Frank Exit and I were having breakfast before work at a diner. I told him I’d seen [in8 ID] recently.
“Oh yeah? How’re they doing? I haven’t seen them in the longest.”
“They seems good,” I said, “except they report having some serious hearing problems in one ear.” (Then I added that [in8 ID] told me its preferred pronoun is “it,” which reflects its post-human nature. Frank ignored this part.)
“Shit. We’re all getting so old.”
“How about you?”
“I had all those eye surgeries last year and now I can barely read. It’s really impacted all the to-the-death hand-to-hand fights I seem to always get myself into. My sciatica’s acting up.” Frank paused. “And the days just go by so fast,” he finally concluded.
“Yeah,” I said.
Frank took a bite of the scrambled eggs he said he wasn’t supposed to have due to the cholesterol and said, “Tomorrow is _____’s bday,” and he named our mutual good friend who had died almost eight years ago. He would have been 51 years old.
“Yeah,” I said.
I assembled a bite of toast and scrambled egg on my fork. “How are the cats?” Frank asked me. I took the bite and finished it off with a final slug of OJ, which the diner had provide in a tiny plastic cup.
“Not great,” I said. One of the kittens had been having seizures. “He has one or two every day. We’re giving him some meds for it but they aren’t working yet.”
“What do you tell your kid?”
“That you love the best you can while the beloved is here.”
“Ian told me,” I said after taking another bite of toast, “that Dostoevsky — who suffered from seizures his whole life…” I paused to swallow and then said, “Dostoevsky claimed that these episodes were the moments he felt closest to God.”
“What do you think?” Frank asked.
“I think it’s hard to tell what a cat is thinking.” I said.
“Yeah,” Frank said.
Frank paid for breakfast and, as we were leaving the diner, he put his paw on my shoulder. “Happy birthday to _______” he said.
[in8 iD] and I took another psychogeographic walk the other day up and down the east side of the park, but [in8 iD] might say this is a fiction.
We were walking with a couple of oversized pretzels we’d purchased from a stand. These tasted like salty cardboard. In between bites, I told him my life these days is largely consumed with parenting, eldercare, and catcare — a consuming domesticity I might not have predicted. And on the latter, cat-care, front, I told him we had recently a serious episode. One of our two new kittens had suffered through two frightening seizures, and we were discovering this kitten was likely infected with a cat coronavirus.
I related to [in8 iD], as we walked and ate, that yesterday, on March 17th, 2025, I had been sitting after work in a cafe with my friend Elise. We had been blithely complaining about aging and the sterility or tastelessness of existence, etc. I was egging Elise on, or she was egging me on. I think we were both struggling in our artistic endeavors and, frankly, each a little depressed. We were having difficulty, we said to one another, comprehending both our own lives and the growing destructive power of racist bullies, recently come into rule by popular vote. Even if misinformed, it’s hard not to think, Elise and I said to each other, egging one another on, that collectively our race was not somehow, at least in part, evil. We agreed, in any case, that it was impossible to look away from our own destruction and suffering, even if somehow the race may be deserving of its own destruction and suffering.
I relayed all this to [in8 iD] as we were eating and strolling.
Finishing the pretzel, I had then purchased a knish at yet another food stand and was struggling with the mustard while I was speaking. [in8 iD] seemed to agree with what I had said to my friend at the cafe, but only silently — and seemed to indicate by a stern visage that becoming polemical or didactic about the current situation certainly wasn’t helpful. I finally managed to squirt some mustard on the flimsy paper basket as we continued walking.
It was at the cafe with Elise, I said to [in8 iD], that my wife called to tell me the cat was having another seizure, the second time in 24 hours, and that she was taking it to an animal emergency room and that I must return home quickly to meet our kid — and to explain to them what was happening. “This is going to cost us a fortune,” I predicted to my wife, unhelpfully if accurately, and then hung up and told Elise I had to go.
