Like A Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality.

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[This text was first published in Etc 96 (October 2012).]



1.
Is it true that today, in casual conversation, artists often speak about wanting to have a career, but rarely speak about wanting to make something meaningful? Or is this casual observation only my cynicism rising to the surface? In the most general sense, the hope that art can be meaningful in people’s lives brings it very close to the spiritual, and this might be one of the many reasons the topic is often avoided. If I say I want a career (which, of course, I do as much as any artist) I might come across as ambitious, but there is also something practical and down-to-earth in my pronouncement. If I say I want to make something meaningful it is a higher style of arrogance, more old fashioned, less critical and therefore less contemporary. The desire to make something meaningful brings along with it a thousand small distastes and taboos.

When you like (or love) a particular work of art, and happen to meet someone else who feels the same way, it creates a sense of possibility: for connection, for the potential that shared values might exist, that these values might be articulated (and questioned) in relation to a shared experience. This is the agency of the work of art, to draw you towards itself and open up peculiar opportunities for connection amongst disparate individuals. This possibility for unexpected connection is, for me, the edge along which art draws closest to the spiritual. Or to put it another way, a sense of ongoing connection, with friends or strangers, in relation to an object or idea outside ourselves, is the closest my thought gets to spirituality.

Let me attempt a rough definition: the spiritual is a sense that there exists something larger than us, larger than us as individuals and larger than us as humanity. There is not just us and what we see in front of us, there is also something else, and it is through this something else we are able to experience ongoing connections between us. This definition is so rough that, using it, we could easily say that fascism is a form of (debased) spirituality. And of course it is. If we don’t get the real thing, if we are not allowed a genuine sense that the gods or spirits exist, that there is something otherworldly to believe in, we will search for every kind of possible substitute.

(I used fascism as my first example, but fear this was only empty provocation. Of course, using my rough definition, a more obvious example would be to say that a felt connection to the natural world – with plants, animals and eco-systems – is extremely spiritual. Many do, and at this point in our disastrous ecological freefall, it is hard to argue.)

Like many of us, I am in crisis (with one possible difference being that I have a compulsion to announce my sense of crisis as often as possible.) I am in crisis about art and also about everything else. There are many ways I have attempted to describe this crisis, but the one I use most often is as follows: I feel like a priest who has lost faith in god, but continues to give a weekly sermon anyways. This description has something to do with making performances, with the feelings engendered by getting up in front of a room full of people, people who are there to watch you, and performing something for them (or for yourself yet in front of them.) About the anxiety that what one is doing may, or may not, be meaningful to many of those present. The performance situation itself suggests a certain potential for connection among a room full of strangers, but this connection is bound to (at least partly) fail, because when the performance is over the connection is severed, is relegated to memory.

If the congregation believes in god, but the priest giving the sermon does not, there is an unbridgeable chasm of intention between what is being said and how it is perceived. If the priest believes in god, but the congregation does not, then one might wonder why they even bother to attend in the first place. Yet even if everyone in the room believes like crazy, there is always a paradox at work in the heart of the experience, since it is the belief itself, the faith and the fact that it is shared, that generates the sense of connection. And, vice versa, the connection that generates a sense of faith. A classic feedback loop. We feel connected to the people who surround us because we all believe in the same thing, and our belief is continually reinforced by our sense of feeling connected to each other.

All of this has very little to do with my actual experiences of watching contemporary performance or looking at contemporary art. I am much too secular, too isolated, for such examples to take on a life of their own. Nonetheless they are analogies that feel potent to me, that speak to a certain lack. When I walk into a contemporary art exhibition what is it exactly that I am supposed to believe in? How many of these beliefs am I expected to bring with me prior to my experience of looking at the work, and what aspects of these beliefs, these preconceptions, are necessary for me to be able to experience it?

I am astonished how empty I often feel after watching a performance or viewing an exhibition. I always wonder how many others feel this way, why more people I know don’t speak of their experiences of art in these terms? It is as if everyone involved in art is simultaneously expected to be a cheerleader for the cause, to keep reciting the sermon every Sunday whether they feel it or not. You are allowed to say you want a career, but you are not allowed to say you want more meaningful art experiences. All of this, of course, makes me wonder what I would need from art in order to feel less empty.



2.
In his 1991 book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that the scientific separation between nature and human affairs that marked the onslaught of modernity – the revolution that severed the modern from the pre-modern world – in fact never occurred. Instead of clearly dividing the natural world from the human one, Latour posits that modernity formed around a series of crafty double games, playing nature against society and vice versa, utilizing critique of both past and present to generate complicated hybrids and paradoxes that become impossible to circumvent. For example, on the one hand modernity says “nature is not our construction, it is transcendent and surpasses us infinitely,” and “society is our free construction, it is immanent to our action.” But, at the same time, it also says “nature is our artificial construction in the laboratory; it is immanent,” and “society is not our construction, it is transcendent and surpasses us infinitely.” While these two positions might, at times, be debated by individuals on opposite sides of a given argument, when taken in their entirety they form a world view that is utterly inconsistent, and can utilize it’s own inconsistencies as a pretext to take power and exploit the natural world. While the modern might claim that primitives were full of irrational beliefs, Latour demonstrates that modern beliefs are equally (or even more) irrational, that they are matters of faith.

I recently became interested in Latour while reading a interview with him in Animism I, the first of two catalogs from a touring exhibition curated by the artist Anselm Franke. Two short sentences in an interview with Latour struck me with particular force: “What is the action of the gene? What does it do and where does it come from?” These questions occurred in the midst of a discussion on animism, when Latour decides to speak of animism not in terms of belief systems of previous cultures, but simply as the possibility that objects, and by extension the natural world, has agency. He imagines confronting a hypothetical critic of Franke’s exhibition:

Now, you are anti-animist. Does that mean there is no agency in the world? At all? Your interlocuter would say, yes, of course there is agency. Atoms have agency, cells have agency, stars have agency, psyches have agency; and then you begin to look at the specificity and the specification of all these agencies, and you realize that you begin to jump from one field to the other […] So we begin to have a whole series of transports, of agencies from one domain to the other. Biology would be full of it. The whole question of agencies in biology is the gene. What is the action of the gene? What does it do and where does it come from?

I believe this question struck me so forcefully because it took me back to the anger I felt, in the early nineties, reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. (The opening sentences of this text might well be subtitled ‘the selfish artist’.) The feeling I had that, in the wrong hands, evolution was little more than a tepid creation myth: once upon a time there were genes that wanted to preserve themselves and these genes evolved and evolved until eventually they became people. The misguided anthropomorphism with which Dawkins speaks of these genes infuriated me, as did his misplaced anger towards religion, which in fact he only wants to replace with his own theory, a theory that is considerably less complex and resonant. It seemed to me that if Western modernity is going to have a creation myth, the very least we could do is come up with something helpful, something that offers solace, something that makes life better instead of worse. And then this well-known quote from Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Unfortunately, I have not seen Franke’s exhibition. I have only read the catalogue, which begins:

For most people who are still familiar with the term “animism” and hear it in the context of an exhibition, the word may bring to mind images of fetishes, totems, representations of a spirit-populated nature, tribal art, pre-modern rituals and savagery. These images have forever left their imprint on the term. The expectations they trigger, however, are not what this project concerns. Animism doesn’t exhibit or discuss artifacts or cultural practices considered animist. Instead, it uses the term and its baggage as an optical device, a mirror in which the particular way modernity conceptualizes, implements, and transgresses boundaries can come into view.

The exhibition, inspired by Latour, desires to examine animism in order to question whether modernity’s claims of having broken with the past are accurate. From the images in the catalog, all of which are intriguing, I believe it stages this inquiry as a strong contemporary art exhibition, with photographs, videos, installations, historical materials, wall texts, etc. The exhibition clearly doesn’t want to be animist, it only wishes to make use of the topic in order to ask extremely pertinent questions. (Questions I am clearly fascinated by.)

There is something ironic in using critique and questioning, the modern strategies par excellence, in order to undermine the assumptions of modernity. Latour is clear that there is no point in critiquing modernity – since modernity continually thrives on critique in order to re-invent itself, creating new hybrids and paradoxes in the process – and instead we must go somewhere else, find another way of looking at the world, another way of understanding our relation to the past. Strategies used by the Animism exhibition suggest there would be no way for an exhibition today to embody an animist worldview, such a thing could only take place if the viewers themselves were believers. However, it is also true that we simply don’t know, since no attempt is made to imagine what kind of exhibition might embody a spirit of animism today. In its refusal to struggle with the possibility that works of art do have a life of their own – in that we, at times, believe in them, and this belief can actually make us act, lead us do or think in ways we would have never otherwise considered – I suspect an opportunity is missed, a challenge that may well be taken up by some future project.

I wonder if the framework in which most contemporary art attempts to generate meaning is analogous to the ‘never been modern’ framework that Latour criticizes. Art is a world that separates, continuously playing the divisions against one another in ways that are often contradictory: good art against bad, art against everything else, political art against commerce, etc. The gallery is a place for art, but it is also a way of removing art from the rest of life. In my earlier analogy of the priest who has lost faith, I move back in time towards Christianity (a faith I have no personal experience with) but perhaps I don’t go back far enough. I have not read nearly enough anthropology to know about previous cultures, previous ways of life, but following Latour’s lead I would like to imagine an art, society and worldview that is considerably less divided. (Latour calls this position ‘amodern’.) If nature is alive then it can, of course, speak to us. And if art is anything, it must have some life of it’s own, but a life far more integrated with our daily impulses and actions. These are ideals I have not taken even the smallest step towards. Nonetheless, I wonder about such matters constantly.

