.
Perverse Curating is a tentative idea for a group show that would attempt to use the juxtoposition of conflicting works of art in a ‘perverse’ manner, both: 1) as a critique of what often feels (to me) like a generalized, much too ‘well-behaved’, curatorial position; and 2) as a way of seeing how far one might push this mischievous, ethically dubious, possibility for exhibition making.
Many (or most?) group exhibitions attempt to place works in space in such a way that they aesthetically and thematically complement one another, forming an experience for the viewer that supports (or, in a best case scenario, endlessly complicates) some larger curatorial position or thesis. With Perverse Curating I would like to attempt the opposite, as if all the works within the exhibition were are war with one another, fighting for their various approaches and positions, taking turns undermining each other, in never-ending conflict. If I were to do this without the complicity and permission of the artists, such a project would merely be questionable. It is the full co-operation of each artist involved that will make this undertaking ‘perverse’, as they agree to present their own works in ways that subjugate, compromise and undermine them, doing the same to the works of their fellow participants.
At this time, I have no particular artists or works in mind. We might think of Perverse Curating as a thought experiment that, eventually, I would like to turn into a exhibition. What would it mean to juxtapose works of art in a way that feels perverse? How could I do so in a manner that brings into question some of the unquestioned paradigms of conventional exhibition-making?
I am partly thinking of one of Chantal Mouffe’s best-known terms: agonism, ‘a political theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict.’ While, according to Mouffe, agonism is a necessary part of any democratic process, within an artistic exhibition it might be useful to put the works into some sort of more extreme form of inter-thematic conflict. (The word I am using for this more extreme form is ‘perverse.’) As well, because a work of art always has many meanings, I would be interested to see if there were ways of creating conflicts that took place simultaneously on varying levels of visual sensation and content.
I have never curated an exhibition. And though I have done many projects in a visual art context, strictly speaking I am not exactly a visual artist. (Though that seems to be the direction my work is slowly heading in.) Much of my artistic history takes places in performance and literature. Therefore, for me, this project would also be in the tradition of works which bring something unusual to a given context simply because they were generated by someone slightly outside of the reigning paradigms, who does things differently partly to shake things up and partly out of a conscious naivité, because he or she doesn’t completely know how things are usually done. For example, I have always been fascinated by figures like Rem Koolhaus (who began his career as a screenwriter) or Robert Wilson (who began as a visual artist.)
There are many curatorial projects today created by artists, and Perverse Curating could certainly be seen in this light. However, my hope is that it could also be something else. A kind of workshop for everyone involved to question how their works are frequently exhibited. As a provocation for opening up other artistic and exhibition possibilities. This will require considerable collaboration and participation from everyone involved, which means each of the artists will have to be carefully chosen. I have no idea where or when an exhibition like Perverse Curating might take place.
[You can find other approaches to Perverse Curating here, here and here.]
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May 20, 2013
Four Sentences
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Someone becomes an artist because at some point in their life someone, implicitly or explicitly, gave them permission to make art.
We need an accurate analysis of the situation to proceed, but the road to an accurate analysis leads only to further debate.
After your presentation, during the questions, at the end of each question, simply admit that you don’t know.
When you’re born it’s real, when you die it’s real, everything else is a mix of reality and conventions.
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Someone becomes an artist because at some point in their life someone, implicitly or explicitly, gave them permission to make art.
We need an accurate analysis of the situation to proceed, but the road to an accurate analysis leads only to further debate.
After your presentation, during the questions, at the end of each question, simply admit that you don’t know.
When you’re born it’s real, when you die it’s real, everything else is a mix of reality and conventions.
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May 14, 2013
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
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So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against endlessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical time.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle and then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I wish I were a better activist. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I can often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work of art feels dead and sterile to me. Also works that strive towards perfection. For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
But perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan often states that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely simple or clear.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
Yet what I like best about art is how communities form around artists, or works of art, they believe in. How you meet someone who loves the same book as you, and already you have so much to talk about.
So many of my ideas about activism come from a single book I read maybe fifteen years ago. (I am ordering it from the internet right now, to take another look, see if my memory is in any way correct.) The book was Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb, and what I remember most about it is the quote: ‘If everyone in your coalition agrees about everything, than you your coalition is too small.’ In this sense, Paul Chan is wrong when he suggests we need to simplify the goal beyond recognition. Or is it only that the more people you have on your team, the harder it will be to reach consensus about anything, simplified or otherwise.
Then there are questions of strategy. Questions of strategy must be the moment where consensus most frequently, most easily, breaks down. I promise that I’m not going to spent the next ten years writing about the fact that I plan to spend ten years working on this book, but it occurs to me now that ‘ten years’ is also a kind of strategy, a strategy to break down my defenses, to wear myself down so I suddenly, eventually, find myself writing things I would never otherwise write; like how in a documentary, if you film all the time, the subjects eventually forget they are being filmed, start to behave more naturally in front of the cameras. I read my own books and think: I put so much of myself into them, but there is also so much I leave out. (Yet maybe they are more ‘me’ because of what I leave out.) But this ten year strategy will not suffice, I need more strategies, so many more strategies, if the reader is to survive.
[Previous excepts: #-1, #0, #2.]
.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against endlessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical time.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle and then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I wish I were a better activist. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I can often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work of art feels dead and sterile to me. Also works that strive towards perfection. For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
But perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan often states that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely simple or clear.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
Yet what I like best about art is how communities form around artists, or works of art, they believe in. How you meet someone who loves the same book as you, and already you have so much to talk about.
So many of my ideas about activism come from a single book I read maybe fifteen years ago. (I am ordering it from the internet right now, to take another look, see if my memory is in any way correct.) The book was Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb, and what I remember most about it is the quote: ‘If everyone in your coalition agrees about everything, than you your coalition is too small.’ In this sense, Paul Chan is wrong when he suggests we need to simplify the goal beyond recognition. Or is it only that the more people you have on your team, the harder it will be to reach consensus about anything, simplified or otherwise.
Then there are questions of strategy. Questions of strategy must be the moment where consensus most frequently, most easily, breaks down. I promise that I’m not going to spent the next ten years writing about the fact that I plan to spend ten years working on this book, but it occurs to me now that ‘ten years’ is also a kind of strategy, a strategy to break down my defenses, to wear myself down so I suddenly, eventually, find myself writing things I would never otherwise write; like how in a documentary, if you film all the time, the subjects eventually forget they are being filmed, start to behave more naturally in front of the cameras. I read my own books and think: I put so much of myself into them, but there is also so much I leave out. (Yet maybe they are more ‘me’ because of what I leave out.) But this ten year strategy will not suffice, I need more strategies, so many more strategies, if the reader is to survive.
