Some favourite books of 2025 (so far)

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[I do a list at the end of every year. And sometimes I also do a shorter list in the middle. Not all of these books were published this year, but this was the year I read and enjoyed them.]

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Touching the Art
Raja Shehadeh – We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
Vivian Blaxell – Worthy of the Event: An Essay
Sarah Schulman – The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi – Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies Novel


Bonus:
Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore



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NEVER STOP ACTING FOR PALESTINE

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Next Wednesday, 5pm, join us for a popular gathering at métro Mont Royal, at the square, a live speak out and recording for broadcast on Radio alHara of poets, political activists and musicians speaking out and playing for Palestine! Thank you to Léon Lo for working on this poster design!

At this gathering we will hear poetry from Alejandro Saravia, community activist Summer Alkhdour, educator Sarwat Viquar, poet Jacob Wren, an anarchist marching band project Fanfare d'occasion featuring many awesome folks, plus many more, I hope to see you there!

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I haven't read this book...

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I haven't read this book. The reason I'm posting it is I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War. And perhaps the Cold War thing I heard most often was that the great difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was that in the U.S. you were allowed to protest as much as you wanted but in the Soviet Union protesting got you sent to the gulag (as I believe is described in this book.) I know the Cold War ended a while ago, and differences between the two systems (now both "capitalist") are no longer held up as having any meaning. But with the current hype around "Alligator Alcatraz" - which I'm sure is just one of hundreds of such "prisons" the U.S. is about to build - I can't help but feel this is the final endpoint of the Cold War, the real race to the bottom, where instead of people in the former Soviet Union now having the right to protest, people in the U.S. who effectively protest will be sent to gulags in great number. The existence of the Soviet Union in some aspects kept domestic U.S. policy on its best behaviour. Now, with any threat of communism in the past, the U.S. will finally do at home what their foreign policy has imposed on so many other countries over the last hundred years.

*

"Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

fourteen years ago

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I've been thinking a lot about this bad poem I wrote fourteen years ago: Obsessing over the ramifications of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. (A moment in history.) The first line was: “In the bright light of day, the United States becomes a lawful fascist state.” You can find it here. 


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So I don't forget this day...

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"With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined."


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“Because it is lucrative for many.”

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“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation – they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip. In an expert opinion last year, Francesca Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The UN report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.

“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un-report-lists-companies-complicit-in-israels-genocide-who-are-they

 

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With an archive in the attic in dHOUSE Magazine

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I have a text in dHOUSE Magazine called With an archive in the attic. The table of contents moves around but, if you search, you can find it here.




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"Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

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"A fantastical text concerning transformation, Jacob Wren’s novel Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim follows a narrator to an unidentified liberated zone, where noncapitalist, collective practices are formed, reworked, and communalized. The zone is unidyllic as it continues to be bombed and fired upon by nearby and faraway imperialists. Amidst the daily raids, the narrator is allowed to sit in on town meetings, where economics and trade become reinvented. In one such meeting, the narrator hears a woman discussing how concerns over goods being “too expensive” must also be applied to items being “too cheap.” She says, “Just as you mustn’t accept a price that is too high, you also must not fight, nor constantly search, for a price that is too low … You need to understand that those who sell you these things also need to live.”

This gallows humor highlights the disparities between life and death and locates a price so low that some are explicitly not allowed to live. Tellingly, Cattelan, the supposed prankster who will sell and hire others to do everything and treats all matter as dispensable, predictably imposes a boundary on engagement with his own critique. In response to Mr. Alam’s critiques of his exploitation, Cattelan stated that “art, by its nature, does not solve problems—if it did, it would be politics.” Evading criticism through a well-worn notion of aesthetic isolationism, Cattelan offers art that ideologically affirms the status quo, upholding supply-chain repression and enforcing and extending class domination. (He offers, in other words, enmeshed and predictable capitalism-as-art.)

