.
[This text was originally published in SIC #2/The Characters]
You turn the corner and there he is. He’s you but he’s not you. He’s pathetic. He’s you, but if you were someone else he would also be you. He’s the person you see unexpectedly when you’re walking down the street, turn a corner, and suddenly chance upon a version of yourself. But what I’m trying to explain is that it’s him. He’s always the same person. I realize this is not an original idea. Doppelgangers have a considerable history in literature and art, and this year alone there were two feature films about characters encountering their doubles. But he doesn’t need to be original because he’s you and, let’s face it, you’re not so original either.
All of this is only preamble. What’s important is that we try to see things from his perspective. Because he knows that he is in fact himself, but you know that he is also you. If you woke up tomorrow with another face, you might have an intense moment of crisis, but in the end you would still know that you’re yourself. And when you turn the corner to stumble upon him, for him it is a bit like he has just awoke with another face, your face, but he’s used to it. It might have bothered him a long time ago, when all this first began, but now it no longer phases him. He simply glances in your direction, thinking here we go again. He’s accepted the fact that constantly others will approach him, others who view him differently than he views himself.
Over time he has become philosophical about the matter. Everyone believes they have a self and is encouraged to over-invest in this belief. However, since his own self is, on an almost daily basis, undermined by the intense projections of relative strangers, he has no choice but to take the opposite road. He works each day to under-invest in his own sense of self, to see it most clearly where the edges blur and he is indistinguishable from many of those who surround him.
Over time he has come to find a strange comfort in this daily fact. As you turn the corner, stumble upon him, and are disturbed, thrown off-guard by your sudden encounter with some new version of yourself, he takes it all in stride. We are each, perhaps, ourselves. But, at the same time, every street is filled with hundreds of others who might also be us, and if they were, or are, what difference would it really make to each of our lives? All you have to do is turn a corner.
.
March 4, 2015
February 26, 2015
Nine quotations on suicide
.
During the decline of Christian moralism few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society [as the suicide has.] It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue. To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely. Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as though to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you don’t want a pet boa, you wouldn’t like the way it swallows mice.
It doesn’t follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is ‘I’d rather be dead’ anything like ‘I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow’; or: ‘I want 6 and 3 to make 10’; or: ‘I want to be a Fiji princess’; or: ‘I want a foot-long-dong’; or: ‘I want that seventh scotch-on-the-rocks’; or ‘I would love to make it with Lena Horne’?
– William H. Gass, The World Within the Word
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
– Andrew Solomon
Afterward, some friends said his death was tragic and asked why. I said I imagined people killed themselves for reasons as varied as the one’s others used to live.
– Nate Lippens, My Dead Book
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
– E.M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
– E. M. Cioran
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
– Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character
Vollmann reports that suicide rates drop dramatically in people older than forty. Because, as he rightly surmises, the absurdity of doing what nature will do anyway reveals itself.
– Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence
Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the door that is merely painted on the wall.
– Vladimír Holan, Pain
Life is suicide, mediated.
– Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
.
During the decline of Christian moralism few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society [as the suicide has.] It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue. To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely. Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as though to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you don’t want a pet boa, you wouldn’t like the way it swallows mice.
It doesn’t follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is ‘I’d rather be dead’ anything like ‘I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow’; or: ‘I want 6 and 3 to make 10’; or: ‘I want to be a Fiji princess’; or: ‘I want a foot-long-dong’; or: ‘I want that seventh scotch-on-the-rocks’; or ‘I would love to make it with Lena Horne’?
– William H. Gass, The World Within the Word
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
– Andrew Solomon
Afterward, some friends said his death was tragic and asked why. I said I imagined people killed themselves for reasons as varied as the one’s others used to live.
– Nate Lippens, My Dead Book
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
– E.M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
– E. M. Cioran
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
– Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character
Vollmann reports that suicide rates drop dramatically in people older than forty. Because, as he rightly surmises, the absurdity of doing what nature will do anyway reveals itself.
– Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence
Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the door that is merely painted on the wall.
– Vladimír Holan, Pain
Life is suicide, mediated.
– Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
.
February 25, 2015
Wanted: Men Who Love / Against Self-Criticism
.
I think the article Wanted: Men Who Love by bell hooks and the article Against Self-Criticism by Adam Phillips actually compliment each other quite nicely.
.
I think the article Wanted: Men Who Love by bell hooks and the article Against Self-Criticism by Adam Phillips actually compliment each other quite nicely.
.
February 20, 2015
February 11, 2015
Tangentially yours — Jacob Wren & Todd Lester in conversation, #4
.
The conversation so far: #1, #2, #3
Dear Todd,
I kept trying to answer your second letter but then I keep coming back to something that I didn’t quite get around to in your first. (I promise I won’t remain one whole letter behind for the entirety of our correspondence.)
It was the question you ended with: “Do we make it worse for people around the world we purport to care for by ‘taking the bait’ in these situations? Do we assure that they become the homo sacer?” It was a question that continued to haunt me. Then I was reading the remarkable book May ’68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross and she historically reframed the question for me in ways I felt really get to the heart of the matter.
This reframing has to do with the ‘third-worldist’ discourse of the sixties and the backlash of the ‘anti-third-wordist’ discourse that arrived in the eighties. In the French context, much of this sixties discourse took place in and around François Maspero’s bookstore La Joie de Lire. Kristin Ross writes:
Cutting ahead to the eighties, to the television show “Le procès de Mai” made in 1988 to mark the twentieth anniversary of May ’68 and hosted by former UEC militant, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, Bernard Kouchner. Describing the program, Ross explains that:
It is now mid-February in Montreal – it is really fucking cold and snow-drenched here, walking home the other day the snow was hitting my face so hard it hurt – so that would most likely make it the time of year in which I find myself most jealous of the fact that you actually had the guts to pick up and move to Brazil. Along with Portugal, Brazil is one of the places I most romanticize in the world. (I’ve been to Portugal but never to Brazil.) (As well, I would also like to go back in time and live within the aisles of La Joie de Lire.) When you speak about your “love for cities that pulse, contract, absorb and accommodate the mobility and dreams of regulars and newcomers alike” I can feel some sort of magic reaching out to me through the computer screen. To this list I might also add: cities that thaw out and melt.
I definitely have more than my fair share of white guilt. I think it’s only this year I’m really trying to think what it would mean to get beyond it a bit. Guilt is certainly conservative if not downright reactionary. Yes, we need to speak out against injustice, but equally important is to find ways to make room for other voices who are also speaking out, perhaps even more intelligently, but for all the usual systematic reasons are not being heard. At a beautiful talk I heard her give last week, Leanne Simpson spoke of “creating communities of co-resistance,” which I felt was especially precise. These are all thoughts I have but I still wonder how far away I am from making them happen. Since, with freeDimensional, you’ve actually done so much more along these lines than me and perhaps, even in this dialog, I should be listening more than talking. I think at the moment I’m slightly possessed by the fervor of the newly converted. ‘The fervor of the newly converted,’ is one of my favorite expressions, if it actually is an expression and not just something I made up. How someone new to a particular topic or question will experience it so much more intensely than those who have lived with it for years, or even for their entire lives.
I have been listening to DJ Haram’s soundcloud page, so full of amazing sounds that cut through this endless winter, mixing Jersey Club with Middle Eastern diasporic instrumentals and so much more. I feel this mix of different cultures and modalities is the future. It is, of course, also the past, present and future. And at the same time I question this feeling. Maybe mixing everything all together creates a sense in which the source cultures become more apolitical, at times even distracting us from the struggles within each culture that are most important.
I have read, and loved reading, Vilém Flusser but didn’t realize he had lived in São Paulo. It reminds me a bit of my fascination with the years Witold Gombrowicz spent in Argentina. Vilém Flusser and Witold Gombrowicz having dinner together is kind of a nice, historically improbable, image. And while I’m being ahistorical, maybe Ernesto Laclau could also join the party. I keep trying to tell myself that things weren’t necessarily better in the past, and what is most important is to try to figure out what can be done starting from exactly now. So perhaps I will end here.
Sincerely,
Jacob Wren
.
The conversation so far: #1, #2, #3
Dear Todd,
I kept trying to answer your second letter but then I keep coming back to something that I didn’t quite get around to in your first. (I promise I won’t remain one whole letter behind for the entirety of our correspondence.)
It was the question you ended with: “Do we make it worse for people around the world we purport to care for by ‘taking the bait’ in these situations? Do we assure that they become the homo sacer?” It was a question that continued to haunt me. Then I was reading the remarkable book May ’68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross and she historically reframed the question for me in ways I felt really get to the heart of the matter.
This reframing has to do with the ‘third-worldist’ discourse of the sixties and the backlash of the ‘anti-third-wordist’ discourse that arrived in the eighties. In the French context, much of this sixties discourse took place in and around François Maspero’s bookstore La Joie de Lire. Kristin Ross writes:
In these years dominated by the decomposition of the European empires, Maspero’s bookstore and press took up the task of representing the image of an exploded world where Europe is no longer the center. And, in so doing, La Joie de Lire became a center of sorts in the lives of many militants, an inevitable stopping place along daily trajectories, a place where, particularly during the Algerian period, any number of censored periodicals, state documents, banned books like Alleg’s La question, as well as foreign, difficult to locate, or ephemeral political pamphlets, could be found downstairs; a place that was not just a meeting place, nor even, as Maspero himself called it, “the meeting place for all the contradictions of the left,” but, quite simply, “the liveliest bookstore in Paris.” It was there that many readers found the tools by which, in the words of Claude Liauzu, “to take into consideration the fact that the West was no longer the measure of everything.”Editions Maspero was the first French press to publish Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre with its preface by Sartre, as well as works by Ben Barka, Giap Cabral, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and others. I think some of the background Ross gives for this endeavor is particularly telling:
…in a 1973 interview [Maspero] recounted a specific event, a great “shock” as he put it, that made him lurch in [this] direction. A student in the mid-1950s in ethnology and a militant member of the Communist Party, Maspero attended the first festival of ethnological film ever screened in Paris. There he watched a Jean Rouch film about hippopotamus hunting among the Dogon. It was less the film itself that jarred Maspero than the interventions by a number of Africans in the audience critiquing the film’s “folkloric” dimensions; they went on to complain about a 1932 law still in place that denied them access to a camera in their own country without the approval of the government. The anecdote is significant in reminding us of one of the most important factors in the development of a third-worldist perspective in postwar France: the sheer number of African, Caribbean, and Asian intellectuals, so many of whom would become loyal clients of La Joie de Lire, living or spending lengthy stays in Paris in those days. For Maspero, it was to this first experience of “meeting” or conjuncture – the film by a French ethnographer and the critique it generated among the “people” it sought to represent – that he later attributed what would become his own commitment to diffusing, making available, a range of works in which people engaged in political struggle represented themselves.If I understand it correctly this third-worldist perspective was a commitment to the fact that struggles and thinking in other parts of the world – Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, etc. – must be given room and support so they could lead the way. And that Western thinking certainly couldn’t claim to know what was best for anyone, since Western imperialism and capitalism was the main thing that must be fought. (I hope I’m not simplifying too much.)
Cutting ahead to the eighties, to the television show “Le procès de Mai” made in 1988 to mark the twentieth anniversary of May ’68 and hosted by former UEC militant, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, Bernard Kouchner. Describing the program, Ross explains that:
Certain topics are not merely neglected but actively targeted for amnesia, erased from the record. This is the case in one of “Le procès de Mai’s” most striking manipulations, one that occurs quite early in the broadcast. Kouchner, who has just praised the ’68 generation’s “daring to dream” in a tone of high self-satisfaction, switches abruptly, and briefly, into the posture of self-criticism. “But we were navel-gazing, we forgot the outside world, we didn’t see what was happening in the rest of the world, we were folded in on ourselves.” He continues much more triumphantly: “We didn’t know what we would discover only in the following years: the third world, misery.”This shift from the third world revolutionary leading a path for Western emancipatory thinking towards the third world victim desperately needing Western help is something that happened before my time, but Kristin Ross documents it at great length in a manner I found utterly convincing. (I was about to quote her for several more pages then thought better of it.) Foreign assistance can be given and foreign assistance can be taken away, but with your own revolutionary struggle the level of agency might vary but there is always a clear position you can claim as your own. As well, with Western aid I so often have a feeling that one hand gives some token offering while the other hand continues to exploit mercilessly. By this point in history so many revolutionary struggles have been assassinated and undermined that it’s hard to believe they are still viable. But what else is there but the knowledge or hope that everything worthwhile returns. And now there’s a new moment of possibility with Syriza in Greece.
In one fell swoop, Kouchner assumes the power to clear away an entire dimension of the movement: its relation to anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in places like Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine, and Cuba, where Kouchner himself travelled in the early 1960s to interview Castro for the Communist student journal Clarté. Kouchner has conducted a massive clearing of the terrain so that he and his friends can “discover” the third world ten years later, like the first colonial explorers of virgin lands. A whole world disappears – the war in Vietnam, the iconography of Che, Mao, and Ho Chi Min, the efforts of editors like Maspero – which is to say a militant or combative third world, so that another can be heroically “discovered” years later: the third world as figured in the Human Rights discourse, of which Kouchner has by that time emerged as one of the principal spokesmen. Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” as the name for an emergent political agency has been essentially reinvented: the new third world is still wretched, but its agency has disappeared, leaving only the victims of famine, flood or authoritarian state apparatuses.
