‘Very rarely does a book come along that you feel might save lives, including your own. In giving voice to the ultimate voiceless in Iran, Sinaki has written a witty and wild tale truly for the best of our beloved angels and devils. He has taken our shared cultures and done something none of us Iranian writers have managed: he gets to the heart of the damaged and damaging politics of our homeland by turning despair into art that’s so invigorating and thrilling, we quite nearly have a new genre. Medusa of the Roses is the most dynamic literary debut, certainly of the Iranian queer canon, I have ever read!’ — Porochista Khakpour
‘Navid Sinaki flips noir on its head in this propulsive, twisting novel about creating identity against formative love in an oppressive society. Sexy, raw, and perfectly paced, Medusa of the Roses will get under your skin.’ — Julia Fine
‘Medusa of the Roses is a beautiful, fast-paced melodrama, a campy, queer reimagining of mid-century noir set in Iran, bloody and poetic in equal measure.’ — Kyle Dillon Hertz
‘Navid Sinaki’s writing is really, really something. Reading Medusa of the Roses not only pleasures through its chaseable story and meticulously tuned characters, it offers the non-stop bedazzlement of some of the most intoxicating and yet exacting prose I’ve read in ages. It’s a rush of a novel, and honestly kind of perfect.’ — Dennis Cooper
Navid Sinaki’s Site
navidsinaki @ instagram
Navid Sinaki @ goodreads
‘The Infinite Garden’
Preorder ‘Medusa of the Roses’
Navid Sinaki Medusa of the Roses
Grove Atlantic
‘Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only
problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife. Then Zal vanishes. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran, Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of Zal, peace, and selfdetermination. Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.
‘Navid Sinaki is an artist and author from Tehran who currently lives in Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited at museums and art houses around the world, including the Lincoln Center, British Film Institute, Cineteca Nacional in Mexico, and the Modern Museum in Stockholm. His first solo art exhibition The Infinite Garden is on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art.’ — Grove Atlantic
Excerpt
You’re in the ward with all the people who are trying their damnedest to keep from oozing outside of themselves. They hold their holes shut, or seal their lips, or wrap themselves tight so nothing falls out, an intestine, a fetus, a third eye.
—-In your room, no flowers. Nobody has come to see you yet. The young man, the one who was holding your hand, would he have brought you lilacs? Would he have bought a wreath and buried it in your neck? He’d hurry in. He’d lick
your chin.
—-“Is it over?” the young man would ask, referring to your love for me.
—-You’d nod. You two would be set. But, without me, it wouldn’t be the same. You need adultery to feel like an adult.
—-You don’t open your eyes. You’re plugged in to so many tubes and twisty straws widen your nose. Your face is stapled, covered in plates. You keep me up with your beeps and gurgles.
—-They rush you in. They rush you out. I get up to go home.
—-“That’s all right,” a doctor says. “You can stay.”
—-I’m relieved he doesn’t oust me from your room. He turns a corner before I finish reading judgment on his face.
—-Your blue shirt sits on the chair next to your hospital bed, cut in two, now purple from all the blood. I bought it for you. You probably didn’t choke him. He probably didn’t need to be goaded into getting fucked. I used to always hesitate. And even though I tried to prepare using thin glasses of blackberry syrup or gardenia shampoo bottles or even the back of a spatula, I still flinch when you get ready to fuck me. My fear is that I’m dirty. My ass, sure, even after cleaning it as best as I can. But also, my preference. With him, you probably don’t hear the slight mumble of apology. I prefer when you force me before I have a chance to protest.
—-A nurse breaks my trance. She enters with a clear, unlabeled bag and shoves your shirt inside. There’s no sentimentality to the act.
—-“It’s all yours.” She plops it on my lap. “You should get outta here. Go for a walk. Grab a soda. Do something to make yourself feel whole. Even just for a minute.”
—-Look here at the beggar I am, asking the colors of your old clothes to come back. Through the bag I can tell the collar is stiff, like when we danced our only dance in a public place. A waltz, years ago. I’m not sure how I knew the steps. A wedding. Yours. The cake was rotten, but I didn’t want to complain. Instead we hid in the hallway that separated the men and the women, the hallway from which we heard the women cheer the bride, and the men call out for you. Somewhere between their two CD players––traditional folk music in one room, Donna Summer in the other––I put my head on your shoulder. In the space between the two rooms, you led the dance.
—-They wheel you in. A moment of unplanned eye contact. I turn away. It’s much easier to look at the walls than see something in your eyes I don’t want to see. A look of panic that it’s me here, not him. I scan the room again. Near your hospital bed they have your teeth arranged in a vial, some powdered to halves. I’ve never seen them out of place. To keep from fainting—your wide-open mouth drooling blood improvisations down your neck—I hold your teeth up to the window. Lit from behind, the molars glow. Outside the window a bee is stuck. I tap the glass to get it to move. It doesn’t. I tap slightly harder. The bee falls down dead.
