that drives so much of my work and my actions. I felt so dissatisfied by what had happened though it was fascinating. And how, at least in this one aspect, I am so much like everything else that is currently fucked in the world. Wanting more instead of accepting the small pleasure life offers us. I don’t write stories or poems (but of course I also do.) And I don’t know what to think about love.



.

I can't believe his name is actually Rich Fink

.



By the late 1980s, Richard Fink had supplanted Cato’s Ed Crane as Charles Koch’s main political lieutenant. Unlike Crane, who was interested in libertarian ideas but regarded it as “creepy when you have to deal with politicians,” Fink was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of power. After studying the Kochs’ political problems for six months, he drew up a practical blueprint, ostensibly inspired by Hayek’s model of production, that impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off. Called “The Structure of Social Change,” it approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an “investment” in intellectuals whose ideas would serve as the “raw products.” The second required an investment in think tanks that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of “citizens” groups that would, along with “special interests,” pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was in essence a libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled, and switched on.

Fink’s plan was tailor-made for Charles Koch, who deeply admired Hayek and approached both business and politics with the systematic mind-set of an engineer. While some might find it disturbing to regard the democratic process as a factory, Charles soon adopted the strategy as his own. As he told Brian Doherty, the libertarian writer, “To bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated.” It must span, he said, from “idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to political action.”

- Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right



.

Excerpt from the final chapter of Polyamorous Love Song

.

[People often ask me about the title of my book Polyamorous Love Song. The following is a short excerpt from the final chapter in which I explain it:]



Around that time I was thinking a great deal about pop music. I had the idea that most already existing love songs, mainstream or otherwise, were directed towards one person, the ultimate soulmate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soulmates, might undermine some basic songwriting assumptions. I dreamed of these not-yet-existing love songs, wondering what they would actually sound like, who might write them and who might listen.

Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great melody and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible melody, the entire endeavour was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?

[...]

Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare to our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs are written in about five minutes and yet we can listen to them over and over again for years. Love songs are about desire, but they are also, often, about loyalty. In some ways romantic love is the passage from desire towards loyalty. But maybe the polyamorous love songs that I dream might some day exist will complicate such dualities, generating nuances closer to our daily reality in which, if we are open to life, conflicting thoughts, questions and desires continuously surprise us.



[As well, if you're interested in another perspective on the title, you can find it here.]



.

Some favourite things from my 2016

.

[It seems I really do love lists. (Thought perhaps not quite as much as I love quotes.) As with previous years, many things on this list were released prior to 2016. I have listed them more or less in the order they gradually came to me. Also, I don’t know quite how it happened, but I read so many good books this year, it really helped me get through it all…]



Books:

The Hills of Hebron – Sylvia Wynter
Outlaw Woman – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The Mushroom at the End of the World – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris – Elizabeth Hall
Zong! – M. NourbeSe Philip
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars – Kai Cheng Thom
Accordéon – Kaie Kellough
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – Pu Songling
Oscar of Between – Betsy Warland
All We Know: Three Lives – Lisa Cohen
From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire – Anne Golden
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? – Kathleen Collins
Radical Love: Five Novels – Fanny Howe
Dark Pool Party – Hannah Black
Counternarratives – John Keene
Salt Fish Girl – Larissa Lai
Style – Dolores Dorantes
Pamela: A Novel – Pamela Lu
Her Paraphernalia – Margaret Christakos
Double Teenage – Joni Murphy
Testament – Vickie Gendreau
Job Shadowing – Malcolm Sutton
Belleza y Felicidad: Selected Writings of Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavon



Albums:

Good God! Apocryphal Hymns
Larry Levan – Genius of Time
Noname – Telefone
Frank Ocean – Blonde
Solange – A Seat at the Table
Blood Orange - Freetown Sound
Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book
Isaiah Rashad – The Sun's Tirade
Duckwrth – I'm Uugly
The Last Artful, Dodgr – 199NVRLND
Anohni – Hopelessness
A Tribe Called Quest – Midnight Marauders
Princess Nokia - 1992
Above Top Secret – Above Top Secret
The Internet – Ego Death
Kamaiyah – A Good Night in the Ghetto
serpentwithfeet - blisters
Jay Arner – Jay II
Tasha The Amazon – Die Every Day
Lolina - Live in Paris
Abra - Rose


Films / Videos:

Cemetery of Splendor – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 – Korakrit Arunanondchai
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen – Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes – Brett Story
Arabian Nights – Miguel Gomes
No Home Movie – Chantal Akerman


Performance:

Decomposition of a Continuous Whole – taisha paggett
…Truthteller… – Eroca Nicols (Lady Janitor)
The All-Token Speakers Panel Presents – Artivistic



.