It is now mid-February in Montreal – it is really fucking cold and snow-drenched here, walking home the other day the snow was hitting my face so hard it hurt – so that would most likely make it the time of year in which I find myself most jealous of the fact that you actually had the guts to pick up and move to Brazil. Along with Portugal, Brazil is one of the places I most romanticize in the world. (I’ve been to Portugal but never to Brazil.) (As well, I would also like to go back in time and live within the aisles of La Joie de Lire.) When you speak about your “love for cities that pulse, contract, absorb and accommodate the mobility and dreams of regulars and newcomers alike” I can feel some sort of magic reaching out to me through the computer screen. To this list I might also add: cities that thaw out and melt.
I definitely have more than my fair share of white guilt. I think it’s only this year I’m really trying to think what it would mean to get beyond it a bit. Guilt is certainly conservative if not downright reactionary. Yes, we need to speak out against injustice, but equally important is to find ways to make room for other voices who are also speaking out, perhaps even more intelligently, but for all the usual systematic reasons are not being heard. At a beautiful talk I heard her give last week, Leanne Simpson spoke of “creating communities of co-resistance,” which I felt was especially precise. These are all thoughts I have but I still wonder how far away I am from making them happen. Since, with freeDimensional, you’ve actually done so much more along these lines than me and perhaps, even in this dialog, I should be listening more than talking. I think at the moment I’m slightly possessed by the fervor of the newly converted. ‘The fervor of the newly converted,’ is one of my favorite expressions, if it actually is an expression and not just something I made up. How someone new to a particular topic or question will experience it so much more intensely than those who have lived with it for years, or even for their entire lives.
I have been listening to DJ Haram’s soundcloud page, so full of amazing sounds that cut through this endless winter, mixing Jersey Club with Middle Eastern diasporic instrumentals and so much more. I feel this mix of different cultures and modalities is the future. It is, of course, also the past, present and future. And at the same time I question this feeling. Maybe mixing everything all together creates a sense in which the source cultures become more apolitical, at times even distracting us from the struggles within each culture that are most important.
I have read, and loved reading, Vilém Flusser but didn’t realize he had lived in São Paulo. It reminds me a bit of my fascination with the years Witold Gombrowicz spent in Argentina. Vilém Flusser and Witold Gombrowicz having dinner together is kind of a nice, historically improbable, image. And while I’m being ahistorical, maybe Ernesto Laclau could also join the party. I keep trying to tell myself that things weren’t necessarily better in the past, and what is most important is to try to figure out what can be done starting from exactly now. So perhaps I will end here.
Sincerely,
Jacob Wren
.
January 26, 2015
"It's much darker, much harder, than anything that happened to you…”
.
I’ve been obsessively listening to the new Belle & Sebastian album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It’s strange the way I’ve been listening to it. I keep telling myself that it’s actually not so good and then keep pressing play again and again.
There’s a kind of story I tell myself about the album. I have no idea if this story has any relation to reality or is simply pure projection. The story is that it’s an album made by artists overly conscious that their best work is long behind them, who are contemplating what it now means to continue making work when you find yourself in this particular situation, how to keep pushing oneself now that the initial rush of youth and inspiration is long gone. This probably says much more about me than it does about Belle & Sebastian, as Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance has become a kind of stand in for me for the kinds of artistic question I’ve been asking myself for (at least) the past twenty years.
There are a few lines in the song Allie that always hit me pretty hard: “You made a list of all your heroes / And you thought about what they went through / Yeah, you thought about what they went through / It's much darker, much harder, than anything that happened to you…”
And then I was thinking about when I first started listening to Belle & Sebastian. It was most likely 1996, the year If You’re Feeling Sinister came out. They were starting out and I was also starting out. I think about the other bands I listened back then: Pavement, Palace Brothers, Smog, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, Silver Jews, Jim O'Rourke, Pulp, Squarepusher. Probably so many others I can’t remember at the moment (it's almost twenty years ago now.) And Belle & Sebastian is the only one I’m still listening to, or at least still listening to their more recent material. Actually, I stopped listening to them for about ten years and just came back to them this past summer. So maybe I’ll come back to some of the other stuff sooner or later as well. (I do really like that Bill Callahan song Riding for the Feeling.)
But I feel there’s something in the way Belle & Sebastian have reinvented themselves starting with 2006’s The Life Pursuit. A way of re-inventing themselves that (for me) admits they’re never going to be as good as they were when they started, but that it’s still possible to do something now, and this something has to do with taking as much time as possible to make each record, with quality control, and with using all of the available resources to make the kind of real start-to-finish albums that perhaps people aren’t making anymore. And yet I still can’t help but feel Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance isn’t actully that good, which is another way of experiencing my constant anxiety that my own work is not as good as it used to be, or won’t be as good in the future as what I'm currently doing now.
Something else: many of the songs speak of Stuart Murdoch’s younger experiences with chronic fatigue syndrome and I had similar experiences, perhaps during the exact same years he did.
Then I read the review in Pitchfork and there was this passage that made me almost angry:
I don’t know if there is nearly enough soul, depth, resistance, rebellion or fucked-upness in Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, but perhaps it’s an album made by people who know what they are missing yet continue trying to get there anyway. Which is the least any of us can do.
.
I’ve been obsessively listening to the new Belle & Sebastian album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It’s strange the way I’ve been listening to it. I keep telling myself that it’s actually not so good and then keep pressing play again and again.
There’s a kind of story I tell myself about the album. I have no idea if this story has any relation to reality or is simply pure projection. The story is that it’s an album made by artists overly conscious that their best work is long behind them, who are contemplating what it now means to continue making work when you find yourself in this particular situation, how to keep pushing oneself now that the initial rush of youth and inspiration is long gone. This probably says much more about me than it does about Belle & Sebastian, as Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance has become a kind of stand in for me for the kinds of artistic question I’ve been asking myself for (at least) the past twenty years.
There are a few lines in the song Allie that always hit me pretty hard: “You made a list of all your heroes / And you thought about what they went through / Yeah, you thought about what they went through / It's much darker, much harder, than anything that happened to you…”
And then I was thinking about when I first started listening to Belle & Sebastian. It was most likely 1996, the year If You’re Feeling Sinister came out. They were starting out and I was also starting out. I think about the other bands I listened back then: Pavement, Palace Brothers, Smog, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, Silver Jews, Jim O'Rourke, Pulp, Squarepusher. Probably so many others I can’t remember at the moment (it's almost twenty years ago now.) And Belle & Sebastian is the only one I’m still listening to, or at least still listening to their more recent material. Actually, I stopped listening to them for about ten years and just came back to them this past summer. So maybe I’ll come back to some of the other stuff sooner or later as well. (I do really like that Bill Callahan song Riding for the Feeling.)
But I feel there’s something in the way Belle & Sebastian have reinvented themselves starting with 2006’s The Life Pursuit. A way of re-inventing themselves that (for me) admits they’re never going to be as good as they were when they started, but that it’s still possible to do something now, and this something has to do with taking as much time as possible to make each record, with quality control, and with using all of the available resources to make the kind of real start-to-finish albums that perhaps people aren’t making anymore. And yet I still can’t help but feel Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance isn’t actully that good, which is another way of experiencing my constant anxiety that my own work is not as good as it used to be, or won’t be as good in the future as what I'm currently doing now.
Something else: many of the songs speak of Stuart Murdoch’s younger experiences with chronic fatigue syndrome and I had similar experiences, perhaps during the exact same years he did.
Then I read the review in Pitchfork and there was this passage that made me almost angry:
A flippant comment to Pitchfork about how listeners would rather lose themselves in Nina Simone than Beyoncé shows not just a flagrant misunderstanding of how people listen to Beyoncé, but to the artists they love. He means well, but it faintly stinks of snobbery that's gotten other indie acts in trouble when they've tried to explain their theory of pop with, well, a lot of theory. Tom Krell of How to Dress Well raised hackles when he told Pitchfork he wanted to be "pop, but not populist." But what's wrong with trying to appeal to as many people as possible?What Stuart Murdoch actually said was:
I don’t hear that kind of honesty so much in pop nowadays, because it’s so processed. When I used to listen to records in the '80s as a teenager—by Morrissey or the Slits or the Raincoats—they were singing to you and telling you stuff about life you didn’t know. It was in the lyrics and it was in the feeling. I don’t mean to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but when you have your headphones on and you’re away for a long walk on the countryside, you want to be controlled by Nina Simone—you don’t want to be controlled so much by Beyoncé.So really I just want to say that I feel there is something wrong with ‘trying to appeal to as many people as possible’ if it’s an end in itself, if it takes over. And if you don’t know the difference between Nina Simone and Beyoncé, between what they represent, then something has really gone wrong with the current state of criticism. They are like different worlds and we need different worlds, now more than ever. I have absolute nothing against Beyoncé, I like listening to Beyoncé (as I’ve previous tweeted I really like that part in Drunk in Love where she sings surfboard several times in a row.) But there is a kind of soul, depth, resistance, rebellion and all-too-human fucked-upness in Nina Simone that I hope can still exist today.
I don’t know if there is nearly enough soul, depth, resistance, rebellion or fucked-upness in Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, but perhaps it’s an album made by people who know what they are missing yet continue trying to get there anyway. Which is the least any of us can do.
.
January 22, 2015
Past, Present, Future, Etc.
.
[This text was originally published in The Coming Envelope Issue 8.]
1.
I read this quote from Chantal Akerman. She is speaking about Jean Luc Godard:
2.
As I write, cinema is a little over 100 years old and its relevance already seems to be fading. But perhaps this is only a lull, and some time in the near or distant future cinema will begin its second (or third or forth) life. Writing books, I have often felt that cinema has won, while literature has lost. That reading can never compete with the mesmerizing, dream-state of the screen. But I mean this only for others. For me, I have always preferred to read. In fact, more and more, I find watching movies or television almost unbearable. How can I feel such a strong desire to be contemporary, while simultaneously being so much at odds with my time?
To bring ‘reality’ into a cinematic work is more direct, more straightforward, then attempting to bring reality into a work of literature. You point the camera at a tree, film it, the tree is reality and that reality, at least partly, is now in your film. This might sound stupid, but I’ve always felt this simple fact has so much to do with the energy and allure of film. When I stare at a tree and attempt to describe it in words (something I have no talent for whatsoever), the tree is already filtered both through my own particular subjectivity and through language.
I have always been fascinated by the use of voiceovers in cinema. I see within them a slight anxiety that the image is not enough, that the moving image requires words to add context or generate narrative. The use of background music gives me a similar feeling. Of course, like theatre before it, cinema is an art form that can eat everything: music, stories, pictures, action, the past, present and future. Very simply, I don’t like watching films because I feel I am being manipulated, and that I am far too susceptible to it. I also feel manipulated by books, but never as intensely. It is so much easier to put a book down.
Literature has something to do with time, with changing the nature and experience of time. You spend four years working on a book that takes two weeks to read. You can also spend four years working on a film that takes two hours to watch. But, if its within a single take, three minutes of film takes three minutes to watch, while a single page of a book might take days or weeks to write. Both cinema and literature are ways of playing with time, but within literature I often feel a difference sense of time than the one that most often surrounds me.
3.
I am writing now in the lobby of a cinema. It is 10pm and I have just walked out of a film in the middle. My date is still inside watching and I am sitting here in the lobby. The film was Post Tenebras Lux by the Mexican director Carlos Regayas and it was very good, completely strange and unprecedented, but I had to flee, couldn’t continue. It was as if the stunning pictures in front of me were too hard on my nervous system, inducing panic. So many times in my life I have walked out of films in the middle. In the past ten years I have left in the middle far more often than I’ve made it to the end (and I of course don’t go to films frequently.)
Earlier in Post Tenebras Lux, there was a scene in which a man strangles his dog. The dog is off screen, you do not see anything particularly violent, just the yelps of the dog and a medium close up of the man hitting and swearing. I left just after a later scene where the same man had argued with his wife, stormed out of the room to go feed the dogs. There was a shot of the dogs in their pen just before the man entered. I thought it would be too obvious a choice, on the director’s part, for the man to beat the dogs again. Most of the film so far had been fragmented, one scene barely relating to the next. But the tension I felt at the shot of those dogs, with my nervous system already at its limit, was too much. This slight hint of possible (most likely mild) cinematic violence was too much for me to take, yet people watch considerably more violent films every day, and often seem to take pleasure in the visceral experience of conflict or gore. I am so far from being able to understand this difference I cannot even see it from here, sitting in the empty lobby of the movie theatre, watching the rather loud air conditioning blow a red, semi-transparent table cloth up and then back down over the legs of a folding table.
Post Tenebras Lux is a poetic film (at least the first half of it was) – random scenes of daily life, gorgeously shot, cut together so one is never quite sure how to place oneself in relation to them. As I watched, I had no sense of what might be holding it together. I feel bad walking out, would like to know what happens in the second half and now suspect I never completely will. I am wondering if there are any books I stopped reading in the middle then never picked up again. I have some memory of an Italian novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda that I don’t believe I ever finished. This must be twenty years ago. What’s strange was I thought it was an amazing book but couldn’t make it through. I often see it in bookstores and every time think about trying it again. I’m a different reader now, almost certain I would sail through it with ease.
And now it’s the next day and already I think Post Tenebras Lux wasn’t such a good film after all. In the second half, apparently, it became more narrative, with the dog-killer getting shot by a thief, his family rallying around him. The things I had liked about it, how fragmented and discontinuous it felt, now seem like mere formal constraints. On the level of content, upon further reflection, the film seems conventional, another story about a male jerk who is redeemed. Having not seen the entire film, I cannot think any of this with certainty.
4.