Regarding that which is purposefully degraded and denied in the supply chain: when Daniel Druet, the artist who made Untitled (Stephanie), sued Cattelan’s gallery over authorship and payment, contemporary artists such as Sophie Calle signed an open letter in support of Cattelan. It stated: “Daniel Druet’s quest for recognition as the exclusive author of the works imagined by Maurizio Cattelan opens the door to the disqualification of conceptual art.” Does the qualification of conceptual art hinge on the erasure of laborers and the repression of its making? The artists who signed the letter seem to think so. Other than capitalism, what qualifies conceptual art?”

- Eunsong Kim, No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy



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PME-ART in Harstad, Norway (June 22-24)

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PME-ART will be in Harstad, Norway
for a series of events at Festspillene i Nord-Norge

Panel: Common Things Made Holy
June 22, 2025 at 12:10pm
Moderator: Ragnheiður Skúladóttir
With: Maret Anne Sara, Stefan Schmitke, Sonya Lindfors & Jacob Wren

The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
June 22, 2025 at 9pm
With: Caroline Dubois, Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren

Bring Your Own Record / Listening Party
June 23, 2025 at 8pm
With: Caroline Dubois, Jacob Wren & special guest Tommy Vandalsvik

*

Bonus: the letter I wrote to the audience of The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information in 2011.

And an article in the Harstad Tidende (in Norwegian but with pictures.)



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The first page...

The first page of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim.

I Make and Watch Performances

[This text was written for the Montreal edition of Oral Method in response to the prompt EXCUSEZ-MOI.]



1.
I make performances. Therefore I feel an obligation to watch performances. Lately this has been creating difficulties. I feel an obligation to watch performances made by other people, perhaps only so that they might in turn feel obligated to watch performances made by me. This is not a good reason. The difficulties are not recent but have recently intensified. The performances I watch mostly do not feature or mention current events. Many of these performances were created long before current events occurred. But current events are weighing heavily upon my interior life. I think I go see art because it is a place we can speak about the world. I think speaking about the world means speaking out against injustice. I think live performance means speaking and acting in the here and now. By this point you might have already intuited what my difficulties are.


2.
I have a fantasy. It is a fantasy I often have while I am watching a performance. The people on stage are doing whatever they are doing. I am in the audience. In the middle of the audience I stand up and begin to speak loudly. I accuse those on stage of failing to mention current injustices in the world. I do so in a charming and entertaining manner so as to win over the rest of the audience. I make my case: that by failing to mention any injustices they are like ostriches with their heads in the sand. (Ostriches don’t actually stick their heads in the sand. This is a myth.) That every moment art fails to mention painful realities is a moment when art is not doing its job, when injustices continue to proceed unchallenged. When injustices continue to devour every living moment of the world. I know I have to make my case quickly. That soon some usher, or audience member wanting to make themselves useful, will forcibly remove me. I don’t mind being removed. I just want to make my case in a manner that will not easily be forgotten.


3.
I do not necessarily require performances to speak out directly against current events. I just want to see some indication that they know these events are happening. That we are all living in the same indefensible world. I want them to know what I know and somehow let me know that they know it. I find it painful, sometimes almost unbearably so, that we are not acknowledging things that are happening every day and all around us. I also find my position unfair. Unfair to the artists on stage who are hopefully embodying and expressing something that is meaningful to them. Unfair to art, which has ways of speaking about the world that can bypass the didactic and reach toward other truths. Unfair to myself, since I am forfeiting my chance to momentarily stop thinking about the injustices of the world and enjoy watching a performance. But I do not enjoy watching these performances, and for that I probably should, but will not, apologize.


