maybe it’s fitting I’m sending this particular missive out later than usual..
I want to begin today with a non-apology, which is to say: I’m not sorry I’ve been absent from this space, or other socials, or distant generally from public writing, and not only because it’s afforded me the time and quiet to write, seriously—to seriously write.
I have missed the interactions, longed, perhaps, for the shared moments, or knowing which sentences strike you, or where you were when you read, or which friend to sent what post to, but I do not apologize, and I no longer do that thing where I excuse myself with the vague, “I’m not really built for the internet” commentary. I mean, I’m not, but that’s a small part of the distance, and barely the issue, and not even an iota of my absence, and I’ve only said it before because it’s sounds friendlier or more reflective than, “I just really had other things that I preferred doing, and also RIP The Internet (1997-2025).”
I genuinely adore my friends who run creative businesses. I am not running a creative business. the posts here are not a part of a marketing strategy; they are works that are about to be published somewhere, or talks I’m preparing, or, like, sex stories about men I’ve dated, and so I keep those between me and the almost six people who care to pay for them. it’s an exchange of priority, not entrepreneurship. it’s that same lack of concern that has de-prioritized writing online since, oh, 2022, if we’re talking about “consistency,” that marketing term that plagues me.
speaking of men I’ve dated: there are thousands of them on apps in New York, a city I had occasion to frequent in this past year (I’ll save the details for another post), and they say this phrase with regularity: “looking for casual, but consistent.” casual, but consistent. I think they mean they want a full roster, and have Tuesday slots for banging, if one is up for that, which is not a terrible offer in the land of middle-age singlehood (though that’s yet another post); however, there’s an invisible element that is unvoiced in the statement, and it seems to operate at a frequency only hetero, 40-something women are hearing, and that’s this: consistency isn’t about regularity or routine at all. it’s about quality. expectations. seeing you every Tuesday for two hours of mealy-mouthed conversation isn’t the same as seeing you once annually for eleven minutes of poetry, just as dating an avoidant type for years doesn’t have the same dynamism as even one night with an eye-to-eye lover.
I think I’m saying casual isn’t consistent, and I don’t know how to be the former. I think I’m saying I’d rather bring magnitude than frequency, and so, in lieu of half-hearted apologies, I offer a bibliography. it’s the way I know to say: here’s where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, and to suggest we begin (not again) from here.
when the site opens for Friday’s pre-sale of two new sound works, you’ll also find a free download in the shop. the zine, a collaborative endeavor toward a collective suggestion, is the last remaining material vestige of a fellowship I pored into over the last academic year. (if you’re counting, this makes three pending posts.) my contribution is below: a collection of unapologetic depth forged in dark quiet.
“A philosophy of sound art must remain a strategy of listening rather than an instruction to hear, and thus its language itself is under scrutiny.” [Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010), xiv.]
“[T]he black text speaks to and in a black world, subjunctive and imaginary as that is, away from the false and damaging expectations that black texts have to speak universally, which means that they speak to the larger racial project or conversation–that is, to people who are not black.” [Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (Duke Univeristy Press, 2021), 14.]
“The ‘feminine’ of l’écriture féminine is not passive. Like a volcano erupting after years of dormancy, it expels energy, explodes through language, with a force and a rigor which have traditionally been associated with the male voice. Given that the tendency of patriarchal social structures is to maintain rigidity in language, the work of the insurgent must be to oppose such tendencies by opening up further linguistic possibilities.” [Ana Aneja, “The Mystic Aspect of L’Écriture Féminine: Hélène Cixous’ Vivre l’Orange,” Qui Parle, Vol. 3, No. 1, Theatricality and Literature (Spring 1989): 189-201, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685880]
“I'm interested in the convergence of blackness and the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection. Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of...hypervisibility.” [Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.]
“Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. Reality is raw material, language the way I seek it–and how I don’t find it…I return to the unsayable.” [Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey (New Directions, 2012), 169-70]
“What would the afterlife in Blackness look like as total obscurity? What if it manifests itself in the most oblique, opaque, and dense ways? Would we find a space of the imagination in the sinkhole, in the break, in the hold? One of the ways such an aesthetic of withdrawal would make itself known is precisely ‘as a structural position of non-communicability,’ silences, breaks, voids, pressed and presented to you so that you never recognize their prior manipulation. Such tactics do not concern or employ negation. Rather, they are decoys, rerouting and rearranging at the level of the surface...” [Adrienne Edwards, “A Splinter to the Heart: On the Possibility of Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics,” ASAP/Journal 5, No. 2 (2020): 273-280, https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2020.0018.]
“What do we remember and what do we forget? How do we name and categorize what we can barely observe, for what purpose, with what results? ...What do we need to remember that will push back against the forgetting encouraged by consumer culture and linear time? What can we remember that will surround us in oceans of history and potential? And how?” [Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), 19.]
“What is terrifying partakes of the abyss, three times linked to the unknown. First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, a boat does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death.” [Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6.]
“[A] Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing. For releasing Blackness from the registers of the object, the commodity, or the other would halt…the very mode of representation, and its philosophical assumptions, that provides those meanings to Blackness–and its signifiers, …”[Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(tion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 2, States of Black Studies (Summer 2014): 81-97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0081]
“[P]oetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action….Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” [Audre Lorde and Roxane Gay, ed., The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020)]
“Such black and feminist posthuman acts of speculation are never simply a matter of inventing tall tales from whole cloth.” [Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2019), 4.]
“History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror…[T]his raise[s] important questions regarding what it means to think historically about matters still contested in the present and about life eradicated by the protocol of intellectual disciplines.” [Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe Number 26, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2008), p. 1-14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.]
“We see that mother doesn't mean ‘mother,’ but ‘felon’ and ‘defender’ and/or ‘birther of terror’ and not one of the principal grounds of terrors multiple and quotidian enactments. ...This is Black being in the wake. This is the anagrammatical. These are Black lives, annotated.” What kind of mother/ing is it if one must always be prepared with the knowledge of the possibility of one's dead child?” [Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 77.]