—-The doctors leave the room. To be alone with you now is the most heinous thing of all. Before I can curse or cry, I find I’m already standing over your bed. My mouth is already on yours. I kiss you once, perhaps twice. You with no teeth, except for one. Your stubborn wisdom tooth.
—-Your teeth are more sensitive than the rest of you. I’m sure it’s because of me. I craved pomegranates when we were kids, so you would bite into their tough skins and tear out openings just for me. More than once I confused the pomegranate juice down your chin for blood from your teeth.
—-“I’m fine.” You always lie during dessert. You eat ice cream often, no matter the pain.
—-Does he know about that pain, that I was the cause of it? Did he choke on any of your teeth? You share an intimacy with him I’ll never know.
—-Perhaps because of him, you never planned on leaving with me. My suggestion was extreme, our circumstances too much to overcome. To be with you here, in our home city, seemed unlikely.
—-“We can pretend you’re blind,” you said once. “That way you can take my hand for hours.”
—-We tested this hypothesis. I closed my eyes to see where you’d take me. I kept my eyes closed to memorize how you walked, the quick step forward, the sudden stops to let anyone pass before us. My sunglasses were too tight. We bought them from a man on the sidewalk who also sold burnt corn. Anything quick to try your experiment. We could finally be lovers in public. I only had to sacrifice my sight.
—-With my eyes closed I noticed how much you apologized to strangers. Was it a show for me? You graciously stopped to let anyone pass, but you wouldn’t let go of my hand. And the thought, the eclipse: What could I sacrifice to keep you with me?
Extras
from ‘Nameh’ نامه, looped single-channel videos (2020)
from ’19 Memories of Roses’, single-channel videos
_______________
‘Once I was on my feet again and back to being emotionally unavailable, I started chewing over frontline interventions, thinking about all the potentially wasted times I’d bowed to occasional titty gropes to keep my gallery representation. I was incensed, just not very. (Crime is normal for those who draw their power and affluence from it.) If I wanted to sparkle today and enjoy fans asking me to sign autographs on an old Woolworths or Whole Foods receipt, I’d have to seriously consider putting up with the supply chain of sexual harassment. Larry was the Tupac of the white cube, a competitive title. Never mind. These glitter models were of an earlier vintage, swaying narrow hips past lawyers and promising curators, remembering to give off ghetto energy every five seconds; they hadn’t had mascarpone in their lives.
‘Trying not to worry about their medical bills for osteoporosis, I latched on to the complimentary champagne and truffled Anjou since I kept blowing my wage on pink art books at MoMA PS1 or a 2 am Obamacare Bronze plan. But God came through for the Israelites before, so I don’t see why He’d stop now. Economy leading the way, dutifully worried by runway pedestrians and hairline fractures, I realized I was not completely unmoved by LARRY’S proposal. Eager Communist seizures, groggy monuments to Karl Marx or Hannah Arendt, eat-the-rich rhetoric had miscarried in the pursuit of winking peacock nail polish, warehouse lofts in Chelsea, bangles, bracelets, and all the king’s horses. I was going native. Zealousness shows up in all sorts of ways: liquor bottles, sanctimony, action films, hypocrisy, prayers for morning-after pills . . . hairline fractures. Even those liberal arts degrees that get you nowhere.
‘Plastic storage units all around, I decided to dazzle everyone at the party with bad-girl hood energy, road-test apathy, or at the very least, the observable appearance of indifference. All this happened in twenty seconds. After twenty more seconds of complete unwavering dedication on the pilgrimage to fame, I panicked at the possibility of anonymity aborted, pushing obscurity onto the J train tracks and sacrificing tranquil trips to Thriftway Pharmacy in Queens. LARRY was looking for someone knocking themselves out googling makeup techniques, knocking themselves up, then buying Plan B pills. A pliable, cooperative, blank canvas of selfhood to build upon. A solemn sign, an asterism, that he truly and quite sincerely didn’t give a shit. Sizes don’t vary. This is all pre-overturning Roe v. Wade, mind you, so praying for abortions was only still in the pipeline. Dissolution of recognizable identities is a search for something more primitive, which makes even complex relationships straightforward. Why eagerness and affordable housing were so unappealing in contemporary art was still a mystery to me, and while trying to find some logic in all of this, I . . . never mind.’ — Estelle Hoy
Estelle Hoy @ instagram
Doc 099: Estelle Hoy
“I’ve Got Principles, and If You Don’t Like Them, I’ve Got Others”
“I’m Going to Slip Myself a Mickey”
Buy ‘saké blue’
Estelle Hoy saké blue
After8 Books
‘Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In sake blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activis practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer melanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.