4.
Then there are performances that do directly denounce specific injustices and I don’t much care for those ones either. You can’t win with me. Because it is not enough to denounce injustice. It is not enough to say those people over there are bad and over here we’re good and that’s all you need to know about the world. The performance must also implicate the audience and do so in ways that lead to action rather than guilt. We must begin to see what is to be done and with what small steps we can begin to do it. I have not yet seen any performances that meet this perhaps unrealistic criteria. Did I mention that many of the performances I see take the form of contemporary dance. I am not sure there is any way, using the forms of contemporary dance, that one can implicate the audience in the injustices of the world and do so in ways that lead to action rather than guilt. But dance is not the problem. Rather it is more like I am going to the hardware store and trying to buy bread. They do not sell bread at the hardware store. Instead of going to watch performances, there might be other kinds of events I could attend. But I want something specific from art, and no matter how many times it disappoints me, I will never stop wanting it.


5.
I make performances. And the performances I make also do not sufficiently fulfil the criteria I have outlined above. Each time I strive toward it, and each time I fail. Since audiences do not have the same strict desires as I have, they do not seem to notice these particular failures. They notice other failures, such as the failure to entertain, or the failure to present aesthetic splendor. But mostly they are not thinking so much about failure. They are people who know how to enjoy watching a performance which is the reason they attend. I could learn from them but I will not. I will wait for one of them to stand up in the middle of the audience and quickly and loudly denounce me. I will continue to wait.


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Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction (along with many other amazing books.)

Oral Method in Montreal / Saturday, May 31, 5pm

🌀📜Excusez-moi! Pardon us! Please save the date for a 🌻 free 🌻 happy hour reading at Star Bar (4671 St Laurent Blvd) on Saturday, May 31. This Mtl edition of Oral Method is co-curated w Rose Flutur and will feature much admired writers from la cool(er) province: H. Felix Chau Bradley, Eva Crocker, Marcela Huerta, Faith Paré, Sina Queyras, Jacob Wren plus illustrations & dj’ing by Amery Press

doors: 5pm, readings: 530pm

Writers will be responding to the prompt *EXCUSEZ-MOI* 🌻 perhaps conjuring the energy of overtaking someone on the sidewalk, navigating Français-English (or other language!) communication dynamics, calling someone in, asking for forgiveness, passive / aggression, or maybe even reflecting on Steve Martin (as Jacob Wren reminded us :)) 🤣

Please come, tell your friends, and support these amazing writers & artists!! 📜 🌀

Poster by: Amery Press 🙏🏻

 

Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman

Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman:


*


“Regardless of specificity, solidarity always requires awareness, self-criticism, consciousness, the decision to act, and the need to create strategy, to build alliances, and to listen. It always requires taking chances, making mistakes, and trying again.”


*


“The US entertainment industry is one of the last places a person can find solidarity.

Most corporate-produced culture is filled with terrible values, is blatantly retrograde or – at best – meaningless, which is its own politic. The product exists to make money for people who have fun solving intense but tightly focused problems. Its social function is to create individuals who can feed the need for fame, upon which American marketing depends. A friend once pointed out to me that America’s greatest exports are film/TV and weapons, and most of the highest-grossing films and TV glorifies violence in a way that serves as advertisement for weapons.

I am not the only person who reads incredible reviews for plays or movies or TV shows that turn out to be banal, repetitive, or nonsensical. Part of the problem is that print and online critical publications are tied to the marketplace. Critics mostly write about books or actors or writers or filmmakers who have a new product on the market right now, rather than works that the critic feels illuminate our current moment.

It occurs to me that most (not all) of these institutions that drive me crazy have historically and consistently excluded, watered down, or marginalized the more interesting and necessary ideas in any given period. Risky and exciting movements of forward-thinking people were usually debased or ignored, while avoidant or repetitive work was elevated and glorified, and then given awards. This system of repetition is reinforced psychologically by the creation and strict maintenance of a scarcity-based concept of an elite. If an artist or intellectual or activist or any combination thereof is looking for non-market-based support adequate to live safely and comfortably while following their gifts full-time, it’s literally a MacArthur or nothing. Repetitive ideas are selected by gatekeepers, elevated by critics, rewarded with prizes, and branded as good and important, when they are often actually stagnant. We have collectively underestimated the ultimate danger of that entrenched cycle. It turned out to be far more sinister than just boring, as corporate entertainment sells bad values about humans being expendable and worth destroying when compared to the risk of losing social status or influence with funders. Cultural producers should be joining the large numbers of people trying to stop this war on Gaza, but either being quiet or supporting the killing is actually consistent with the norm.”