Richard Senett writes: “Ritual’s role in all human cultures is to relieve and resolve anxiety, by turning people outward in shared, symbolic acts; modern society has weakened those ritual ties. Secular rituals, particularly rituals whose point is co-operation itself, have proved too feeble to provide that support.” Going to galleries and performances is a kind of ritual, as is making any kind of art. But they are weak rituals indeed, full of bad faith, ego and careerist intentions. Why can’t we create works of art, and philosophies, that actually help us live our lives? Why does this question feel so naïve and ridiculous to me? From the beginning of time utopians of every stripe have been searching for a less divided world, and there is certainly no reason to stop searching today.



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Intention / Concept

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"A writer who wrote only the things he intended would be a very poor writer." - Borges / The tendency in conceptual art to foreground intention.



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La Règle du jeu Quote

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"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons."

 - Jean Renoir, La Règle du jeu



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Michèle Le Doeuff Quote

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I have never had anything against philosophical rationality. As for its irrationality, that’s a different matter. To be more precise, it seems to me that philosophy is not a function of some strictly ‘masculine’ form of ‘rationality’, but philosophy often produces a misogynist style of imagination, by trying to be more than it actually is, trying to make rationalization operate to an extent beyond what it is actually capable of.

- Michèle Le Doeuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique



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If the absurdity within which we currently live results in our full or partial extinction does that make it less or more absurd?

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[The following text was translated into French by Christophe Bernard, designed by Åbäke, and then presented in the group exhibition Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) 1/4 Bruit Rose curated by Marie Frampier at Maison populaire Montreuil in France.]



If the absurdity within which we currently live results in our full or partial extinction does that make it less or more absurd? With what attitude must we view our full or partial, possible or inevitable, immanent or eventual extinction? Or is it perhaps more like: each and every one of us becomes a little bit extinct within ourselves each and every day? Or a little bit more alive? Or a mixture of the two? Around such topics there is much room for laughter of a devastatingly specific strain. There is also agency. Agency, among other things, is believing one’s actions will change things then acting accordingly. It generally works best when many push in the same direction, towards the same goal, effectively, with minimal disagreement, which is absurd and necessary, like walking around a piano fifteen times. Sometimes this pushing genuinely occurs for short bursts during which things do in fact change, move forward, actions are effective, though unfortunately not for good. Nothing good lasts forever, especially not revolutions. As well, a certain functional disagreement is necessary for politics to be politics. Conflict is one of the main ways we learn. It depends on what stage of the fight you find yourself in, how close to the emergency, if we must topple the wall or only debate whether or not the wall must be toppled. How obviously the wall finds itself in our way, since each wall is always also a misunderstanding between and within us. We need an accurate analysis of the situation in order to proceed, but the road towards an accurate analysis leads only to further debate. The current debate on how close we are to the emergency is completely absurd. We would do ourselves no harm by using less oil, less energy, slowing down, living differently. Feeling more satisfied in what we already have and less insatiable hunger for always more. The billionaires who will be forced to have less will not suffer either, but when you are at war you are at war with everyone. Hell is other billionaires. What is the relationship between agency and extinction? If one simply stops worrying about oneself as an individual all of this becomes much easier, but feeling this connection to all other things is the most difficult, most painful, most limitless. I often tell people that if they are looking for evidence that I am a bad person the two most damning examples are 1) I don’t have friends and 2) I don’t particularly enjoy food. But what evidence might there be of my shortcomings within the words of this text? Is it absurd to search for them? I have noticed that, over the years, my writing has become more political while my other works have become less. It increasingly seems absurd to me to present political work to such a small number of people, this number constituting the art audience my works have access to. My texts also reach few people but I dream that they have a slightly greater potential to reach into the future, bear witness to what is happening today, what we are doing to the world, much like I read about massacres from hundreds of years ago and wonder if they would have killed more or less if they’d had access to our current technological prowess. Of course, I know that it is humans that kill humans, plants, animals, lakes, air but often it feels to me that it is machines, since we would have to do it all so much more slowly, more laboriously, if the machines did not exist. How many times does one look at something happening in the world and think: anyone with a heart or a brain knows that this is wrong. This frequent thought cannot be true: since these crimes are committed by individuals and groups in full possession of both hearts and brains. Is the naïve absurd? Is doing something because you feel you have no choice? Are we more haunted by the past or by the future? I write this way, without specific or coherent arguments, because I already know I will not convince you. But neither do I want to convince you that everything is meaningless and/or absurd. In the clean light of the gallery, all walls are grey. Walls are cats. When animals look at us and when machines look at us: to which category do we appear more ridiculous? All of this has something to do with no longer believing in reason, no longer believing in enlightenment values. They have led us astray and we need other values to replace them. But you cannot see where you are going only through the lens of where you have been, or perhaps that is the only way to see it. A debate with myself, this phrase takes us to the heart of the matter. As you are reading this, at any time you can stop, but not if I stop writing first. When Ravel refused the Legion d'honneur, Satie said he did the wrong thing, instead he should have accepted it, worn it as a badge of shame, as evidence that he had done something wrong, that his music wasn’t angry or absurd enough, as each of us must also accept the evidence of what we have done and are doing. But Satie’s eccentricity took place in a less eccentric world, when there were still clear rules to break, when everything was not yet broken, though every age wishes to view itself as unique, even (or especially) in this negative sense. How is the absurdity of our climate violence any different from the absurdity of their religious apocalypse? Does scientific evidence change anything? Participating in madness is always the same: from the bubonic plague to the inquisition to fracking. How would the world be any worse if there were only one billion people in it? Would it be too much to ask to ask the other seven billion to politely step aside? Jonas Salk, Biologist: “If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” I would be happy to step aside, but am several billion short. And would I really be happy? Perhaps what I’m writing about here is in fact this happiness. It is absurd to think that the planet is alive and it is also absurd to deny the simple fact that it is. How are words that appear on walls different from words that appear in books? How are walls different from books? How are they more or less naïve? How are books different from insects? If you ask me to write about hope I will, do so with a vengeance, and you will also read it with a vengeance, and in one hundred years we will both be dead. (While in one thousand years is there some sense in which we will both still, or once again, be alive?) Walking into a gallery means something. Already there is some modicum of trust, music in the walls, images that have been left behind. Against this position one might say: I have made a coherent argument, each sentence follows naturally from the sentence before with the goal of convincing you. Walking into a gallery means something, changes something, I believe the relevant historical parallel would be World War One. People felt one way before entering and another way when it was done. And on the topic of war, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I am writing this text in English while you are reading it in French. Walking into a gallery means something because it must. As you enter you escape one kind of violence while possibly encountering another. Does the absurdity within which we currently live reveal to us the possibility of our extinction and if it fails to do so does that make it less or more absurd? Does walking into a gallery? Does failure or awareness of failure? I am trying to say something about what words and images can and cannot do since I believe they do both too much and not enough. We need to work towards a completely different understanding of time. Our extinction can only occur in the future: this is the best argument for removing the future from our current conception of time. I am writing this on a computer, in Canada, in English, and you are reading it on a wall, in France, in a language achieved only through the magic of translation. My arguments are fierce. Languages also can become extinct. Here we return to agency. We must focus on the things that are killing us, band together to reduce this killing. My fear is that this simple, reasonable course of action is completely absurd. Fear is human and my fear is accurate. We return to agency. Only within a different sense of time will such agency be possible. Walking around a piano fifteen times. We return.



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I have to admit...

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I have to admit, I now somehow genuinely regret writing so much about feelings of failure on this blog. I wish I had written about it just a little bit less. Feelings of failure are fine but sometimes I kind of overdo it. Is it an artistic theme or is it a life?



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A playlist of 115 videos for 2014 (with commentary.)

Previous playlists: 2010, 2011, Japan and 2013.



Yesterday I was reading about old school hip hop and realized that Missy Eliott is the same age as me. I wondered what, if anything, I could make of this fact. I thought of googling "(other) celebrities born in 1971" but then thought that would be pathetic. (Born in 1971: Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dog, Mary J. Blige.) I'm now wondering if this has anything to do with my recent, reignited obsession with hip hop, a music that I have been alive for the entire history of. A music that has changed, become less innocent, perhaps more cynical, over the exact same years I have.

If you have been reading A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality, and I find it almost impossible to imagine that anyone is, you will know I have spent much of the past year obsessed with my own failure. I still can't quite believe that the most hits here this past year went to my post Must lead to something else, where I begin: "Most of my favorite artists follow a fairly standard trajectory. They start out okay or good, have a period of getting better and better, peak, then slowly or rapidly decline. (Some of them die young, before the decline begins, but that’s another kind of question.) I have now been making work for about twenty-five years and wonder if my decline has already begun, or will begin any minute."

