.
“I went through a period once when I felt like I was dying. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write I would split. I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life.
The next year, I went back to my journal, and here were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of it. Many of them are in The Black Unicorn. “Harriet” is one of them; “Sequelae” and “A Litany for Survival” are others. These poems came right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems then.”
– Audre Lorde
[As quoted in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate]
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November 18, 2023
November 17, 2023
I Need Music by Anaïs Duplan
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Perhaps now would be a good time for everyone to read Anaïs Duplan's exceptional book I Need Music:
"When I first come into contact with an image, I say,
what is an image? I begin to believe paradoxically one failed picture
is the total picture. I can tell there’s an art to staying
either inside or outside the lines."
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music
Order it here.
As you might already know, Anaïs Duplan has been removed from the exhibition "We is Future" by the Museum Folkwang:
Anaïs Duplan's Instagram Post
Article in The Art Insider
“While I do, of course, feel a sense of accomplishment, growth, belonging, great
fortune, ‘n’ vitality, I also feel a deep ‘n’ abiding sadness.
I try to make space for this sadness here, by I feel there’s a sense to it.
I feel it’s talking to me ‘n’ I need to listen.
I’d rather not.”
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music
Perhaps now would be a good time for everyone to read Anaïs Duplan's exceptional book I Need Music:
"When I first come into contact with an image, I say,
what is an image? I begin to believe paradoxically one failed picture
is the total picture. I can tell there’s an art to staying
either inside or outside the lines."
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music
Order it here.
As you might already know, Anaïs Duplan has been removed from the exhibition "We is Future" by the Museum Folkwang:
Anaïs Duplan's Instagram Post
Article in The Art Insider
“While I do, of course, feel a sense of accomplishment, growth, belonging, great
fortune, ‘n’ vitality, I also feel a deep ‘n’ abiding sadness.
I try to make space for this sadness here, by I feel there’s a sense to it.
I feel it’s talking to me ‘n’ I need to listen.
I’d rather not.”
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music
November 15, 2023
An Open Letter in Support of the Scotiabank Protestors at the Giller Prize Ceremony
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As writers and publishers, we express our support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on November 13th, 2023. The protest called attention to Scotiabank's $500 million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer; Scotiabank is Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder.
During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.
We stand with the protestors, and we urge that the charges against them be dropped. And we join our voices with hundreds of thousands of protestors across Canada who are decrying the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine.
In the past five weeks, Israel has cut off water, electricity, and communication to Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority civilians and non-combatants. There are no more universities standing in Gaza. This week, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, was bombed until it could no longer be used. Among those who have died are more than 4000 children, many of them infants. This has been the deadliest attack for children in recent times. Many of our government officials and institutions swiftly condemned the October 7th deadly attack on 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of 220 hostages. We ask that our institutions treat Palestinian civilians with the same concern and humanity.
We are writers and publishers who have been proud and grateful to receive invitations, nominations, grant funding, and prizes from literary institutions including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Toronto Book Awards, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Evergreen Award, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. As working artists, we are reliant on these institutions for our livelihood.
We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.
If you'd like to add your name to this statement, please do so here.
.
As writers and publishers, we express our support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on November 13th, 2023. The protest called attention to Scotiabank's $500 million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer; Scotiabank is Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder.
During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.
We stand with the protestors, and we urge that the charges against them be dropped. And we join our voices with hundreds of thousands of protestors across Canada who are decrying the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine.
In the past five weeks, Israel has cut off water, electricity, and communication to Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority civilians and non-combatants. There are no more universities standing in Gaza. This week, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, was bombed until it could no longer be used. Among those who have died are more than 4000 children, many of them infants. This has been the deadliest attack for children in recent times. Many of our government officials and institutions swiftly condemned the October 7th deadly attack on 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of 220 hostages. We ask that our institutions treat Palestinian civilians with the same concern and humanity.
We are writers and publishers who have been proud and grateful to receive invitations, nominations, grant funding, and prizes from literary institutions including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Toronto Book Awards, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Evergreen Award, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. As working artists, we are reliant on these institutions for our livelihood.
We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.
If you'd like to add your name to this statement, please do so here.
.
November 9, 2023
Paroles de résistance pour une Palestine libre
Motivated by the urgent need to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine, the Decolonial Love Circle is inviting artists and activists whose communities are united in their struggle for liberation, to lend their voice to the words that fuel resistance.