As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like. I spend a great deal of time wondering why this is the case, if it has anything to do with a gradually increasing bitterness that constitutes my inner life. What does it mean to not like other people? That I would prefer to spend the time alone? That I am threatened by them in some way? Or competitive? Life can seem so repetitive: I feel I meet the same people over and over again. And the people I have known for years so rarely surprise me. (I don’t know any of them particularly well.) I wonder if there is some connection between not liking people and not being able to watch movies. The people I don’t like claim to love watching movies, as does practically everyone I meet. Does this love encapsulate some key difference between us? Is their pleasure in watching movies, a pleasure I am unable to share, analogous to a more general, unbridgeable divide?
I find movies manipulative and I find people manipulative. I find movies emotionally draining and I find people emotionally draining. (This reminds me of the following, told to me when I was young to demonstrate a certain kind of logic error: fire engines are red, and communists are red, therefore all communists are fire engines.) All of this has something to do with being too fragile, too vulnerable, somehow not tough enough for the modern world.
5.
My last book, published in 2010, was called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. There was a moment, before I started, when I thought of making it as a movie instead, but then realized I didn’t have the energy or will to make a film, to raise money, to convince producers and distributors, therefore decided it would work better as a book. Revenge Fantasies is about a group of activists who meet once a week to discuss politics. Because they are living in a dystopian near future, there is one rule for their meetings, that they are there only to talk, only to think together, and not to engage in any acts of civil disobedience or direct resistance, because they fear if they were to do so they might be kidnapped by the government, tortured, killed, that their families might come to harm or worse. I was thinking about Argentina during the disappearances, but also about the direction my paranoia reasonably tells me that much of the Western world is rapidly heading.
As I was finishing a first draft I suddenly went into crisis. What gave me the right to make a book set within an activist milieu, a world I’ve had few experiences with and know very little about. I felt I was writing something too disconnected from reality, my fantasy of an activism in which people got together only to speak about ideas and felt no concurrent pressure or responsibility to act. (Talking about ideas has always been one of my strong suits.) I had turned activism into a discursive art, one that played to my immediate strengths but in the larger world changed nothing. However, when the book was finally released, at least some of my fears were alleviated. A few activists I know liked the book, were enthusiastic about it, told me that for them, though absurd, the tone of the meetings rang true. I had captured some of the spirit of how things are organized, of how people behave in such situations, accurate enough, at times, to make them laugh aloud in recognition. I had fired an arrow in the dark and miraculously hit at least one part of the target.
6.
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against ceaselessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical modality.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I keep circling round and round this idea that what politics needs today is a different way of thinking about time, that the problem with Marxism is it was working towards victory in the future, while what we need is more like a victory of living together in mutual loneliness, a victory-in-the-present-as-future-that-will-never-come, which sounds frustrating, and probably is. But how to imagine this impossible present-future hybrid as not frustrating, as something good, something desirable, a struggle and strength worth having, as possible. Trying to imagine the things I am not yet able to imagine.
7.
I wish I were a better activist, a better citizen. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work feels dead and sterile. (Also works that strive towards perfection.) For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
Perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan has often stated that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely clear or simple.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
.
[This text was originally published in The Coming Envelope Issue 8.]
1.
I read this quote from Chantal Akerman. She is speaking about Jean Luc Godard:
You can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright. And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other filmmakers.And I wondered if the same thing was happening to me. I have been thinking so much about blurring reality and fiction. I feel it is important to do so, that it is our zeitgeist, but am never precisely sure why. Why is it important to blur reality and fiction? It has something to do with a lack of reality in our lives. Gilles Deleuze writes:
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.In using these quotes it is as if I were trying to bring a piece, a moment, of outside reality into this text. It is still writing, still words on a page, yet it came from somewhere else, not from me. It is as if I think quotations are a small chunk of the world.
2.
As I write, cinema is a little over 100 years old and its relevance already seems to be fading. But perhaps this is only a lull, and some time in the near or distant future cinema will begin its second (or third or forth) life. Writing books, I have often felt that cinema has won, while literature has lost. That reading can never compete with the mesmerizing, dream-state of the screen. But I mean this only for others. For me, I have always preferred to read. In fact, more and more, I find watching movies or television almost unbearable. How can I feel such a strong desire to be contemporary, while simultaneously being so much at odds with my time?
To bring ‘reality’ into a cinematic work is more direct, more straightforward, then attempting to bring reality into a work of literature. You point the camera at a tree, film it, the tree is reality and that reality, at least partly, is now in your film. This might sound stupid, but I’ve always felt this simple fact has so much to do with the energy and allure of film. When I stare at a tree and attempt to describe it in words (something I have no talent for whatsoever), the tree is already filtered both through my own particular subjectivity and through language.
I have always been fascinated by the use of voiceovers in cinema. I see within them a slight anxiety that the image is not enough, that the moving image requires words to add context or generate narrative. The use of background music gives me a similar feeling. Of course, like theatre before it, cinema is an art form that can eat everything: music, stories, pictures, action, the past, present and future. Very simply, I don’t like watching films because I feel I am being manipulated, and that I am far too susceptible to it. I also feel manipulated by books, but never as intensely. It is so much easier to put a book down.
Literature has something to do with time, with changing the nature and experience of time. You spend four years working on a book that takes two weeks to read. You can also spend four years working on a film that takes two hours to watch. But, if its within a single take, three minutes of film takes three minutes to watch, while a single page of a book might take days or weeks to write. Both cinema and literature are ways of playing with time, but within literature I often feel a difference sense of time than the one that most often surrounds me.
3.
I am writing now in the lobby of a cinema. It is 10pm and I have just walked out of a film in the middle. My date is still inside watching and I am sitting here in the lobby. The film was Post Tenebras Lux by the Mexican director Carlos Regayas and it was very good, completely strange and unprecedented, but I had to flee, couldn’t continue. It was as if the stunning pictures in front of me were too hard on my nervous system, inducing panic. So many times in my life I have walked out of films in the middle. In the past ten years I have left in the middle far more often than I’ve made it to the end (and I of course don’t go to films frequently.)
Earlier in Post Tenebras Lux, there was a scene in which a man strangles his dog. The dog is off screen, you do not see anything particularly violent, just the yelps of the dog and a medium close up of the man hitting and swearing. I left just after a later scene where the same man had argued with his wife, stormed out of the room to go feed the dogs. There was a shot of the dogs in their pen just before the man entered. I thought it would be too obvious a choice, on the director’s part, for the man to beat the dogs again. Most of the film so far had been fragmented, one scene barely relating to the next. But the tension I felt at the shot of those dogs, with my nervous system already at its limit, was too much. This slight hint of possible (most likely mild) cinematic violence was too much for me to take, yet people watch considerably more violent films every day, and often seem to take pleasure in the visceral experience of conflict or gore. I am so far from being able to understand this difference I cannot even see it from here, sitting in the empty lobby of the movie theatre, watching the rather loud air conditioning blow a red, semi-transparent table cloth up and then back down over the legs of a folding table.
Post Tenebras Lux is a poetic film (at least the first half of it was) – random scenes of daily life, gorgeously shot, cut together so one is never quite sure how to place oneself in relation to them. As I watched, I had no sense of what might be holding it together. I feel bad walking out, would like to know what happens in the second half and now suspect I never completely will. I am wondering if there are any books I stopped reading in the middle then never picked up again. I have some memory of an Italian novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda that I don’t believe I ever finished. This must be twenty years ago. What’s strange was I thought it was an amazing book but couldn’t make it through. I often see it in bookstores and every time think about trying it again. I’m a different reader now, almost certain I would sail through it with ease.
And now it’s the next day and already I think Post Tenebras Lux wasn’t such a good film after all. In the second half, apparently, it became more narrative, with the dog-killer getting shot by a thief, his family rallying around him. The things I had liked about it, how fragmented and discontinuous it felt, now seem like mere formal constraints. On the level of content, upon further reflection, the film seems conventional, another story about a male jerk who is redeemed. Having not seen the entire film, I cannot think any of this with certainty.
4.
As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like. I spend a great deal of time wondering why this is the case, if it has anything to do with a gradually increasing bitterness that constitutes my inner life. What does it mean to not like other people? That I would prefer to spend the time alone? That I am threatened by them in some way? Or competitive? Life can seem so repetitive: I feel I meet the same people over and over again. And the people I have known for years so rarely surprise me. (I don’t know any of them particularly well.) I wonder if there is some connection between not liking people and not being able to watch movies. The people I don’t like claim to love watching movies, as does practically everyone I meet. Does this love encapsulate some key difference between us? Is their pleasure in watching movies, a pleasure I am unable to share, analogous to a more general, unbridgeable divide?
I find movies manipulative and I find people manipulative. I find movies emotionally draining and I find people emotionally draining. (This reminds me of the following, told to me when I was young to demonstrate a certain kind of logic error: fire engines are red, and communists are red, therefore all communists are fire engines.) All of this has something to do with being too fragile, too vulnerable, somehow not tough enough for the modern world.
5.
My last book, published in 2010, was called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. There was a moment, before I started, when I thought of making it as a movie instead, but then realized I didn’t have the energy or will to make a film, to raise money, to convince producers and distributors, therefore decided it would work better as a book. Revenge Fantasies is about a group of activists who meet once a week to discuss politics. Because they are living in a dystopian near future, there is one rule for their meetings, that they are there only to talk, only to think together, and not to engage in any acts of civil disobedience or direct resistance, because they fear if they were to do so they might be kidnapped by the government, tortured, killed, that their families might come to harm or worse. I was thinking about Argentina during the disappearances, but also about the direction my paranoia reasonably tells me that much of the Western world is rapidly heading.
As I was finishing a first draft I suddenly went into crisis. What gave me the right to make a book set within an activist milieu, a world I’ve had few experiences with and know very little about. I felt I was writing something too disconnected from reality, my fantasy of an activism in which people got together only to speak about ideas and felt no concurrent pressure or responsibility to act. (Talking about ideas has always been one of my strong suits.) I had turned activism into a discursive art, one that played to my immediate strengths but in the larger world changed nothing. However, when the book was finally released, at least some of my fears were alleviated. A few activists I know liked the book, were enthusiastic about it, told me that for them, though absurd, the tone of the meetings rang true. I had captured some of the spirit of how things are organized, of how people behave in such situations, accurate enough, at times, to make them laugh aloud in recognition. I had fired an arrow in the dark and miraculously hit at least one part of the target.
6.
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against ceaselessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical modality.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I keep circling round and round this idea that what politics needs today is a different way of thinking about time, that the problem with Marxism is it was working towards victory in the future, while what we need is more like a victory of living together in mutual loneliness, a victory-in-the-present-as-future-that-will-never-come, which sounds frustrating, and probably is. But how to imagine this impossible present-future hybrid as not frustrating, as something good, something desirable, a struggle and strength worth having, as possible. Trying to imagine the things I am not yet able to imagine.
7.
I wish I were a better activist, a better citizen. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work feels dead and sterile. (Also works that strive towards perfection.) For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
Perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan has often stated that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely clear or simple.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
.
January 19, 2015
Tangentially yours - Jacob Wren & Todd Lester in conversation, #2
.
Read the first letter: Tangentially yours —Jacob Wren & Todd Lester in conversation, #1
Dear Todd,
Wow, you’ve managed to raise a series of questions and complexes that I literally know almost nothing about. There are many, many things I know almost nothing about, so this is not particularly surprising. What is surprising (to me at least) is that I’m now considering writing something on these topics and posting it on the internet.
I spent almost two weeks reading article after article on the Charlie Hebdo situation and could not quite get my thinking around it completely clear. (I did post a very quick thought about it.) But after reading all those articles I started asking myself a different set of questions. Why was I reading all these articles? What did it matter if I had a complex enough understanding of the situation and what did it matter whether my opinions around the questions raised were correct? Did I simply want to add my perspective to the endless opinion machine that is the internet and if so towards what end?
I then had a different kind of thought: what if tomorrow there was a moratorium on white people writing about Charlie Hebdo? What if suddenly every last sentence one could read about it was written by a person of colour or by someone from a different cultural community? How would the discourse change? I don’t mean this would be a solution to anything. Absolutely anyone is equally capable of being wrong about anything. But I am certain that the conversations would have a substantially different texture and feel. It would simply be a different conversation.
The dominant voices establish so much not only in what is said but in how it is said. They are like the polluted air we read about in pollution warnings but on a daily basis often forget we are breathing.
One of the reasons I read so many articles about Charlie Hebdo is I am completely, completely addicted to Facebook. I am very worried about this addiction because in so many ways it has taken over my life, altered how I see the world. I have less and less real life interactions with people, and since I have always found interacting with people difficult I am frightened to the degree in which this reduction feels like a relief. I mostly have Facebook ‘friends’ I have never met in real life. One of these individuals recently wrote to me that it was great to been in touch with another queer writer. I wrote back saying that unfortunately I had to admit I was a straight white male. (Perhaps many people think I’m queer these days because there’s queer content in my most recent book Polyamorous Love Song.) I don’t think I’ve ever publicly written that I’m a straight white male anywhere before and I honestly don’t like doing so now. Since queer is such an open category, I could simply claim it for myself but I feel, in doing do, I would be claiming a kind of artistic cultural capital that I’m pretty sure I haven’t earned.
A few minutes ago I posted this quote from an interview with Jackie Wang:
I’m trying to come back around to that Charlie Hebdo image of a male staffer with a pencil behind his ear and a Muslim man kissing. The first moment I saw it my very first thought was ‘this is a homophobic cartoon.’ Then I immediately asked myself: How do I know that? Would it make any difference if it was drawn by a gay man or if it was in a queer publication? Can I trust my gut instincts or do I need to know more?
