March 20, 2024

Survival Technologies at FTA

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PME-ART has been working on this for a long time and we're excited to finally be able to announce it:

Survival Technologies
by Kamissa Ma Koïta and Elena Stoodley
at FTA on May 30,31 & June 2,3, 2024

More info here: https://fta.ca/en/event/survival-technologies/

Image by Kamissa Ma Koïta.

March 14, 2024

New Jacob Wren chapbook: From Desire Without Expectation

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From Desire Without Expectation
Jacob Wren
$5

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

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
as the twenty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

This is Jacob Wren’s second chapbook with above/ground press, following Tributes To The Subtlety Of Matter (1996).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

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




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March 5, 2024

some kind of mini-utopia

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"I now find myself thinking of such conversion experiences as some kind of mini-utopia. Utopia reflecting a desire for the world to change and these personal experiences being evidence that an individual’s sense of purpose and action can shift – more, and more quickly, than one might at first suspect."


(From my current work-in-progress Desire Without Expectation. More and more it seems to be becoming a novel about political conversion experiences.)



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March 3, 2024

Possible opening (updated)...

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Possible opening for a new book:

“Things are going badly. But not everything can go badly, or at least not all the time. On the other hand, no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. For my entire life, for as long as I can remember, I have felt the world as a catastrophe. Perhaps all that's changed is that, in our current moment, considerably more people agree. The things that were once (somewhat) hidden, we’re no longer bothering to hide. When I was young, all of official culture seemed to enthusiastically endorse capitalism. Now the enthusiasm behind such endorsements feels weak at best. Increasing numbers of people can feel we’re reaching the end of something and, if anything comes next, it doesn’t look good. Or, at least, that’s how matters currently feel to me. But I’ve been wrong before.”



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