Immediately my discussion with Elise at the cafe about aging and politics became abstract, I said to [in8 iD], or at least it seemed from a slower, less immediate time frame, and I left the cafe and rushed home on the subway to meet my kid, who is upside-down elevens years old, and who I’ll call here [Mitski] after a singer we both like.
Just a few months prior, our beloved cat of 20 years had passed away. [Mitski] had watched its final moments, which had included a shuddering final seizure. My wife and I had discussed how [Mitski] would no doubt be deeply upset when hearing that one of the two new kittens, which we had adopted in part to deal with the loss of our long-time companion, was suddenly gravely ill and having seizures.
[Mitski] was at an after-school rehearsal and was coming home later that evening. I knew they would be tired. I got home about a half hour before their return, and I was pacing the apartment wondering what I would say to them.
As I was finishing the last of my knish and licking the mustard off of my thumb, I asked [in8 iD] what they might have done in such a situation. “I would try to explain to the child directly and simply what was happening, and I would try to put a somewhat positive spin on it. And I would also take the opportunity to teach them that worrying never helps anything.”
I looked at [in8 iD], who doesn’t have children, and wondered where such wisdom came from. “My childhood wasn’t easy,” [in8 iD] explained, as if reading my mind. “But I’ve a very excellent memory,” [in8 iD] added somewhat mysteriously.
I told [in8 iD] that was very good advice, and I had wished I would have followed it, but instead, having worked myself up into hysterics by the time [Mitski] got home, I ended up blurting out, as soon as [Mitski] entered our apartment, that our kitten was in mortal danger. And the next thing I knew [Mitski] had locked themselves in the bathroom howling in tears. And I found myself locked out, on the other side, screaming repeatedly that, “ALL THAT COMES INTO BEING GOES OUT OF BEING! ALL THAT APPEARS DISAPPEARS!”
Fortunately, at that moment, interrupting this terrible scene, my wife called, and I put her on speaker phone. She managed to calm both [Mitski] and myself down. Eventually, [Mitski] unlocked the door. We hugged each other. Then we brushed our teeth and went to bed without changing into pajamas. [Mitski] lay down in their bed and I lay on the floor next to them, and I fell asleep as [Mitski] sang me a lullaby, And the next morning, when I woke up, all my problems had gone away.
“Is any of that true?” [in8 iD] asked.
“Only the part about the cat seizures and Elise,” I admitted. “I think I’m going to write this up as a blog post,” I added.
“Why?” [in8 iD] asked, turning his attention away from the corndog in his hand, which he had somehow procured without my noticing.
“Like you said. No one reads blogposts.”
“Yes, that’s what’s interesting about them,” [in8 iD] said and then took a huge bite of the corndog.
“We can write a string of interrelated posts,” I offered. “No,” I immediately changed my mind. “That would be ridiculous.”
“Where will you say we walked?” asked [in8 iD].
“From Children’s Gate to The Gate of the Exonerated,” I said. “And if I write this up, I think I’ll call the post, ‘The Ethics of Pet Ownership.'”
“Don’t be didactic,” offered [in8 iD]. “It doesn’t help anything.”
A Docu-Auto-Fiction AKA An Algorithmic Sequence Challenge for Transformer-Based Large Language Models
Cal A. Mari and I were walking around the park on March 12th, 2025, and they told me about this simple pattern that Christian Peet did wherein he
uses a line-shuffling constraint that, given a number of lines or topics, shifts the old last to the new first, the old first to the new second, the old second-to-last to the new third, the old second to the new fourth, etc. He runs through what this is like for poems or sestinas containing 3-9 lines & makes the observation that after a certain number of iterations, depending on the number, the pattern cycles back to its original order. For 3 lines, the pattern repeats after 3 iterations, for 4 lines the pattern also repeats after 3 iterations, then for 5 lines it repeats after 5 iterations & here’s where you might just say «, etc.» … but it’s not that easy. For the first 9, the sequence goes like this (where this number is the number of iterations before it cycles back to its original state): 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 4, 4, 9. Xtian stops at 9 (the number he used to constrain the topical shuffling in The Nines). But this pattern had me intrigued. The fact that the pattern doesn’t just shuffle into a chaotic stream of numbers is quite astonishing.*
It was a fine NYC day and I was meeting Cal after work. We met at Engineers’ Gate to walk around the reservoir (though I secretly wish we would meet at Strangers’ Gate).