I was sure there was a way for to me to come back around to rape as a war crime and homophobia in other countries, how these things might relate to any given foreign policy. But maybe there’s not. I can’t get past the feeling that my (not well enough informed) thoughts on these matters won’t change anything. But then what will?
I think the main way my thinking has changed in the past few years is I’ve become more and more aware of the degree to which racism is the gasoline of imperialist capitalism. Norway also has oil but if the U.S. were to start bombing Norway I believe the outcry would be much greater. I know I’m not saying anything new but I feel I need to work so much harder to honesty feel this reality. And also to imagine other possibilities.
In the end I fear I’ve avoided writing too much about the things I know nothing about. I’m not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. Writing is strange.
Jacob
.
Read the first letter: Tangentially yours —Jacob Wren & Todd Lester in conversation, #1
Dear Todd,
Wow, you’ve managed to raise a series of questions and complexes that I literally know almost nothing about. There are many, many things I know almost nothing about, so this is not particularly surprising. What is surprising (to me at least) is that I’m now considering writing something on these topics and posting it on the internet.
I spent almost two weeks reading article after article on the Charlie Hebdo situation and could not quite get my thinking around it completely clear. (I did post a very quick thought about it.) But after reading all those articles I started asking myself a different set of questions. Why was I reading all these articles? What did it matter if I had a complex enough understanding of the situation and what did it matter whether my opinions around the questions raised were correct? Did I simply want to add my perspective to the endless opinion machine that is the internet and if so towards what end?
I then had a different kind of thought: what if tomorrow there was a moratorium on white people writing about Charlie Hebdo? What if suddenly every last sentence one could read about it was written by a person of colour or by someone from a different cultural community? How would the discourse change? I don’t mean this would be a solution to anything. Absolutely anyone is equally capable of being wrong about anything. But I am certain that the conversations would have a substantially different texture and feel. It would simply be a different conversation.
The dominant voices establish so much not only in what is said but in how it is said. They are like the polluted air we read about in pollution warnings but on a daily basis often forget we are breathing.
One of the reasons I read so many articles about Charlie Hebdo is I am completely, completely addicted to Facebook. I am very worried about this addiction because in so many ways it has taken over my life, altered how I see the world. I have less and less real life interactions with people, and since I have always found interacting with people difficult I am frightened to the degree in which this reduction feels like a relief. I mostly have Facebook ‘friends’ I have never met in real life. One of these individuals recently wrote to me that it was great to been in touch with another queer writer. I wrote back saying that unfortunately I had to admit I was a straight white male. (Perhaps many people think I’m queer these days because there’s queer content in my most recent book Polyamorous Love Song.) I don’t think I’ve ever publicly written that I’m a straight white male anywhere before and I honestly don’t like doing so now. Since queer is such an open category, I could simply claim it for myself but I feel, in doing do, I would be claiming a kind of artistic cultural capital that I’m pretty sure I haven’t earned.
A few minutes ago I posted this quote from an interview with Jackie Wang:
Perversion is probably more important to me than “orientation.” I’m certainly not a purist when it comes to identity but I do want “queer” to retain its freakish and non-normative edge, and for people to back their aesthetic commitments by embodying that commitment in how they lives their lives. Normal people who write weird shit disappoint me hahahaha.I posted it because I suddenly felt it was about me. I am a ‘normal’ person who writes weird shit. But I’m not sure anyone who knows me would really say I’m normal. I’ve spent most of my life trying to be anything but normal. I certainly feel extremely queer positive and feel a deep love for queer art and politics. Maybe already I’ve gotten a bit lost.
I’m trying to come back around to that Charlie Hebdo image of a male staffer with a pencil behind his ear and a Muslim man kissing. The first moment I saw it my very first thought was ‘this is a homophobic cartoon.’ Then I immediately asked myself: How do I know that? Would it make any difference if it was drawn by a gay man or if it was in a queer publication? Can I trust my gut instincts or do I need to know more?
I was sure there was a way for to me to come back around to rape as a war crime and homophobia in other countries, how these things might relate to any given foreign policy. But maybe there’s not. I can’t get past the feeling that my (not well enough informed) thoughts on these matters won’t change anything. But then what will?
I think the main way my thinking has changed in the past few years is I’ve become more and more aware of the degree to which racism is the gasoline of imperialist capitalism. Norway also has oil but if the U.S. were to start bombing Norway I believe the outcry would be much greater. I know I’m not saying anything new but I feel I need to work so much harder to honesty feel this reality. And also to imagine other possibilities.
In the end I fear I’ve avoided writing too much about the things I know nothing about. I’m not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. Writing is strange.
Jacob
.
January 18, 2015
Manifeste pour la confusion, l'épreuve et les émotions conflictuelles
[Translation by Simon Brown. This text was originally published in Le Merle. You can read the English version here.]
Je fais de l'art depuis toujours et je ne me suis jamais senti aussi perdu qu'en ce moment. Je ne suis pas le seul à me retrouver dans cette situation.
Est-ce que l'art est assez important pour nous? C'est-à-dire, est-ce que le monde dans lequel nous vivons nous importe assez pour que nous reconnaissions enfin que nous sommes devant une impasse? Que nous tournons en rond sans nous en rendre compte? Que ça ne touche plus vraiment la société qui nous entoure et que nous ne sommes pas prêts à nous rendre à l'évidence?
Les remous dans le monde de l'art, les ruptures modernistes, les naissances, les renaissances, les cataclysmes — ce sont des choses du passé. Les tendances de l'heure disparaissent aussitôt. La possibilité de faire quelque chose d'original ne semble plus être possible, ni même souhaitable. Il y a saturation, une surenchère de tout. Une saturation d'art, de théâtre, de performances, de musique, d'installations, de tableaux, de livres, de films, de sites web — et ce, de tous les genres et de toutes les qualités imaginables. On ne pourrait pas passer à travers en un million d'années. De toute façon, la vie est bien trop courte, et le carpe diem proverbial d'autrefois ne semble plus avoir de sens clair. Sommes-nous vraiment obligés de faire semblant?
La politique s'est égarée il y a longtemps — les gouvernements de droite et l'emprise des riches sur le pouvoir constituent notre nouvelle réalité, et les artistes ne semblent pas avoir la volonté de rien y changer. En ce qui concerne l'environnement, il est évident que la planète ne s'en sortira pas. Dans tous les cas, si nous continuons sur la voie actuelle, l'être humain ne s'en sortira pas — il pourrait y avoir quelques rescapés, c'est vrai, mais on ne peut pas faire de l'art pour eux, on se doit de faire de l'art pour nous, maintenant.
Étant donné les réalités du moment présent et celles qui nous attendent, on ne peut plus vraiment affirmer que les gestes audacieux peuvent apporter quoi que ce soit. La confusion et les émotions conflictuelles sont nos nouveaux repères. L'ambivalence dicte tout. Où sont les artistes conscients du caractère futile de leurs actions mais qui continuent quand même; parce qu'ils n'ont pas le choix?
Pour changer les choses, il faut travailler avec les autres. C'est le noyau de tout mouvement artistique et de tout manifeste. Ceux qui travaillent ensemble doivent partager les mêmes convictions et s'entendre sur un objectif commun. L'union fait la force des clans, des clubs, des mafias... pourquoi pas des artistes? Nous, les artistes désorientés et fichus, ne pourrions-nous pas unir nos forces dans le but de trouver une solution? Même si aucune conviction ne nous rassemble, ne pourrions pas nous réunir sous la bannière de l'ambivalence et d'un aveu collectif de vulnérabilité?
(Un artiste qui se concentre sur l'autopromotion est en voie de perdition et risque de ne jamais retrouver le chemin de la signification. J'ai peur de devenir cette personne.)
Je rêve à quelque chose d'effervescent, qui a de la substance, de la valeur, du contenu. Un populisme de gauche qui fonctionne. La fin de l'aliénation, de la société de consommation, de la guerre, de la stupidité. Mais celui qui rêve est endormi, et il faut que je me réveille; que je me rende à l'évidence. Je ne sais pas transformer ces rêves en réalités. Partout des impasses, partout des écueils. Je n'ai aucune idée comment m'en sortir, comment produire quelque chose d'utile ou même de poétique. Je veux être éveillé, mais je ne veux pas perdre de vue ce rêve qui est la seule chose qui m'empêche de devenir fou.
À vrai dire, je voulais écrire un manifeste en guise de confession : une confession d'ambivalence, de sentiments conflictuels, du fait de me vendre, de l'humiliation, du cynisme, de la confusion, du fait que je n'arrive pas à distinguer mes amis de mes adversaires. Une confession de tout, pour voir si d'autres qui se sentent comme moi. Pour voir si la franchise et la confusion peuvent avoir une valeur quelconque dans notre monde. Pour voir si la probité existe toujours. Pour voir s'il existe toujours de vraies choses, des choses utiles.
Un artiste n'a pas besoin de convictions. Un artiste n'est pas obligé de connaître son parcours d'avance. Il lui faut plutôt du talent, de la sincérité, d'une communauté, de l'expérience de vie — des choses tout à fait compatibles avec le fait d'être perdu.
(Je voudrais un jour écrire un autre manifeste pour dénoncer l'art qui n'a pas de rapport direct avec la vraie vie. Mais je n'arrive pas à entrer dans ce qu'on appelle la vie. Je suis un cas extrême.)
Normalement on n'écrit pas des manifestes sur ce genre de choses. Mais peut-être qu'il est temps de commencer à le faire.
.
Je fais de l'art depuis toujours et je ne me suis jamais senti aussi perdu qu'en ce moment. Je ne suis pas le seul à me retrouver dans cette situation.
Est-ce que l'art est assez important pour nous? C'est-à-dire, est-ce que le monde dans lequel nous vivons nous importe assez pour que nous reconnaissions enfin que nous sommes devant une impasse? Que nous tournons en rond sans nous en rendre compte? Que ça ne touche plus vraiment la société qui nous entoure et que nous ne sommes pas prêts à nous rendre à l'évidence?
Les remous dans le monde de l'art, les ruptures modernistes, les naissances, les renaissances, les cataclysmes — ce sont des choses du passé. Les tendances de l'heure disparaissent aussitôt. La possibilité de faire quelque chose d'original ne semble plus être possible, ni même souhaitable. Il y a saturation, une surenchère de tout. Une saturation d'art, de théâtre, de performances, de musique, d'installations, de tableaux, de livres, de films, de sites web — et ce, de tous les genres et de toutes les qualités imaginables. On ne pourrait pas passer à travers en un million d'années. De toute façon, la vie est bien trop courte, et le carpe diem proverbial d'autrefois ne semble plus avoir de sens clair. Sommes-nous vraiment obligés de faire semblant?
La politique s'est égarée il y a longtemps — les gouvernements de droite et l'emprise des riches sur le pouvoir constituent notre nouvelle réalité, et les artistes ne semblent pas avoir la volonté de rien y changer. En ce qui concerne l'environnement, il est évident que la planète ne s'en sortira pas. Dans tous les cas, si nous continuons sur la voie actuelle, l'être humain ne s'en sortira pas — il pourrait y avoir quelques rescapés, c'est vrai, mais on ne peut pas faire de l'art pour eux, on se doit de faire de l'art pour nous, maintenant.
Étant donné les réalités du moment présent et celles qui nous attendent, on ne peut plus vraiment affirmer que les gestes audacieux peuvent apporter quoi que ce soit. La confusion et les émotions conflictuelles sont nos nouveaux repères. L'ambivalence dicte tout. Où sont les artistes conscients du caractère futile de leurs actions mais qui continuent quand même; parce qu'ils n'ont pas le choix?
Pour changer les choses, il faut travailler avec les autres. C'est le noyau de tout mouvement artistique et de tout manifeste. Ceux qui travaillent ensemble doivent partager les mêmes convictions et s'entendre sur un objectif commun. L'union fait la force des clans, des clubs, des mafias... pourquoi pas des artistes? Nous, les artistes désorientés et fichus, ne pourrions-nous pas unir nos forces dans le but de trouver une solution? Même si aucune conviction ne nous rassemble, ne pourrions pas nous réunir sous la bannière de l'ambivalence et d'un aveu collectif de vulnérabilité?
(Un artiste qui se concentre sur l'autopromotion est en voie de perdition et risque de ne jamais retrouver le chemin de la signification. J'ai peur de devenir cette personne.)
Je rêve à quelque chose d'effervescent, qui a de la substance, de la valeur, du contenu. Un populisme de gauche qui fonctionne. La fin de l'aliénation, de la société de consommation, de la guerre, de la stupidité. Mais celui qui rêve est endormi, et il faut que je me réveille; que je me rende à l'évidence. Je ne sais pas transformer ces rêves en réalités. Partout des impasses, partout des écueils. Je n'ai aucune idée comment m'en sortir, comment produire quelque chose d'utile ou même de poétique. Je veux être éveillé, mais je ne veux pas perdre de vue ce rêve qui est la seule chose qui m'empêche de devenir fou.
À vrai dire, je voulais écrire un manifeste en guise de confession : une confession d'ambivalence, de sentiments conflictuels, du fait de me vendre, de l'humiliation, du cynisme, de la confusion, du fait que je n'arrive pas à distinguer mes amis de mes adversaires. Une confession de tout, pour voir si d'autres qui se sentent comme moi. Pour voir si la franchise et la confusion peuvent avoir une valeur quelconque dans notre monde. Pour voir si la probité existe toujours. Pour voir s'il existe toujours de vraies choses, des choses utiles.