*


“What makes it so confusing is their embedded accompanying system of self-praise telling us repeatedly that the repetitive, banal ideas in mass circulation are special and deserve reward. Year after year we are told through many selections at elections, through promotions or even the Oscars, Tonys, Pulitzers, and the full range of intellectual and citizenship awards in corporate marketing venues, that irrelevant products deserve to be the focus of our attention and should be replicated. This reinforces the idea that the way things are is not only great, but the best. This merry-go-round debases and marginalizes risky, exciting movements of forward-thinking people while elevating and glorifying avoidant work that pretends away the most important questions of our time: Who has the power, and why?”


*


“It was a cultural moment that made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window.”


*

Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore:


*


And how this happened for me too – twenty years ago, when my chronic pain first became debilitating and I couldn’t write like I used to, in frantic bursts trying to get everything out. So I decided to write a few sentences a day, with no intention of plot or structure, and after a few years I was shocked to find I had over four hundred pages. And that text became my second novel.


*


How music always carries the memory of when you first heard this music. How this can be a burden. How this can be glorious. How this can be suffocating. How this can make you shake. How this can make you sing. How this can make you dance. And this can be true of visual art too.

Sometimes, when the CD skips, I think maybe I should stop listening to CDs. And sometimes, when the CD skips, I think this is what it feels like to really love something.


*


Gladys saw herself as a contemporary artist, so she didn’t want to be defined by the past. She wanted her art to be considered on its own. But then Bobby wrote the catalog copy, and she rejected it. So someone else was hired to write it.

Bobby says Gladys was not a risk-taker, she was fiercely competitive with herself and how she saw herself among Baltimore artists, but she turned her back on the professional art establishment, and after that she didn’t pursue a professional career, and you can’t expect the world to come to you. She enjoyed the process of painting, and put that above anything else.

Like many artists of her generation, Bobby says, Gladys made the mistake of thinking that genius will be discovered.


*


When someone asks what is your writing process, I think it must be to try and try and then finally, in the gap between the limits of my body and the possibility of pulling something through, somewhere in that gap—


*


Maybe a different way to say history repeats itself would be to say history never resolves itself. History is a lesson, this may be true, but, as with any other lesson, the people who need it the most rarely listen.


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truly amazing!

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Really nice to see this very concise Goodreads review for my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART.

in the gears

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If you are pushing a theory that puts oil in the gears of the status quo, it is different than if you’re pushing a theory that puts sand in the gears. The gears will still turn, but nonetheless it is different.


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trying to convince myself

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I’m not trying to convince you. I’m trying to convince myself. That there is art worth fighting for. And art worth fighting against.


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Nick Romeo on José María Arizmendiarrieta

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In his collected writings, José María Arizmendiarrieta championed a revolutionary pragmatism. To deserve the name, idealists must take their own goals seriously enough to try to realize them. “The ideal thing is to do the good that can be done, not the good that is dreamt of,” he wrote. The value of lofty ideals lies in their capacity to inspire action: “Great ideals do not have to be precisely attainable to be useful to us.” For those who critique current systems but create nothing better to replace them, his words still offer a pointed challenge: build institutions, develop capacities, and change legislation. “No moans but action,” he urged. The noblest ideals risk becoming empty rhetoric if not married to effective and disciplined execution. “Being badly organized should not be confused with having respect for freedom.”