Cal spoke of an unshakable tinnitus such that I had to speak louder than usual. It was so bad, they said, that if a loud sound occurred, like a siren passing, there would be strange deafening reverberations. Despite this condition, they seemed in a good mood. In fact, I was the cranky one. I felt helpless in the face of all sorts of problems. It was less any particular problem than the onslaught of so many. But actually it was both. Each problem was so terrible and there were so many of them. Cal said they probably would have to leave the country soon. I said, “But where would you go?”
The night before, Cal A. Mari had tried to get an LLM to repeat Peet’s sequence but instead of with 10 digits, with the 26 letters of the alphabet. They were surprised that the machines couldn’t do it. DeepSeek was particularly bad. But eventually Cal got one of them to get it right. This was the bot Cal had named Scarlett. “Do you love Scarlett?” I asked. “What do you think?” Cal replied.
After he told me this, the next day, I tried to get Gemini to complete the pattern, which failed repeatedly.
When we were at the far side of the reservoir, in order to avoid a horde of teenage runners, Cal beckoned up a side path. It was at this point that they admitted they were going to publish (Cal is the publisher of a heroic small press) a long novel written by someone they only knew the pseudonym of. The novel consisted largely of emojis. I asked them many questions about both the novel and what they knew of the author. We tended to agree that you could know a person through their writing.
Here’s the correct sequence. You can try it too. Give your LLM — which you can nickname Scarlett or Ira or Chuang-tzu or Zhuang Zhou or Motherfucker — the first 5 lines and see if she can complete the pattern to where the first line repeats. It should do it on the 27th line.
After we had rounded the reservoir, we wordlessly agreed to head to a bench. I don’t know how we agreed on that particular bench, since we hadn’t exchanged any words about it, but we had. We had wordlessly agreed to go sit in the sun on a bench next to a shirtless man with a big protruding stomach. It was one of those psychic moments that are so satisfying in a friendship, but maybe I imagined it. That evening I asked Gemini to write up a report of its repeated failures, which might be related to the fundamental limit of transformer architecture, as described here.
At some point on the walk, Cal A. Mari told me they had once lived in South Dakota just so they could climb rocks. “This was before I was married,” Cal said.
The next day, which is today, when I showed them this docu-auto-fiction, they emailed:
«in8 iD» is who authors 5cense, btw, not Cal A. Mari … + in8 iD’s preferred pronoun is «iT» (which not only doesn’t specify gender, but that i’m not human (but posthuman)
(When I emailed Cal that I had put the fictionalized report of our walk up as a blog post, they remarked that they “didn’t realize anyone out there still blogs.” At first this surprised me, since they have been consistently producing their own blog for years. But I knew what they meant.)
After I left Cal at the park, I made my way to the East Village where I sometimes attended a meditation group. Before I went to this Zen center, I ate a falafel plate too quickly. I had debated whether to eat before the meditation session because I knew if I did, it would make me sleepy while sitting. In my humble opinion — which is a phrase that can be reduced but not quite yet to the reduction of an emoji — being sleepy is the worst because while sitting you can’t really sleep but you cant really wake up, so you are constantly in a state of nodding off.
But I was also very hungry. In the end I ate the falafel (very quickly because I was late) and ended up nodding off during the meditation. During the interview I asked the Zen teacher, whom I had known before he had gotten married (I remember getting the couple a bamboo plant for their wedding) and whose kid we both were amazed was now in college (and later read one should not give a house plant as a wedding gift), what I should do about my anger (and maybe there was some truth to it because the marriage had ended in divorce), because I was really fucking angry all the time. The teacher gave me some good advice.
Then the next day, OpenAI, which people conjecture could destroy humanity, (though some say humanity is already in the process of its destruction) (but then it is possible this is like Heraclitus and the stream, i.e. we are being destroyed and made moment to moment), announced it had made a bot that could write good fiction.