(At the same time I know at least some people are looking at this because I obsessively check the blogger statistics. I suppose this is mainly what I mean by 'failure': this life of checking blogger statistics and compiling YouTube playlists. And at the same time I manage to do so many other things. I'm never quite sure how. I suppose I work quickly and don't look back.)

I was about to start writing this post about failure (even though I am continuously promising myself that I will stop writing about failure on my blog) when I stumbled on the Momus post 2013: A bloody good year to be Momus. I was going to write about what a failure my life is while, at more or less the same time, Momus was writing about how well things are going for him. (Momus writes about all the amazing things he did this past year but I could never bring myself to do the same thing in regards to my own past year. I wonder why. Is it only because I'm a self-deprecating Canadian?)

As many people seem to already know, Momus is one of my ongoing obsessions. (Others include: Hip Hop, Las Malas Amistades, Chris Kraus, The Transformation by Juliana Spahr, Alvaro Mutis, Lene Berg, David Graeber, I'm sure there are more I can't think of at the moment.) But for such a long time Momus has been an obsession very much connected to my own sense of disappointment. In my early twenties I was so obsessed with his first five records (Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend, Tender Pervert, Monsters of Love, The Ultraconformist -- not actually his first five records but those were the ones I loved) and so much of what came after was a let down. Specifically, I had a story about him I told myself: that he made a conscious decision to sell out, that he wanted to sound more like The Pet Shop Boys, and more importantly to have their success, and this decision led him down a road that, for me as a listener and fan, was mainly a road of disappointment.

Strangely, I have the same story in my head about David Bowie, a story I heard in an interview with Nile Rogers, that when Bowie came into the studio to begin recording Let's Dance, Nile Rogers was preparing to experiment and get weird, but instead Bowie began the session by saying: "I want a hit." For Bowie it worked (for one album at least, after Let's Dance I think it was pretty much downhill), for Momus not so much (I think he had a minor hit with Michelin Man but then got sued by Michelin and had to remove the song from his record.) However, both of these stories are burned into my mind as a kind of lesson: when you make a conscious decision to 'sell out', it later becomes extremely difficult to get back onto the right artistic path.

I say 'strangely' because Momus begins his post with how excited he is that Bowie put out a new record in 2013. I was disappointed with Momus, but Momus was never disappointed with Bowie (I believe his major influence.) And the past few years I've come around to Momus again. I liked Otto Spooky, Ocky Milky, Joemus and Hypnoprism. I spent a lot of time this year listening to the first MOMUSMCCLYMONT record and now there's already a second. And I realize I've listened to every record he's ever made many many times, and even on the records I liked the least there were a few songs I still listen to. Disappointment is part of life and yet shouldn't go on forever.

I'm wondering if I'll have to stop making these YouTube playlists because there now seems to be a commercial between almost ever track. When I started the playlists in 2010 I don't recall it being this way. Everything on the internet is becoming (unsurprisingly) more monetized. More ads on Facebook, boost your post, more commercials on YouTube, etc.

Something has changed in how I listen to music. This was the year I decided to try living with no internet at home (in a futile attempt to spend less time on Facebook), and because of this I mainly leave my computer at the office. So at work I listen to music on the internet and at home I listen to CD's. This split has somehow begun to fascinate me. I listen to music in completely different ways on my computer than I now do at home. The most obvious difference being at home I listen to albums all the way through while on the computer its always some form of jumping around or shuffle. The computer is really the land of A.D.D. And at home I'm listening to the same records again and again, while the computer ignites my thirst to hear something new, always new. More music than I will ever be able to listen to and a slight sense of defeat that I will never make it through it all.

Last thought (for now) on YouTube playlists. If I love all these obscure songs enough to compile them every year, why aren't I delighted to be among the obscure and relatively unknown? Why do I consider my own relative obscurity as such a complete failure? Is it only because I feel that music - as a thing in itself - is so much better than anything I'm capable of? Yet these seem to be the (mostly obscure) artistic things I love most.

And Missy Elliott is still really good.



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Twelve records I heard this year

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(For some reason I told myself I wasn't going to do this again this year and now I seem to be doing it. I suppose I still love lists. I have no idea how many of these records actually came out in the past year. And the first one on the list I discovered only today.)



Charanjit Singh - Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat

Mammane Sani et son Orgue - La Musique Electronique du Niger

Ab Soul - Control System

Kool A.D. - 51

Rapsody - She Got Game

The Pastels - Slow Summits

Under the Influence Vol.3 compiled by James Glass

Harmony, Melody & Style: Lovers Rock In The UK 1975 - 1992

Freelove Fenner - Do Not Affect A Breezy Manner

Marathon - yes things no people say

Oren Ambarchi - Sagittarian Domain

Diana - Perpetual Surrender



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Society...

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Society might well be a series of social constructs, but in attempting to undo these constructs we also produce an anxiety that we are losing our connectedness to the world.



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The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)

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About one year ago, I published an earlier draft of the first chapter of this book in a literary periodical called The Coming Envelope. (Not one year ago from whenever you happen to be reading this, but one year from when I’m writing it now. Today is December 13, 2013.) The version in The Coming Envelope was six pages, but I had edited it down from an earlier draft of thirty-six pages, an earlier draft that was also the beginning of yet another failed attempt at writing a new novel. This earlier, never finished, novel was also called Past, Present, Future, Etc., but I somehow had another title or nickname for it. I often called it, at least in my mind, ‘the slander book’.

There were three main ideas I planned to utilize in the writing of the slander book. The first was that it was a book I would decide beforehand would take me ten years to write. The second was that I would use it to slander all the people in my life who I didn’t like (which ended up being almost everyone.) And the third was that I would refer to everyone slandered not by their names but simply by using the letter X.

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Ten Years

At the time in my life when I began the slander book, I had completed five books but only published three. (Published: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. Unpublished: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor.) Five books, to me at the time, seemed like enough. I prefer writers who write less, find writers who have written shelves and shelves of books to be somehow pompous or excessive. Another anxiety was that the more books you write, the greater the odds that the well will run dry, the formula become diluted. Perhaps I’ve always had the overly romantic idea that the less you publish, the harder the choices you have to make in terms of what to edit out, what you actually want to say with the relatively small literary space you have allotted yourself. The fewer the published works the more intensely focused and potent each one will be. So, in one sense, ten years was simply a way of forcing myself to write less books, to perhaps write more pages but then edit them down (much like the previous chapter was edited from thirty-six pages down to six.)

But, of course, the other reason for the ten year decision is it would be much easier for me to slander people if the result would be published not tomorrow but ten years from now. And as the book progressed, it would require more and more courage for me to continue slandering people, since the gap between writing and publication would constantly grow slimmer.

Finally, deciding beforehand that the slander book would take ten years to write was about the search for new ways of dealing with time. As mentioned in the previous chapter, more and more I feel that time is the problem that politics must begin to solve. To reconcile ourselves with the fact that we’re going in circles, and put this fact to better political use.


Slander

There has always been a chasm between my public persona and my inner life. In public, through the thick sludge of my social awkwardness, I try to keep things positive. To the best of my limited ability, I am warm, supportive, always searching for ways to keep going. But inside my head are almost only negative thoughts. In this dynamic there is some residue of my teenage attempt to reinvent myself, to not become a caricature, to avoid the self-parody that all depressed souls so easily drift down into. Instead of wearing black I would wear colours. Instead of always predicting the worst I would try to find the quiet humour in each new hopeless situation. In one sense, I feel I live my life in such a painfully dishonest way, and that I’m not doing my depression any favours by keeping it all bottled up inside. But in another sense, for some reason, and have been enacting this divide between my inner and outer life for so long that I barely notice anymore. Another way of looking at this dynamic is that when I behave in a depressed manner no one wants to hang out with me, while with my current personality, combined with a low level of artistic success, there always seem to be people swirling about. When I think about it, I have to admit that most of these people I don’t particularly like, but most of the time I don’t think about it. (Of course, at the same time I’m fooling no one. If you were to ask anyone who knows me, or anyone who has read my work, if I am a depressed or negative person, I am sure not a single one would hesitate to immediately say yes.) I don’t tell any of these people that I don’t like them, instead I try to be as friendly and kind as possible, but I’m sure many of them suspect. Then again, what’s the difference between liking no one and liking everyone?

So a book that would pour all of these repressed thoughts, insights and feelings out onto the page. Not as therapy (though I have no problems with art as therapy, often find it one of the most interesting strains) but as a way of having a different kind of intensity, a different kind of reality, of honesty, in my work. This, however, is not that book. (You can sense the residue of this earlier slander aspect in a line from the previous chapter: “As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like.”)


The Letter X

I wanted to be honest but didn’t want to attack each of these people by name. By calling them all X, I would turn almost everyone I knew into one many-headed monster of irritation, a monster ready for the sword of my literary slander.

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I don’t think anyone will have any difficulty understanding why I abandoned the slander book. It was a project that could only get me in trouble and, with every new page, it became clearer to me that I was not nearly tough enough to deal with the eventual fallout or repercussions. However, now I am only on page eight of this new attempt at a novel and already I am full of doubts. Have I started writing yet another book about how misanthropic and negative I am? Is this really the vision of myself I want to put out into the world? Is it even accurate? I remember, years ago, meeting someone who had read my books, and her telling me how surprised she was, that I was nothing like she imagined I would be. When I asked her what was different, she explained that she was certain I would be far more harsh and curmudgeonly. She was surprised how much I smiled – I smile when I’m nervous and I’m almost always nervous – that I laughed and cracked jokes. From reading my work she had imagined almost the exact opposite.