[Previous excepts: #-1, #0, #2.]
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Jacob Wren Long Bio
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Jacob Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature.
His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty (1998), Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010), Polyamorous Love Song (2014), Rich and Poor (2016), Authenticity is a Feeling (2018), Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim (2024) and Desire Without Expectation (forthcoming in 2027).
Polyamorous Love Song was a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014. Rich and Poor was a finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2016. Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim was a finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. His books have been translated into French (by both Le Quartanier and Éditions Triptyque) and Norwegian.
His performances, made collaboratively with other artists, engage with the struggle and paradox of ‘being oneself’ in a performance situation, with what it means to stand in front of an audience and speak honestly about the things one finds important, at the same time never afraid to show how vulnerable and nervous one might naturally feel in such a situation.
Many of these performances are made as Artistic Director of PME-ART, with whom he co-created: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), Unrehearsed Beauty-Le Génie des autres (2002), La famille se crée en copulant (2005), the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including: 1: The Title Is Constantly Changing (2008), 3: Individualism Was A Mistake (2008), 2: Gradually This Overview (2010) and 5: The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011), Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2013), Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie (2014), A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling (2018) and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition (2022).
PME-ART has also presented the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes (2020) which won the 2020-2021 Coup de cœur de LA SERRE arts vivants, published the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes (2021) and was nominated for the 27th Conseil des arts de Montréal Grand Prix in the category of New Artistic Practices. In 2024, PME-ART invited Kamissa Ma Koïta and Elena Stoodley to create the project Survival Technologies.
International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the 1954 Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin, 2007), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser / Campo, Ghent, 2008), Big Brother Where Art Thou? (a project entirely on Facebook co-created with Lene Berg / OFFTA / PME-ART, 2011) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo / The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, 2012).
He has also collaborated with Nadia Ross and her company STO Union. Together they co-wrote and co-directed Recent Experiences (2000) and Revolutions in Therapy (2004).
Some of these projects have been reinvented by other artists. For example: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize was reinvented by the National Theatre School to celebrate their 50th anniversary, co-directed by Chris Abraham and Christian Lapointe. Recent Experiences was reinvented by Amir Reza Koohestani / Mehr Theatre Group in a production that toured extensively. And La famille se crée en copulant was reinvented by La Periscope in a production directed by Frédéric Dubois.
Jacob created the exercise Relay-Interview, has led workshops in Montréal, Stockholm, Annaghmakerrig, Ghent, Cologne, Toronto, Zürich, Chicoutimi and Harstad, and has had residencies in Hamburg, Viborg, Brussels, Lisbon, Kochi, Calgary, Portland, Cologne, Chicoutimi and Santarcangelo.
In a visual art context he has co-created works such as Five Important Books (co-created with Shannon Cochrane - Dare Dare/Mercer Union/Kyber, 2002), Hospitality 2: Gradually This Overview (PME-ART/Articule, 2010), Music And Theatre Must Learn To Disassociate (co-created with Adam Kinner as part of the group exhibition Stage Set Stage at SBC Gallery, Montréal, 2014) and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie (PME-ART/Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2014), works that focus on how to use the gallery space in an unconventional, always performative, manner. He also had a text piece entitled If the absurdity within which we currently live results in our full or partial extinction does that make it less or more absurd? in the group show Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) at Maison Populaire (Montreuil, 2014.)
He has also written about visual art for Mix Magazine, C Magazine, Useless Magazine, Spike Magazine, Fillip, Rekto Verso, Scapegoat, Etc., Valeveil, YYZ, The Capilano Review, Canadian Art, Eastern Edge, 3e impérial, SKOL, Folie/Culture and written catalog texts for Johanna Billing, Gwen MacGregor, MASS MoCA, Lorna Bauer, Hazel Meyer, Pedro Gomez-Egana, MAC, Raphaëlle de Groot, Sarah Pierce, Kim Waldron, Monika Romstein and Alegría Gobeil.
He was a member of the musical project Enters (with Alexei Perry Cox and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh) and co-founder of the orchestra The Air Contains Honey whose first album The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes is out from Quindi Records in Florence, Italy.
He has performed in Aberystwyth, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Austin, Belfast, Bergen, Berlin, Birmingham, Bonn, Bordeaux, Boston, Brighton, Brussels, Calgary, Cardiff, Chicoutimi, Cognac, Cologne, Copenhagen, Créteil, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Fribourg, Geneva, Ghent, Glasgow, Groningen, The Hague, Halifax, Hamburg, Harstad, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kingston, Kortrijk, Krakow, Linz, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Maastricht, Madrid, Malmö, Manchester, Mannheim, Marseille, Maubeuge, Melbourne, Montréal, Munich, Münster, New York, Nottingham, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris, Peterborough, Polverigi, Prague, Québec City, Rakvere, Regina, Reykjavík, Riga, Rotterdam, Rouen, Saint-Jean Port-Joli, Salamanca, Salzburg, Stavanger, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Tallinn, Taipei, Tielt, Toronto, Tokyo, Trondheim, Vancouver, Vienna, Vilnius, Yokohama, Zagreb and Zurich.
His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.
If you'd like to be extra-generous and help Jacob continue to write books, you can find his Patreon here.
*
Links:
Jacob Wren Links
PME-ART Links
www.pme-art.ca
www.radicalcut.blogspot.com
www.goodreads.com/author/show/1841571.Jacob_Wren
www.lequartanier.com/auteurs/wren.htm
twitter.com/EverySongIveEve
jacobwren.tumblr.com
instagram.com/jacob_wren_writer
bsky.app/profile/jacobwren.bsky.social
mastodon.social/@Jacob_Wren
patreon.com/c/jacob_wren_writer
.
Jacob Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature.
His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty (1998), Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010), Polyamorous Love Song (2014), Rich and Poor (2016), Authenticity is a Feeling (2018), Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim (2024) and Desire Without Expectation (forthcoming in 2027).
Polyamorous Love Song was a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014. Rich and Poor was a finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2016. Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim was a finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. His books have been translated into French (by both Le Quartanier and Éditions Triptyque) and Norwegian.