Un artiste n'a pas besoin de convictions. Un artiste n'est pas obligé de connaître son parcours d'avance. Il lui faut plutôt du talent, de la sincérité, d'une communauté, de l'expérience de vie — des choses tout à fait compatibles avec le fait d'être perdu.
(Je voudrais un jour écrire un autre manifeste pour dénoncer l'art qui n'a pas de rapport direct avec la vraie vie. Mais je n'arrive pas à entrer dans ce qu'on appelle la vie. Je suis un cas extrême.)
Normalement on n'écrit pas des manifestes sur ce genre de choses. Mais peut-être qu'il est temps de commencer à le faire.
.
Kristen Ross on October 17, 1961
.
On October 17, 1961, the first mass demonstration of the 1960s occurred, organized by the FLN to protest a recent curfew set by the prefect of police that prohibited Algerians in the Paris region from being on the street after 8:30 PM. Informed in advance of the demonstration, the police, along with the CRS and the mobile gendarmerie, are armed with bidules, a longer version of the matraque with greater leverage and range, capable of breaking a skull open in a single swing when adroitly applied. The police have also been virtually exonerated in advance of any “police excesses” that might occur; in the preceding weeks Papon has visited the various commissariats, imparting these messages: “Settle your affairs with the Algerian yourselves. Whatever happens, you’re covered,” and “For one blow, give then back ten.” And, to overcome the scruples of certain more hesitant members of his forces, he adds: “You don’t need to complicate things. Even if the Algerians are not armed, you should think of them always as armed.”
The Algerians – between thirty and forty-thousand men, women and children – are, in fact, unarmed, and the demonstration is peaceful. Many of the Algerians are wearing their best “Sunday” clothes, in the interest of impressing the French and the international communities with their peaceful motives. Nevertheless, police open fire almost immediately. Confrontations occur simultaneously throughout the city wherever the Algerians are concentrated. Police “combat groups” charge the crowd in the main thoroughfares and boulevards, while other police ranks stand behind in the side streets, blocking escape routes and splitting the crowd into small pockets of two or three individuals, each of whom is then surrounded by police, and men and women are methodically clubbed. Along the Seine, police lift unconscious and already dead or dying Algerians and toss them into the river. A document published soon after the massacre by a group of progressive police describes what went on in one part of the city:
On the night of October 17, the police publish a communiqué stating that the Algerians had fired on police, who were then forced to return fire. The official death count, originally two, was revised the next morning by Papon’s office to three. The almost total news blackout that surrounded the event makes it very hard to determine the exact number of Algerians – for no police were injured – who actually died. Most knowledgeable estimates put the number at around two hundred.
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
.
On October 17, 1961, the first mass demonstration of the 1960s occurred, organized by the FLN to protest a recent curfew set by the prefect of police that prohibited Algerians in the Paris region from being on the street after 8:30 PM. Informed in advance of the demonstration, the police, along with the CRS and the mobile gendarmerie, are armed with bidules, a longer version of the matraque with greater leverage and range, capable of breaking a skull open in a single swing when adroitly applied. The police have also been virtually exonerated in advance of any “police excesses” that might occur; in the preceding weeks Papon has visited the various commissariats, imparting these messages: “Settle your affairs with the Algerian yourselves. Whatever happens, you’re covered,” and “For one blow, give then back ten.” And, to overcome the scruples of certain more hesitant members of his forces, he adds: “You don’t need to complicate things. Even if the Algerians are not armed, you should think of them always as armed.”
The Algerians – between thirty and forty-thousand men, women and children – are, in fact, unarmed, and the demonstration is peaceful. Many of the Algerians are wearing their best “Sunday” clothes, in the interest of impressing the French and the international communities with their peaceful motives. Nevertheless, police open fire almost immediately. Confrontations occur simultaneously throughout the city wherever the Algerians are concentrated. Police “combat groups” charge the crowd in the main thoroughfares and boulevards, while other police ranks stand behind in the side streets, blocking escape routes and splitting the crowd into small pockets of two or three individuals, each of whom is then surrounded by police, and men and women are methodically clubbed. Along the Seine, police lift unconscious and already dead or dying Algerians and toss them into the river. A document published soon after the massacre by a group of progressive police describes what went on in one part of the city:
At one end of the Neuilly Bridge, police troops, and on the other, CRS riot police, slowly moved toward one another. All the Algerians caught in this immense trap were struck down and systematically thrown into the Seine. At least a hundred of them underwent this treatment. The bodies of the victims floated to the surface daily and bore traces of blows and strangulation.Some of the arrested men and women are taken to the courtyard of the prefecture of police where, as Pierre Vidal-Baquet reports, “If I believe the testimony of one policeman, gathered immediately after the event by Paul Thibaud and that I’ve often had occasion to evoke since then, Papon had several dozen Algerians beaten [matraqué] to death in front of his eyes in the courtyard of the police prefecture.” Some six thousand others are taken to several sports stadiums reserved by police for that purpose. In all of these places, people die while in custody – of wounds they had already received or of new blows administered by police “welcoming committees” arranged in a kind of gauntlet outside the entrance to the sports arenas.
On the night of October 17, the police publish a communiqué stating that the Algerians had fired on police, who were then forced to return fire. The official death count, originally two, was revised the next morning by Papon’s office to three. The almost total news blackout that surrounded the event makes it very hard to determine the exact number of Algerians – for no police were injured – who actually died. Most knowledgeable estimates put the number at around two hundred.
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
.
January 14, 2015
I don't know...
.
I don't know if Charlie Hebdo is racist or not, because I don't read French and don't have the French cultural background to properly judge the situation. But more and more I realize this cannot be the point. The point is that the Arab world is the true scapegoat of our time, that history teaches us there is no end to what might be done to any given scapegoat, to how horrifying it can get (if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not already horrifying enough) and that worldwide Islamophobia is on the rise in ways I find extremely frightening.
I have now read far too many articles on the topic but here are three I found convincing:
Charlie Hebdo and the hypocrisy of pencils
Charlie Hebdo and the Limits of the Republic
“Charlie Hebdo”, not racist? If you say so…
I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but this article has made me (continue to) further rethink my position:
Paris, 2015
.
I don't know if Charlie Hebdo is racist or not, because I don't read French and don't have the French cultural background to properly judge the situation. But more and more I realize this cannot be the point. The point is that the Arab world is the true scapegoat of our time, that history teaches us there is no end to what might be done to any given scapegoat, to how horrifying it can get (if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not already horrifying enough) and that worldwide Islamophobia is on the rise in ways I find extremely frightening.
I have now read far too many articles on the topic but here are three I found convincing:
Charlie Hebdo and the hypocrisy of pencils
Charlie Hebdo and the Limits of the Republic
“Charlie Hebdo”, not racist? If you say so…
I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but this article has made me (continue to) further rethink my position:
Paris, 2015
.
January 12, 2015
Freedom of speech...
.
Freedom of speech is most often the freedom to be celebrated for saying things that support the status quo and to be ignored for saying things that challenge it.
.
Freedom of speech is most often the freedom to be celebrated for saying things that support the status quo and to be ignored for saying things that challenge it.
.
January 5, 2015
We’re finally necessary: Kristen Ross on the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts
.
For May ’68 itself was not an artistic moment. It was an event that transpired amid very few images; French television, after all, was on strike. Drawings, political cartoons – by Siné, Willem, Cabu, and others – proliferated; photographs were taken. Only the most “immediate” of artistic techniques, it seems, could keep up with the speed of events. But to say this is already to point out how much politics was exerting a magnetic pull on culture, yanking it out of its specific and specialized realm. For what does it mean that art should suddenly see its purpose as that of keeping apace with events, with achieving a complete contemporaneity with the present and with what is happening around it?
The incommensurability or asymmetry that seems to govern the relation between culture and politics holds true for the ’68 period in France. In fact, that incommensurability is what the event is about: the failure of cultural solutions to provide an answer, the invention and deployment of political forms in direct contestation with existing cultural forms, the exigency of political practices over cultural ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the experience of the Beaux-Arts students who occupied their school in mid-May 1968, proclaimed it the revolutionary Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, and began producing, at breakneck speed, the posters supporting the strike that covered the walls of Paris during those months. The “message” of the majority of posters, stark and direct, was the certification, and at times the imperative, that whatever it was that was happening – the interruption, the strike, the “moving train” – that it simply continue: “Continuons le combat.” “La grève continue.” “Contre offensive: la grève continue.” “Chauffeurs de taxi: la lute continue.” “Maine Montparnasse: la lute continue.” Nothing, that is, in the message aspires to a level of “representing” what was occurring; the goal, rather, is to be at one with – at the same time with, contemporary with – whatever was occurring. Speed, a speedy technique, was of the essence; students learned this soon enough when they abandoned lithography early on because, at ten to fifteen printings an hour, it was far too slow to respond to the needs of a mass movement. Serigraphy, which was light and easy to use, yielded up to 250 printings an hour. Speed and flexible mediums facilitated the absolute interpenetration of art and event achieved by the posters, but speed is not the most important factor in rendering art capable of living the temporality of an event. Writing thirty years later, one of the militants active in the Atelier populaire, Gérard Fromanger, recalls the genesis of the posters in a brief memoir. His title, “Art Is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art,” goes far in giving a sense of the dizzying opening created when the social refuses to stay “out there,” distinct from art, or when art achieves presentation, rather than representation:
“Bourgeois culture,” reads the statement that accompanied the founding of the Atelier populaire, “separates and isolates artists from other workers by according them a privileged status. Privilege encloses the artist in an invisible prison. We have decided to transform what we are in society.”
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
.
For May ’68 itself was not an artistic moment. It was an event that transpired amid very few images; French television, after all, was on strike. Drawings, political cartoons – by Siné, Willem, Cabu, and others – proliferated; photographs were taken. Only the most “immediate” of artistic techniques, it seems, could keep up with the speed of events. But to say this is already to point out how much politics was exerting a magnetic pull on culture, yanking it out of its specific and specialized realm. For what does it mean that art should suddenly see its purpose as that of keeping apace with events, with achieving a complete contemporaneity with the present and with what is happening around it?
The incommensurability or asymmetry that seems to govern the relation between culture and politics holds true for the ’68 period in France. In fact, that incommensurability is what the event is about: the failure of cultural solutions to provide an answer, the invention and deployment of political forms in direct contestation with existing cultural forms, the exigency of political practices over cultural ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the experience of the Beaux-Arts students who occupied their school in mid-May 1968, proclaimed it the revolutionary Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, and began producing, at breakneck speed, the posters supporting the strike that covered the walls of Paris during those months. The “message” of the majority of posters, stark and direct, was the certification, and at times the imperative, that whatever it was that was happening – the interruption, the strike, the “moving train” – that it simply continue: “Continuons le combat.” “La grève continue.” “Contre offensive: la grève continue.” “Chauffeurs de taxi: la lute continue.” “Maine Montparnasse: la lute continue.” Nothing, that is, in the message aspires to a level of “representing” what was occurring; the goal, rather, is to be at one with – at the same time with, contemporary with – whatever was occurring. Speed, a speedy technique, was of the essence; students learned this soon enough when they abandoned lithography early on because, at ten to fifteen printings an hour, it was far too slow to respond to the needs of a mass movement. Serigraphy, which was light and easy to use, yielded up to 250 printings an hour. Speed and flexible mediums facilitated the absolute interpenetration of art and event achieved by the posters, but speed is not the most important factor in rendering art capable of living the temporality of an event. Writing thirty years later, one of the militants active in the Atelier populaire, Gérard Fromanger, recalls the genesis of the posters in a brief memoir. His title, “Art Is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art,” goes far in giving a sense of the dizzying opening created when the social refuses to stay “out there,” distinct from art, or when art achieves presentation, rather than representation:
May ’68 was that. Artists no longer in their studios, they no longer work, they can’t work any more because the real is more powerful than their inventions. Naturally, they become militants, me among them. We create the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts and we make posters. We’re there night and day making posters. The whole country is on strike and we’ve never worked harder in our lives. We’re finally necessary.Fromanger describes in greater detail the stages in the dismantling of art and artists during May: how, as the mass demonstrations got under way in mid-May, art students first “got down off their horses to gather the flowers,” as the Maoists would say, how they left art behind as they ran from demo to demo. “We artists had been in the movement for ten days, we run into each other at the demos. We had separated from everything we had before. We don’t sleep in the studios… we live in the streets, in the occupied spaces… We no longer paint, we don’t think about it anymore.” The next phase describes a retreat to familiar spaces: “We painters say to ourselves that we have to do something at Beaux-Arts, that we can’t let the buildings be empty, closed up.” An old lithograph machine is located; the first poster, USINE-UNIVERSITE-UNION, is produced immediately. The thought at that point is for someone to run the thirty copies down to a gallery on the rue Dragon to sell them to help the movement. But it is at this point that “the real,” in the shape of the movement, literally intervenes, short-circuiting the steps that art must take to be art in bourgeois culture and hijacking it, so to speak, off that path, bringing it into the now. There is no time, it seems, for the art object to remain a commodity, even one that had been redirected in the service of the movement. On the way to the gallery, the copies are snatched out of the arms of the student carrying them and plastered immediately on the first available wall. The poster becomes a poster.
“Bourgeois culture,” reads the statement that accompanied the founding of the Atelier populaire, “separates and isolates artists from other workers by according them a privileged status. Privilege encloses the artist in an invisible prison. We have decided to transform what we are in society.”
- Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives
.
January 4, 2015
Two year attempt...
.
In my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don't want people to know about my life.
.
In my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don't want people to know about my life.
.
