Six albums that would have made my list if I'd heard them earlier

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Elijah Minnelli - Perpetual Musket
Mohammad Syfkhan - I Am Kurdish
Church Chords - elvis, he was Schlager
Sahra Halgan - HIDDO DHAWR
Fievel Is Glauque - Rong Weicknes
MEMORIALS - Memorial Waterslides



[You can read the rest of the list here: Some favourite things from my 2024.]


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Six Months

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There's something about how when you put out a book it allegedly only has six months to find its readership. Because in six months it will be the next season, and then bookstores will no longer have your book out on the display tables, but the new books that just came out. So my book has been out for about three months, which means it just has three more months to go: https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/jacob-wren/dry-your-tears-to-perfect-your-aim-by-jacob-wren/


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Excerpt from the novel-in-progress: One Yes & Many Know

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“I would write it as fiction, so unreal things could happen. I always wanted to write books in which unreal things happened. Of course, another reason was to avoid possible libel suits from the family of the deceased. They had a lot of money and could therefore hire a lot of lawyers. Expensive lawyers. But fiction was always the best defense. It was the first time I had a story with genuine appeal. The first time anything high-profile ever happened to me. Previous to this, my life was a long series of uneventful middle ground, with few moments worth writing about, and my mid-range level of success reflected this history. But now something had really happened. How could I let it pass? It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it. What would be my first move (apart from writing the book itself)? The goal was to win a major prize. Or to have one of my books made into a movie, most likely the book I was about to write. Or to have a celebrity seen with the book on some red carpet. Or some other path onto the bestseller list I couldn’t yet intuit. I had decided on a fairly narrow and conventional definition of success. But I was open to mixing it with a broader definition. Could I imagine being as successful as Jonathan Franzen or Ben Lerner? As George Orwell? As Franz Kafka? As Willian Faulkner or James Joyce? As Shakespeare? Could this become my own small version of Citizen Kane? I knew this line of questioning was corny as hell. I should focus on success within my lifetime and let matters of legacy take care of themselves. The writers who were famous now weren’t very good anyways, it shouldn’t be difficult to overtake them.”

[A paragraph from my current attempt to write a novel about an artist who tries to sell out. Working title: One Yes & Many Know.]



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Luigi Mangione

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So many people have written to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminds them of my novel Rich and Poor. [Rich and Poor was also translated into French and published by Le Quartanier as Riches et pauvres.] The perfect gift for Xmas.

Years ago I also started writing a sequel to Rich and Poor but then gave up on the endeavour. If you’re curious you can find it here: The Biography (Unfinished Story Fragment).

As well, so I don't need to do another post, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a bestseller at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.



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Some favourite things from my 2024

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



Music
serpentwithfeet – GRIP
Tomeka Reid Quartet – 3+3
Tomeka Reid Quartet – Old New
Mike Lindsay – supershapes volume 1
Quinton Barnes – HAVE MERCY ON ME
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – The Way Out of Easy
Robert Wyatt – Different Every Time
Grian Chatten – Chaos For The Fly
Ka – The Thief Next To Jesus
more eaze – lacuna and parlor
Sports Team – Gulp!


Books
Mauro Javier Cárdenas – American Abductions
Eunsong Kim – The Politics of Collecting
Nuar Alsadir – Animal Joy
Stacey D’Erasmo – The Long Run
Sofia Samatar – Opacities
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo – Design against Design
Yaniya Lee – Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art
Valérie Bah – Subterrane
Angel B.H. – All Hookers Go To Heaven
Mercedes Eng – cop city swagger
Renee Gladman – My Lesbian Novel
Camilla Townsend – Fifth Sun
Jonas Eika – After the Sun (Translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)


Performances and Visual Art
Rébecca Chaillon – Carte noire nommée désir
Sonia Hughes – I am from Reykjavik
Michikazu Matsune – All Together
Louise Liliefeldt – Seen and Heard


Plus:
Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir
Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo
Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman



[Finally, as you probably already know, I published a book this year that got some really nice reviews.]




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Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman:


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I find it hard to pretend like something is happening all the time. I resist, in fiction, the notion that you must write the boring stuff to make the parts you’re excited to write about more believable. If something makes you go dim, I think you should avoid it.


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But I want to be a kind of reader as I write. That means not knowing what’s up ahead.


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I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV.


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Did I say that a large majority of books in the lesbian romance genre are poorly written? This is the case for hetero and other queer romances, too. It’s an asshole thing to say but no less true. The genre does not regard language as a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter. Rather, each sentence tends to be treated as if it were a sharp-edged container with one function. Like: point. Or: explain. Or: dramatize. It goes: “Lucy opened the refrigerator.” “I drove home.” “We looked at each other with heat in our eyes.” “Doug nodded.” “Bess was puzzled.” “After everything that happened yesterday, Morgan knew what she needed to do.” In a way, these are the sentences we live with. Maybe we don’t say them, but this is what we’re acting out all day, and someone had the bright idea, yes, let’s use these sentences for writing. Conversely, though, literary fiction is bad with love. Very very bad. Like ugh, could this be any more devastating, any heavier or more hopeless? I do it too. I leave my characters sitting on hilltops for all eternity. I have them being swept out of a familiar world into an unknown and dangerous one. People walking the streets desperately alone, fleeing a crisis they can’t even see. So… yeah… could I write something that made people feel good – women, I guess, or people who were excited to see women fall for each other – and could the language have some aliveness to it? Be porous? Be responsive? Make atmospheres?


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When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.


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Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo

Some passages from The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo:


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In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.


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I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.


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When dealing with power – the power of employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.


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This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.


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Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

Some passages from Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir:


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The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.


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“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.” 


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One of the exercises in clown school was to take the stage with others and spontaneously create a game. The first initiated action functions as a proposal that is then collaboratively developed through improvisation. When I performed this exercise, one of the actors onstage with me lifted his shirt and another spontaneously slapped his belly. We then created a game of shirt-lifting and belly-slapping.

However, as anyone who has participated in a group project knows, there is invariably an alpha participant, who, believing they have an idea superior to the one at hand, directs their energy toward changing course, switching from shirt-lifting and belly-slapping to some other game that has been proposed by them that is more in line with how they would like to be perceived.

One of the most meaningful lessons I learned in clown school was offered by Bayes in the moment when one of the actors onstage with me tried to do just that. “There is no better game,” he admonished, “than the one you’re playing.”

Or, as in driving, always turn your wheel in the direction of the skid –


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