His performances, made collaboratively with other artists, engage with the struggle and paradox of ‘being oneself’ in a performance situation, with what it means to stand in front of an audience and speak honestly about the things one finds important, at the same time never afraid to show how vulnerable and nervous one might naturally feel in such a situation.
Many of these performances are made as Artistic Director of PME-ART, with whom he co-created: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), Unrehearsed Beauty-Le Génie des autres (2002), La famille se crée en copulant (2005), the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including: 1: The Title Is Constantly Changing (2008), 3: Individualism Was A Mistake (2008), 2: Gradually This Overview (2010) and 5: The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011), Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2013), Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie (2014), A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling (2018) and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition (2022).
PME-ART has also presented the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes (2020) which won the 2020-2021 Coup de cœur de LA SERRE arts vivants, published the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes (2021) and was nominated for the 27th Conseil des arts de Montréal Grand Prix in the category of New Artistic Practices. In 2024, PME-ART invited Kamissa Ma Koïta and Elena Stoodley to create the project Survival Technologies.
International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the 1954 Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin, 2007), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser / Campo, Ghent, 2008), Big Brother Where Art Thou? (a project entirely on Facebook co-created with Lene Berg / OFFTA / PME-ART, 2011) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo / The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, 2012).
He has also collaborated with Nadia Ross and her company STO Union. Together they co-wrote and co-directed Recent Experiences (2000) and Revolutions in Therapy (2004).
Some of these projects have been reinvented by other artists. For example: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize was reinvented by the National Theatre School to celebrate their 50th anniversary, co-directed by Chris Abraham and Christian Lapointe. Recent Experiences was reinvented by Amir Reza Koohestani / Mehr Theatre Group in a production that toured extensively. And La famille se crée en copulant was reinvented by La Periscope in a production directed by Frédéric Dubois.
Jacob created the exercise Relay-Interview, has led workshops in Montréal, Stockholm, Annaghmakerrig, Ghent, Cologne, Toronto, Zürich, Chicoutimi and Harstad, and has had residencies in Hamburg, Viborg, Brussels, Lisbon, Kochi, Calgary, Portland, Cologne, Chicoutimi and Santarcangelo.
In a visual art context he has co-created works such as Five Important Books (co-created with Shannon Cochrane - Dare Dare/Mercer Union/Kyber, 2002), Hospitality 2: Gradually This Overview (PME-ART/Articule, 2010), Music And Theatre Must Learn To Disassociate (co-created with Adam Kinner as part of the group exhibition Stage Set Stage at SBC Gallery, Montréal, 2014) and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie (PME-ART/Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2014), works that focus on how to use the gallery space in an unconventional, always performative, manner. He also had a text piece entitled If the absurdity within which we currently live results in our full or partial extinction does that make it less or more absurd? in the group show Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) at Maison Populaire (Montreuil, 2014.)
He has also written about visual art for Mix Magazine, C Magazine, Useless Magazine, Spike Magazine, Fillip, Rekto Verso, Scapegoat, Etc., Valeveil, YYZ, The Capilano Review, Canadian Art, Eastern Edge, 3e impérial, SKOL, Folie/Culture and written catalog texts for Johanna Billing, Gwen MacGregor, MASS MoCA, Lorna Bauer, Hazel Meyer, Pedro Gomez-Egana, MAC, Raphaëlle de Groot, Sarah Pierce, Kim Waldron, Monika Romstein and Alegría Gobeil.
He was a member of the musical project Enters (with Alexei Perry Cox and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh) and co-founder of the orchestra The Air Contains Honey whose first album The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes is out from Quindi Records in Florence, Italy.
He has performed in Aberystwyth, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Austin, Belfast, Bergen, Berlin, Birmingham, Bonn, Bordeaux, Boston, Brighton, Brussels, Calgary, Cardiff, Chicoutimi, Cognac, Cologne, Copenhagen, Créteil, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Fribourg, Geneva, Ghent, Glasgow, Groningen, The Hague, Halifax, Hamburg, Harstad, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kingston, Kortrijk, Krakow, Linz, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Maastricht, Madrid, Malmö, Manchester, Mannheim, Marseille, Maubeuge, Melbourne, Montréal, Munich, Münster, New York, Nottingham, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris, Peterborough, Polverigi, Prague, Québec City, Rakvere, Regina, Reykjavík, Riga, Rotterdam, Rouen, Saint-Jean Port-Joli, Salamanca, Salzburg, Stavanger, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Tallinn, Taipei, Tielt, Toronto, Tokyo, Trondheim, Vancouver, Vienna, Vilnius, Yokohama, Zagreb and Zurich.
His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.
If you'd like to be extra-generous and help Jacob continue to write books, you can find his Patreon here.
*
Links:
Jacob Wren Links
PME-ART Links
www.pme-art.ca
www.radicalcut.blogspot.com
www.goodreads.com/author/show/1841571.Jacob_Wren
www.lequartanier.com/auteurs/wren.htm
twitter.com/EverySongIveEve
jacobwren.tumblr.com
instagram.com/jacob_wren_writer
bsky.app/profile/jacobwren.bsky.social
mastodon.social/@Jacob_Wren
patreon.com/c/jacob_wren_writer
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May 13, 2013
Email from Kathrin Tiedemann
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I found these two sentences in Ricardo Piglia's "Short Forms" in a chapter with the title "Borges' Last Story" about how reading is the art to construct a personal memory from experiences and memories that are not yours. Scenes from books you read will be recalled as private memories. That way life and literature become something inseparable, an unforgettable experience that will be remembered like a melody. - I love this thought so much. It reminded me of how much I have always been a reader and that if I don't read enough I feel cut off from my memory.
If reading is the art to construct a personal memory I wonder how in comparison "watching a performance" could be defined?
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I found these two sentences in Ricardo Piglia's "Short Forms" in a chapter with the title "Borges' Last Story" about how reading is the art to construct a personal memory from experiences and memories that are not yours. Scenes from books you read will be recalled as private memories. That way life and literature become something inseparable, an unforgettable experience that will be remembered like a melody. - I love this thought so much. It reminded me of how much I have always been a reader and that if I don't read enough I feel cut off from my memory.
If reading is the art to construct a personal memory I wonder how in comparison "watching a performance" could be defined?
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May 12, 2013
Tilda Swinton Quote
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Loneliness is the deal. Loneliness is the last great taboo. If we don’t accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain’t true.