Despite his eloquent insistence on pragmatic action, Arizmendiarrieta also rejected a utilitarianism that values only results. How something is achieved matters. “It is not enough for the managers and bosses to perform good deeds, it is necessary that the workers participate,” he wrote. If an enlightened executive in a traditional company chose to cap their pay at six times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, this would be good. It would also resemble the decree of an enlightened monarch. Within Mondragon, members of the cooperatives have voted democratically on the ratio between the highest and lowest compensation levels. Particular cooperatives are free to have a ratio smaller than 6:1, as many do; member-owners could also vote to expand the ratio in the future. Mondragon’s institutional design depends on democracy. It can flourish only if most individuals continue to value its traditions of equality and solidarity. Rather than assuming that markets alchemize private greed into public good, Arizmendiarrieta built the cooperatives in a way that emphasized both institutional safeguards and individual moral character: “There can never be great works without people giving generously and without them sacrificing their selfish appetites,” he wrote.

Arizmendiarrieta’s defiance of easy categorization makes him a provocative challenge to many contemporary shibboleths. He created effective institutions without ignoring the importance of individual ethics; he recognized the value of capital and profit but saw both as subordinate to broader social aims; he created a business structure that competed effectively in international markets while rejecting basic assumptions of capitalist firms. Perhaps most astonishing of all, his insights were not merely theoretical achievements; they were realized in a dense web of structures that have become the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world.

– Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy



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One Yes & Many Know

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I’m always trying out different titles for books I’m working on. Currently I’m trying out: One Yes & Many Know.


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Two short quotes from Rich and Poor

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“I start to think fear is the most furious part of courage. Knowing how full and real and justified your fears are but still not letting them stop you.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 144)


“I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or this struggle happen without me.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 176)


*

Someone posted these two quotes on Goodreads and, even though I don't remember writing either of them, they struck me as things I was rather happy to have written.

Also, I suppose thanks to Luigi Mangione, more people seem to be reading my 2016 novel Rich and Poor. (It’s about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act.)

You can read my favourite review of Rich and Poor here.



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Ambition...

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I try to differentiate between artistic ambition and career ambition. And I try to see artistic ambition as the ambition to make something I find meaningful and career ambition as the ambition to make something other people will like. Since I don't really know what other people like I try to lean away from that impulse, and instead tell myself that if I make something I really like, some other people will like it as well.

Somehow related to: Six sentences concerning art and jealousy


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Voting

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Now we have fascism. But there were tyrants long before the invention of fascism. One of the things that makes fascism different is this situation in which large numbers of people vote the tyrants into power. It is difficult to know to what extent these voters get what they want, since it all takes place awash in endless propaganda. Nonetheless, the dispiriting feeling that not only are so many evil things being done, but that so many people voted for them, is perhaps at the heart of why it is so difficult to know, with any certainty, what are the best strategies and tactics to bring about positive change. How to harness mass desires in ways that bring about greater fairness, kindness and care?


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Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone)

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[This text was originally published in French translation in the book Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement.]

“But part of it is that if you are really committed to working collectively you have to give up some of your preciousness around style.”
– Fred Moten and Stefano Harney


“I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.”
– David Graeber

Over the past thirty years I have written a great deal about artistic collaboration but I worry that, despite my attempts to be completely honest on the topic, I have often ended up being less than completely honest. When I started making collaborative group performances I was a teenager, that was over thirty years ago, and I desperately wanted to believe that working together we could make something so much better than any of us could make on our own. I still have a strong desire to believe this. And perhaps belief gets me a little bit closer to the heart of the matter. The desire for a belief. To believe in something. I’m remembering a line from the Czech poet Vladimír Holan: “But we who do not believe are always expecting something…“ I find that I’m still expecting something and sometimes the name I give to this sense of expectation is collaboration.

In the Jewish education of my youth, most of which I’ve almost completely disowned, the name given to people who helped the Nazis was “collaborators.” When I think of the word “politics” my first immediate associations are leftist politics and activism. When I think of the word “collaboration” my first immediate associations are intriguing artistic collectives. But fascism is also politics. “Collaborators” are also engaged in collaboration. (Every word is a double-edged sword.) I often think of artistic collaboration as a difficult friend, a friend I’m happy to have but who at any moment might do something that would make me extremely unhappy. Sometimes even friendship can be like this, and you need to put in the hard work to find the best way to remain friends.