December 30, 2014
Hugo Ball Quote
.
A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins.
- Hugo Ball
.
A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins.
- Hugo Ball
.
December 29, 2014
I look at my life and think...
.
I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness
I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness but
I have no one to blame but myself
because I can’t really deal with others
but lord knows I try
I look at my life and think:
is the loneliness I feel the
loneliness I’m actually experiencing
or am I feeling something different
than my experience, am I feeling
a fantasy of what is or isn’t possible
and what is or isn’t possible
for me to feel
I dissect the phrase: I look at my life
I look at my life instead of living it
there is summer rain and winter rain
my poems aren’t as complex
as some of the other poems I read
but I like their simplicity
all those years ago I decided
I didn’t want to be a poet anymore
all those years ago I decided
to be lonely or not to be lonely
still doing that as well
.
I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness
I look at my life and think:
I’m dying of loneliness but
I have no one to blame but myself
because I can’t really deal with others
but lord knows I try
I look at my life and think:
is the loneliness I feel the
loneliness I’m actually experiencing
or am I feeling something different
than my experience, am I feeling
a fantasy of what is or isn’t possible
and what is or isn’t possible
for me to feel
I dissect the phrase: I look at my life
I look at my life instead of living it
there is summer rain and winter rain
my poems aren’t as complex
as some of the other poems I read
but I like their simplicity
all those years ago I decided
I didn’t want to be a poet anymore
all those years ago I decided
to be lonely or not to be lonely
still doing that as well
.
December 18, 2014
Town Crier's first ever double feature review
.
Excited that Polyamorous Love Song is the recipient of the Town Crier's first ever double feature review:
When Filmmakers Don’t Make Movies: A Review of Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song / Sex, Guns, Revolutionary Orgies, and the Problem With Forgetting About Propaganda / by André Forget
“Artists are Lepers”: Another Review of Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren / The Winnipeg Review Misses Wren’s Uncanny Cultural Realism / by Domenica Martinello
.
Excited that Polyamorous Love Song is the recipient of the Town Crier's first ever double feature review:
When Filmmakers Don’t Make Movies: A Review of Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song / Sex, Guns, Revolutionary Orgies, and the Problem With Forgetting About Propaganda / by André Forget
“Artists are Lepers”: Another Review of Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren / The Winnipeg Review Misses Wren’s Uncanny Cultural Realism / by Domenica Martinello
.
December 8, 2014
Two end of year mentions for Polyamorous Love Song
.
Saelan Twerdy includes Polyamorous Love Song in his 2014 Staff Picks:
For what it's worth, I finished this book in the hospital during my partner's 48-hour labour. Even if I'd read it in more prosaic circumstances, though, I don't think I'd forget it. Jacob Wren is an endlessly fascinating individual: no writer I can think of is so sincere in their pursuit of questions about the value of art and its relation to life. Like most of his writing, Polyamorous Love Song straddles the boundary between essay and fiction, art and literature (Wren is also active as a performance artist). He asks himself difficult questions about why we make art and what we hope it can do while also offering a rollicking, sometimes absurdist sci-fi adventure featuring an organization of terrorists in mascot costumes and a virus that only kills political reactionaries. It's a book that defies boundaries and categorization: Wren's art is total or not at all.
Polyamorous Love Song is also one of The Globe and Mail's best 100 books of the year:
An experimental novel with interests as multiple as its title suggests: art, anarchy, freedom, but most particularly, the power of dreams. Dark yet hopeful and unabashedly avant-garde.
.
Saelan Twerdy includes Polyamorous Love Song in his 2014 Staff Picks:
For what it's worth, I finished this book in the hospital during my partner's 48-hour labour. Even if I'd read it in more prosaic circumstances, though, I don't think I'd forget it. Jacob Wren is an endlessly fascinating individual: no writer I can think of is so sincere in their pursuit of questions about the value of art and its relation to life. Like most of his writing, Polyamorous Love Song straddles the boundary between essay and fiction, art and literature (Wren is also active as a performance artist). He asks himself difficult questions about why we make art and what we hope it can do while also offering a rollicking, sometimes absurdist sci-fi adventure featuring an organization of terrorists in mascot costumes and a virus that only kills political reactionaries. It's a book that defies boundaries and categorization: Wren's art is total or not at all.
Polyamorous Love Song is also one of The Globe and Mail's best 100 books of the year:
An experimental novel with interests as multiple as its title suggests: art, anarchy, freedom, but most particularly, the power of dreams. Dark yet hopeful and unabashedly avant-garde.
.
December 5, 2014
Some favourite things from my 2014
.
(As is often the case with me, many of these things were released prior to 2014. I have listed them in the order they gradually came to me.)
Music
Oddisee – Tangible Dream
Ratking – So It Goes
Leikeli47 - Lk-47 Pt. II
Little Simz – E.D.G.E
Pearls Negras – Biggie Apple Mixtape
Noname – what the fuck is a noname gypsy
Karol Conka – Batuk Freak
Cate le Bon – Mug Museum
Planningtorock – All Love’s Legal
Destroyer – Five Spanish Songs
1970s Algerian Folk & Pop
Books
Forgery – Amira Hanafi
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination – Sarah Schulman
Islands of Decolonial Love – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis
Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge – Renee Gladman
The Book of the Dead – Kgebetli Moele
The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
Thou – Aisha Sasha John
Records Ruin the Landscape – David Grubbs
The Story of My Accident Is Ours – Rachel Levitsky
History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom – Oxana Timofeeva
The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings of Claudia La Rocco
Karmic Traces – Eliot Weinberger
So Far From God – Veronica Gonzalez-Peña
Films
Concerning Violence – Göran Hugo Olsson
Seven Blind Women Filmmakers – Mohammad Shirvani
.
(As is often the case with me, many of these things were released prior to 2014. I have listed them in the order they gradually came to me.)
Music
Oddisee – Tangible Dream
Ratking – So It Goes
Leikeli47 - Lk-47 Pt. II
Little Simz – E.D.G.E
Pearls Negras – Biggie Apple Mixtape
Noname – what the fuck is a noname gypsy
Karol Conka – Batuk Freak
Cate le Bon – Mug Museum
Planningtorock – All Love’s Legal
Destroyer – Five Spanish Songs
1970s Algerian Folk & Pop
Books
Forgery – Amira Hanafi
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination – Sarah Schulman
Islands of Decolonial Love – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis
Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge – Renee Gladman
The Book of the Dead – Kgebetli Moele
The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
Thou – Aisha Sasha John
Records Ruin the Landscape – David Grubbs
The Story of My Accident Is Ours – Rachel Levitsky
History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom – Oxana Timofeeva
The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings of Claudia La Rocco
Karmic Traces – Eliot Weinberger
So Far From God – Veronica Gonzalez-Peña
Films
Concerning Violence – Göran Hugo Olsson
Seven Blind Women Filmmakers – Mohammad Shirvani
.
November 28, 2014
Black Lives Matter - TORONTO PEACEFUL PROTEST ACTION
.
I was walking towards the "Black Lives Matter - TORONTO PEACEFUL PROTEST ACTION" earlier tonight. I was a bit late. Up ahead I heard chanting. From several blocks away I could already tell it was a good turn out. So many voices in the distance, chanting in unison so loudly, so much pure energy. But I couldn't quite make out what they were saying until I got closer, then suddenly heard it clearly: Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter... And I just started crying, tears started streaming down my face uncontrollably. I don't know when was the last time I cried that hard. Such a simple, basic, necessary demand and yet so far from the reality of the world that surrounds us. I cried the entire rally. The chant kept coming back. Hoping to god (and I'm not in any way a believer) that this is only the very beginning of a long and successful fight. I didn't know about Justice For Jermaine Carby. But now I do.
.
I was walking towards the "Black Lives Matter - TORONTO PEACEFUL PROTEST ACTION" earlier tonight. I was a bit late. Up ahead I heard chanting. From several blocks away I could already tell it was a good turn out. So many voices in the distance, chanting in unison so loudly, so much pure energy. But I couldn't quite make out what they were saying until I got closer, then suddenly heard it clearly: Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter... And I just started crying, tears started streaming down my face uncontrollably. I don't know when was the last time I cried that hard. Such a simple, basic, necessary demand and yet so far from the reality of the world that surrounds us. I cried the entire rally. The chant kept coming back. Hoping to god (and I'm not in any way a believer) that this is only the very beginning of a long and successful fight. I didn't know about Justice For Jermaine Carby. But now I do.
.
November 15, 2014
November 14, 2014
Roger Fry Quote
.
And here we touch on a curious economic accident, the importance of which as a determining condition of art production has never been properly emphasized. In modern life, great works of art generally have been, and I suspect, almost must be, produced in defiance of the tastes and predilections of society at large. The artist, therefore, except in those cases where he possesses inherited means, must be able to live and function on an extremely small sum. He must exist almost as sparrows do, by picking up the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. What wonder, then, that periods of artistic creation and impotence are as hard to predict or account for at the weather itself! And yet there is a certain irony in the fact that every civilization is ultimately judged by what of spiritual value it has contributed to the human patrimony. It is only at each present moment that this appears to be of so little consequence as to be negligible.
– Roger Fry
.
And here we touch on a curious economic accident, the importance of which as a determining condition of art production has never been properly emphasized. In modern life, great works of art generally have been, and I suspect, almost must be, produced in defiance of the tastes and predilections of society at large. The artist, therefore, except in those cases where he possesses inherited means, must be able to live and function on an extremely small sum. He must exist almost as sparrows do, by picking up the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. What wonder, then, that periods of artistic creation and impotence are as hard to predict or account for at the weather itself! And yet there is a certain irony in the fact that every civilization is ultimately judged by what of spiritual value it has contributed to the human patrimony. It is only at each present moment that this appears to be of so little consequence as to be negligible.
– Roger Fry
.
November 13, 2014
Some Short Quotes
.
I dedicate every pore to what’s here.
– Ikkyū
Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
– E.M. Cioran
Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I make art in order to give other people my problems.
– Mike Kelley
Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?
– Anne Sexton
Theory is good, but it does not prevent things from existing.
– Jean-Martin Charcot
How long can a person recover before it becomes another form of not being?
– Claudia La Rocco
I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
– Allen Ginsberg
There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.
– Etel Adnan
The artists I work with turn to emotion because this is where ideology does its most devastating work.
– Jennifer Doyle
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.
– Samuel R. Delany
He loved the moment when a bouncing ping-pong ball stops bouncing, but one doesn't know if it has finally come to rest.
– Eliot Weinberger on Hans Faverey
To be making something as yet unformed, unknown – to be living in a deferred moment – is the most seductive way to exist.
– Moyra Davey
The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.
– Karl Marx
But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
– Will Self
If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.
– Vincent van Gogh
.
I dedicate every pore to what’s here.
– Ikkyū
Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
– E.M. Cioran
Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I make art in order to give other people my problems.
– Mike Kelley
Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?
– Anne Sexton
Theory is good, but it does not prevent things from existing.
– Jean-Martin Charcot
How long can a person recover before it becomes another form of not being?
– Claudia La Rocco
I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
– Allen Ginsberg
There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.
– Etel Adnan
The artists I work with turn to emotion because this is where ideology does its most devastating work.
– Jennifer Doyle
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.
– Samuel R. Delany
He loved the moment when a bouncing ping-pong ball stops bouncing, but one doesn't know if it has finally come to rest.
– Eliot Weinberger on Hans Faverey
To be making something as yet unformed, unknown – to be living in a deferred moment – is the most seductive way to exist.
– Moyra Davey
The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.
– Karl Marx
But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
– Will Self
If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.
– Vincent van Gogh
.
November 12, 2014
Three passages from Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Three passages from Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:
*
etienne gets out the lines and in two minutes we know we’re on the school because we’re pulling in mackerel easy. he watches as i hold the hook and snap the fish into the garbage pail, which is my reveal. it’s sunny and it’s windy and it’s perfect and the arms of the day are wide open and no one has to be anywhere. i see a northern gannet and i love gannets because they can disconnect their wings before they plummet into the sea after a fish. imagine disconnecting a body part! the gannet swims over to the boat smelling the fish blood and etienne hands the gannet a fish and says “the bird is my family, all of this, the fish, the seals, the water – this is my family,” which is his reveal.
our eyes meet because now he has my attention. i walk over and hug him and he is the kind of person that can give and receive a real hug and i’m not one of those people because my alarm system goes off when people touch me and I freeze up and shut down. this time that doesn’t happen. i decide to kiss him and it’s perfect and easy and we make out void of awkwardness but with a clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined ending, then he drives back to shore while i gut the fish in the back of the boat using his terrifyingly sharp knife, feeding the guts to the gulls and the gannets. he drops me off on the dock. we thank each other. we say goodbye and i pay attention to each step, instead of looking back.