‘sake blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Herve Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing – and no one, exposing cultural cliches and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier – we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.’ — After8 Books
Excerpt
The stench of a potential ammonia shoplifter spawned an embarrassment of neighborly espionages, which I devoutly ignored; I’m not prone to confrontation, and besides, the assistant was probably just fed up, bloated maybe. Periods can really turn you into a fascist, but everybody loves a fascist; it’s so resolute. I don’t want to talk to anybody, let alone people who’d already decided who I was, but the modulating factor was the side-ponytailed ten-year-old eyeing me like a watchdog with the moral code of Nelson Mandela. Being the low-key guerrilla that I was, I asked for the key to the Toiletten, which she hesitantly handed over, saying, “Expect precipitation,” like we were in a Tom Waits song, so I skipped to the Toiletten like a rainbow Care Bear cracking strawberry Hubba Bubba. I dropped the utterly exhausting joie de vivre the moment the door closed behind me and stood examining myself in the mirror under cataclysmic fluorescent lighting, the red eye shadow, spike choker, and go-go girl getup I wore so I didn’t look approachable—I was biracial, so I needn’t have worried. Taking my lukewarm ass to the cubicle, I slid my stripper Hosen to the floor in case the surveillance team checked for feet under the door, pulled the Japanese flip knife I carried around so I didn’t get raped or whatever. Inside the cubicle, I tried to scrub away the shadows and think of what crusade I’d anxiously hack into the dm wall, hovering my mind over Audre Lorde’s quotes from her Berlin years. I cracked my Hubba Bubba before carving “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” into the drywall, which, by anyone’s estimation, had asbestos, so I could probably buy (steal) that hair bleach after all. Public toilets the world over, from Kabukichō district, Tokyo, to Hanko, Finland, have a set menu: skin products discontinued when the Wall came down, makeshift tourniquet, the sycophantic air of a fetish convention, underground organ trafficking, family-sized Persil washing powder, hiragana syllabary. Things like that. I leaned back on the bowl to ooh and aah over my handiwork, which instantly made me miserable: I’d missed the C in “silence.” “Your Silene Will Not Protect You.” Arschloch! I was down in the dumps, but I wanted to be a person who overcame things, like Helen Keller or Anne Frank or whatever, so I scratched the C in above the word where it should have been.
My Russian Eeyore depression gave Myers-Briggs traction, lots of introspective journal entries about avoiding human interaction, the look of cyanide on Arabian night plates, and other shitty INFP traits nobody likes. We cannot know why one both dislikes and craves melancholy, why sadness permeates diaries, or why we fuck the sadness, but I know that building on that ambiguity is what drives existence. Suddenly I perked up a little, thinking of all the people who’d see the Lorde quote over time; melancholy lost its detail, and I was no longer imperceptible to myself—objections never contributed to anything anyway. I maybe felt happy—too happy for a sinner like me. Gathering myself up off the toilet, I pretended to wash my hands and prowled out in badass anonymity, a namelessness, a quietude, a lastingness knitted of sequins and appetition, held out like a communion host. My reappearance brought Frau Müller to the security beepers, mothlike, but I said nothing. A superior mind might’ve yelled or called her out or whatever, but I was low-key happy with my Ouija-graffiti uprising and had a hard-on from my Chinese-whispers resistance. These were silver thorns I knew to skip over, and besides, I was five minutes out from a double shift at Bauhaus, totally spent selling Makita drill bits and sex vibes to dirty men over fifty. What o’clock could it even be?
I outsmarted the security scanner, pretty Pollyanna, the acetic smell of chlorophyll, mumbled ♫ Tschüssieee♫ in melodic Deutsch, maybe genuflected, and took out the rest of my stolen strawberry Hubba Bubba. I lack the memory cells to properly recall the conglomerate that owned Hubba Bubba—probably Wrigley’s or Pfizer—but I was lucid enough after sixteen hours of overtime to remember the multinational turned over five billion last year while their employees made minimum wage in uniforms with hidden SOS Post-it messages in Vietnamese. I congratulated myself for doubling up on my teeny revolutionary overthrow, tripling my image of myself for myself: a die-hard anticapitalist, a frondeur, a rebel, a go-go dancing freedom fighter with claret-stained eyes, a mute insurgent, militant even. U-Bahns ran with precision, so I bolted for my train with an ambiguous fire in the loins, leaped through the doors with an embarrassing amount of spare time, tiptoed around the usual objects of scorn performing the customary liturgy required at such times: used Billy Boy condom, fleur-de-lice bucket seats, the piss corner, tacky under Nike knockoffs. I was elbowed out of the last seat left by some lickety-split tween wearing a grape pink leotard and camel jazz shoes whom I would definitely not confront, which was horseshit but the only personality I had—how many lines of coke does it take to like a girl like me?