In these matters, as with so many things, it is less about method and more about something else. But what exactly? A sense of ethical reflection? Letting an artistic reality of “not knowing” be one’s guide? A realization that we’ve all had different life experiences and within the space created by such differences we might might find something closer to truth? Letting experiences evolve into wisdom, though it is extremely unfashionable today to speak in these terms. And, whatever terms one might use, such ethical reflections, experiences and wisdom must somehow be embodied within the method. Also, open to change over time. Also, it will always be less than perfect and imperfection should be its guide. I am still searching for all of these things.

Then there is practical matter of what I’ve actually experienced during such collaborations. The chasm between theory and practice is noticeable. Sometimes I think: if I want to move my practice closer to my ideals, I need to change the goals. Perhaps the goal is to make something I don’t like. Because then I’ll truly know I wasn’t the one who made it. That it’s not overly based on my own idiosyncratic tastes. That it was something made by all of us. By the same logic the goal could be to make something equally loved by all of us. However, this seems rather difficult to do. Perhaps the heart of the matter is not belief but compromise. What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? Such thoughts might be alalogous to discourses that value process over product, but I fear I’m too much of an artist (for my own good) not to be overly focused on the end result. On the other hand, perhaps many of the works I’ve been involved in do in fact look more like process than they do like product, with aspects of collaboration foregrounded and embodied. The differences between the collaborating artists become the visible cornerstone of the work, which is one way of understanding what process is.

With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.

As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.

So I return to collaboration over and over again. Trying to learn from my mistakes and making every new kind of mistake in the process. Sometimes I feel mentally trapped in the previous century: the battle between communism and capitalism, between collectivity and individualism. (Though, for me, the Soviet Union was often little more than a form of state capitalism, and technological breakthroughs in the West were made possible through state funded research and the collectivity of taxation.) But if I try to move my thinking a little bit more into our current century, I feel all sorts of new energies continuously forming. A new emphasis on care as the most politically radical position. Activists working on Transformative Justice, which has to do with addressing harm within community without ever calling the police. When I read about Transformative Justice I find it incredibly inspiring and also clearly see how difficult the work can be. The logic of Eurocentric-derived cultures are completely tied up in notions of punishment. Searching for different ways of dealing with harm, for methods of accountability and healing that sidestep the logic of punishment, is counterintuitive for so many people, and therefore has to be learned (or learned again) almost as if from scratch. Often there is frustration around situations where a Transformative Justice process was attempted and it simply doesn’t work. These activists are pushing forward toward a time in the future when hopefully more people will have found ways to reduce harm within community, or where experiments in that direction have led to other kinds of transformative discoveries, and therefore cannot allow themselves to be overly discouraged.

Reading about Transformative Justice, I very much recognize the description of a certain very specific kind of frustration, of a process where sometimes it “simply doesn’t work,” from my long history of making collaborative performances. In Transformative Justice movements they are working toward a world without police and without prisons. A great deal of the time I don’t entirely know what I’m working toward. Just to be a different kind of artist, to collaboratively make one really good show, not to worry so much about pushing my name. My name is at the top of the first page of this text. I could have tried to write it collaboratively with someone, but I don’t actually have anyone in my life I’m able to do that with. (Once again, the chasm between theory and practice.) Perhaps it’s about belief. And perhaps it’s about compromise. And perhaps it’s about loneliness.

What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.