- Tilda Swinton (from this interview in The Guardian.)
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Loneliness is the deal. Loneliness is the last great taboo. If we don’t accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain’t true.
- Tilda Swinton (from this interview in The Guardian.)
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May 8, 2013
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
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Each of my previous books took me approximately four years to write, but I didn’t decide beforehand they would take four years. I started at the beginning and wrote until they were done. In retrospect, the fact that each took about the same length of time seems to have led me to the conclusion that it takes me four years to write a book. Yet this length of time is so arbitrary, rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I put my mind to it I could most likely complete a book in a year (I have always written quickly), but I have already decided it takes four so, unconsciously, I stretch it out. What if I were to stretch it out even more?
It is this question of ‘deciding beforehand’ that pushes my mind into so many flavors of chaos. Pop psychology would nail me with fear of commitment. I am at the beginning, full of uncertainty: is writing this book for ten years even a good idea? will it lead toward breakthrough or mediocrity? will I stick with it? am I only over-indulging my most self-indulgent writerly traits? What does it mean to decide beforehand, what exactly am I deciding?
I believe, for most of the history of literature, a writer had every reason to believe it was possible that people would continue to read their books long after they were dead. Today you would be somewhat delusional to assume this with any confidence. It of course may happen, just as anything might happen, but it’s a bit of a long shot. There are so many writers, so many books, so little built to last. We live in a time when the future itself is a long shot, when human extinction, due to environmental collapse, feels like one of many very real dystopic possibilities. There is little well-reasoned confidence that the future will be better than the present, much evidence it will be worse. Of course, the world will still be here in ten years, but these ten years might also be an analogy for 50, 100, 300, 500 years into the future. What would it mean to write a book that you wanted people to read in 300 years? (I suspect it would be only a hairs-breadth away from writing a book you wanted people to read right now.) Today, a feeling of complicit ‘no future’ increases at a steady clip, yet perhaps this opens the possibility for something else. What comes after the future?
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold. It is not my plan to spend ten years writing down my random thoughts, keeping my fingers crossed they might be at least slightly profound. It is my plan, at some point over the next ten years, to start making stuff up, elements of fiction, stories that didn’t happen and didn’t happen to me. I still don’t know why this might be necessary. Is fiction only an insecurity around fact? Or around thought?
.
Each of my previous books took me approximately four years to write, but I didn’t decide beforehand they would take four years. I started at the beginning and wrote until they were done. In retrospect, the fact that each took about the same length of time seems to have led me to the conclusion that it takes me four years to write a book. Yet this length of time is so arbitrary, rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I put my mind to it I could most likely complete a book in a year (I have always written quickly), but I have already decided it takes four so, unconsciously, I stretch it out. What if I were to stretch it out even more?
It is this question of ‘deciding beforehand’ that pushes my mind into so many flavors of chaos. Pop psychology would nail me with fear of commitment. I am at the beginning, full of uncertainty: is writing this book for ten years even a good idea? will it lead toward breakthrough or mediocrity? will I stick with it? am I only over-indulging my most self-indulgent writerly traits? What does it mean to decide beforehand, what exactly am I deciding?
I believe, for most of the history of literature, a writer had every reason to believe it was possible that people would continue to read their books long after they were dead. Today you would be somewhat delusional to assume this with any confidence. It of course may happen, just as anything might happen, but it’s a bit of a long shot. There are so many writers, so many books, so little built to last. We live in a time when the future itself is a long shot, when human extinction, due to environmental collapse, feels like one of many very real dystopic possibilities. There is little well-reasoned confidence that the future will be better than the present, much evidence it will be worse. Of course, the world will still be here in ten years, but these ten years might also be an analogy for 50, 100, 300, 500 years into the future. What would it mean to write a book that you wanted people to read in 300 years? (I suspect it would be only a hairs-breadth away from writing a book you wanted people to read right now.) Today, a feeling of complicit ‘no future’ increases at a steady clip, yet perhaps this opens the possibility for something else. What comes after the future?
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold. It is not my plan to spend ten years writing down my random thoughts, keeping my fingers crossed they might be at least slightly profound. It is my plan, at some point over the next ten years, to start making stuff up, elements of fiction, stories that didn’t happen and didn’t happen to me. I still don’t know why this might be necessary. Is fiction only an insecurity around fact? Or around thought?
.
April 27, 2013
Macedonio Fernández Quote
.
It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to the Effect of dis-identification, the only thing that would justify its existence…
- Macedonio Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
.
It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to the Effect of dis-identification, the only thing that would justify its existence…
- Macedonio Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
.
April 1, 2013
Passage from Mopus by Oisín Curran
.
William says, While stapling MISSING DOG signs to a telephone pole on Jade St., I saw a little boy toting a saucer of milk. He knelt by a grating in the sidewalk, put down the saucer and walked off a few steps.
Moments later a tiny paw stretched out from the grating, dipped into the saucer then withdrew. Next, the owner of the paw, a tabby kitten, squeezed through the iron grating, intent on the saucer. But no sooner was it out than the little boy grabbed it and kissed it madly as he slipped inside a doorway where a woman waited.
The saucer of milk remained. Around a corner came a big dog. Not mine. It bent to the milk and lapped it up with a single sweep of its tongue, then padded away. I crossed to where the sun burnt the sidewalk.
It was an omen, but of what? I could make neither head nor tail of the signs that troubled my sight that day. From the plaster of a streetside building a pattern of bricks stood out, spelling some message in a script I’d never seen.
In this part of town, laundry was slung between houses. There were little bridges arching over the laundry. Above me two men stood on such a bridge, smoking. One asked the other if he would be attending the meeting tonight. Of course, said his friend. They looked down at me as I passed. One flicked the ash from his cigarette and it fluttered to my feet. I picked up my pace.
At the arena I found a bench and sat, pulled out my book and read that classed among the impossibles are those things that neither are nor were, nevertheless the impossible thing exists, if only as a thought. A thought too has breath, organs, wind comes from its system, thus if an impossibility takes shape in one’s mind, one is exhorted to quell it at once, for it may possess the mind, wishing to have material existence, feeding on one’s capacity to do the impossible. In this way the gods desire themselves into existence, so too buildings and revolutions, ghosts, cars, pickled zebras, toaster ovens and all the excresences of humanity. All classed at one time into the impossibles, now thriving, impeccably empirical, swanning across our landscape, not merely possible but even more real than we are.