Ugh. My psychic promised I’d be dead by now.
Extras
A conversation with Estelle Hoy
Estelle Hoy on “Cloudland”
______________
‘Bushes are individuals, and when they’re situated in strictly organized front yards and boxes outside of buildings, their opportunities to blend with other plants are limited. When you spot a vine from elsewhere over their carved sides or the rods of a fence coming through their tiny gatherings, it is beautiful. To stand and stare at a totally lush bush, the kind with breathing room between bright, waxy leaves, is like looking at joy.
‘Bushes [almost] stand exquisitely apart from our knotted, distorted and devastatingly narrow definitions of value, wisdom, and success, from the motions of rampant violence and discrimination, the assorted poisonous fears of human variety coursing around, paving over a mutual respect that is always in reach and frequently overlooked, and capitalism’s stifling of many things that matter. They did when I first wrote that sentence. They are indeed in touch with the urges of people to arrange and control presentations of clarity, neatness, flourish, value, safety, normalcy, whatever. They are also in touch with people’s creativity, pride, joy and delight, of course. Bushes are def free from the temptation to navigate, understand, resist, or alter the structures that push us around. It feels good to just walk by and see them. When you get very close to a bush it’s like looking at a tree from far away.
‘There’s no such thing as a lackluster plant, in the way there are unsuccessful poems. All plants are complete. A bush is only one exemplary vessel of the enchantingly positive and sharp, reflective power of natural and constructed forms, just everywhere, covering the globe, offering themselves to our automatic and largely unconscious anthropocentric similes. Because they’re not using language or built by it, there’s no need to attempt to choreograph the experience of witnessing them with words. They give you all they are. They’re never wrong. That’s it. It’s thrilling to meet them.’ — Emily Hunt
Emily Hunt’s Site
Emily Hunt @ instagram
Emily Hunt @ goodreads
WORK AND LABOR, POEMS AND FLOWERS: A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY HUNT
Buy ‘Stranger’
Emily Hunt Stranger
The Song Cave
‘Stranger, Emily Hunt’s long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor, and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor, and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences––from the mundane to the profound. Whether it’s her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th century political speeches, dizzying corporate communication, or emails from her schizophrenic brother, the exact details and use of language in these poems become almost elemental, making an urgent record of the present. Stranger blurs the boundary between life and art—“The things that happened / bled into the language we exchanged.”—with the crystalline touch and nuance of a truly gifted writer.’ — The Song Cave
Excerpts
Doritos
At 34, she was weak,
hungry, impossibly
bold, dead by 1943.
Weil was really into the word
supernatural. She circles around it.
The ideas she is building
come back to it.
It ends many sentences
containing her
so she gives it a life.
Man’s great affliction
which begins with infancy
and accompanies him
till death, is that looking
and eating are two different
operations. Eternal
beatitude is a state
where to look is to eat.
My chip was invented
after her time.
Man only escapes
from the laws of the world
in lightning flashes.
It is through such instants
that he is capable
of the supernatural.
I’ve watched a cat
eat a Dorito in grass,
have eaten whole bags
by the black sea.
They are plain, thin,
fried, dry
corn until they’re covered
in bright powder.
Salt, cheddar cheese,
maltrodextrin, whey,
monosodium glutamate,
buttermilk solids, romano,
whey protein concentrate,
onion powder, partially
hydrogenated soybean
and cottonseed oil,
corn flour, disodium
phosphate, lactose, natural
and artificial flavor, dextrose,
tomato powder, spices, lactic
acid, Yellow 6, Yellow 5,
Red 40, citric acid, sugar,
garlic powder, sodium,
caseinate, disodium inosinate,
disodium guanylate, nonfat
milk solids, whey protein,
isolate, corn syrup,
but I want more of them.
Contradiction is the point of the pyramid.
Doradito means “little golden thing.”
*
TV
One man slides his hand
down the length of a counter.
He talks about his relationship,
concerned, agitated,
then he’s silent.
Fruit sits in a bowl,
waxed, flawless and raw.
I like the character
because I feel more
inclined to behave like him
or decide that I have, in the past,
acted in comparable ways
when living with people.
By the end of the episode,
I prefer the woman’s personality.
I like her especially
in the last scene
when she loses it,
stands up and leaves,
centering the hidden crew.
The sky changes,
but it’s planned.
A truck pulls up with food,
like something new will happen.
*
Houses, Your House
The telephone network
starts in your house.
A pair of copper wires
runs from a box at the road
to a bridge at your house.
From there, the red and green pair
connects to each phone.
If your place has two lines,
then two separate pairs
run from the road to your house.
The second is usually yellow
and black inside your house.
Sound waves from the voice
compress and decompress
the granules, changing their resistance
and modulating the current
flowing through the mic.