When I put my name on the cover of a book, I also think of it as being in dialog with all the other books that have been written, one node in the interrelated web of books. As Italo Calvino writes: “Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it.” I have often written about how I live a double life, one half spent writing novels, the other half spent making collaborative performances. Books are the activity I do (mostly) alone and performances are the activity I do with other people. I find writing books much, much easier than making collaborative performances. So often I find myself wondering if, for this reason, I should give up making performances and only write books. There is much about me that fits the cliché of the melancholy writer, the dandy, the flâneur, wandering alone amongst the city within my melancholy thoughts which I will later write down in an attempt to communicate something that goes far beyond my own narrow experience.

I’m not sure what kinds of personalities are most and least suited for working collaboratively but, if I were to make a list, the melancholy flâneur probably would rank rather high in the least suited column. And this must be yet another reason I do it, somehow going against my nature, trying to open up a world, the world of my own thoughts, that always suggests the best thing to do would be to shut everything down. The desire for artistic collaboration, at least for me, is a desire to find a third way between solitude and community, and it is less important that this third way actually exist then that I manage to keep alive the search for it. In this sense it truly is an impossible dramaturgy.

But it is not just a struggle within my thoughts. It is something I actually do with other people. Each time we start again we cannot fully rely on the maps we’ve made in the past. We have to concretely deal with the task at hand, in the moment, deciding from moment to moment when to fight and when to compromise, what aspects of the work are most important to us, what we think we are making and why, and how might it be possible for us to make it better together than any of us might be able to make it alone.



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[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]



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18 performing arts organizations across Canada stand in solidarity with Palestine!

18 performing arts organizations across Canada (including PME-ART) stand in solidarity with Palestine! This group endorsement was organized by Theatre Artists for Palestinian Voices’ PACBI working group. TAPV is a coalition of Palestinian, Indigenous, Jewish and allied artists and arts workers committed to bringing a diversity of Palestinian voices to our stages, and to ongoing Indigenous land struggles against settler colonialism from Turtle Island to historic Palestine. To learn more about PACBI, endorse the call with your organization, or join us in advocating for PACBI in the Canadian performing arts sector and beyond, email: theatre4palestinianvoices@gmail.com 

The organizations are: Alma Theatre (Edmonton), Aluna Theatre (Toronto), The Black Pledge Canada (Toronto), Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto), The Bus Stop Theatre (Halifax), Enable Arts Society (Vancouver), Generator (Toronto), manidoons collective (Toronto), MT Space Theatre (Kitchener-Waterloo), New Harlem Productions (Hamilton), Paprika Festival (Toronto), The Theatre Centre (Toronto), PME-ART (Montreal), rookies with friends (Toronto), Rumble Theatre (Vancouver), Shakespeare in the Ruff (Toronto), Teesri Duniya (Montreal), We Quit Theatre (Winnipeg).

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Onze organisations culturelles de Montréal ont officiellement endossé PACBI

Dans une forte déclaration de solidarité, onze organisations culturelles de Montréal ont officiellement endossé la Campagne palestinienne pour le boycott académique et culturel d'Israël (PACBI), soulignant ainsi leur engagement envers le mouvement mondial de Boycott, Désinvestissement et Sanctions (BDS).

Les organisations qui soutiennent cette initiative se joignent à un mouvement mondial croissant d'artistes, d'universitaires et de travailleur·euse·s culturel·le·s qui s'engagent à soutenir le peuple palestinien dans sa lutte pour la libération et l'autodétermination. Ces organisations espèrent que plus d'organismes voudront adopter PACBI partout au Québec et au Canada.

À ce jour, les organisations suivantes ont unies leurs forces pour appuyer ou réaffirmer leurs engagements à PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, OBORO, PME-ART et Vidéographe.

Pour en savoir plus sur le PACBI, consultez https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi

_________________

In a strong statement of solidarity, eleven cultural organizations in Montreal have officially endorsed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), highlighting their commitment to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The organizations supporting this initiative are joining a growing global movement of artists, academics, and cultural workers committed to supporting the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and self-determination. These organizations hope that more groups will adopt PACBI across Quebec and Canada.