At this point I raised my head to gaze across the arena, a fawaway look in my eyes as I pondered the above. In the arena children played in the dust, kicked balls against the stone walls and took whacks at each other.
Someone lurked in a corner of my eye, I turned my head.
On the other end of the bench a woman had seated herself. She was looking at me. I smiled and turned back to my book which was saying that the origin of impossible things is not known, it may be that conscious thought itself is another life form, a type of parasite that inhabits the ether, bores itself inside the receptive skulls of human beings and organizes society into means of production of impossibility.
I stopped reading. Without turning my head I could see that the woman was still looking at me. Not surreptitiously. No, she had turned in her seat and was staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. Who was she? I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. It was not kind. Nor was it unkind, but it prickled my skin.
- Oisín Curran, Mopus
.
William says, While stapling MISSING DOG signs to a telephone pole on Jade St., I saw a little boy toting a saucer of milk. He knelt by a grating in the sidewalk, put down the saucer and walked off a few steps.
Moments later a tiny paw stretched out from the grating, dipped into the saucer then withdrew. Next, the owner of the paw, a tabby kitten, squeezed through the iron grating, intent on the saucer. But no sooner was it out than the little boy grabbed it and kissed it madly as he slipped inside a doorway where a woman waited.
The saucer of milk remained. Around a corner came a big dog. Not mine. It bent to the milk and lapped it up with a single sweep of its tongue, then padded away. I crossed to where the sun burnt the sidewalk.
It was an omen, but of what? I could make neither head nor tail of the signs that troubled my sight that day. From the plaster of a streetside building a pattern of bricks stood out, spelling some message in a script I’d never seen.
In this part of town, laundry was slung between houses. There were little bridges arching over the laundry. Above me two men stood on such a bridge, smoking. One asked the other if he would be attending the meeting tonight. Of course, said his friend. They looked down at me as I passed. One flicked the ash from his cigarette and it fluttered to my feet. I picked up my pace.
At the arena I found a bench and sat, pulled out my book and read that classed among the impossibles are those things that neither are nor were, nevertheless the impossible thing exists, if only as a thought. A thought too has breath, organs, wind comes from its system, thus if an impossibility takes shape in one’s mind, one is exhorted to quell it at once, for it may possess the mind, wishing to have material existence, feeding on one’s capacity to do the impossible. In this way the gods desire themselves into existence, so too buildings and revolutions, ghosts, cars, pickled zebras, toaster ovens and all the excresences of humanity. All classed at one time into the impossibles, now thriving, impeccably empirical, swanning across our landscape, not merely possible but even more real than we are.
At this point I raised my head to gaze across the arena, a fawaway look in my eyes as I pondered the above. In the arena children played in the dust, kicked balls against the stone walls and took whacks at each other.
Someone lurked in a corner of my eye, I turned my head.
On the other end of the bench a woman had seated herself. She was looking at me. I smiled and turned back to my book which was saying that the origin of impossible things is not known, it may be that conscious thought itself is another life form, a type of parasite that inhabits the ether, bores itself inside the receptive skulls of human beings and organizes society into means of production of impossibility.
I stopped reading. Without turning my head I could see that the woman was still looking at me. Not surreptitiously. No, she had turned in her seat and was staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. Who was she? I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. It was not kind. Nor was it unkind, but it prickled my skin.
- Oisín Curran, Mopus
.
Nina Power Quote
.
But should the Left be coming up with ‘new’ ideas all the time? Politics is not fashion – and, in any case, even fashion is more cyclical rather than endlessly transhistorical. […] Certain fundamental things that the Left seeks to abolish – exploitation, inequality, material poverty, exclusion – are more present than ever and while they may take on ‘novel’ forms, the real newness may simply be quantitative, as more and more people ‘pay’ for a crisis they didn’t create (which is not to buy into the idea that austerity is in any way ‘necessary’, of course).
Perhaps the real problem here is the way in which time itself always serves as the measure for all politics, and all critique of politics, whether it be the bleak future, the heroic past, the desolate present, the utopian tomorrow, the shadowy past or the dawning of a new day. […] If time is a weapon used against people fighting against the speed and brutality of what is happening, we may be forced to use a different image of time – or perhaps an image of a world without time altogether – against those whose only measure seems to be the maximisation of profit in the shortest possible period. The question of whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t – a brutal marker not only of the division between life and death but between the more important distinction between those whose life/death ‘counts’ and those about whom nothing is counted at all – is played out in the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter: permanent accumulation. The dedication to amassing at the expense of life itself reveals a terror of time so disturbing that any politics of temporal pessimism/optimism looks insignificant by comparison.
As we defend those who await trial, or write to those in prison, or sit in courts, job centres and universities as futures are crushed all around, time may be all we have left: time in which to abolish their notion of time and replace it […] with a life in which nobody seeks to make time measurable at all, for all time.
- Nina Power, The Pessimism of Time
.
But should the Left be coming up with ‘new’ ideas all the time? Politics is not fashion – and, in any case, even fashion is more cyclical rather than endlessly transhistorical. […] Certain fundamental things that the Left seeks to abolish – exploitation, inequality, material poverty, exclusion – are more present than ever and while they may take on ‘novel’ forms, the real newness may simply be quantitative, as more and more people ‘pay’ for a crisis they didn’t create (which is not to buy into the idea that austerity is in any way ‘necessary’, of course).
Perhaps the real problem here is the way in which time itself always serves as the measure for all politics, and all critique of politics, whether it be the bleak future, the heroic past, the desolate present, the utopian tomorrow, the shadowy past or the dawning of a new day. […] If time is a weapon used against people fighting against the speed and brutality of what is happening, we may be forced to use a different image of time – or perhaps an image of a world without time altogether – against those whose only measure seems to be the maximisation of profit in the shortest possible period. The question of whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t – a brutal marker not only of the division between life and death but between the more important distinction between those whose life/death ‘counts’ and those about whom nothing is counted at all – is played out in the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter: permanent accumulation. The dedication to amassing at the expense of life itself reveals a terror of time so disturbing that any politics of temporal pessimism/optimism looks insignificant by comparison.
As we defend those who await trial, or write to those in prison, or sit in courts, job centres and universities as futures are crushed all around, time may be all we have left: time in which to abolish their notion of time and replace it […] with a life in which nobody seeks to make time measurable at all, for all time.