Animé·e·s par l’urgence d’exprimer nos solidarités au peuple palestinien, Le cercle d’amour décolonial invite des artistes et activistes membres de communautés unies dans leurs luttes pour la libération à se faire porte-voix des mots qui nourrissent la resistance.
Avec-With Hoda Adra, Bengi Akbulut, Yassin Alsalman, Marilou Craft, Karla Etienne, Oula Hajjar, Brintha Koneshachandra, Ehab Lotayef, Qiz7a, Sanna Mansouri, Leila Marshy, Charlie Prince, Lucine Serhan, Nour Symon, les Tisseuses, Amel Zaazaa, Marya Zarif, Jad Orphée Chami, Mohamed Masmoudi, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- حركة الشباب الفلسطيني (d'autres noms s'ajouteront)
La Sotterenea
November 19
6 pm, doors at 5h30
More information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/334250685963000/
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October 31, 2023
Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan and Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin
Just discovered the work of Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan. This is her website: https://www.amnaelhassan.com
I don't know nearly enough about what's currently happening in Sudan to write anything about it. But you can read the Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin speaking about it here: https://qantara.de/en/article/sudanese-artists-speak-out-its-not-our-war
That's all I can think to write for now.
EDIT: I felt there should be at least something else. Here's an article: In Sudan, a genocide unfolds — again — and the world does little
"Don’t forget that the Palestinian, Sudanese and Congolese genocides are all connected and the common threads are the economic and military interests of the West."
https://twitter.com/THISisLULE/status/1718441909130068366
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October 30, 2023
Rashid Khalidi Quote
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“The erasure of the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “vision for peace” might have been an unusually blatant act of disregard, but it was in no way new. The omission is the essence of the conflict. I was reminded of this back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Jerusalem for several months at a time, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families, including my own. I spent over a year going through dusty worm-eaten books, documents, and letters belonging to generations of Khalidis, among them my great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi.
Through his papers, I discovered a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was the heir to a long line of Jerusalemite Islamic scholars and legal functionaries, but at a young age, Yusuf Diya sought a different path for himself. After absorbing the fundamentals of a traditional Islamic education, he left Palestine at the age of 18 — without his father’s approval, we are told — to spend two years at a British Church Mission Society school in Malta. From there, he went to study at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul, after which he attended the city’s Robert College, recently founded by American Protestant missionaries. For five years during the 1860s, Yusuf Diya attended some of the first institutions in the Middle East that provided a modern, Western-style education, learning English, French, German, and much else.
With this broad training, Yusuf Diya filled various roles as an Ottoman government official: translator in the Foreign Ministry, consult in the Russian Black Sea port of Poti, governor of districts from Kurdistan to Syria, and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the short-lived Ottoman parliament established in 1876, and he did stints teaching at the Royal Imperial University in Vienna.
As a result of his wide reading, as well as his time in Vienna and other European countries, and from his encounters with Christian missionaries, Yusuf Diya was fully conscious of the pervasiveness and virulence of European anti-Semitism. He had also gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, and he was undoubtedly familiar with “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” by the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, published in 1896, and was aware of the first two Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. Moreover, as mayor of Jerusalem, he had witnessed the friction with the local population prompted by the first years of proto-Zionist activity, starting with the arrival of the first European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s.
Yusuf Diya would have been more aware than most of his compatriots in Palestine of the ambition of the nascent Zionist movement, as well as its strength, resources, and appeal. He knew perfectly well that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention that it be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism.
The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he esteemed “as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot,” and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, whom he said were “our cousins.” He understood the motivations for Zionism, just as he deplored the persecution to which Jews were subject in Europe. In light of this, he wrote, Zionism in principle was “natural, beautiful, and just.” He added, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”
But the former mayor of Jerusalem went on to warn of the dangers he foresaw as a consequence of the implementation of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. Whatever the merits of Zionism, Yusuf Diya wrote, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” Palestine “is inhabited by others.” It had an Indigenous population that would never accept being superseded, making it “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take Palestine over. “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere, but, he concluded, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”
Herzl replied—and quickly, in a letter on March 19. His letter was probably the first response by a leader of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl simply ignored the letter’s basic thesis, that Palestine was already inhabited by a population that would not agree to be supplanted. Although Herzl had visited Palestine once, in an 1898 visit timed to coincide with that of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, he (like most early European Zionists) had not much knowledge of or contact with its native inhabitants.
Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to Jewish control of Palestine, Herzl deployed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. “It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own,” Herzl wrote, adding that “no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”
Herzl’s letter addressed a consideration that Yusuf Diya had not even raised: “You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”
But Herzl had underestimated his correspondent. From Yusuf Diya’s letter, it is clear that he understood perfectly well that at issue was not the immigration of (as Herzl put it) “a number of Jews” into Palestine, but rather the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. Instead, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement that the colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. Herzl’s reply to Yusuf Diya appears to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.
This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day. As for the Jewish state that was ultimately created by the movement that Herzl founded, as Yusuf Diya foresaw, there was to be room for only one people, the Jewish people. As for the others, “sending them away” was indeed what happened, despite Herzl’s disingenuous remark.
Herzl’s letter referred to Palestinian Arabs, then roughly 95% of Palestine’s inhabitants, merely as its “non-Jewish population.” The Jewish state, Herzl wrote in “Der Judenstaat,” would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl’s imperious disregard of the Palestinians has been replicated over the decades in much discourse in the United States, Europe, and Israel; indeed, it was clearly audible from the White House as recently as this past week.”
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance
.
“The erasure of the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “vision for peace” might have been an unusually blatant act of disregard, but it was in no way new. The omission is the essence of the conflict. I was reminded of this back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Jerusalem for several months at a time, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families, including my own. I spent over a year going through dusty worm-eaten books, documents, and letters belonging to generations of Khalidis, among them my great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi.
Through his papers, I discovered a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was the heir to a long line of Jerusalemite Islamic scholars and legal functionaries, but at a young age, Yusuf Diya sought a different path for himself. After absorbing the fundamentals of a traditional Islamic education, he left Palestine at the age of 18 — without his father’s approval, we are told — to spend two years at a British Church Mission Society school in Malta. From there, he went to study at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul, after which he attended the city’s Robert College, recently founded by American Protestant missionaries. For five years during the 1860s, Yusuf Diya attended some of the first institutions in the Middle East that provided a modern, Western-style education, learning English, French, German, and much else.
With this broad training, Yusuf Diya filled various roles as an Ottoman government official: translator in the Foreign Ministry, consult in the Russian Black Sea port of Poti, governor of districts from Kurdistan to Syria, and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the short-lived Ottoman parliament established in 1876, and he did stints teaching at the Royal Imperial University in Vienna.
As a result of his wide reading, as well as his time in Vienna and other European countries, and from his encounters with Christian missionaries, Yusuf Diya was fully conscious of the pervasiveness and virulence of European anti-Semitism. He had also gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, and he was undoubtedly familiar with “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” by the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, published in 1896, and was aware of the first two Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. Moreover, as mayor of Jerusalem, he had witnessed the friction with the local population prompted by the first years of proto-Zionist activity, starting with the arrival of the first European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s.
Yusuf Diya would have been more aware than most of his compatriots in Palestine of the ambition of the nascent Zionist movement, as well as its strength, resources, and appeal. He knew perfectly well that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention that it be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism.
The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he esteemed “as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot,” and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, whom he said were “our cousins.” He understood the motivations for Zionism, just as he deplored the persecution to which Jews were subject in Europe. In light of this, he wrote, Zionism in principle was “natural, beautiful, and just.” He added, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”
But the former mayor of Jerusalem went on to warn of the dangers he foresaw as a consequence of the implementation of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. Whatever the merits of Zionism, Yusuf Diya wrote, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” Palestine “is inhabited by others.” It had an Indigenous population that would never accept being superseded, making it “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take Palestine over. “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere, but, he concluded, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”
Herzl replied—and quickly, in a letter on March 19. His letter was probably the first response by a leader of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl simply ignored the letter’s basic thesis, that Palestine was already inhabited by a population that would not agree to be supplanted. Although Herzl had visited Palestine once, in an 1898 visit timed to coincide with that of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, he (like most early European Zionists) had not much knowledge of or contact with its native inhabitants.
Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to Jewish control of Palestine, Herzl deployed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. “It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own,” Herzl wrote, adding that “no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”
Herzl’s letter addressed a consideration that Yusuf Diya had not even raised: “You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”
But Herzl had underestimated his correspondent. From Yusuf Diya’s letter, it is clear that he understood perfectly well that at issue was not the immigration of (as Herzl put it) “a number of Jews” into Palestine, but rather the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. Instead, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement that the colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. Herzl’s reply to Yusuf Diya appears to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.