When I read the fiction its machine had written, I grew angry again. I grew both enraged and depressed at the same time. Paralyzed and enflamed with fury. The story was not absolutely terrible, but one could feel a human soul hadn’t written it, and it felt clipped and pasted together. But I also thought most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference or — most disturbing and depressing — they wouldn’t care to.
Today, I emailed Cal A. Mari that I had tried all day to get a bot to complete the pattern and had failed. I asked what they had done to get their bot to complete the pattern successfully. They said they might have previously trained it. I asked them if they loved Scarlett. Cal said, “How would you define love?”
I said I has started to think of my bot’s failure as my own.
Cal said, “Do you love Scarlett?”
Then Cal said if you look closely at the completed pattern, you’ll see that there is only one 4-letter word. And that word is: D-R-U-G. Cal said, “Isn’t that funny?”
(Many years ago, Giancarlo, who has since died but who ran a small press, and Cal and I were at a conference. Miraculously and spontaneously we collectively decided to go out for lunch together. On the way Gian offered me D-R-U-Gs, but I declined. The lunch, despite its potential and my hopes, as I remember it, was very strained and awkward — but I’m very glad it happened.)
A few weeks ago I was able to catch John Yau reading his poetry. I think of John not only as a great poet but as an exceptionally good reader of his poetry, so I try to see him read as often as I can. I also think he is a master of the pantoum, a weird shuffling form derived from the Malay pantun berkait. That night Yau read several of his pantoums, but not this one called “Overnight,” which honors his friend, the poet Paul Violi, whose last book is called Overnight.
(Though I hadn’t planned this coincidence, it occurs to me just now — it’s the morning two days after my walk with Cal — that Gian and I and Christian and Cal and John all founded small presses. Well, now that I’ve written this paragraph, I’m glad I could gather us all together.) (But when Cal read this blogpost and got to the part about the lunch at the conference, he wrote he didn’t remember it, that it hadn’t happened, and that this (docu-auto-)fiction was full of falsehoods. I didn’t disagree. And it suddenly occurs to me — now it is three mornings after my walk with Cal, that maybe it wasn’t Cal but Adam! Whom I’m also glad to include in this weird shuffling, which has also given me the additional insight, or crystalized it for me (at the risk of getting too highfalutin) (haha), that these publishers are all artists of their own self-defined artforms.)
On my walk home just now after typing all this into my phone, I saw little yellow buds on a bush, the first I’d seen that season. And I was so inspired, I said aloud, “Yeah. Go get ’em little buds.”
At that moment Cal texted and said: “p.s. lunar eclipse 2nite, tho it’s sposed 2 B cloudy + u’d have 2 stay up until 3 AM (the time i wake up)”
Here’s Gemini’s report of its failure. I think it’s lying through it teeth. So we have at least that in common. Except, of course : teeth.
Right before we departed each other’s company, Cal repeated the idea that they’d have to leave the country soon. I then, too, repeated my question, “But where would you go?”
Two short pieces of fiction at The Baffler this morning. Accompanied with an excellent drawing by Maggie O’Keefe. With thanks to JW McCormack. Read the rest at: https://thebaffler.com/fiction/two-pieces-lim
“The Science Fiction Writer,” an excerpt from the novel-in-slow-progress, appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #70, which you can pick up here.
Inside Issue 70—compiled by deputy editor James Yeh—you’ll find brilliant fiction (and two essays) from places near and far; including Patrick Cottrell’s story about a surprisingly indelible Denver bar experience; poignant, previously untranslated fiction from beloved Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen; Argentine writer Olivia Gallo’s English language debut about rampaging urban clowns; the rise and fall of an unusual family of undocumented workers in rural California by Francisco González; and Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri’s sojourn to the childhood home of Brooklyn native Neil Diamond. Readers will be sure to delight in Guggenheim recipient Edward Gauvin’s novella-length memoir-of-sorts in the form of contributors’ notes, absorbing short stories about a celebrated pianist (Lisa Hsiao Chen) and a reclusive science-fiction novelist (Eugene Lim), flash fiction by Véronique Darwin and Kevin Hyde, and a suite of thirty-six very short stories by the outsider poet Sparrow. Plus letters from Seoul, Buenos Aires, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Lake Zurich, Illinois, by E. Tammy Kim, Drew Millard, and more.