- Nina Power, The Pessimism of Time
.
March 24, 2013
Passage from 'Literature Will Be Tested' by Kirill Medvedev
.
The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be independent of the proletariat working in their mines and oil fields, bohemia would be independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it – “celebrity culture,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth – is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.
It’s as if, within this system, the artists were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. The artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theatre director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perfection is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important – it is a major stimulus to the production of art.
But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it begins to look suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.
Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrates this: Vyacheslav Butusov, a former star of the punk underground, expresses genuine surprise that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; the fashionable theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov criticizes the President in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party.
The theatre director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in exchange for which he receives a theatre in the centre of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht – ars longa, vita brevis!
I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a pro-Kremlin website. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them toward direct political action! And he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya), but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say I was surprised, he answered” “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it” – again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.
What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities – not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but for exactly the opposite reason: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.
- Kirill Medvedev, Literature Will Be Tested (2007)
.
The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be independent of the proletariat working in their mines and oil fields, bohemia would be independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it – “celebrity culture,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth – is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.
It’s as if, within this system, the artists were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. The artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theatre director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perfection is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important – it is a major stimulus to the production of art.
But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it begins to look suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.
Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrates this: Vyacheslav Butusov, a former star of the punk underground, expresses genuine surprise that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; the fashionable theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov criticizes the President in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party.
The theatre director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in exchange for which he receives a theatre in the centre of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht – ars longa, vita brevis!
I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a pro-Kremlin website. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them toward direct political action! And he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya), but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say I was surprised, he answered” “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it” – again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.
What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities – not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but for exactly the opposite reason: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.
- Kirill Medvedev, Literature Will Be Tested (2007)
.
March 22, 2013
Solidarity Comment Thread
.
I posted the following quote:
“Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” - Yevgeny Yevtushenko
And then found the comment thread particularly interesting:
JM: Cause 1/2 those people only call themselves liberals!
TP: We're still alive.
JW: We fall out with each other because we're still alive? Solidarity equals death?
TP: Nous n'aimons pas mais comment pouvons-nous ne pas aimer?
FG: Let me try something. Maybe it's because lots of right-wing ideas are really simple (close to stupid), so the complexity off bringing smart and creative minds together is not an issue there...
JW: Calling the enemy stupid might also be a way of avoiding the fact that the enemy is winning.
FG: I would say that weirdly, it's not stupidity, it's in fact, in a way, faith. Maybe we have to work on faith.
MA: Because the left never fucks the company, it prefers posting and discussing instead.
EZ: Because they have the power to create money... they can and do fall out with each other all the time... but no matter how much they fall out with each other, they have limitless resources to fall back on... when "liberals" fall out with each other, its often because we are competing for scarce resources.
JR: The right wing bastards understand that corporate/collective action is power. They are winning because they understand this more practically than the left does.
RF: We are cursed with the capacity for independent thought??
NK: Because we're still thinking of "us" and "them".
KC: Who's we?
JM: When dealing with justice, ie: values and principles (and the rights that societies develop in putting those into practice) the monolithic 'they' that decrees and enforces is an entity that by its essence creates 'we' by virtue of those who fall outside its estate. 'We' is a defacto description of those who do not create, police, enforce or litigate the application of 'justice'; 'We' speaks to those upon whom justice is administered. That is not to be confused with 'justice' as in the 'just' access to rights and application of law, but rather, the imperfect and structurally flawed enforcement of social mechanisms that include the administration of law. 'We' are the excluded, 'they' are the exclusive.
JW: I always thought that maybe it had something to do with a greater respect for hierarchy, a greater respect for discipline and a greater respect for power. But it's also clearly true that's it's much easier to display solidarity when you are the police then it is when you're fighting against the police. Still, no explanation ever feels completely satisfying. And I keep wishing that I was, personally, better at feeling a sense of solidarity.
.
I posted the following quote:
“Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” - Yevgeny Yevtushenko
And then found the comment thread particularly interesting:
JM: Cause 1/2 those people only call themselves liberals!
TP: We're still alive.
JW: We fall out with each other because we're still alive? Solidarity equals death?
TP: Nous n'aimons pas mais comment pouvons-nous ne pas aimer?
FG: Let me try something. Maybe it's because lots of right-wing ideas are really simple (close to stupid), so the complexity off bringing smart and creative minds together is not an issue there...
JW: Calling the enemy stupid might also be a way of avoiding the fact that the enemy is winning.
FG: I would say that weirdly, it's not stupidity, it's in fact, in a way, faith. Maybe we have to work on faith.
MA: Because the left never fucks the company, it prefers posting and discussing instead.
EZ: Because they have the power to create money... they can and do fall out with each other all the time... but no matter how much they fall out with each other, they have limitless resources to fall back on... when "liberals" fall out with each other, its often because we are competing for scarce resources.
JR: The right wing bastards understand that corporate/collective action is power. They are winning because they understand this more practically than the left does.
RF: We are cursed with the capacity for independent thought??
NK: Because we're still thinking of "us" and "them".
KC: Who's we?
JM: When dealing with justice, ie: values and principles (and the rights that societies develop in putting those into practice) the monolithic 'they' that decrees and enforces is an entity that by its essence creates 'we' by virtue of those who fall outside its estate. 'We' is a defacto description of those who do not create, police, enforce or litigate the application of 'justice'; 'We' speaks to those upon whom justice is administered. That is not to be confused with 'justice' as in the 'just' access to rights and application of law, but rather, the imperfect and structurally flawed enforcement of social mechanisms that include the administration of law. 'We' are the excluded, 'they' are the exclusive.
JW: I always thought that maybe it had something to do with a greater respect for hierarchy, a greater respect for discipline and a greater respect for power. But it's also clearly true that's it's much easier to display solidarity when you are the police then it is when you're fighting against the police. Still, no explanation ever feels completely satisfying. And I keep wishing that I was, personally, better at feeling a sense of solidarity.
.
March 12, 2013
Too Much Fragment
.
As an artist, my most piercing feeling is that there are too many artists in the world. This mirrors my feeling, as a person, that there are too many people. But what is this 'too many'? Is it based on notions of scarcity? Of competition? Of sustainability? Or simply of wanting to feel special on an overcrowded field?
[Unfinished.]
.