There was in fact yet another, even earlier, version of the slander book (before I had the idea to call it the slander book), with yet another title. It was called I Want To Start Again, and began as follows:

I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might soon be dead.

A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it. Should I keep the names the same or change them? I will change the names. The world is small enough. Those who care about such things will figure it out. Gossip is a false mystery that must be solved.

A few seconds ago I felt confident I would openly slander people and now, still on the first page, I am no longer sure it is a good idea, this oscillation being so familiar it hurts.

I’m still on the first page and, already, I know I basically won’t slander anyone. And yet, still, I want to start again. I always want to start again.

It now strikes me that this earlier opening is also about time, this ‘wanting to start again,’ in fact it is the very conception of time I now feel we need to work past before a real possibility for emancipatory politics can gain ground. This wanting to start again – which I feel so strongly at regular intervals in my life – suggests it is possible to make a clean break with the past, when in fact it only possible to do the exact opposite: to keep going in circles, and each time we come round again, learn from past mistakes, build just a little bit more on whatever progress we managed to make last time around.

I am starting to believe in all this but, I have to admit, I still don’t really like it. As well, I have no idea how big the circle is. Will we come back around to a time before capitalism or only to the beginning of the unions? Or both at different times, different speeds, different cycles? Writing in this way I realize I can’t mean anything nearly so literal. I must mean something more like: the solution doesn’t lie in the future, doesn’t lie in the past, and there is no solution because we’re just going round and round, and knowing this might be the only reason to keep going, even as we crash into difficulties very close to our impending extinction. And yet I also try to imagine it differently, what if the ‘I want to start again’ was not a desire to make a clean break with the past, but rather a way to acknowledge rounding another bend of the circle, to say winter is ending, spring is coming, another year is done, what have we learned and what can we do differently, here we go again. This vague metaphor needs an anchor in reality. Or many anchors.

In writing about the slander book, a project I have started, re-started, abandoned and re-abandoned many times over, I can’t help but recall another book about an earlier book that couldn’t be finished (or perhaps couldn’t even be started.) Much like Past, Present, Future, Etc., The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud is two books, an earlier book also called The Great Fire of London that Roubaud was never able to finish, and the book he did eventually publish in which he recalls his earlier failed attempt, contrasting his memory of it with the reality of his current life, thoughts and writing. There is a silently bleak shadow that hangs over The Great Fire of London: Roubaud’s young wife had recently died and, perhaps to deal with his grief, he gets up early each morning and writes, always moving forward, never looking back, meticulously describing his actual working process as he goes. He writes:

And I am writing only in order to keep on going, to elude the anguish awaiting me once I break off, once I suspend their uncertain and awkward progression, in order that this new beginning, in the wake of so much anxiety and paralysis, won’t turn out to be merely a false start of the prose enterprise, object of my vain endeavours for so many years.

And I’m also nervous that, as I write this, I am simply embarking on yet another ‘false start.’ But then, if I am working towards a new way of thinking of time, maybe ‘false start’ is simply another way of thinking there is nothing else to do but round the same circle again, each new aborted start another step in the same ongoing cycle. A few pages later, on page twelve, Roubaud writes:

So then I write in this notebook, and each autonomous slice of prose figures here like a white paper band of sorts running with even stripes of black lines, closely written in a minute and almost illegible script (even I find it so on occasion!) between other lines, red or green, marked with dates (of composition), a numerical order, some sort of title. These red or green lines separate the black slices, each supplemented by a line of white. There are rarely any additions or corrections – infrequently, and for two reasons: the first being that I never move, as it were, backwards, and hesitate only mentally; the second, that any rate there is practically no space for corrections, because the lines are extremely dense (a good hundred or so upon a single page), full from one edge to the other, from top to bottom.

Only moving forwards, never back, as a way to make sure that this time his literary project will not stall (as it had stalled so many times before), as a way of fleeing from the recent past, which held only heartbreak and, line by steady but almost illegible line, towards something hopefully more bearable. We move forward because we die, because those around us die. A different way of thinking time would suggest reincarnation, that we don’t end but rather come back, in different ways, different forms.

My idea for this book is that, as it goes, as it goes round and round the same questions and topics, these topics might begin to transform themselves into fiction and literature. I think of writing stories in which after we die we come back, in which time runs in circles and activism utilizes this reality in order to undermine capitalism, in which everything is alive and has agency. I wonder if it would be possible to write such narratives without becoming science fiction or magic realism, while retaining a direct connection my own, and to the readers, daily reality and agency. What kind of stories might these be? How can I get from slander, from my own personal struggles, to some larger grasp of how to get off this accelerating one directional highway towards greater dystopia and catastrophe? Or towards a sense of progress that shifts in many directions at once? What kind of circles should I be writing and why include stories? There’s the famous Godard quip: “A film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.”



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The Infiltrator

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My story The Infiltrator in Maisonneuve.



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Two Links

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Two of the best essays I've recently read:


For A Left With No Future by T.J. Clark

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion by Rita Felski



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Luc Boltanski Quote

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"The problems posed by the way in which the notion of domination was employed in critical sociology derive from the fact that it is at once too powerful and too vague in character. Extensive use of the notion of domination leads to conceiving virtually all relations between actions in their vertical dimension, from explicit hierarchical relations to the most personal of links. By the same token, what the sociologist will establish, in critical fashion, as a relationship of domination is not necessarily presented or even lived by actors in this register; and the later might even turn out to be offended by such a description. (If, for example, as a sociologist you explain to a man engrossed in the enchantment of love that the passion he experiences for his companion is in fact merely the result of the effect of social domination that she exercises over him, because she comes from a higher class than his, you risk meeting with some problems in getting your viewpoint accepted.) This extension of the notion of domination leads to extending the notion of violence in such a way as to stretch physical violence, which is experienced and described, at least in a number of cases, precisely as violence by the actors themselves, in the direction of symbolic violence (a key notion in Bourdieu’s sociology), which invariably is not experienced as such.

To explain how and why actors are dominated without knowing it, the theory must accord great importance to the illusions that blind them and appeal to the notion of the unconscious. An initial consequence is that actors are often treated as deceived beings or as if they were ‘cultural dopes’, to use Harold Garfinkel’s phrase. Their critical capacities in particular are underestimated or ignored. Another consequence is that preponderant weight is given to the dispositional properties of actors, at the expense of the properties inscribed in the situations into which they are plunged, and an attempt is made to explain virtually all of their behaviour by the internalization of dominant norms, above all in the course of the education process. It takes the form of an incorporation, which inscribes these norms in the body, like habits – a process that accounts for the reproduction of structures. However, by the same token, situations are neglected, sometimes in favour of dispositions and sometimes of structures. While situations can be observed and described as clearly by the actors who are continually immersed in them in the course of their everyday life as by sociologists, knowledge of structures is accessible exclusively to that latter. Their unmasking in fact requires the use of instruments of a macro-social character and, in particular, statistical instruments, based on the construction of categories, nomenclatures, and a metrology. But this is also to say that the instruments of which the exposure of structures is going to be based are largely dependent on the existence of powerful centres of calculation invariably places under the supervision of state or inter-state organizations. It follows, as numerous works over the last thirty years have shown, that these macro-social instruments, as well as the categories and metrologies on which they are based, must themselves be regarded as products of social activity and, in particular, the activity of states, so that they occupy the dual position, embarrassing to say the least, of instruments of social knowledge and objects of that knowledge.

Finally, a third consequence is to increase the asymmetry between deceived actors and a sociologist capable – and, it would appear from some formulations, the only one capable – of revealing the truth of their social condition to them. This leads to overestimating the power of sociology as science, the sole foundation on which the sociologist could base his claim to know much more about people than they themselves know. Sociology then tends to be invested with the overweening power of being the main discourse of truth on the social world, which leads it to enter into competition with other disciplines laying claim to the same imperialism. Above all, however, the critical enterprise finds itself torn between, on the one hand, the temptation of extending to all forms of knowledge the unmasking of the ‘ideologies’ on which they are based and, on the other, the need to maintain a reserved domain – that of Science – capable of providing a fulcrum for this operation. Finally, let us add that the intensification of the difference between sociological science and ordinary knowledge leads to an under-estimation of the effects of the circulation of sociological discourses in society and their re-appropriation/re-interpretation by actors – which is rather problematic in the case of a sociology that claims reflexivity. These repercussive effects of sociology in the social world are especially important in contemporary societies on account of the fact, in particular, of the enhanced role of secondary and university education (not to mention the role of the media), which leads actors to seize on explanatory schemas and languages derived from social science and to enlist them in their daily interactions (particularly in the course of their disputes.)"

- Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation



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Fragment 1

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Something went wrong. This something implied there was a different way things might have gone. Two ways, a fork in the road. But there weren’t two ways. There was only the way things actually went and that way was wrong. Because this wrongness has already occurred, is already a part of my history, of my life, there is another sense in which it is now right. The wrong thing has found its place in time. Time, the past, is a series of things gone wrong made right by their passing.