All Profound Distraction

.



[This text was originally published in Fiktion: Concentration.]

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate. —Julio Cortázar

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. —John Cage

1. 
I don’t think I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I think I’m doing. I stare at these two sentences. I know they each have a distinctly different meaning but for a long moment can’t intuit which means which, or which one I mean. Either way, I don’t know what I’m doing and haven’t for a very long time. This ‘not-knowing’ is something I tell myself I believe in, and might be reformulated as a fairly specific kind of concentration. I even find myself searching for a ‘more real’ not-knowing, while at the same time experiencing anxiety that I’ve accidentally fallen into a false one: that I do actually know what I’m doing, only pretending I don’t in service of some half-articulated ideal of how an artist should or shouldn’t proceed.

Directly next to any not-knowing I perform or attempt to conjure while creating work, there is another, perhaps more honest, not-knowing that keeps me awake at night, and that, more often than not, makes me almost unbearably sad. This awake-at-night not-knowing has something to do with all the injustice and suffering in the world. Why don’t we simply just know how to reduce it, fight it, undermine it? This must be pure naiveté on my part, but I cannot believe it would be so impossible or so difficult. Yet apparently it is all that and more. I can think about these problems endlessly, read about them endlessly, turn them over and over in my mind, and get virtually nowhere, back around in circles to things I already know and seem so obvious that there was little need to give them any thought in the first place.

So what I now find myself wondering is: what is the connection between these two aspects of my not-knowing? Between not-knowing as a longing for artistic breakthrough, as desire to leave behind both acknowledged and unacknowledged habits, and not-knowing as not knowing how to save or even slightly improve the world?



2.
When I write I often listen to hip-hop. On a line by line basis, I have to admit that my comprehension of what they’re getting at in any given track is, to say the least, somewhat limited. Some things are of course clear, others I’ve listened to hundreds of times and remain, for me, in the realm of multiple possible meanings. As a writer, at least I think it’s because I’m a writer, when I listen to music I focus on the lyrics. So listening to hip-hop while writing is often a distraction that almost completely prevents me from actually writing, focusing on lyrics I’m perpetually unable to fully decipher instead of on the blank screen in front of me I’m supposed to be filling with words. My solution is to turn down the volume until the track is barely a murmur. This hip-hop murmur pulses in the background as I type and somehow gives me a feeling that somewhere in the world there is an energy greater than the dull silence in the room that surrounds me.

My computer is full of hip-hop that I mainly listen to on shuffle. Often when a track comes on that seems too sexist or homophobic I simply delete it. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I’m nervous about sexism and homophobia seeping into my subconscious through tracks I listen to sometimes hundreds of times. It might be stating the obvious to say that this hip-hop also exists as an artistic otherness, completely removed from anything I immediately identify as part of my daily life or experience. Many tracks speak of socioeconomic experiences I haven’t had: life-threatening poverty or almost comically conspicuous wealth (or both at the same time.) I also listen to a lot of hip-hop that has nothing to do with either of these things yet the modality of the language itself is mostly enough to separate me from relating it to my own experiences too directly. (It just occurred to me that I delete tracks that are too sexist or homophobic, but don’t delete tracks that are too capitalist, which might be equally important.)

When I ask myself why I like hip-hop so much there is one aspect to the pleasure that is fairly straightforward. I am a writer with a certain faculty for language. In many ways my writing is performative; it asks to be spoken aloud. However, even mediocre hip-hop displays a virtuosity of spoken language that I could never approach or aspire to. It is simply something I can’t do. The pleasure I get from it might be analogous to the pleasure I assume others get from watching sports, seeing someone do something that you could never possibly do that well yourself.