As an artist, my most piercing feeling is that there are too many artists in the world. This mirrors my feeling, as a person, that there are too many people. But what is this 'too many'? Is it based on notions of scarcity? Of competition? Of sustainability? Or simply of wanting to feel special on an overcrowded field?
[Unfinished.]
.
Carol Treadwell Quote
.
When they finally slept together, Jean discovered that intimacy between them would not do any good, that when they touched they made dents in each other, made each other cold.
She’d meant to slam him into walls or be slammed. She’d meant to conquer her shyness. But they were in bed and blanketed, one of the more active things she did was sit up.
- Carol Treadwell, Spots and Trouble Spots
.
When they finally slept together, Jean discovered that intimacy between them would not do any good, that when they touched they made dents in each other, made each other cold.
She’d meant to slam him into walls or be slammed. She’d meant to conquer her shyness. But they were in bed and blanketed, one of the more active things she did was sit up.
- Carol Treadwell, Spots and Trouble Spots
.
March 11, 2013
The books I brought home from AWP
.
It Then – Danielle Collobert
Murder – Danielle Collobert
Notebooks 1956-1978 – Danielle Collobert
Mopus – Oisín Curran
Tlemcen or Places of Writing – Mohammed Dib
Sprawl – Danielle Dutton
The Parapornographic Manifesto – Carl-Michael Edenborg
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) – Macedonio Fernández
Slut Lullabies – Gina Frangello
In the Moremarrow – Oliverio Girondo
Everything Flows – James Greer
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist – Emile Habiby
The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal – Tytti Heikkinen
The High Life – Jean-Pierre Martinet
Enduring Freedom – Laura Mullen
Calendar of Regrets – Lance Olsen
The Shock of the Lenders & Other Poems – Jorge Santiago Perednik
Beach Birds – Severo Sarduy
How Phenomena Appear to Unfold – Leslie Scalapino
May We Shed These Human Bodies – Amber Sparks
The Porthole – Adriano Spatola
Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing – Paul Vangelisti
West Wind Review 2013
Vertical Motion – Can Xue
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It Then – Danielle Collobert
Murder – Danielle Collobert
Notebooks 1956-1978 – Danielle Collobert
Mopus – Oisín Curran
Tlemcen or Places of Writing – Mohammed Dib
Sprawl – Danielle Dutton
The Parapornographic Manifesto – Carl-Michael Edenborg
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) – Macedonio Fernández
Slut Lullabies – Gina Frangello
In the Moremarrow – Oliverio Girondo
Everything Flows – James Greer
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist – Emile Habiby
The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal – Tytti Heikkinen
The High Life – Jean-Pierre Martinet
Enduring Freedom – Laura Mullen
Calendar of Regrets – Lance Olsen
The Shock of the Lenders & Other Poems – Jorge Santiago Perednik
Beach Birds – Severo Sarduy
How Phenomena Appear to Unfold – Leslie Scalapino
May We Shed These Human Bodies – Amber Sparks
The Porthole – Adriano Spatola
Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing – Paul Vangelisti
West Wind Review 2013
Vertical Motion – Can Xue
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March 1, 2013
Short poem based on an insight (and possible example of sophistry) gleaned while reading A Time for Everything
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Scientific method is based on repeatability
you know an experiment is true because you are able to repeat it
a miracle is something that happens only once
therefore, by definition, science cannot recognize a miracle.
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Scientific method is based on repeatability
you know an experiment is true because you are able to repeat it
a miracle is something that happens only once
therefore, by definition, science cannot recognize a miracle.
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February 22, 2013
Excerpt from Antje Majewski / Alexandro Jodorowsky interview
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Alexandro Jodorowsky: I’ve developed it into an art. The art of Tarot, for me that’s an art. So it’s the tarots that brought me to it. I developed it. And that’s how I came that far. Without trying. It does it all by itself. I always wondered what sanctity is. There are champions, heroes, geniuses, saints! No. So, I wanted to know what sanctity is. OK, for me, sanctity goes with churches. There’s Catholic sanctity, Muslim sanctity, Buddhist sanctity, OK? And the just man of the Jews. They all have different ideas, because they’re part of the prejudices of the churches. So I wondered what civil sanctity is. How a being that does not belong to any moral law of a religion can perform acts of sanctity without belonging to any sect—simply out of love for humanity. Or perhaps not even for that—simply out of love for art. You understand?
Antje Majewski: Yes.
AJ: So I began to imitate sanctity. Every Wednesday I imitate sanctity. Sanctity is being at other people’s service. Without judging them. Except of course, seeing the inner treasure everyone has. And trying to awaken it. Without any desire for profit, because I do it for nothing. Not even a word of thanks. Without deriving any benefit. No benefits. Simply doing it for the pleasure of doing it. OK. And that’s why I do that. I imitate sanctity.
AM: And why ‘imitate’?
AJ: I put it on, I’m not saintly by nature. I imitate.
AM: For me, you…
AJ: I imitate, I imitate. I do that when I think I should be a good person. And I do it.
AM: And why you do doubt?
AJ: I don’t doubt.
AM: But why do you say you imitate?
AJ: What? Why do I say what?
AM: For me, you are like that. It’s not imitation.
AJ: Not all the time. Not all the time. For example, when I’m going to read or in my conferences, everything that’s for others, I suffer a lot in advance. I don’t want to do it. I really suffer, it’s terrible. And then I’m in a bad mood. And once I get there, I change, and afterwards, once it’s over, I’m euphoric and pleased. I pledge myself to go on with it.
AM: Yes.
AJ: And afterwards I ask myself why I pledge myself to do that. I’m mad. It’s years, thirty or so, thirty years I’ve been doing that, and every time, I suffer. And afterwards I do the thing again. So it’s not a state of sanctity. You understand? I imitate.
AM: (laughs)
AJ: I imitate. But it’s a good imitation, because there are people who imitate being an assassin. In reality, I think everyone imitates something. Authenticity is difficult to find. You yourself look for authenticity. To see what you really sense in objects, it’s a quest—a modest one—about objects, isn’t it? But from the moment we’re in our mothers’ wombs, we begin to imitate our families, parents, we have a nationality. Nationality is imitation, it’s not a reality. To be German, or Chilean or French is imitation. Because we’re much more than that. Being a man or women is imitation. Because we’re everything. In reality, we have sexual desires, but that’s not what we are. We’re something else. Age is an imitation. Because spiritual age doesn’t exist. And so on. We imitate thinking, we imitate feeling, we imitate desire. But the real being we don’t see. So to get near it, we have to imitate. And from imitation to imitation, sometimes you get there for a moment. Really, there are moments when you get there. Yes indeed, there are moments you get there. (laughs) But every act of kindness I do, I force myself. It’s not natural, I force myself to do it.