*
old lady levi then asked ira to speak and tell them about the project. he lit a cigarette and he told them three things. first, that the band council had asked us to help the elders document all the ways they related to the land in the past and in contemporary times. second, that throughout the project, the elders would be in charge. they would make all of the decisions because as far as he was concerned, they were the experts. and third that the final document could be whatever they wanted.
then he sat down.
old lady levi stood up, thanked us and asked us to leave. she opened the living room door, watched us as we passed through it, and then told us to wait outside until she reappeared.
we did. for probably two hours.
we heard a lot of talking. some praying. some singing. some more talking.
ira smoked. i drank watery maxwell house out of a styrofoam cup, and then bit teeth marks all around the top edge, wondering what was going to happen to me when i hit the end of the prozac prescription no one was monitoring.
then we heard old lady levi’s footsteps. she paused on the other side of the door. i imagined her hand on the handle, hesitating and then opening it.
we stood up.
she looked through us and said, “come back next month, maybe a monday next time. monday is better.” she went back into the room and shut the door.
ira lit another cigarette, did up his coat, and walked outside, remotely starting the car on the way. it was nearly four, and the sun was sinking below the stand of black spruce out my window. we retraced our morning’s steps back to thunder bay. a month later, this time on a monday, we went back, and we kept going back for two years, sometimes moving the meeting twice a month.
i redrew the maps those old ones kept tucked away in their bones. i took these notes:
how to pluck the feathers off a goose
how to roast a duck on an open fire
how to block the cnr lines
how to live as if it mattered
*
bringing up trauma from my life made therapy-lady cry, especially if it was “aboriginal” themed. she said “aboriginal” a lot, and i knew she was trying to be respectful so i planned on letting it slide until the breaking point and then i was going to let her have it in one spiralling long manifesto. therapy-lady liked to compare my life to refuges from war-torn countries who hid their kids in closets when airplanes flew over their houses. this was her limit of understanding on colonized intimacy. she wasn’t completely wrong, and while she tried to convince me none of us had to hide our kids anymore, we both knew that wasn’t exactly true. i knew what every ndn knows: that vulnerability, forgiveness and acceptance were privileges. she made the assumption of a white person: they were readily available to all like the fresh produce at the grocery store.
lucy says that I made a critical mistake on my first day of therapy. “you have to lay all of you indian shit out on the first day, drug abuse, suicide attempts, all the times you got beat up, all of that shit. then you sit back and watch how they react. then you’ll know if they can deal or not.” lucy had a social work degree but she didn’t buy it, which is always useful.
.
*
etienne gets out the lines and in two minutes we know we’re on the school because we’re pulling in mackerel easy. he watches as i hold the hook and snap the fish into the garbage pail, which is my reveal. it’s sunny and it’s windy and it’s perfect and the arms of the day are wide open and no one has to be anywhere. i see a northern gannet and i love gannets because they can disconnect their wings before they plummet into the sea after a fish. imagine disconnecting a body part! the gannet swims over to the boat smelling the fish blood and etienne hands the gannet a fish and says “the bird is my family, all of this, the fish, the seals, the water – this is my family,” which is his reveal.
our eyes meet because now he has my attention. i walk over and hug him and he is the kind of person that can give and receive a real hug and i’m not one of those people because my alarm system goes off when people touch me and I freeze up and shut down. this time that doesn’t happen. i decide to kiss him and it’s perfect and easy and we make out void of awkwardness but with a clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined ending, then he drives back to shore while i gut the fish in the back of the boat using his terrifyingly sharp knife, feeding the guts to the gulls and the gannets. he drops me off on the dock. we thank each other. we say goodbye and i pay attention to each step, instead of looking back.
*
old lady levi then asked ira to speak and tell them about the project. he lit a cigarette and he told them three things. first, that the band council had asked us to help the elders document all the ways they related to the land in the past and in contemporary times. second, that throughout the project, the elders would be in charge. they would make all of the decisions because as far as he was concerned, they were the experts. and third that the final document could be whatever they wanted.
then he sat down.
old lady levi stood up, thanked us and asked us to leave. she opened the living room door, watched us as we passed through it, and then told us to wait outside until she reappeared.
we did. for probably two hours.
we heard a lot of talking. some praying. some singing. some more talking.
ira smoked. i drank watery maxwell house out of a styrofoam cup, and then bit teeth marks all around the top edge, wondering what was going to happen to me when i hit the end of the prozac prescription no one was monitoring.
then we heard old lady levi’s footsteps. she paused on the other side of the door. i imagined her hand on the handle, hesitating and then opening it.
we stood up.
she looked through us and said, “come back next month, maybe a monday next time. monday is better.” she went back into the room and shut the door.
ira lit another cigarette, did up his coat, and walked outside, remotely starting the car on the way. it was nearly four, and the sun was sinking below the stand of black spruce out my window. we retraced our morning’s steps back to thunder bay. a month later, this time on a monday, we went back, and we kept going back for two years, sometimes moving the meeting twice a month.
i redrew the maps those old ones kept tucked away in their bones. i took these notes:
how to pluck the feathers off a goose
how to roast a duck on an open fire
how to block the cnr lines
how to live as if it mattered
*
bringing up trauma from my life made therapy-lady cry, especially if it was “aboriginal” themed. she said “aboriginal” a lot, and i knew she was trying to be respectful so i planned on letting it slide until the breaking point and then i was going to let her have it in one spiralling long manifesto. therapy-lady liked to compare my life to refuges from war-torn countries who hid their kids in closets when airplanes flew over their houses. this was her limit of understanding on colonized intimacy. she wasn’t completely wrong, and while she tried to convince me none of us had to hide our kids anymore, we both knew that wasn’t exactly true. i knew what every ndn knows: that vulnerability, forgiveness and acceptance were privileges. she made the assumption of a white person: they were readily available to all like the fresh produce at the grocery store.
lucy says that I made a critical mistake on my first day of therapy. “you have to lay all of you indian shit out on the first day, drug abuse, suicide attempts, all the times you got beat up, all of that shit. then you sit back and watch how they react. then you’ll know if they can deal or not.” lucy had a social work degree but she didn’t buy it, which is always useful.
.
November 9, 2014
The counter-literature prize
.
The wrong books win the prizes: safe books, conventional books, books that strive for the known excellence of today rather than for the unknown excellence of a not yet known future. Books that are too much of their time, as opposed to books that leap into the pure breakthrough risk of the untimely.
We think there should be a prize for books that are different, unusual, unnerving, too political or unrealistic, not quite right. We think there should be a prize for books that are really, really good but - because they are just too different - will most likely never win any of the many literary prizes that already exist in the world.
For now, this prize is only a hypothetical entity. What might be the best way to bring it into reality? Who should the judges be? How would we even find the strange, counter-literary books in the first place?
[Unfinished.]
.
The wrong books win the prizes: safe books, conventional books, books that strive for the known excellence of today rather than for the unknown excellence of a not yet known future. Books that are too much of their time, as opposed to books that leap into the pure breakthrough risk of the untimely.
We think there should be a prize for books that are different, unusual, unnerving, too political or unrealistic, not quite right. We think there should be a prize for books that are really, really good but - because they are just too different - will most likely never win any of the many literary prizes that already exist in the world.
For now, this prize is only a hypothetical entity. What might be the best way to bring it into reality? Who should the judges be? How would we even find the strange, counter-literary books in the first place?
[Unfinished.]
.
November 8, 2014
October 12, 2014
A short notes on: Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie
.
The Book of Disquiet
The Book of Disquiet was written as a series of inter-related fragments that Fernando Pessoa worked on between 1913 and his death in 1935. It was discovered in a trunk left behind in his small room, a trunk that also contained a lifetime of other writings: poetry, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, etc., variously typed, handwritten or illegibly scrawled in Portuguese, English and French. He wrote in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements, handbills and in the margins of earlier texts. The Book of Disquiet was first published in Portuguese in 1982 and there have been many different versions since, as various editors and translators attempted to put the book together in whatever way seemed best to them at the time.
Fernando Pessoa also continuously fragmented himself into other writers he famously called heteronyms: imaginary characters created to write in different styles. Some of his most fully developed heteronyms include: Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd, a humble man of little education who nonetheless wrote poems filled with philosophy and paganism; Ricardo Reis, a classicist, a monarchist, a doctor who wrote in an austere, cerebral manner, with particular attention paid to the correct use of the Portuguese language; and Álvaro de Campos, a world traveller, whose poems expressed a fervent wish to experience the entirety of the universe in himself. However, Bernardo Soares, the author of The Book of Disquiet, an accountant working on Rua dos Douradores in Lisbon, was merely a semi-heteronym. “He’s a semi-heteronym,” Pessoa wrote in the final year of his life, “because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.”
Pessoa clearly planned to compile his fragments of disquietude into a finished manuscript, but never managed to do so. Based on the many notes he left behind, if he had been able to complete the book in his lifetime, it is likely he would have edited it down towards a shorter, more cohesive narrative. Like many authors, he might very well have edited out some of the most contentious, vulnerable or revealing passages. Therefore, the ramshackle glory of The Book of Disquiet that we know today derives in no small part from the fact that it was assembled long after its original composition, and that this method of assembly implicitly acknowledges the work’s deeply unfinished nature.
Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie
When you watch a film that makes you cry, do the tears come from within the film or from within you? This is a stupid question, since the answer must be something like: a bit of both. Another question might be: if you were to get together with your friends and remake the film not in order to imitate it, but in order to change it into something closer to your own life, would this new, remade version still make you cry?
The relation between art and emotion is a long and complicated one. With Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie, PME-ART rewrites The Book of Disquiet page by melancholy page, altering the emotional tenor of the book in many subtle and unsubtle ways. Of course, within any conventional view of literature, rewriting such a classic and deeply loved text is practically sacrilege. But the intention here is not to break any particular canonical rules, rather to see what happens when a door long assumed to be locked is partially reopened, when fragments left unfinished seventy-nine years ago are mischievously treated as if they still remained unfinished today, as if one could simply continue working on them.
Fernando Pessoa was a great writer and it is unlikely that PME-ART will be able to consistently match his eloquence or depth. They will give it their best shot, but clearly that cannot be the point. This is a more playful, democratic, collaborative notion of writing. Pessoa’s virtuosity in turning his own compulsions and doubts into literature here meets a contemporary moment, the year 2014, in which compulsions and doubts are expressed in a multitude of old and new ways: online, in televised pseudo-reality and in every kind of autobiographical literary expression. What might it mean to rewrite these fragments today? What shades of early twenty-first century emotion might be woven into Pessoa’s unfinished twentieth century elegy?
One joke we often tell: PME-ART is rewriting The Book of Disquiet to make it a little bit happier. But just a little bit. And then what kind of happiness could this possibly be? Is it the author or the reader whose mood will be lightened? The word ‘happiness’ perhaps conjures an imaginary past-life America: ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of…,’ fantasies that in the harsh light of our current economic and ecological collapse might seem threadbare at best. At times, in artistic works, there is a kind of reverse psychology effect; extremely sad works can make you feel happy and vice versa. Sometimes simply expressing something socially taboo, for example extreme sadness or apathy, gives the viewer or reader a feeling of release, even elation. Pessoa’s almost absolute melancholy has this effect on many readers, and therefore the happiness being sought of course already exists between the lines, in the affect of the original text.
One clue to the added happiness PME-ART is searching for might be found in the unfinished nature of the composition itself. While previous experts and translators sought to work towards some definitive version of The Book of Disquiet, here we clearly find ourselves drifting towards the distant other end of the finished/unfinished spectrum. (Emotions, one might suggest, are always left unfinished.) When nothing is finished, everything remains possible. At least for awhile. Or at least within a work of art. This is one of the paradoxes that art can scratch away at and evoke: sometimes a job well done is a job left partially undone, to make room for the future. Pessoa never finished his masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, and neither does Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. One can gaze at a fragment and fear its implicit sense of failure. Or one can glance at a fragment and think: this is only the beginning.
Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie happens from October 23 - November 1, 2014 at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
Facebook event here.
.
The Book of Disquiet
The Book of Disquiet was written as a series of inter-related fragments that Fernando Pessoa worked on between 1913 and his death in 1935. It was discovered in a trunk left behind in his small room, a trunk that also contained a lifetime of other writings: poetry, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, etc., variously typed, handwritten or illegibly scrawled in Portuguese, English and French. He wrote in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements, handbills and in the margins of earlier texts. The Book of Disquiet was first published in Portuguese in 1982 and there have been many different versions since, as various editors and translators attempted to put the book together in whatever way seemed best to them at the time.
Fernando Pessoa also continuously fragmented himself into other writers he famously called heteronyms: imaginary characters created to write in different styles. Some of his most fully developed heteronyms include: Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd, a humble man of little education who nonetheless wrote poems filled with philosophy and paganism; Ricardo Reis, a classicist, a monarchist, a doctor who wrote in an austere, cerebral manner, with particular attention paid to the correct use of the Portuguese language; and Álvaro de Campos, a world traveller, whose poems expressed a fervent wish to experience the entirety of the universe in himself. However, Bernardo Soares, the author of The Book of Disquiet, an accountant working on Rua dos Douradores in Lisbon, was merely a semi-heteronym. “He’s a semi-heteronym,” Pessoa wrote in the final year of his life, “because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.”
Pessoa clearly planned to compile his fragments of disquietude into a finished manuscript, but never managed to do so. Based on the many notes he left behind, if he had been able to complete the book in his lifetime, it is likely he would have edited it down towards a shorter, more cohesive narrative. Like many authors, he might very well have edited out some of the most contentious, vulnerable or revealing passages. Therefore, the ramshackle glory of The Book of Disquiet that we know today derives in no small part from the fact that it was assembled long after its original composition, and that this method of assembly implicitly acknowledges the work’s deeply unfinished nature.
Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form. – Fernando Pessoa
When you watch a film that makes you cry, do the tears come from within the film or from within you? This is a stupid question, since the answer must be something like: a bit of both. Another question might be: if you were to get together with your friends and remake the film not in order to imitate it, but in order to change it into something closer to your own life, would this new, remade version still make you cry?