3.
I remember something I said in a recent interview and go looking for it in my computer. When I find it I’m disappointed; it doesn’t quite say what I had hoped. What it does say is: “I’m searching for breakthroughs, if one is still allowed to think in such romantic terms. At the given juncture of any breakthrough one momentarily feels there is no precedent. It is only later that one might see how everything fits (or doesn’t fit) into various histories and narratives.” This feeling, this momentary feeling that there’s no precedent, must in another sense be a kind of concentration, almost tunnel vision. A radical openness combined with an equally intense focus on a few key aspects of a current endeavour. Do artists still want to have breakthroughs? Do people? Is it something we can still imagine having at every stage of our life, right until the end, or is it only for the young?



4.
Thinking about the many ways my love of hip-hop is problematic, I begin to think about Descartes as one of the foundations for white Western thought. How he decided to sit in front of that fireplace and simply concentrate on the core philosophical problem, get rid of all distractions, all assumptions, and begin again. Descartes wanted to know, to get to the truth of the matter, while when I concentrate on a given artistic question I claim to want to not-know. But either way, isn’t there something a bit anaemic about this idea of what it means to concentrate—to block out distractions and focus—when another word for distractions might be life: other people, the sensual world that surrounds us.

My thinking takes places in dialogue with so many things, texts and people, and yet I most often feel I’m working in almost complete isolation. I regularly complain about this isolation but now also wonder if it is a sort of Cartesian ideal that I claim not to want but perhaps actually do. What does it mean to actually want something you claim not to want? I know relatively little about Descartes but he is an unquestioned stand-in for something in the daily habits of my thought. He is a stand-in for a mode of scientific thinking that focuses on certain questions at the expense of everything else. To give a cartoon example: that focuses on how to get the oil out of the earth as efficiently as possible at the expense of all the repercussions involved in doing so. This also has something to do with a desire for certainty, often connected to domination of things and/or people. Within a certain theoretical framework, much of this has also become, over time, a cliché.



5.
I’ve made 20516 posts on Tumblr but only two have gone viral. The first was from a Rwandan speaking as part of the Moth podcast ‘Notes on an Exorcism’:

We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.

The second was from Walter Benjamin:

Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

In the space between these two quotations lies almost the entirety of the problem.



6.
In 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the then newly elected president of Iran, was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup. His crime was his desire to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. I often wonder what that part of the world would look like today if he had successfully managed to build a working socialist-democratic precedent in the region. When I lie awake at night, more and more often it is history that fills my thoughts: Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile. There is another moment I often think of: shortly after Mussolini was elected he apparently managed to either kill or jail almost every single card-carrying member of the Italian communist party.

When you start reading the history of the left, stories like these pile up one atop of another. (As I’m writing this I chance upon a New York Times piece about Operation Condor: six South American military dictatorships meeting in 1976 to “concoct a secret plan to eliminate their left-wing opponents.”) It is stories like these that form the background for Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative.” The more I read the clearer this background becomes: over the course of the twentieth century, all attempted alternatives have been systematically undermined using money, propaganda, dirty tricks and, whenever necessary, extreme violence.

Of course, we can’t change the past, things that are done cannot be undone. But how to effectively think possibilities for the present and future while at the same time keeping this history at the front of one’s mind? How to actually feel the fact that the world we currently live in didn’t just happen, that battles were fought, won and lost, and in so many ways we are living the desired outcome of the victors. Through posing these questions, I am attempting to walk myself towards activism. In most of what I have witnessed, single-issue activism has the greatest chance of success. But I always fear this is little more than blocking out larger realities in favour of short term gains. Is it possible to have a genuine overview and still effectively fight? This fight might resemble the familiar slogan: think globally, act locally. In this sense I can always get behind the hope of setting a precedent: success in one context can create a sense of possibility elsewhere—a sense that there is, in fact, an alternative.

If I concentrate my energies on the specific activist battle at hand, it does not necessarily mean I am ignoring the global history that has brought us to this point. But I do feel there is something painful, almost enervating, in attempting to focus on both levels of reality at the same time, both on the devastations of history and on possible gains in the present moment. So many battles have already been lost that the playing field feels almost nihilistically askew.