A thick cable will run
directly to the company
or it will run to a box
the size of a refrigerator
that acts as a concentrator,
digitizing your voice
at 8,000 samples per second,
then combining your voice
with dozens of others
to send them all down a single wire.
The division of a city
into small cells allows
extensive frequency reuse
across a location
so that millions of people
can speak simultaneously.
Any real phone contains
a coil or something
functionally equivalent
to block the sound
of your own voice
from reaching your ear.
Extras
_______________
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou: It sometimes feels as if you’re taking a scalpel to the surface of your work to reveal another layer, a second interior; then, within that, another body, a new space entire (those black holes and ancient lake-locked forests in ‘Nocturne’, the humming canopies in ‘Installation’, the Loy-inspired ghost haunting the narrator, then the spaces she occupies in ‘Lost Lunar Apogee’). I love this secret capaciousness built into your stories, an opening up and out, like a prairie, as well as an endless stream of quietly deposited discoveries too for us to marvel at, enjoy, and hold, should we choose. Could you talk more about inner prairies and the bodies that come up with them? Do you come upon them in the course of your writing or do they come upon and rise up within you as you write?
Danielle Dutton: One way I know it’s time to start writing a story is when I have several of these layers or bodies or ideas vibrating together in my head. I need to have a collection of them, only very loosely assembled, like barely holding together, before I can begin. I would never start writing with only one of these in hand. So I might start with one news item that’s been troubling me plus one wild thing my kid said plus an incredibly beautiful line I’ve read somewhere plus the peculiar way someone treated me on the street, and then those “items” start vibrating together, and I have to write to figure out why that is, how they fit, what it is they’re trying to do together. All of which is to say that I start with a certain number of these “inner prairies” already humming together . . . and then as I work other prairies or bodies or images wander in to join them.
HH-G: Sound features a lot in ‘Installation’ – indeed, this is one of the most excitingly installation-like forms of writing I’ve encountered in a while. There are the sounds of the words that the narrator savours (‘zebra swallowtail’, ‘chalcedony’, ‘dog-day cicadas’), and then the audible rhythms of the surrounding river and far-off man-made movements (a tractor, cars). To me you’re building a visual score as well as an aural one – the story is beautifully textured and immersive – and it’s almost as if the words themselves rather than the material things they point to have more palpability and power. This had me thinking about speech acts and sounds in your earlier fictions – Attempts at a Life and SPRAWL – and how you are building worlds through utterances, the cadences of language and the “thingness” of words as much as the spaces they contain or allude to. Talk to me about this aural-visual landscape in your works and whether the dimensions and qualities of words matter more than what they’re supposed to signify.
DD: ‘Installation’ actually started as a field recording of a particular spot on a beautiful but contaminated river in a state park in Missouri. I don’t mean I made an audio recording, but I remember sitting there in that spot and wondering how a story might work if it were a field recording, especially of a disappearing and disturbed habitat. I took a lot of notes.
There’s this bioacoustician named Bernie Krause who takes field recordings of animals and places from all around the world and then creates what he calls performances out of these recordings. A visitor to one of these performances would move through different habitats of sound. He says that each habitat has its own story to tell, and I think I was wondering about the inverse, like could a story have its own habitat to tell.
But to answer your question: yes, I’m interested in language as material. I love words, the names we’ve come up with for plants and animals especially. I mean, the names of prairie plants are like poems all by themselves: blazing star, blue false indigo, whorled milkweed. The names of the rocks are so good. My son was a rock hound from about age five to ten, so our house back then was filled with rocks and the language of rocks.
Also, Gertrude Stein was a big influence on my early writing, and I was reading mostly poetry when I started, and I started at an art school, where I was instructed on materiality in specific and non-literary ways. For years, if I had to pick between sound and meaning in my prose, I would very likely choose sound. But I trusted that there was a delightful if wonky kind of meaning making that would naturally arise out of that play with language. That was a kind of meaning that interested me very much. My prose has shifted over the past twenty or so years. My relationship to meaning in language or narrative feels more focused now. I’m more concerned with what words signify, as you put it. But I do still think that words are slippery. I am still interested in sound.
Danielle Dutton’s Site
A Carousel of Feminine Experience: Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
Danielle Dutton’s Surreal Take on Human Existence
Stitches, Stems and Pockets in the Sublime Work of Danielle Dutton
Buy ‘Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other’
Danielle Dutton Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
Coffee House Press
‘”Luminous” (The Guardian) and “brilliantly odd” (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times.
‘”Prairie” is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest. “Dresses” offers a surprisingly moving portrait of literary fashions. “Art” turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction might relate to one another, a question central to the whole book; while the final section, “Other,” includes pieces of irregular (“other”) forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious and heartbreaking by turns.