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Fragment 2

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So you asked for a favour and are given a favour so then you ask for a bigger favour but are refused and you don’t know if you should be upset for being refused or upset at yourself for trying to push your luck or simply grateful for the earlier, smaller favour you actually were granted. There are at least three choices and you’re sure there must be more. But then something else happens and you completely forget about this earlier dilemma because the new thing has presented a new dilemma, even stickier.



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...they don't have to be the "right" or "great" works...

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My list in response to the Facebook meme with the rules: In your status line, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard - they don't have to be the "right" or "great" works, just the ones that have touched you.


1. Aliens & Anorexia – Chris Kraus
2. The Transformation – Juliana Spahr
3. Motion Sickness – Lynne Tillman
4. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll – Alvaro Mutis
5. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
6. Third Factory – Viktor Shklovsky
7. Event Factory - Renee Gladman
8. The Seven Madmen – Roberto Arlt
9. Chapel Road - Louis Paul Boon
10. Impossible Object – Nicholas Mosley



[I later did a revised list which you can find here.]



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This overwhelming feeling of failure.

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When I joined twitter, about a year ago, the first thing I wanted to tweet was “I have this overwhelming feeling of failure,” and every time I tweet anew my first desire is to tweet it again “I have this overwhelming feeling of failure,” and I do, know I am not alone in this, know it is disconnected from reality and is, very basically, the way I am part of the problem, buying into impossible and wordly notions of success and wanting more and more of one thing (success) that serves no purpose other than to create a greater sense of dissatisfaction within me. I know this is what drives me, am able to see everything that is wrong with it, yet I keep going. In his diaries, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote: “It’s a feature of any kind of acclaim that it eventually leads to depression, disappointment, even to something rather like a hangover, a feeling of guilt.” And I have had acclaim, more than my share, but it never quite catches, just drifts past me, a few warm comments and it’s gone, wondering what it’s like for others at more or less my level of success, if they feel any more or less satisfied. At other times I think my dissatisfaction, which might only be another word for this sense of failure – and it’s always been my nature to be dissatisfied – has a positive side in that it drives me to keep challenging myself, to make better work. But then I’m not sure, since it seems to me today there is so little connection between quality and success. So much of my favorite work is relatively obscure when compared to the endless mediocrities continuously rolled out as being the most successful, most acclaimed, or even the hot new thing. So if I want more success perhaps, instead of making better work, I should try to get worse. (But worse in such a specific way: “I dumb down for my audience / And double my dollars”) From another angle, another myth, good or great artists are only discovered after they are dead. The real hope lies far in the future, a Kafkaesque utopia where my Max Brod will push my posthumous writing as hard as today I secretly hope (to myself) that it is meaningful or worthwhile. Are there hidden Kafka’s in the corners of today's culture or has the internet, at least partially, exposed every last one? Exposed them as semi-available and semi-obscure? There is some connection between this sense of failure, too much fleeting acclaim, and an inability to believe in the future. Perhaps there is no future for my work, but it is even more likely that there is little future for culture as we know it due to some degree of environmental collapse. Did those in the past really have a greater belief in their distant future? Again I chance upon what is perhaps the most effective treatment for these tepid feelings of failure: I must read more history. Why have I never been interested in history? Why am I so threatened by it? I have tweeted: “those who do know history are doomed to endlessly dissect it.” And then, later: “trying not to repeat history is a repetition of others who have tried not to repeat history in the past.” Finally: “those who don’t know history are doomed to think that things are worse now than they were in the past.” Twitter, the internet in general, is such an absence of history. Things endlessly scrolling downwards and vanishing into the barely remembered nothingness of a few minutes ago. I started making performances because I wanted to make something in the present, something that would feel like it was happening now, but now feel cursed by how ephemeral it all was, how everything I’ve made seems to have so completely disappeared. (I suppose this is why, a few years ago, I started putting more energy into making books.) “I have this overwhelming feeling of failure.” And yet perhaps still think failure is beautiful, only wish I was not quite so overwhelmed. When is being overwhelmed most productive? When does it ask the precise right questions, knowing the answers will never come?



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Per Højholt Link

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From Praxis, 8: Album, tumult by Per Højholt. Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.



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"...to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence..."

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“You could say that all my work is about the repressed fantasies of our field and about the desires produced and pursued through those fantasies. I do think that you have to understand the structure of that field and its fantasies in order to get at those desires – which I’ve also considered in more political and sociological terms as interests. And I do think that such understanding takes a certain amount of research, and that certain reading lists can be of help. But you can’t get at those fantasies and those desires through intellectualizations. Psychoanalysis would consider that just another mechanism of repression. In the end you can only get at them by subjecting yourself to their excesses, to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence, to their contradictions. And in those contradictions there is violence and there is also absurdity and there is also pleasure. And there may also be a kind of beauty.”

- Andrea Fraser



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Andrea Fraser Quote

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“...the ambivalence of artists who want to be wanted and loved for what they do, even in their transgressions and their objectifications and their critiques. One of the things that critique is, after all, is a test of love.”

- Andrea Fraser



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Öyvind Fahlström Quote

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“I infect Stockholm with infectious madness and in the end everyone is mad except me and everything turns into a film that was made during the time and then in a dream and then in darkness.”

- Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) describing the plot of his unpublished (and now lost) novel ‘Ryska Dansöser’ (‘Russian Dancers’).



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A playlist of 70 videos (with commentary).

It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011 and in Japan.

I have written a short post On making YouTube playlists.

All year I have been working on one for 2014. And now, twice, I have hit the playlist limit of 200 videos. Previously I didn't realize there was a limit and now I've hit it twice. I'm trying to think a little bit of this idea of a limit. Who would possibly take the time to watch a playlist of 200 videos? I know the internet has almost completely changed the way I listen to music, an endless stream of songs so many of which I can barely remember even a few minutes after having listened to them. So many amazing songs and wanting to organize them into playlists each year is almost defeatist.

I can keep adding songs to the playlist but eventually hit a limit. Then I go through the playlist, delete some of the weaker songs in order to make room for more. At the end of the year I'll remove as many songs as I can bear in order to get the list down to some reasonable size. I will try for under a hundred. None of this seems to me like a particularly good use of time and yet, internet addiction aside, it does also possibly spring from some desire to share.

The number of songs on the internet feels infinite yet, as I compile them, I hit a limit. It is not a real limit: I could simply begin a new playlist, but the limit in itself is perhaps useful, curbing the compulsive activity ever-so-slightly, forcing me (eventually) to start making decisions. With so many of these songs I would like to hear more, know more about the artist, but so often I don't. The slot in the playlist is as far as it goes. The curiosity is there but not the followthrough. Of course there might also be information I will stumble upon randomly at some future moment.

Along with the 200 video playlist limit, I am also continuously hitting the 5000 Facebook 'friend' limit. I have been thinking about writing about this other limit for a while, a limit made somehow resonant due to the inclusion of the word friend, but songs always feel like the more telling metaphor. And anyway I'm embarrassed to write about Facebook, fearful that it's evidence, a verdict too clearly depicting just how little I live.



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Possible first chapter of the novel-in-progress The Biography

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I had just published a short novel about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire for political reasons when I received an email that I at first ignored. It was a strange email, seemed almost like a prank. “Dear Mr. Wren,” it began, “you don’t know me and there’s no reason you should.” This is actually where, at first, I stopped, writing it off as spam, or as a fan letter written in a particularly distasteful style. Either way it failed to maintain my interest even to the end of the first sentence and it wasn’t until several weeks later, scrolling through old emails, trying to decide which ones to delete, that I first read it through all the way to the end. “I have read your most recent novel with great interest. The main reason for my interest was personal, as is perhaps always the case with literature. One of your two main characters, since they are both unnamed I am unsure how to refer to them, bore a striking resemblance to my own history and character. I too began in relative poverty and have worked my way up to become one of the world’s richest men. I too see life through a complex web of cynicism and hope. There were moments, reading your book, when I wondered if I should in fact sue you for libel, moments too close for comfort, in which I was painfully aware of your characters shortcomings and therefore of my own. But instead of a lawsuit I have decided to come to you with a proposal. I would like you to write my biography. I suspect anyone able to write a fictional character so close to my own would also be able to capture my real self in all its complexity and nuance. From reading your work I of course realize that, politically, we are neither on the same page nor on the same side. However, as a struggling author I also assume you are very much in need of money, and that I would obviously be able to provide in substantial quantities. Let me be clear, I am not looking to pay you off, not bribing you in order for you to whitewash either my history or my character. I simply wish for you to write about me honestly, using your full abilities of both observation and research, including all of my shortcomings and flaws and bringing to bear upon them the full force of your literary craft. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. As a first step I simply propose that we meet in person. You can see for yourself, decide if I might be a worthy subject for your pen. There are many extremely boring books being written about CEO’s and business hero’s of our time. I very much hope you will understand my desire to have a more interesting, one might even say eccentric, book written about me. I kindly hope you will consider my proposal, at the very least the first step in which we meet in person. If your only temptation is monetary I will certainly not be offended. By this point in my life I’m used to it. Sincerely,” at this point I believe I should withhold his name, for fear of incurring an actual lawsuit at some future point in time. But I did, after reading over his email several times, trying to decide if it was for real, staring at page after page of google search results, all of which confirmed his enormous wealth, eventually reply to his email and agree to meet with him.