7.
There is a most-likely apocryphal story I’ve seen mentioned in various forms over the years. In it, there was a secret meeting of all the major record labels at which they decided to work together to promote gangsta rap, to make gangsta rap the dominant form in hip-hop. Whether or not this meeting actually took place, any hip-hop fan can’t help but notice that the lyrical content of early hip-hop was considerably more varied, often more sunny, and generally more political than it is today . When one form dominates, other perspectives fall by the wayside. Even if marginalized, however , they never completely disappear. When concentrating on the things directly in front of us, our peripheral vision remains rife with every possibility not currently pursued. The peripheral might be seen as a distraction or it might, perhaps as effectively, be seen as our only chance for discovery.



.

Every Song I’ve Ever Written in Montreal (Nov 4-11)

.



PME-ART presents: 

Toutes les chansons que j’ai composées
Every Song I’ve Ever Written

Friday Nov 4th
Karaoke Version
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal 
Nocturne de la Biennale
9pm 
Facebook Event

Monday Nov 7th
Solo
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
6pm - 11pm
Pay What You Can
Facebook Event

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday / Nov 9, 10 & 11th
Band Night
La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines
8pm 
Facebook Event
With:
The Besnard Lakes 
Catherine Valéry 
Jef Ellise Barbara 
Mozart's Sister 
Elena Stoodley 
Tickets: bit.ly/2e3zy9o 


And at all times the website: http://www.everysongiveeverwritten.com


World premier of the entire project 
Presented in partnership with La Biennale de Montréal 
In collaboration with Usine C as part of Actoral festival 


Les beaux malaises de Jacob Wren
Un mariage spectacle et «talk-show»



.

Finalist

.



Rich and Poor was one of four finalists for the 2016 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Huge MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

Facebook Event


.

An ongoing list of possible titles

.

[It seems my main activity these day is trying to think of a title. I will attempt to continue this as an ongoing list.]

Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison

Instead of calling it a performance I will call it a caprice.

If this was you, disregard this message.

A World Without Money

One Yes & Many Know

Money Selling Posion

Anger & Complcity

Complicity With Contingency

Know Me Better Than I Know Myself

The Dead Have No Debts

In Death There Are No Debts

Belatedly Announcing that Death Waits has Changed his Name to Jacob Wren

Place Your Bets

Undoing Failure

Kind Sadness

Precious Compromise

Sacred Landslide

Talented Ruins

Autistic Player

Imperfect Ten

Platform Decay

Faithful Unbeliever

Unfinished Mystery

Unbeliever Courage

Disorderly Sympathy

Complicated Ethics

The Healthiest Junk Food

People speaking of things important to them

Shameless Seductions

Timid Lust

The exhilarating tale of one boring person, written by said boring person

More Utopian Than We Can Fathom

Jacob’s in a State of Decimation

Art in the Age of Ecological Collapse

Actions at the Border

Utopian Counterinsurgency

Instead of a prison I would build a...

My General, My Popsicle

Reading the Obits and Finding Your Own Name

Helpless Laughter

Falling and Laughing

The Paradoxes of Performing Yourself

Magic to Turned Backs

The Also-ran

Solar Kittens

Amateur Compassion

The Uncontrived Encounter

Promiscuous Bewilderment

The Worst Apology

I Must Decline For Secret Reasons

A Vagabond Steps Off A Cliff

The Earth Owns Itself

So Much To Unlearn

Those Who Can't Teach

The Past is the Future

Having Never Experienced Jealousy

Imperfect Love

Unfinished Love

The Unfinished Present

My Apologies

Past, Present, Future, Etc.

How Not To Be A Hypocrite

Desire Without Expectation

Unfinished Love / Imperfect Love

Some Future

Life is very short and should not be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels

The Depressed Saint

Ashes Without A Phoenix

Not of the Ruins

Unfinished, Imperfect, Untitled

Everything Has Not Been Done

My Plan is to Stay Calm

I often say that I'm not particularly consequent

Because I Love Art, I Want Art To Be Different

When We Bomb It's War, When They Bomb It's Terrorism

Care and Time

Pushing the Wealth Upwards

Practical Utopias

And the Sadness is the Comedy

Aging Rock Star

Do people like sex?