The relation between art and emotion is a long and complicated one. With Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie, PME-ART rewrites The Book of Disquiet page by melancholy page, altering the emotional tenor of the book in many subtle and unsubtle ways. Of course, within any conventional view of literature, rewriting such a classic and deeply loved text is practically sacrilege. But the intention here is not to break any particular canonical rules, rather to see what happens when a door long assumed to be locked is partially reopened, when fragments left unfinished seventy-nine years ago are mischievously treated as if they still remained unfinished today, as if one could simply continue working on them.
Fernando Pessoa was a great writer and it is unlikely that PME-ART will be able to consistently match his eloquence or depth. They will give it their best shot, but clearly that cannot be the point. This is a more playful, democratic, collaborative notion of writing. Pessoa’s virtuosity in turning his own compulsions and doubts into literature here meets a contemporary moment, the year 2014, in which compulsions and doubts are expressed in a multitude of old and new ways: online, in televised pseudo-reality and in every kind of autobiographical literary expression. What might it mean to rewrite these fragments today? What shades of early twenty-first century emotion might be woven into Pessoa’s unfinished twentieth century elegy?
One joke we often tell: PME-ART is rewriting The Book of Disquiet to make it a little bit happier. But just a little bit. And then what kind of happiness could this possibly be? Is it the author or the reader whose mood will be lightened? The word ‘happiness’ perhaps conjures an imaginary past-life America: ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of…,’ fantasies that in the harsh light of our current economic and ecological collapse might seem threadbare at best. At times, in artistic works, there is a kind of reverse psychology effect; extremely sad works can make you feel happy and vice versa. Sometimes simply expressing something socially taboo, for example extreme sadness or apathy, gives the viewer or reader a feeling of release, even elation. Pessoa’s almost absolute melancholy has this effect on many readers, and therefore the happiness being sought of course already exists between the lines, in the affect of the original text.
One clue to the added happiness PME-ART is searching for might be found in the unfinished nature of the composition itself. While previous experts and translators sought to work towards some definitive version of The Book of Disquiet, here we clearly find ourselves drifting towards the distant other end of the finished/unfinished spectrum. (Emotions, one might suggest, are always left unfinished.) When nothing is finished, everything remains possible. At least for awhile. Or at least within a work of art. This is one of the paradoxes that art can scratch away at and evoke: sometimes a job well done is a job left partially undone, to make room for the future. Pessoa never finished his masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, and neither does Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. One can gaze at a fragment and fear its implicit sense of failure. Or one can glance at a fragment and think: this is only the beginning.
Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie happens from October 23 - November 1, 2014 at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
Facebook event here.
.
October 11, 2014
Twenty all-time albums
.
No one asked me but I started wondering what a list of my twenty all-time albums might look like so this is an attempt:
Alhaji K. Frimpong – Kyenkyen Bi Adi Mawu
Chrisma - Chinese Restaurant
Connie Converse - How Sad, How Lovely
Destroyer – Streethawk: A Seduction
Electrelane – The Power Out
Al Green – The Belle Album
Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band - Tche Belew
Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music
Las Malas Amistades – Patio Bonito
Lloyd Miller – A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz
Mammane Sani et son Orgue - La Musique Electronique du Niger
Moles – Instinct
Momus – Circus Maximus
Mustafa Ozkent – Gençlik Ile Elele
Palace Music – Arise Therefore
Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble – s/t
Reiko Kudo – Rice Field Silently Riping In The Night
Selda – s/t
THEESatisfaction – awE natural
Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth
.
No one asked me but I started wondering what a list of my twenty all-time albums might look like so this is an attempt:
Alhaji K. Frimpong – Kyenkyen Bi Adi Mawu
Chrisma - Chinese Restaurant
Connie Converse - How Sad, How Lovely
Destroyer – Streethawk: A Seduction
Electrelane – The Power Out
Al Green – The Belle Album
Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band - Tche Belew
Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music
Las Malas Amistades – Patio Bonito
Lloyd Miller – A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz
Mammane Sani et son Orgue - La Musique Electronique du Niger
Moles – Instinct
Momus – Circus Maximus
Mustafa Ozkent – Gençlik Ile Elele
Palace Music – Arise Therefore
Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble – s/t
Reiko Kudo – Rice Field Silently Riping In The Night
Selda – s/t
THEESatisfaction – awE natural
Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth
.
October 8, 2014
Three examples of the real life Mascot Front (now with bonus photo essay)
.
Since I wrote about The Mascot Front in Polyamorous Love Song, people have been sending me examples and photos. Here are three:
Since I wrote about The Mascot Front in Polyamorous Love Song, people have been sending me examples and photos. Here are three:
October 6, 2014
Five responses to some deplorable aspects of the current literary/internet world
.
From the Mouth of a Survivor: An Open Letter to Elizabeth Ellen’s Open Letter to the Internet and All the Conversation Surrounding by Sarah Certa
there are a few things i feel the need to address regarding elizabeths piece and this weeks events generally by Sophia Katz
On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes A Victim by Mallory Ortberg
Stories Like Passwords by Emma Healey
On sexism, sexual assault and the threat of the ‘non-bro’ by Robyn Pennacchia
.
From the Mouth of a Survivor: An Open Letter to Elizabeth Ellen’s Open Letter to the Internet and All the Conversation Surrounding by Sarah Certa
there are a few things i feel the need to address regarding elizabeths piece and this weeks events generally by Sophia Katz
On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes A Victim by Mallory Ortberg
Stories Like Passwords by Emma Healey
On sexism, sexual assault and the threat of the ‘non-bro’ by Robyn Pennacchia
.
Kitchen
.
I was sitting in my kitchen
on a grey cloudy day
when the sun came out
and for a split second
I thought a police helicopter
was shining a spotlight
through my window.
.
I was sitting in my kitchen
on a grey cloudy day
when the sun came out
and for a split second
I thought a police helicopter
was shining a spotlight
through my window.
.
October 2, 2014
The search for new forms of art is somehow directly connected to the search for new ways to love.
.
"My favorite read this summer, Jacob Wren’s latest book Polyamorous Love Song, surprisingly ends with a happy moment of a loving couple, after weaving layers and layers of dark stories about art, sex and violence. A group of New Filmmakers are making films without camera, by scripting and directing their lives as if these were movies. Mascot Front is a terrorist organization that might or might not be an art movement.
In the book, the search for new forms of art is somehow directly connected to the search for new ways to love.
The events in the book take place in a world where art is in crisis, the society is in violent struggle, and artists and activists are looking for new strategies to work, to engage, to create change, to make sense. But at the same time, to blur fiction and reality, to establish multiple points of view, to battle dualities, to be transgressive and unpredictable.
It is a world that looks suspiciously like the world where we live now."
- Eva Neklyaeva, from her program notes for Baltic Circle
.
"My favorite read this summer, Jacob Wren’s latest book Polyamorous Love Song, surprisingly ends with a happy moment of a loving couple, after weaving layers and layers of dark stories about art, sex and violence. A group of New Filmmakers are making films without camera, by scripting and directing their lives as if these were movies. Mascot Front is a terrorist organization that might or might not be an art movement.
In the book, the search for new forms of art is somehow directly connected to the search for new ways to love.
The events in the book take place in a world where art is in crisis, the society is in violent struggle, and artists and activists are looking for new strategies to work, to engage, to create change, to make sense. But at the same time, to blur fiction and reality, to establish multiple points of view, to battle dualities, to be transgressive and unpredictable.
It is a world that looks suspiciously like the world where we live now."
- Eva Neklyaeva, from her program notes for Baltic Circle
.
September 28, 2014
Moyra Davey Quote
.
To be making something as yet unformed, unknown—to be living in a deferred moment—is the most seductive way to exist.
- Moyra Davey, Polyvalence
.
To be making something as yet unformed, unknown—to be living in a deferred moment—is the most seductive way to exist.
- Moyra Davey, Polyvalence
.
September 27, 2014
Moyra Davey Quote
.
Finally, there is the accident of words: what wells up when we make space for such occurrence, when we lie on the bed in morning sunlight and bring laptop to lap. I’ve often heard it said, most recently by novelist Monica Ali, that as writers “we’re not at liberty to choose the material, the material chooses us.” Geoff Dyer has noted parallel statements by photographers: “It is the photo that takes you” (Henri Cartier-Bresson), “I don’t press the shutter, the image does” (Arbus), and one from Paul Strand on choosing his subjects: “I don’t… . They choose me.” While I’ve always intuited this about pictures, I was skeptical when it came to words. But I now know it to be true, beyond any doubt, for writing as well.
- Moyra Davey, Notes on Photography
.
Finally, there is the accident of words: what wells up when we make space for such occurrence, when we lie on the bed in morning sunlight and bring laptop to lap. I’ve often heard it said, most recently by novelist Monica Ali, that as writers “we’re not at liberty to choose the material, the material chooses us.” Geoff Dyer has noted parallel statements by photographers: “It is the photo that takes you” (Henri Cartier-Bresson), “I don’t press the shutter, the image does” (Arbus), and one from Paul Strand on choosing his subjects: “I don’t… . They choose me.” While I’ve always intuited this about pictures, I was skeptical when it came to words. But I now know it to be true, beyond any doubt, for writing as well.
- Moyra Davey, Notes on Photography
.
Future
.
If you truly begin to alter the system
in fundamental and emancipatory ways
they kill you
if they can’t buy you first
they kill you literally
or in some other way
bombs and teargas are the music of neoliberal governance
you can struggle your whole life
to change a few small things
“to have a political life is, often, to have a broken life”
and if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams
they kill you
and jail your friends
If everyone in your coalition agrees
your coalition is too small
they kill you
but how to stay focused
on five, ten, fifteen generations into the future
if there is no future
there can be no change
the only thing that works is persistence
the only thing that works is persistence
the only thing that works is persistence
I hope some day I can begin
to imagine things again
or for the first time
.
If you truly begin to alter the system
in fundamental and emancipatory ways
they kill you
if they can’t buy you first
they kill you literally
or in some other way
bombs and teargas are the music of neoliberal governance
you can struggle your whole life
to change a few small things
“to have a political life is, often, to have a broken life”
and if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams
they kill you
and jail your friends
If everyone in your coalition agrees
your coalition is too small
they kill you
but how to stay focused
on five, ten, fifteen generations into the future
if there is no future
there can be no change
the only thing that works is persistence
the only thing that works is persistence
the only thing that works is persistence
I hope some day I can begin
to imagine things again
or for the first time
.
September 23, 2014
Sentiment
.
From my near perfect disaster solitude
I wonder what might be possible
when it comes to interacting
with others, I continue to try my best
but feel all such interactions
are like little gusts of wind
that come from nowhere and go nowhere
never enough to fill a sail
yes, this is about loneliness
but also, no, it is not about loneliness
often I confuse loneliness and ethics
how to treat others well gets confused
with how to fully engage
solitude against solidarity, longing
for solidarity
I think: if you don’t know how
to be alone you don’t know how
to be with others
then: this must be the point, that
I don’t know how to be alone
don’t know how to be with others
everything that is true is also not true
trying to find something honest and vulnerable
trying to be something honest and vulnerable
trying to find the right lie
.
From my near perfect disaster solitude
I wonder what might be possible
when it comes to interacting
with others, I continue to try my best
but feel all such interactions
are like little gusts of wind
that come from nowhere and go nowhere
never enough to fill a sail
yes, this is about loneliness
but also, no, it is not about loneliness
often I confuse loneliness and ethics
how to treat others well gets confused
with how to fully engage
solitude against solidarity, longing
for solidarity
I think: if you don’t know how
to be alone you don’t know how
to be with others
then: this must be the point, that
I don’t know how to be alone
don’t know how to be with others
everything that is true is also not true
trying to find something honest and vulnerable
trying to be something honest and vulnerable
trying to find the right lie
.
September 17, 2014
Revised list of ten books
.
After reading A Feminist Response to "List Ten Books that Stayed with you Some Way" I decided to redo my previous list. This new version was also made somewhat spontaneously, while at the same time attempting to correct my previous, perhaps unconscious, bias. Here's the new list:
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. Ghostly Matters – Avery F. Gordon
6. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
7. The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
8. Third Factory – Viktor Shklovsky
9. Event Factory – Renee Gladman
10. Ethics Of Luxury: Materialism And Imagination – Jeanne Randolph
.
After reading A Feminist Response to "List Ten Books that Stayed with you Some Way" I decided to redo my previous list. This new version was also made somewhat spontaneously, while at the same time attempting to correct my previous, perhaps unconscious, bias. Here's the new list:
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. Ghostly Matters – Avery F. Gordon
6. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
7. The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
8. Third Factory – Viktor Shklovsky
9. Event Factory – Renee Gladman
10. Ethics Of Luxury: Materialism And Imagination – Jeanne Randolph
.
September 12, 2014
Jacqueline Mabey wrote this on my timeline...
.
Jacqueline Mabey wrote this on my timeline:
"i've been thinking about your comments about only experiencing solidarity as a short-lived or temporary condition. and thinking that maybe that's critical to it: we stand in solidarity with others in order to reach some critical mass or moment of progressive chance, some change of state. so maybe solidarity is utopian in that it is no-place, it is nowhere you can inhabit permanently but a shifting space of alliances."
Followed by this link:
Students show solidarity by helping Columbia rape survivor carry her mattress
.
Jacqueline Mabey wrote this on my timeline:
"i've been thinking about your comments about only experiencing solidarity as a short-lived or temporary condition. and thinking that maybe that's critical to it: we stand in solidarity with others in order to reach some critical mass or moment of progressive chance, some change of state. so maybe solidarity is utopian in that it is no-place, it is nowhere you can inhabit permanently but a shifting space of alliances."
Followed by this link:
Students show solidarity by helping Columbia rape survivor carry her mattress
.
September 3, 2014
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