Our first meeting took place almost surreptitiously. It was only much later that I realized he had hired someone to watch me, learn my routines, and when he approached me in the bookstore it was the furthest thing from a coincidence, though he most likely already knew about my fondness for coincidences and that I would be taken in by the appearance of one, that I would want to believe it, believe it was a sign of some sort that I should write his biography after all. He said hello, said his name (though by this point I already recognized him), that we had already corresponded over email, that he was happy to meet me for the first time in person. What was strange was I immediately liked him. We had already arranged a meeting for later that week so our first encounter was brief. It’s only now I see how skillful this first chance encounter actually was. (What the hell would he have been doing in that low rent bookstore otherwise.) And also what it meant, how much he must have wanted me to do as he wished in order to go to all that effort. But even as I’m writing this I see it is incorrect. It had so little to do with me. He is simply a man who puts his mind to something and then does everything possible to get his way. In this way we are almost opposite, since so many of my desires and wishes over the years have almost completely eluded me.

Then there was our second meeting, a somewhat more substantial encounter. Very quickly I understood I was speaking to someone with certain skills, someone considerably more persuasive than I would ever be. He was talking, telling me about his life, and as he did so I could feel myself being persuaded that I should take him up on his offer, that working with or for him would make my life considerably more compelling. But what seemed strange to me in retrospect was, to the best of my recollection, I don’t believe he mentioned his offer once, or even alluded to it. (Except maybe at the very end in the form of a joke.) How did he do it, why was I persuaded? As I examined this question in my mind, turned it over and around, in fact spending the next several days wondering, I came to the conclusion that the right solution must be the most obvious one. It had to do with money. I thought, if you were to show me a nice looking watch, and give it to me, I would say thank you and wear it and be pleased with the situation. But if you were to show me a nice watch, tell me it was worth one million dollars, and then give it to me, against my better judgment, perhaps even against my most deeply held convictions, I would be overwhelmed. The man who wanted me to write his biography was just such a watch. He made a good impression, but the extra kick I got from him had almost nothing to do with whatever he may have done or said. The more I wondered about it the more I felt it came from somewhere else, from my own insecurities and doubts around the topic of money. From feeling that money is meant for other people, I want enough to get by but otherwise don’t really care for such things, and yet when I tell myself this supposed fact (about myself) in a more conscious way, the only place it leads me is to doubting whether or not it is actually true. I certainly have my own kind of ambition: ambition to write great literature and be recognized for it. How can I keep telling myself this ambition is so different from the ambition to accrue wealth? How is it so different from the man I met who so effortlessly persuaded me to write about his life? I thought the persuasion was little more than my unacknowledged desire to be close to money, to see a kind of wealth that honestly I can barely imagine – or, more accurately, my imagination runs wild, but I have no idea what it would be like in reality – and to witness it up close.

The end of this second meeting was particularly intriguing. Quite suddenly he changed his tone, in a sense changed his approach. He told me that when you have a lot of money you start to attract a different kind of person: brownnosers and sycophants, and he always worked hard to ensure there were enough people around him who knew how to say no, who knew how to stand up to him, to tell him when he was going off the rails and not just always what they thought he wanted to hear. He was sure I was this kind of person: stubborn, my own man, willing to speak ‘truth to power’ as an activist protesting against his corporation once described the true value of activism to him, and as he told me this, for the first time in our meeting, I doubted him, wondered if he was now simply telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. Sitting there across from him, what I actually felt is that I was just another potential sycophant in a coterie of the same. I knew that in my life, in so many positive but also self-destructive ways, I could certainly be stubborn, but I really wasn’t sure if standing up to the person who was paying my rent (and perhaps also my retirement fund) was one of those ways. At the same time, I told myself, if for whatever reason at any point the situation became intolerable, I could simply walk away. I would have the financial courage to walk away. Then he told a joke that seemed strange to me at the time, that I didn’t fully get, in fact I wasn’t even sure it was a joke. He said: “You and I are completely different people. We have completely different lives, different politics. But I always negotiate on the basis that everyone has something in common. And I’m certain we have a lot. That as you begin to work on the book you’ll really start to see it. And one thing I think maybe we have in common is this, you and I both: when we’re staring into the eyes of a pig, we really know how to grab it by the ears, we really know how to get our knee right in there, right between the eyes. You in your writing. And for me, of course, its just business.” Then he laughed, a genuine, hearty laugh, it was one of the few times I heard anything so joyful come out of his mouth, and, in one of the few moments in this story I’m genuinely ashamed of, I laughed along with him. I laughed as if he had just said the funniest thing in the world.

It will be no secret to anyone who knows me that my life is, in large part, a struggle with depression. However, it is often difficult for me to describe or explain the exact nature of my depression, what it is like for me. And what happened next was – instead of tearing into the large package of research material that appeared on my doorstep the next week, instead of reading the thirty-seven page contract that also arrived a few days later, instead of thinking about him or reconsidering whether or not I should actually write his biography – I instead fell into a deep depression and did absolutely nothing for several months. For this entire period the thick package remained unopened, propped up against the wall next to my front door. The contract remained unread.

Of course, I did not literally do nothing during this period. I was reading a great deal and continuing to half-heartedly work on the unfinished novel I had been chipping away at for several years. This novel was going to be different from any of my previous books. It was going to be more personal, closer to non-fiction, closer to my real daily life and thoughts. I wanted to write a book that went more in this direction, felt it was part of my natural progression and also part of the general zeitgeist, but at the same time within me there seemed to be an incredible resistance towards the undertaking. It was as if I wanted to write about my life without actually giving anything away. For example, I didn’t want to write about my romantic life, and when I did allude to it in certain passages, I would just as quickly edit those allusions away. Mostly what remained were my thoughts on philosophy, literature, activism and politics, and yet I refused to see it as a book length essay or collection of aphorisms, continued to think of it as a kind of autobiographical novel, and did everything in my power to continuously push the manuscript in this, perhaps unrealistic, direction. After the relative success of my last book, the book that had gotten me into this biography mess in the first place, I feared this new book of philosophical and political reflections would be seen by many as a disappointment. It had no characters (only me), no narrative energy or forward momentum. I realized I was up to my old tricks. My books had always alternated: a more accessible work followed by a more difficult or experimental one. I am never sure if this is a form of career self-sabotage or a way of keeping my artistic edge. But I know I can’t seem to help myself. I once thought of writing three unpublished books in a row: an accessible one, a more difficult one, and then another accessible one. This would make it possible for me to publish the two more accessible books back to back, allowing the second more accessible book to build on the first one’s success. But such nefarious long-term plans also seem beyond me. As soon as I finish an acceptable draft of a book I immediately want to get it off my desk, out into the world, out of my life, to be free of it. Keeping two unpublished books in a desk drawer while I attempted to complete a third would have required an act of pure will I was simply incapable of. It occurred to me that at the same time I was attempting to write a book about my own life, I was also going to begin writing a book about someone else’s. I wondered how these two books would bleed into each other, contaminate one another, how each book might make writing the other one easier or more difficult.

I said I did nothing during these three months, and felt I was doing nothing because the depression had once again overwhelmed me, but if I think back upon it there was actually so much that happened. One thing that happened is more and more unanswered messages accumulated, and were deleted, on my voicemail. These messages were from the potential publisher of the biography and became increasingly aggressive, even hostile, over the course of the three months. At first they were messages simply inquiring whether or not I had received the contract and whether the terms were acceptable to me. There were also emails. But as the months progressed the messages and emails wanted to know why they had not heard back from me, if I was planning to accept their extremely generous financial offer or if I was planning to continue ignoring them, if I wanted them to instead find another writer to complete this project or if, instead, it was my desire that this important book would not be published at all. I assumed, in the depth of my depression, that I would simply lose the gig, but as the messages grew angrier began to realize something else might be going on. That perhaps the subject of the biography had even insisted that the writer had to be me, and if this was the case it might be possible for me to demand even more money. Or was I only flattering myself.

During this time there were also difficulties in my romantic life that I was not able to write about in my non-fiction novel-in-progress and therefore will also not attempt to write about here.

One aspect of my ongoing depression is that it comes and goes, even though I don’t quite experience it in this manner. What I experience is that I am always depressed. It is only in retrospect that I am able to see that during certain periods I am slightly more functional and during others I am considerably less. Often, with these periods of more severe depression, there is something, some event, that snaps me out of it, and in this case it was a visit from my potential biography subject. I was sitting at the exact same café I go to each morning, a novel in my hands and a notebook open in front of me (years ago I had started writing longhand because spending too much time on the computer was hurting my back.) I was reading Volume One of The Aesthetics of Resistance by the German author Peter Weiss. There was a rap at the window and I looked over. I always prefer to sit as close to the window as possible, as if literally enacting my desire to be closer to the outside world. It was him, smiling at me like I was his favorite person in the world. He came and sat across from me. I was expecting him to be angry, but he didn’t seem even remotely upset.

“I was expecting you to say yes right away, which you haven’t,” he began, “but of course you also haven’t said no. You haven’t said anything. I’ve spent some time wondering how to interpret this rather ambiguous situation but haven’t come to any real conclusions. So I thought the best thing to do would be to ask.”