[You can watch the full interview here.]
.
Alexandro Jodorowsky: I’ve developed it into an art. The art of Tarot, for me that’s an art. So it’s the tarots that brought me to it. I developed it. And that’s how I came that far. Without trying. It does it all by itself. I always wondered what sanctity is. There are champions, heroes, geniuses, saints! No. So, I wanted to know what sanctity is. OK, for me, sanctity goes with churches. There’s Catholic sanctity, Muslim sanctity, Buddhist sanctity, OK? And the just man of the Jews. They all have different ideas, because they’re part of the prejudices of the churches. So I wondered what civil sanctity is. How a being that does not belong to any moral law of a religion can perform acts of sanctity without belonging to any sect—simply out of love for humanity. Or perhaps not even for that—simply out of love for art. You understand?
Antje Majewski: Yes.
AJ: So I began to imitate sanctity. Every Wednesday I imitate sanctity. Sanctity is being at other people’s service. Without judging them. Except of course, seeing the inner treasure everyone has. And trying to awaken it. Without any desire for profit, because I do it for nothing. Not even a word of thanks. Without deriving any benefit. No benefits. Simply doing it for the pleasure of doing it. OK. And that’s why I do that. I imitate sanctity.
AM: And why ‘imitate’?
AJ: I put it on, I’m not saintly by nature. I imitate.
AM: For me, you…
AJ: I imitate, I imitate. I do that when I think I should be a good person. And I do it.
AM: And why you do doubt?
AJ: I don’t doubt.
AM: But why do you say you imitate?
AJ: What? Why do I say what?
AM: For me, you are like that. It’s not imitation.
AJ: Not all the time. Not all the time. For example, when I’m going to read or in my conferences, everything that’s for others, I suffer a lot in advance. I don’t want to do it. I really suffer, it’s terrible. And then I’m in a bad mood. And once I get there, I change, and afterwards, once it’s over, I’m euphoric and pleased. I pledge myself to go on with it.
AM: Yes.
AJ: And afterwards I ask myself why I pledge myself to do that. I’m mad. It’s years, thirty or so, thirty years I’ve been doing that, and every time, I suffer. And afterwards I do the thing again. So it’s not a state of sanctity. You understand? I imitate.
AM: (laughs)
AJ: I imitate. But it’s a good imitation, because there are people who imitate being an assassin. In reality, I think everyone imitates something. Authenticity is difficult to find. You yourself look for authenticity. To see what you really sense in objects, it’s a quest—a modest one—about objects, isn’t it? But from the moment we’re in our mothers’ wombs, we begin to imitate our families, parents, we have a nationality. Nationality is imitation, it’s not a reality. To be German, or Chilean or French is imitation. Because we’re much more than that. Being a man or women is imitation. Because we’re everything. In reality, we have sexual desires, but that’s not what we are. We’re something else. Age is an imitation. Because spiritual age doesn’t exist. And so on. We imitate thinking, we imitate feeling, we imitate desire. But the real being we don’t see. So to get near it, we have to imitate. And from imitation to imitation, sometimes you get there for a moment. Really, there are moments when you get there. Yes indeed, there are moments you get there. (laughs) But every act of kindness I do, I force myself. It’s not natural, I force myself to do it.
[You can watch the full interview here.]
.
February 20, 2013
On making YouTube playlists
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It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and I'm already working on one for 2014. There is also the playlist I made of music from Japan. I have written about this process twice: A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) and A play list of 96 videos (with commentary).
I have been meaning to write about all of this again. How these internet habits feel like a part of my art and life, and how often they feel more like art than my actual art practice, and yet how this idea has also somehow become thinner and less compelling to me since I first wrote about it three years ago.
Also I wanted to write about how videos keep disappearing from these lists. I just opened the playlist from 2010 and the fist thing I am told is that '12 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.' The internet is a place where things disappear and nobody notices. In fact, the internet is a place where things appear and disappear and practically nobody notices.
2011: 10 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2012: 6 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2013: 1 video in your playlist has been deleted from YouTube.
As time goes on more and more of these videos will disappear. And I have no right to them, I have only compiled them for a moment in time. YouTube is a privately owned corporation and can delete whatever videos it likes.
Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. But what is strange (or actually completely predictable) is I have absolutely no recollection of which videos have disappeared. I have no notes. They are gone, and if YouTube hadn't told me of their absence I think I would have barely noticed.
I don't know if my logic will be as apparent to everyone else as it is to me. But all of this leads me to believe that there is still something really remarkable about writing books. The books will also disappear. But not quite yet.
.
It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and I'm already working on one for 2014. There is also the playlist I made of music from Japan. I have written about this process twice: A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) and A play list of 96 videos (with commentary).
I have been meaning to write about all of this again. How these internet habits feel like a part of my art and life, and how often they feel more like art than my actual art practice, and yet how this idea has also somehow become thinner and less compelling to me since I first wrote about it three years ago.
Also I wanted to write about how videos keep disappearing from these lists. I just opened the playlist from 2010 and the fist thing I am told is that '12 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.' The internet is a place where things disappear and nobody notices. In fact, the internet is a place where things appear and disappear and practically nobody notices.
2011: 10 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2012: 6 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2013: 1 video in your playlist has been deleted from YouTube.
As time goes on more and more of these videos will disappear. And I have no right to them, I have only compiled them for a moment in time. YouTube is a privately owned corporation and can delete whatever videos it likes.
Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. But what is strange (or actually completely predictable) is I have absolutely no recollection of which videos have disappeared. I have no notes. They are gone, and if YouTube hadn't told me of their absence I think I would have barely noticed.
I don't know if my logic will be as apparent to everyone else as it is to me. But all of this leads me to believe that there is still something really remarkable about writing books. The books will also disappear. But not quite yet.
.
February 17, 2013
Lauren Berlant Quote 1
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...lives are not novels - or maybe they are, as no critic has ever accounted for all the acts and details in a novel either.
- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
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...lives are not novels - or maybe they are, as no critic has ever accounted for all the acts and details in a novel either.
- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
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