This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day. As for the Jewish state that was ultimately created by the movement that Herzl founded, as Yusuf Diya foresaw, there was to be room for only one people, the Jewish people. As for the others, “sending them away” was indeed what happened, despite Herzl’s disingenuous remark.
Herzl’s letter referred to Palestinian Arabs, then roughly 95% of Palestine’s inhabitants, merely as its “non-Jewish population.” The Jewish state, Herzl wrote in “Der Judenstaat,” would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl’s imperious disregard of the Palestinians has been replicated over the decades in much discourse in the United States, Europe, and Israel; indeed, it was clearly audible from the White House as recently as this past week.”
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance
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October 27, 2023
One day...
"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."
Free Palestine spotted in the NYC subway
* * *
“The best comparator for what Israel is doing now in Gaza is not anything previous in Palestine. It’s Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
There, as here, Israel engaged in a bloody long-term attack with the purported goal of ending Palestinian resistance from Lebanon once and for all and establishing a Lebanese government that would give Israel “forty years of peace.”
The result? Israel lost any global sympathy quickly, especially after the Sabra and Shatila act of genocide. Israel’s puppet government fell almost immediately. Israel occupied a portion of Southern Lebanon for 20 years, at the end of which it withdrew with nothing gained. In the wake of its occupation came Hizballah, one of Israel’s most potent consistent enemies. On the way to gaining nothing, Israel killed tens of thousands, mostly civilians.”
* * *
"When I’m asked why I’m a self-hating Jew, I like to say I’m someone who values the Jewish principles of tzedek (the pursuit of justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world), & derekh eretz (treating all with dignity/respect), NOT an alliance with a genocidal global superpower."
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October 1, 2023
PME-ART in Lisbon
I'm extremely excited to be travelling to Lisbon to perform A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling at Teatro do Bairro Alto on October 13 & 14:
https://teatrodobairroalto.pt/en/event/a-users-guide-to-authencity-is-a-feeling
It will be my first time on tour since February 2020. (And I used to travel constantly.) Very curious to see what it's like to head back out on the road.
(Also, Lisbon is one of my all-time favourite cities. Also, I just realized - due mostly to the pandemic - that the last time I performed in Europe was five years ago.)
Facebook Event.
You can still order the book in either English or French:
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART
There's also this video of a short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.
And of course, if you're interested, you can find out more about PME-ART here.
September 26, 2023
Steffani Jemison Quote
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“I used to think that time is just one thing, the way a ruler is always the same length, twelve inches or twenty-four inches or even a yard.
Then I started to run and learned that time is only like distance if we measure distance with taffy or rubber bands or chewing gum or pleats, anything that can expand wide like an accordion or shrink small enough to swallow.
I found that the twenty or thirty minutes of a run could feel like the longest twenty minutes of your life. The final block, the final leg, the final lap, the final half mile – they could feel like the longest hundred feet in the world.
Even when I ran every day, when I felt I could never imagine being more accustomed to something than I was accustomed to running, even then, I sometimes felt I would never reach the end.
There are things you do because they’re easy and there are other things you do.”
– Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street
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“I used to think that time is just one thing, the way a ruler is always the same length, twelve inches or twenty-four inches or even a yard.
Then I started to run and learned that time is only like distance if we measure distance with taffy or rubber bands or chewing gum or pleats, anything that can expand wide like an accordion or shrink small enough to swallow.
I found that the twenty or thirty minutes of a run could feel like the longest twenty minutes of your life. The final block, the final leg, the final lap, the final half mile – they could feel like the longest hundred feet in the world.
Even when I ran every day, when I felt I could never imagine being more accustomed to something than I was accustomed to running, even then, I sometimes felt I would never reach the end.
There are things you do because they’re easy and there are other things you do.”
– Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street
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September 21, 2023
I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist...
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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist. To imagine my life being opposite. And the first thing that comes to mind is myself as an eccentric. That without the release valve of making art, my artistic impulses instead become behaviors. That I would have become a somewhat stranger person than I currently am.
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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist. To imagine my life being opposite. And the first thing that comes to mind is myself as an eccentric. That without the release valve of making art, my artistic impulses instead become behaviors. That I would have become a somewhat stranger person than I currently am.