‘Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness, and indefinable beauty.’ — Coffee House Press
Excerpt
“DOUBT EQUALS WRITING.”
That’s Marguerite Duras in her essay “Writing.”
I could write something called “Not Writing.” I am writing it. Soon, I’ll have been the one who wrote it.
Whenever I’m not writing, which is most of the time, what is it I’m doing? I am someone pursuing fitness. I am obviously sometimes sleeping. I am someone collecting the sentences she reads: “The question of food is salt. The question of food is salt. The question of food is salt.”
That is Clarice Lispector.
Of course it’s natural for a writer to not be writing, even most of the time. What can be surprising is the extent to which one might feel, upon finding oneself newly not writing, struck—as if one has dropped the reins and fallen. As if a moment before one was up on a horse and now one is down on the ground. All one can say, looking around, is that one is not a one upon a horse.
Meanwhile, K and S are collaborating on tone. C just sold a book. R is giving a series of lectures on drawing and language and lines. Last night in a lecture, she said: “I am writing and by writing I am moving and by moving I am living.”
By not writing am I not moving and by not moving am I dead?
Sometimes, when not writing, I’m listening to the news. I might even cry in the kitchen. I’ll weep while stirring the soup. I’m of no help to anyone when I cry. Do I help anyone when I write, or when I am waiting to write? Tonight I make the soup and I surround the soup with anguish. The whole world is anguish, except the soup.
A while back, at his request, I wrote texts to accompany the images in an artist’s book of collages. An assignment minimizes doubt, that’s true. Yet was I happy writing? Later, he asked where I find the things I want to use in my work, and I said: “Visual art has always been one of the main places I go.” I told him how I’d been looking at Agnes Martin’s paintings and also reading her texts, and that reading her writing about painting made me want to write stories.
He said: “Agnes Martin’s writings are amazing, I agree with you there. But what really happens as you read them? How does what you’ve read manifest in what you write?”
And I said: “Well, I’m reading this essay about how her paintings are ‘about’ nothing, yet when you look at them there’s an obvious beauty and a kind of performance happening—something happens to you as you look at them. I read that and look at her work and I feel that performance and I think, yes, that’s exactly what I want to do, exactly what I want to make happen with language.”
The problem is I’ve chosen words, which can’t seem to be about nothing. Words don’t make things happen—performances or feelings—without also making meaning.
miserable means wretchedly unhappy
friendless means alone
ugly can be hideous or plain
For some reason, lately, I can’t stop telling people about the time my sixth grade teacher asked me (miserable, friendless, ugly) to stand up and show the class that I didn’t have a typically Jewish face. In an interview, the artist Moyra Davey says that shame is beautiful when we bring it out in the open. I wonder if we have to do anything to our shame other than share it. Shape it?
“They came, these restrained, reserved, exquisite paintings, as visions, for which she would wait sometimes for weeks on end, rocking in her chair . . . ‘I paint with my back to the world,’ she declared.”
That’s Olivia Laing in “Agnes Martin: The Artist Mystic Who Disappeared into the Desert.” Of Martin’s paintings Laing writes: “They aren’t made to be read, but are there to be responded to.”
Is it wrong to want to write toward what isn’t intended to be read? What I want is a story that’s an object that can turn itself inside out. So perhaps what I’m thinking of as inspiration is something else instead. Not to be writing like Martin but to be not writing like her.
I look again at one of R’s drawings, the one that hangs on my wall. She describes her drawings as language with its skin pulled back. In a second evening lecture, R says, “Fiction is a category of not-knowing.” And it’s true I want a story to be a hole I drop inside of. Then I fall asleep. While sleeping I have one of those dreams in which you think you’re awake in your bed. In this particular iteration of that category of dream, there’s a ladybug on my sheets. But the ladybug is enormous, at least as big as my head, and it’s reared up on its hind legs as if ready to attack. I cry out, “Marty, there’s a bug!” And Marty gets rid of the bug. Then I remember that I left a bright-green poisonous snake over on my bookshelf. So Marty grabs the snake behind its head and takes it into the yard. Then I remember that I left something else on my bookshelf, something worse, on the shelf below the snake, but Marty’s still outside. I know I have to handle this myself. I walk slowly across the room. What’s there is an enormous gray pulsating slug. It’s gelatinous, repulsive. It fills the entire shelf. There are many smaller gray slugs attached to the larger slug, and they’re feeding off it somehow, making sucking sounds. As they suck, the smaller slugs seem to be constructing sacs around themselves, dark hard sacs like scabs. The whole thing is magnetic, revolting. But these words don’t come to me in the dream. In the dream there is only the slug, filling the shelf, and the certain knowledge I have that it is a thing I have made.