He was asking me a question, but I didn’t reply. And, in fact, I had no idea how to reply. In that moment it felt to me a bit like I was meeting the devil and he was asking me whether or not I was willing to sell my soul. I realized I hadn’t told anyone else about his offer, which suggested I felt shame, that I was ashamed to even be so fully considering it. Because I was definitely considering it, at the back of my mind where often it felt like I thought about almost nothing else. I considered all of this while an awkward silence settled deeply into the space between us.

“I don’t know,” I said, “your offer seems to have short circuited some part of my life. And left me paralyzed. I’m not sure I can write about you. I want the money but I’m not sure I can write about you. I just don’t know what it would mean.”

“That is a very honest answer,” he said, “that’s why I’m asking you. Because I believe you’d give me more honesty than some other writer. Of course I might be wrong about that. I don’t actually know you. Here’s what I propose. Why don’t you shadow me for a week. Get a sense of what my life is like. Find out whether or not a week in my life makes you feel like writing. We’ll of course pay you for the week. It could be a first step. Then at least you’d be basing your decision on something rather than nothing.” A week felt like a reasonable offer, and I definitely needed the money.

What was most unnerving about the week is that everywhere we went he introduced me as his biographer. And I didn’t correct him. In a way, he was only explaining why I was there. What other reason did I have to be there if I wasn’t going to write his biography? And because I was his “biographer” everyone we met treated me almost as if I was someone important. I carried a notebook and took as many notes as possible across the course of every day, not really because I wanted to get anything down, but because I wanted everyone to see I was taking notes. Sometimes I was tempted to write things like “this is so stupid” or “these people are all assholes” but I refrained, not because I didn’t agree with such sentiments, but because I was afraid of someone reading over my shoulder and catching me in the act. In actual fact, a week of his life didn’t provide so much to report. A lot of long tedious meetings, during which everyone went back and forth between normal speech and some sort of awkward business jargon I often didn’t fully understand. Dictating emails to a series of secretaries who could have easily written the emails themselves without the benefit of his tedious assistance. Some very expensive dinners during which everyone laughed at his jokes and were careful he always had more opportunities to hold the floor than anyone else at the table. A week of his life was like a string of living cliches, all of which he apparently enjoyed and enjoyed having me witness.

On the Thursday he asked me if I’d like to join him for a drink after work and I assumed this would be the meeting during which I had to give an answer. Was I going to write the book or not? But it wasn’t that kind of meeting at all. Instead, it was the meeting in which he told me he knew I was depressed, and he could relate, since he was also often sad. It was the meeting where he confessed that him and I weren’t so different after all. But I didn’t think depression was the thing that made us different. The thing that made us different was he was a capitalist and I was anti-capitalist. That I was completely against everything he stood for. That he was my enemy and, instead of sitting here drinking this very expensive scotch, listening to him talk about how sad he is while considering just how badly I need the money, and if I needed it enough to write this very questionable book he was proposing, I should instead write another book loudly calling for his death and the deaths of every one of his kind (since I’d already written at least one.) I realized he was still talking and I was barely even listening to him. Worried that I might miss something important, I made an effort to tune back in. But it was nothing so important, he was just explaining how he’d started poor, worked his way up from the bottom to where he was today. I of course didn’t believe him. If I were to write his biography maybe its main purpose should be to completely demolish this self-aggrandizing myth. To find the smoking gun, the irrefutable proof that he was born with far more privileges than he admits. Wasn’t meeting someone, gaining insights into their daily life, walking a mile in their shoes so to speak, supposed to grant you a little bit more empathy for them? Yet it was true I didn’t really dislike him personally. Spending time with him was more or less okay, if a little bit boring.

As we said our goodbyes, I mentioned I was going to rush to catch the last subway, and he insisted that his driver was already here, they’d drop me off, it wasn’t exactly on their way but they’d make the necessary detour. In the car, he finally asked me if I was going to do it. He couldn’t wait forever. It was a simple question requiring a simple yes or no answer. I hesitated, said I still have one more day of shadowing him and I’d decide by the end of the workday tomorrow. “You’re quite a strange person,” he said, “I knew that already when I read your book. I guess I want people to read about me through the lens of that strangeness. Which must mean I’m kind of a strange person as well. Don’t you think?”

I didn’t find him particularly strange, he was almost too normal for words. I guess this was yet another argument meant to persuade me to take the gig, and he really had no idea what kind of arguments might actually persuade me. But, then again, I didn’t really know either.

Our last day together began normally enough with a small, casual breakfast meeting with a handful of his top executives. It was actually the most relaxed I’d seen him, though later he told me it might have only seemed that way because he was a little hung over from the drinks we’d had the previous night. I hadn’t even noticed he was particularly drunk. Everyone around the table gave a short report on how things were going in their departments, but the reports seemed almost beside the point. It occurred to me for the first time that this entire week might have been a PR exercise staged for my benefit. Perhaps that’s why basically nothing had happened. I was really trying to pay attention, listen to what each executive was saying, but there didn’t seem to be any real content to it. All just variations on the same theme and the theme was: everything’s just going so damn well, we all just keep on making so much money. I wondered if anyone would have said anything differently if I weren’t here. If everyone around the table was simply auditioning for their small cameos in the biography I was allegedly going to write. And I also wondered if there was any way I could write about a scene like the one I was currently witnessing and make it seem interesting to a reader. In general, I’ve found the reader is only as interested as I am. And I was so uninterested I could barely stay awake. Then something almost interesting did occur. There had been a large oil spill a few years back and the negligence lawsuit against the company was about to go to trial. They of course wanted to settle out of court, but the plaintiffs wanted a full trial with all the damning evidence as fully on display as possible. The topic wasn’t so much whether they’d win or lose the lawsuit, or how much they’d have to pay if they did lose, but rather how much bad press they’d have to endure and what that might feel like. “It was the second biggest oil spill in recorded history, one of the executives said, and then everyone suddenly looked at me, to see if I was writing this down. I did not write it down, and satisfied that I wasn’t there only to rat them out, someone quickly changed the subject. But then, after the meeting, as we were walking down a long hallway back to his office, my potential biography subject said: “It's all right if you write about the oil spill. It’s a matter of public record anyways, so it would be conspicuous if you avoided the topic. And, also, I don’t want the book to be whitewashed, I definitely don’t want something over-sanitized, if I did I wouldn’t have asked you in the first place. You can’t make as much money as I’ve made without getting your hands dirty from time to time. And sometimes things do go wrong, that’s just a fact of life. But I believe, if you really get to know me, you’ll see I always work in ways that minimize the damage.” He clearly had a fantasy that I would write a biography in which he still came off looking relatively good. And, thinking about all of this later, I could begin to understand why. Because the fictional billionaire in the novel I wrote, the novel he read, was humanized. He was both an evil capitalist and an interesting, critical human being, with an almost Marxist perspective on his own capitalist role, which is another way of saying he was fictional. But I wasn’t going to take this billionaire asshole walking alongside me in the hallway of a building he basically owns and make him seem like a nice guy. There wasn’t enough money in the world to squeeze that out of me. Or was there?

Next, he said because this was my last day of shadowing him, we’d make an unexpected visit to one of their factories. We got in a car and the driver pulled away. Several times along the way my potential biography subject emphasized that they weren’t expecting us. I would get to see things as they were, not some sanitized play acting performed for my benefit. Each time he said this I wondered if they were actually expecting us and were now simply preparing to pretend like they weren’t. It was quite a long drive, out past the suburbs then through an industrial area that took us far past what I normally thought of as the outer boundaries of the city. Eventually our car pulled up in front of a building that, from the outside, looked exactly like my clichéd idea of what a factory might look like. When we walked in the front door it really did seem like they weren’t expecting us, and my first thought was that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I had the strange feeling that most of the people here had never seen the big boss in person, and it was almost like a mean practical joke to spring himself on them like that. Everyone he spoke with interacted with him in a tone that suggested they might be fired at any moment. That he had shown up unexpectedly in order to fire everyone in some sort of mass layoff. I thought to myself that if he suddenly fired everyone it would make a really good scene in his biography, genuinely dramatic. Then I hated myself for having such an evil thought. People appeared to be hurrying in every direction to alert the others about our unexpected visit. It all gave me a bad feeling, as if we were cats and this was the kerfuffle of mice with nowhere to flee. My potential biography subject wanted to be given the grand tour immediately, but they insisted on a bit of time to prepare, so we were taken to a corner office, I assume what they felt to be the nicest office in the building, where I was introduced to a woman in business attire, who was also the first black person I’d been introduced to since the week began. I believe she was introduced as the foreman, but at the time I didn’t know enough about such titles, so I’m not entirely sure. There were a few rounds of small talk, which I made no mental note of, and then I was taken off guard when the foreman said: “After we unionize there will be some repercussions when you drop by unannounced like this.”

Without missing a beat my potential biography subject said: “I believe pushing through your union is not going to be as easy as you think.”

Just as quickly, the foreman replied: “I believe that stopping us isn’t going to be as easy as you think.”

The tone of this exchange is difficult for me to describe: cordial, almost sportsmanlike. It felt like they’d sparred like this before. And, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than for their union bid to be successful. That would really give me something to write about.