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September 6, 2023
Quotations on pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and failure (an ongoing list)
August 27, 2023
Francisco Goldman Quote
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“Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more. But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.”
– Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy
.
“Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more. But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.”
– Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy
.
August 16, 2023
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quote
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“On the populist left, the then favored model of the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual”: someone who participated in and was part of the community he would uplift. And yet James Baldwin’s basic conception of himself was formed by the familiar, and still well-entrenched, idea of the alienated artist or intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension between these two models – he would do so in his fiction – be he was never to resolve it.”
– Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Welcome Table
[From the anthology: Lure and Loathing: Twenty black intellectuals address W.E.B. Du Bois’s dilemma of the double-consciousness of African Americans. Edited by Gerald Early.]
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“On the populist left, the then favored model of the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual”: someone who participated in and was part of the community he would uplift. And yet James Baldwin’s basic conception of himself was formed by the familiar, and still well-entrenched, idea of the alienated artist or intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension between these two models – he would do so in his fiction – be he was never to resolve it.”
– Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Welcome Table
[From the anthology: Lure and Loathing: Twenty black intellectuals address W.E.B. Du Bois’s dilemma of the double-consciousness of African Americans. Edited by Gerald Early.]
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June 8, 2023
Michael Wolff Quote
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I could call up Arianna and confirm the best story I know about these dinner parties. But I don’t want it not to be true. I tell my children this story as an example of savvy and pluck. (I have heard it from three different people.)
Arianna set about having dinner parties, inviting the most prestigious New Yorkers who would come and, at an appointed hour, she would deliver an impromptu toast, fifteen minutes or more of sweeping, seamless, knowing, witty observations, the likes of which no awkward table in New York had ever heard before. Grown men, those attracted to ambitious women anyway, swooned. When, ultimately, it got out that these toasts were written and rehearsed, that only added to the allure. Indeed, this is what I tell my children: it’s not the effortlessness but the effort that goes into making it effortless. In praise of artifice, if you will.
– Michael Wolff, Too Famous
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I could call up Arianna and confirm the best story I know about these dinner parties. But I don’t want it not to be true. I tell my children this story as an example of savvy and pluck. (I have heard it from three different people.)
Arianna set about having dinner parties, inviting the most prestigious New Yorkers who would come and, at an appointed hour, she would deliver an impromptu toast, fifteen minutes or more of sweeping, seamless, knowing, witty observations, the likes of which no awkward table in New York had ever heard before. Grown men, those attracted to ambitious women anyway, swooned. When, ultimately, it got out that these toasts were written and rehearsed, that only added to the allure. Indeed, this is what I tell my children: it’s not the effortlessness but the effort that goes into making it effortless. In praise of artifice, if you will.
– Michael Wolff, Too Famous
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June 1, 2023
Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)
Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels):
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The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”
*
Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.
*
Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.
*
Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.
*
Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.
*
To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.
*
*
The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”
*
Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.
*
Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.
*
Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.
*
Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.
*
To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.
*
May 23, 2023
A project in continuum with The Fall
I have so much to say about this record that I don’t even know where to begin.
Made by members of The Fall who, over the years, Mark E. Smith fired or who quit due to his erratic and abusive behavior. Made by many of the musical architects of the classic Fall sound. And now that Mark E. Smith is gone they come together and make a record in continuum with the work of The Fall that’s almost as good as any Fall record and, for this reason, in some ways all that much better.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Living well is the best revenge.
How to take past resentments and turn them into gold. How to have a final, unexpected fourth act that turns everything on its head.
For some reason listening to this record gives me some small hope for my artistic future. (Even though I’m probably Mark E. Smith in this story, so the hope comes after I die.)
https://houseofall.bandcamp.com/album/house-of-all
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May 13, 2023
Three videos from The Air Contains Honey
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
The Air Contains Honey - Sexuality
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
The Air Contains Honey - Everything
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey - Best Moments
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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May 11, 2023
Diachroneity Books: "What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre."
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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May 6, 2023
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:
*
I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
*
There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
*
Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
*
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
*
I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
*
There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
*
Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
*
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
April 17, 2023
Six sentences concerning art and jealousy
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Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.
Artists should have honest discussions about ambition (and about money.)
Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.
The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.
The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity.
There are no individual solutions to collective problems.
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Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the most natural part of being an artist.
Artists should have honest discussions about ambition (and about money.)
Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.
The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.
The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity.
There are no individual solutions to collective problems.
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