Hospitality and Resistance

Something Might Still Change

Love Is Not A Game

Manifesto For Collective Child Rearing

There Are At Least Seven Bands With The Name Triangle

Always Connected To Disappointment

How Not To Be Irrelevant

Where I Come From We Give Love

You Told A Secret But Not The Truth




(Also, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)


.

The Bookhug Interview with Jacob Wren, author of Rich and Poor

The Bookhug Interview with Jacob Wren, author of Rich and Poor



.

On Tori Kudo, Reiko Kudo and Momus

.



I can’t remember how long ago it was now when I walked into the Montreal record store Phonopolis and, over the sound system, heard a record I absolutely loved. The album was Rice Field Silently Riping In The Night by Reiko Kudo. It is an album I have come back to again and again. Not a year goes by in which I don’t listen to it at least a few times, and often many more.

Around that time, I wrote to a Japanese friend to ask her if she’d also heard it. I was surprised when she wrote back suggesting an artistic collaboration between Tori Kudo and myself. I was already in the process of listening to absolutely everything I could find by both Tori and Reiko. The owner of Phonopolis was also obsessed with their music so it was possible for me to find almost everything they’d put out.

From January 24 to February 23, 2012, I went to Matsuyama and Kochi to begin working with Tori and figure out what we might do together. Tori suggested we begin by making pottery, something that not only had I never done but in fact had never even considered. Over a month I got to know Tori a little bit and we made some things. I have previously written that “all the artists I admire are such a strange combination of completely open and completely stubborn,” and Tori might be the perfect example of this phenomena. (Of course, the same might be said about me.)

The music of Maher Shalal Hash Baz represents for me some kind of perfect balance between structure and freedom, between pure music and impure anarchy. Tori’s complex, and at times self-defeating, virtuosity meets the energizing non-virtuosity of so many different band members over such an expanse of years, each member twisting the project ever-so-slightly in their own direction. It is classical pottery full of spirited cracks, with the cracks built in, pushing forwards and retreating against the pure timeless spirit of rock ‘n’ roll and glorious punk.

Reiko Kudo’s music feels, to me, timeless in a different, perhaps deeper, sense. Timeless like dust. Like gold dust. Fragile melodies from multiple other worlds. You can hear Tori’s anarchy informing the background and yet it is clear that Reiko is so precisely and delicately in charge. I of course don’t understand Japanese so I often don’t know what she’s singing. But like the very best singers somehow I do know what she’s singing because I imagine that I can feel it through and against the limits of language.

I do of course know what Momus is singing. More so than with most singers because I have so many of his old songs memorized or almost memorized, like they have been with me from almost before I was born. There was a period of my life – the period in which I wrote many of the songs from Every Song I’ve Ever Written – in which I listened to Momus every day. There were many, many days in which I listened to nothing else. With Momus I imagined the pop song as a literary novel, the pop song as a philosophical tract, the pop song as perverse détournement of everything else that wasn’t a song by Momus.

And speaking of a perverse détournement: in Tokyo it is very possible we will have Momus performing the songs I wrote twenty-five years ago which were, at the time, almost completely inspired by Momus. (But, then again, he might also choose different songs.) My teenage self could have never imagined things coming full circle in quite this way. A story of time travel that is almost, but not quite, worthy of a Momus song.



Every Song I've Ever Written will be performed at Sound Live Tokyo on Sept 17 & 18, featuring Momus, Reiko Kudo, Maher Shalal Hash Baz & The Hardy Rocks (Keiji Haino).

You can listen to the Momus covers here.

And find a playlist of my favorite Tori, Reiko and Maher Shalal Hash Baz tracks here.

 

.

Seven Momus covers for Every Song I've Ever Written

My teenage idol Momus covers Of Course, The Dirty Old Man Song, Hotel Room Sex, I've Seen It All, The Opposite of Irony, It didn't work... and Unmailed Postcards. for the Every Song I've Ever Written Band Night at Sound Live Tokyo (Sept 18 & 19, 2016).

You can find the entire playlist here.




.