Someone knocks at the door to say that they’re ready for us, and we’re taken down a back staircase onto the factory floor. Everyone is standing by their machine, but all the machines are off, creating a kind of eerie silence, we’re told because it would be impossible to hear the explanations over the din of the machines. The explanations are very much by the book, as if we were a visiting group of schoolchildren being given the standard tour, this machine does one thing while another machine does another, everything must be done with absolute precision for the end product to be as reliable as necessary. I realize that no one explains just exactly what it is they make here, I guess because it is assumed that we all already know. But I don’t know, and the hyper-specific explanations provided by the tour guide don’t bring me any closer to that key piece of information. The workers, standing beside their machines, don’t make eye contact. I have to admit, the machines do appear to be state of the art, one step away from fully automated, so soon the workers might be superfluous as well. Our tour ends at a maquette of an offshore oil rig, and it takes me a long moment to realize that some prankster has added a giant oil spill to the diorama. They’d done a good job. The oil looked menacing and viscous, making the entire diorama look like a world gone wrong. Everyone else seemed to be noticing this at about the same rate.

When we got back outside, someone had spraypainted a message on the car. It read: “What will you tell your grandkids when they ask you: grandpa, why did you fuck up the planet?” The graffiti covered the hood and front windshield, making it impossible to drive away. We had to wait for another car. The driver apologized several times. He’d only left for a few minutes and when he returned it looked like this. There was some talk of calling the police, but my potential biography subject decided not to bother. He didn’t want to draw further attention to the situation, didn’t want even more photos of the graffiti going out onto the internet. Activists had been tailing him for a while now, so such incidents seemed like par for the course.

On the drive back he gave a speech that felt like he’d been rehearsing it in his head for a long time: “We’re not only an oil company. That’s a misunderstanding about who we are and what we do. We’re actually at the forefront of renewables. Our wind and solar divisions are the fastest growing aspects of our organization. When the time comes we’ll be part of the first big wave to phase out oil and implement the growing alternatives.”

I interrupted: “I have a feeling that might make people even more angry. You reap all the rewards of destroying the planet and then also want to reap the rewards for mitigating that destruction. As well, if you’re interested in reading the room, most people I know believe that by the time people like you decide ‘the time has come’ it will already be far too late.”

He looked at me for a long, dark moment. It was the first time I had openly disagreed with him since we’d first met. I must have been emboldened by the oil spill diorama and by the graffiti. I wondered if he was going to lash out at me, and there is a moment in which it seems he might, but he quickly calms himself down and, it seems to me, starts to reflect on what he should say next. He eventually decides on this: “I must be surrounded by too many yes men. Almost no one talks to me like that anymore. It doesn’t feel good, but it does feel interesting. Nonetheless, it makes me realize that maybe you really are the wrong person to write my biography. I need to be honest with myself. I don’t think I could handle reading that level of criticism about myself in a book, out there for all the world to see. It was an intriguing idea, but I see now that it’s the wrong way to go. Thank you for spending this week with me. It was instructive.”

I realized I had just lost the gig. I didn’t even know if I wanted it and yet, in that moment, losing it still stung. Actually, I think the only part that bothered me was the prospect of losing a big, fat paycheck. Some part of me had already started spending the money in my head. The potential biography subject, for this biography that was now never meant to be, looked out the window. Our car wasn’t moving at all. We were stuck in a deadlock of traffic. He asked the driver how far we were from the head office and it was only a fifteen minute walk. He took out his phone and called his security retinue, asked them to walk over and then walk us there. He said, almost to himself: “Maybe a short walk would do me good.” It was a beautiful day outside. Before now I hadn’t really noticed that he didn’t go anywhere without some sort of security. We waited in silence. There was some part of my brain that thought, if I played my cards right, there might be some way for me to get the gig back, and another part that thought that was the worst idea I’d ever had in my life. We were almost complete strangers, but in that moment we’d both managed to hurt the other one, though probably not so deeply. After fifteen minutes there was a tap on the window and we both got out of the car. There must have been an accident up ahead, because in those fifteen minutes traffic had barely moved at all. As we walked, it was educational for me to experience how the security agents kept their distance, giving us enough space to feel like normal civilians, yet remaining close enough to rapidly intervene in anything should happen. There weren’t so many people on the sidewalk, yet just enough for the security agents to at least partly blend into the crowd. We mostly walked in silence, though from time to time he’d make some polite, innocuous comment to which I didn’t reply. Now that I no longer felt this might be my big payday I no longer had the energy to be polite, at least not to this figure who represented everything I hated in the world.

What happened next happened so fast I’m not even sure I’m recounting the events in the correct order. A man in a mask stepped out of a corridor, walked up to the billionaire and shot him in the face. It happened so quickly I didn’t see if he was already holding the gun or if he pulled it out at the last minute. As he did so, the four security guards all ran toward us. The assassin was already fleeing, but one of the agents grabbed him and was about to pin him to the ground when another man, who appeared to be a random bystander, grabbed the agent and managed to pull him away just long enough for the assassin to get away. In all the chaos I didn’t see where he went and apparently, neither did any of the other three security guards. Already I heard police sirens, though perhaps that happened later. The billionaire was dead on the ground beside me. I stood there unsure what to do. I was taken to the police station for questioning, my phone and computer were confiscated, but I was released around seven a.m. the next morning with a warning not to leave town. I returned to my apartment still very much in shock. I had written a book about a person who wants to kill a billionaire, and then I had walked alongside a billionaire at the very moment he was killed. It was a coincidence that completely boggled the mind. However, in the novel I had written, the billionaire was not shot. He was strangled with a piano wire. And he survived.

The next day there was a picture on the front page of every newspaper. That picture has changed my life more than any other thing that has ever happened to me. Some very quick-on-the-draw bystander had managed to pull out their phone and snap a picture at the exact moment the billionaire was shot. The picture shows a masked man firing the gun and the billionaires head shattering, with me standing stock still beside him. However, it is really only the caption underneath the picture that triggered the coming, overwhelming changes in my life. Because the caption described me as ‘his biographer.” And there could be no book more in demand at that moment than a biography of that murdered man.

The days that followed were a blur of emails, phone calls and meetings. Every publisher and every agent was interested in a firsthand biography of this man whose assassination perhaps signaled the first volley in the coming revolution (though probably not.) The search for his assassin was of course equally voracious. A photo was circulating of the most likely suspect and the internet was utterly obsessed with it. The internet was considerably less obsessed with me, frequently wondering to what extent I was a traitor to the cause. To what extent I had betrayed all the values I had been associated with leading up to that strange reversal which had rapidly become my sole claim to fame. I did no issue a statement of any kind, wondering over and over again what I should do. Should I cash in and write some sort of biography? I would likely never have such an opportunity again. If I wrote it in a way that was effectively critical of capitalism and the oil industry, maybe it could be a kind of trojan horse, smuggling my ideas into the mainstream where they would be seen by far more people than had read any of my previous books. Or would they? Maybe people would see through this ruse and respond by not buying my book in the first place.


*


[This is an expanded version of my long ago attempt to write a sequel to Rich and Poor. A sequel that I previously left unfinished. However, I am now considering that I might some day finish it.]



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True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels

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My interview with Masha Tupitsyn for The Believer Logger: True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels



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Chicoutimi Writing Exercise

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What I understand about things I think I already know in a language I don't understand. What I don't understand because I don't understand French. What I don't understand simply because I don't understand.


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I've always thought the most important part of teaching is to admit you don't know. I don't know why I think this or in what sense it could be true.


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I feel the most important task for politics today is to re-think our sense and experience of time.



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Walter Benjamin Quote

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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.

- Walter Benjamin



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Possible List of New Projects in Alphabetical Order

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Adventures Can Be Found Anywhere

Manifesto for Collective Childrearing

Melancholy is the Depression that Says Yes to Life

Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate

No Double Life for the Wicked

Ouvroir d’optimisme critique

Past, Present, Future, Etc.

Resistance as Paradox

Speaking These Lines for the First Time…

You Can’t Judge…



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In Different Situations Different Behavior Will Produce Different Results: A Chapbook

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“In Different Situations Different Behavior Will Produce Different Results: A Chapbook” (Paper Pusher), featuring an interview with me and an interview with Chris Kraus, is one of BLOUIN ARTINFO's Top Six Art Books for Fall. (Special thanks go out to interviewer Yaniya Lee and publisher Danielle St-Amour.)



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Ten Short Quotes

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For – back to Schlegel – the nature of the world only reveals itself to us in fragments. The fragment is the only way to refer to the lost totality of the world without offering some kind of unified whole as a consolation; that is, without lying.
- Adam Jasper


In the vision I had two years ago I came to the end of myself and found other people standing there- and knew that the present was a gift of time in which to sing a true history of equal historical selves.
– Peter Dimcock


Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.
- Gianni Vattimo


The state is to its map as its citizens are to their passports. No map = no existence; that is the hard verdict modernity hands down to upstart states no less than to travelers.
- Michael Taussig


The deplorable thing is that the people who were tortured yesterday, torture today.
- B. Traven, The Death Ship


Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need?
– Ludwig Wittgenstein


If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini


Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
- David Graeber


Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.
- Luc Boltanski


If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
- Jonas Salk, Biologist



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Finalist

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My yet-to-be-published novel Polyamorous Love Song was a finalist for the inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose.



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