To date, the following organizations have united their efforts to support or reaffirm their commitments to PACBI: Ada X, articule, Atelier La Coulée, Céline Bureau, Centre Clark, Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Dazibao, Metonymy Press, Oboro, PME-ART and Vidéographe.

To learn more about PACBI, see https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi

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For years...

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For years I couldn’t stop writing about the oncoming fascism and then the fascism was here and I couldn’t seem to write about it anymore.


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Sam Kriss Quote

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“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Walter Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.”

- Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer



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possible titles

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I've been keeping this ongoing list of possible titles since 2016.

(As well, in case you don't already know, my last book, which has a really nice title, also got some really nice reviews.)

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

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Mastodon & Bluesky

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https://mastodon.social/@Jacob_Wren
https://bsky.app/profile/jacobwren.bsky.social

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PME-ART commits to PACBI

PME-ART commits to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) that was launched in 2004 as part of the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. PACBI advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, based on their continued complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law.

Solidarity with PACBI means that PME-ART will not collaborate, fund, or accept funding from the Israeli government or related funding bodies. We acknowledge that based on our organizational scale, these demands are not difficult to carry out. However we believe that it is important to consider such stances within the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

We strongly encourage Montreal-based artistic groups, cultural workers, and artists to publicly support these demands and share this commitment with their members.

To learn more about PACBI, see https://www.bdsmovement.net/pacbi
This statement on the PME-ART website: https://www.pme-art.ca/en/about

Camilla Townsend Quote

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“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant “year count” or “yearly account,” even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources “annals.” In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards located between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time. Such performances generally recounted stories that would be of interest to the larger group – the rise of chiefs and later their deaths (timely or untimely), the wars they fought and the reasons for them, remarkable natural phenomena, and major celebrations or horrifying executions. Although certain subjects were favored, the texts were hardly devoid of personality: different communities and different individuals included different details. Political schisms were illustrated via colorful dialogue between leaders of different schools of thought. The speakers would sometimes even slip into the present tense as they delivered such leaders’ lines, as if they were in a play. Occasionally they would shout questions that eager audience members were expected to answer.”
– Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs



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Royalties

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People often ask me how much I make from each of my books when they sell. And it's kind of a complicated calculation, so I'm never able to answer off the top of my head. But I just thought to look it up again, and thought I would share it here (if you've asked me in the past and I've given a vague answer, here is a more precise one):

PRINTED EDITIONS:
10% of List Sales from the sale of the first 3,000 copies of printed editions of the WORK;
12.5% of List Sales from the sale of 3,001-6,000 copies of the WORK;
15% of List Sales from 6,001 or more copies of the WORK.

ELECTRONIC EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all electronic editions of the WORK

AUDIO EDITIONS:
25% of Net Sales from the sale of all audio editions of the WORK


(If I understand correctly, this is all after the book has sold out it's advance. As the contract clearly says the advance "will be deducted from the author’s Royalty Commissions." As well, just to be clear, this post was not meant as a criticism. It's just a question people frequently ask me.)


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CODE NOIR by Quinton Barnes

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Quinton Barnes just put out a new record. It's called CODE NOIR and you should listen to it here: https://quintonbarnes.bandcamp.com/album/code-noir


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Francesca Polletta Quote

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“What comes across in the stories that Myles Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decision-making; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all of the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”

Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that this guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along… You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leadings questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective – the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.”

– Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements




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"I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight."

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“In some deep way, I feel I need to be an artist. But I don’t actually think what the world needs right now is art. I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight. I think art is probably more a reflection of the world than a driver of change.”
- Jacob Wren, from this interview with Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl



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

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



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


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

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

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



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Luigi Mangione

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

Years ago I also started writing a sequel to Rich and Poor but then gave up on the endeavour. If you’re curious you can find it here: Possible first chapter of the novel-in-progress One Yes & Many Know.

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



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Some favourite things from my 2024

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



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

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


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


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


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



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




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Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman:


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


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


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


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


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


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Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo

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


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


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


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


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


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Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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