In the morning, over oatmeal, I tell my son about the dream, which he finds completely hilarious. Yet the moment I’ve spoken it aloud, I experience a kind of electric shock in which I understand that the slug in the dream is the very thing I’ve been hoping to write, which is not writing. And it isn’t about doubt at all. It’s this whole new thing, unseen in the world, replacing the books on my shelf.
That afternoon, in an email, K asks if I’m thinking of writing about Agnes Martin. I don’t know how to tell her about this thing I’ve already done. “I have been wanting to write about an old woman,” I say back.
Now I’m in bed re-reading a favorite novel in which the main character, a polite spinster aunt named Laura, abruptly leaves her life in London against the wishes of her family and moves to a remote country village to be alone. Tramping through meadows, she decides to become a witch. She listens to the violets, listens to the trees. One day, she runs into Satan in the woods. They have a lengthy conversation. Near the end of this talk, a bug lands on Laura’s arm and she smacks it. “Dead!” Satan says, and the word spreads out in ripples like a rock dropped in a pond.
Extras
Fictions and Forms Reading: Danielle Dutton
Scripps Presents: Danielle Dutton
________________
‘I often work through a slow process of collection and cataloging. I move through various media and drop links, fragments of text, visual structures, etc. and then split them into folders on my computer. It’s not a particularly clear process, but I think of it as a documentation of my reading practices. I typically start with a clear sense of what I want, but these fragments slowly overtake the project, contorting the original vision towards something else. Often, I want something really lucid, minimal, open, etc. but I end up with messy, excessive textual sludge.’ — Jake Reber
‘Gloom Mediation Industrial Center is an informational blackhole. It seems to draw endless suspicion, but no one can say much with any certainty. Strange hallways, experimental procedures, missing workers, mysterious deaths, conspiracies, rituals, chants, slime. Open this book with caution. Restricted Access. No unauthorized personnel beyond this point…
‘Gloom is a serialized collection of comics and zines. Each section will be released 35 days after the previous installment, stretching over the course of a year.
‘As the project begins to evolve and extend, the threads and fragments embedded across these materials will begin to pull us in deeper. Listen to the hum. Document the slow passage of time. Immerse yourself in the strange interfaces and recite the digital prayers that proliferate in this glitchy environment. — 11:11 Press
35 YEARS
35 DAYS
35 PAGES
https://vaticglitch.net/
ZER000 EXCESS
https://www.hystericallyreal.com
Buy ‘Gloom’ (physical media) here
Download ‘Gloom’ (free) here
Jake Reber 3. Subfloor Intensities
11:11 Press
‘Down to the subfloor. Screen bleeds. Cannibalistic rituals. Pixel teeth. Digital inhumanity. Wake up in the gloom. Listen. Hum. Flow. A monolith. A chant. A prayer.’ — 11:11 Press
‘Most of my books are really just reading notes or documents of my reading habits. Traces of other books and my writing are completely entangled.
‘It’s not necessarily about the same sort of content as the books I’m reading, but it ends up being a reflection of the way a book takes up physical and psychic space, within my body and in near proximity.
‘When writing I get very interested in how other books navigate the interplay between the material substrates, formatting and design, the body of text, and the conceptual content. The zones of friction are where I’m drawn in, and this usually leads me back to writing, documenting, transcribing, archiving, etc.’ — Jake Reber
Excerpt
Extras
LEECH LAUNCH, with Jake Reber & A.V.Marraccini
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Oh, nice: the shooting being great. It’s true: I’m always amazed by the huge seeming range people who tell me they like my work. I’m totally thrilled by that. Thanks, have a fine, fine Monday if not even week ahead. ** Jamie F, Well, you’re most welcome. I’m actually really confident of my work, but it’s strange how fragile I feel about it before I get to the point where that confidence starts. To hugely generalise, LA people are great, nice, and they make the best friends. So it seems to me. The French = arrogant thing is crap. Maybe they’re rather reserved and unusually comfortable in their minds/bodies, but I think you’d have to be very insecure or a social control freak to think they’re arrogant. Wait until you go to Japan, if you haven’t been. People there are so nice and helpful that it almost feels like they’re playing some kind of evil game with you. I just meant maybe something happened with you that seemed unusually good, I guess? Congrats on the check! There you go. Um, no, I don’t worry about overly exposing myself in my work and putting myself in a vulnerable position thereby. I think I must’ve worried a bit when I was starting out, but I don’t remember feeling that way. I sometimes let my family look at my writing when I was teen, and it was pretty wild/open even then, and they told me I was sick and that it was terrible, and that didn’t bother me at all, so I guess maybe I grew a thin skin starting then? But I totally understand the fear. Maybe I think being an artist gives you a kind of inherent armour and protection. You have a daring imagination, and that’s a gift. If people read your writing and think less of you or more critically about you because of what you write, you’re learning who’s close to you and who’s not? I know that’s really easy to say. Does that make any sense? xo, Dennis. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Granted I’m a lifelong vegetarian, but, dude, that stroganoff was killer. When Mr. Furlong accidentally hocked in my face he was sort of midway between being the cute young Furlong and the tragic looking Furlong he is today. So, it wasn’t, like, exciting or anything. I hope love reminded you about the freezer situation. Love making living two blocks from Olympics central not feel more and more potentially hellish, G. ** Bill, Hey. I’ll find Sebastian Silva’s stuff. I don’t think I know it unless I’m spacing. Ah, Gastr del Sol odds and ends sounds plenty tasty. Thanks, Bill. ** Steve, Hi, No, I didn’t do that interview. I should have credited whoever did. I don’t remember why I didn’t. No date on the 10 list that I know of, but I’m presuming tomorrow evening to be timed with the opening ceremony? Nice about the Prismatic stuff. I spaced and missed it. And that was not compensated for by Eurovision. Although I did finally watch the Black Metal doc ‘Until the Light Takes Us’, which I thought was quite good. ** PL, Hey! I like your drawings a lot. I think my favorites were those in the ‘lustração livre’ folder, but I loved everything. Is ‘Processo de criação’ your notebook, or is it a book/work? Anyway, thank you! A great pleasure! I find Taylor Swift’s stuff extremely bland and uninteresting, but the phenomenon is kind of interesting. And the fact that she seems to be preparing to use her enormous powers to help defeat Trump makes me feel kindly towards her. Film: we’re just waiting with great frustration to finish the last post-production bits. It’s under consideration by four festivals, but I don’t think we’ll hear answers until mid-late summer. I have never owned a single Madonna record or even downloaded a song, so I only know the popular stuff. I don’t know what my favorite song of hers would be … Uh, maybe ‘Erotica’ or, mm, ‘Live to Tell’? What’s yours. I’ll probably have to hunt it down. Intriguing about the girl. Do you think that’s the end of that part of your and her story? ** _Black_Acrylic, He was in pretty consistently good films for, oh, five years or so, and then, bang, no more. New PTv2! ASAP with bells on for me. Everyone, Mr _Acrylic has an important announcement, and I second its importance: ‘Play Therapy v2.0 is back to take you somewhere new. Where is this place, and when is it? The answer is, it doesn’t make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence. On this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Here. ** Dee Kilroy, Hi, Dee! So lovely to see you! Honestly, I think ‘shame about the script’ could be said about 98% of the films in existence. How are you? xo. ** Harper, Hi! I’m happy to hear you’re ensconced in the resolving period. I don’t understand the impetus to make a kid, although all respect to anyone reading this who has made a kid. Where would we be with you, etc.? No, I don’t know ‘Lord of Dark Places’. You’ve made me curious, obviously. I’ve been reading the books you see up above. I watched the first, oh, hour or hour and a half of Eurovision, then I hit the sack. Yeah, meh, as usual. But I wouldn’t miss it. The ABBA thing was nice. They’re gods in my book. I guess I’m happy that the person who won was the person who won. ** Justin D, I asked John Waters, who’s a friend of mine, what Furlong was like to work with, and he said he had a much, much older girlfriend who was kind of annoying and always there and that he did nothing but play video games when he wasn’t on camera. Sounds kind of complicated. No, he just spit out his window randomly and didn’t look back. Hm, I can’t think of any song that I associate with a book. Interesting question. I’m going to try to pay attention from now on. Maybe I do, and I just forget immediately. Huh. And I’ll check out the Cemeteries vid once I’m out of here. Thanks! ** Darby🦦, Hey, bro. Uh, urgh, the toilet, hopefully fresh as a daisy by now. Sincerest apologies for misgendering Frankie. Won’t happen again. My weekend was alright, saw a visiting friend, did this and that, can’t remember. The poetry workshops were in a classroom with the desks/chairs organised in a circle, and you’d sit down and the teacher would have xeroxed poems by participants and would pass those out, and then the author would read their poem and everyone would comment with the teacher waiting until last. They did the trick for me. I guess I recommend trying one. (A lot of the people are talentless assholes, though, but who cares). I did meet some really cool fellow young poet friends, yes. I don’t think I know any of them anymore, but it was good to have a fellow aspiring poet posse. I like long strings of emojis. I can pretend I’m trying to read something in ancient Egypt. ** Uday, Parents can be so weird and clueless. I hear you. Mine were of that sort too. I was plenty messed as a kid/teen, and I’m remarkably sane and well adjusted. I don’t know why. Seems weird. Reduce your online presence, why? Why does your pal think it’s a problem? Strange. ** Okay. There are five books above that I read of late and highly recommend, and now you can see what you think of them based on first impression if you like. See you tomorrow.
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