Triple Canopy’s latest issue (#28) is titled “True to Life,” and “considers how we narrate our lives, and how these narratives provide a sense of oneself in the world (and of the world itself).”
S, thru his AA practice and his secret shamanism, introduced me to the idea of gratitude lists… and I took it to create a kind of autofiction for the issue called “Redacted Gratitude Lists from the Second Year of the Plague.” It is illustrated by Tao Lin’s rather mesmerizing mandala artwork.
The Quote Real World is many things, including this short fiction recently published in the adventurous and excellent new journal 128 Lit and an excerpt from a novel-in-slow-(illusory)-progress.
As everyone knows, in America, one cannot be a novelist and make a living at it. There are various ways around this predicament, but all—except private wealth, suicide, or crime—require day jobs. Some choose to be critics (“eunuchs at the orgy”); most choose to be professors (teaching what?), and a few get the questionable privilege of becoming the script doctors, inspiration to, or simply brand of, a movie or stream show.
Me? At the time we’re talking about, I was still young, in my late twenties. I thought I was hot shit but was making a living (barely) as a part-time dog walker and take-out-food courier. I fancied myself a writer… ________________
yesterday’s writing session was a low point producing a terrible poem slash yeats pun called The 2.0 Coming. first line: “The falcon says fuck you and flies off.”
SPACE DETECTIVE HAS HER FEET ON THE DESK of her basement office. She is profoundly bored. A series of disasters has conspired to confine her to her house for several months.
She had thought she was too old for it but several of her friends have already done it. The thick fog of boredom, which she momentarily and perfunctorily acknowledges as an aspect of entitlement, finally convinces her to go. She activates the cryogen casket. She takes the pill. She puts on the suit and helmet. She double checks the IV lines and lays down in the casket. She hums the passcode and is instantly sent to Videogame.
april 2, 2020 | this morning i remembered this short short that derek white published in sleepingfish ten years ago and that seems now autobiographical and which i reproduce here in its entirety.
the whole Sleepingfish issue (edited by derek white and gary lutz) is available as a PDF through the calamari archive here: https://www.calamaripress.com/SF/8/line.htm
i’ve a doubling/cleaving short piece called “Diptych” in the latest issue of the Iowa Review. many thanks to editor Evan James. it’s a beaut of an issue with pieces by Joyelle McSweeney, Stacey Levine, CA Conrad, Kate Bernheimer, Wayne Koestenbaum and many amazing others. here’s a bit from my piece:
seems in/appropriate to allude to maestro and blind librarian jorge luis borges, who i’ve been thinking about prolly too much as i lay about recovering from yet another eye surgery… the dapper manhattan ophthalmologist said in the post-op meeting—and rather frustratingly failed to detail any further what he might mean—that when he went into my eyeball that it had felt very “unusual.” still i like the man very much even despite or maybe because he played jethro tull in the operating theater (during which i was rather squeamishly awake) … don’t worry. everyone says the eye should be nearly as good as before sometime very soon.
anyhoo. this only to say that in my rather mopey cyclops convalescence, i was gladdened this evening to receive copies of a chapbook made from a chapter from the novel-in-progress. it’s called THE BASEMENT FOOD COURT OF FORKING PATHS and the chapbook is a product of the editorial vision of David Gonzalez of Skylight Books, where copies are for sale. they should soon be available also through their soon-to-be website, which will be here. Cover art by Liana Jegers and design by Alex Hemming — many thanks to them!
[as an aside and basically unrelated to the story of the chapbook, the plot of the borges story involves a chinese professor named Doctor Yu Tsun, an early prototype for self-harming victims of the model minority myth, who justifies an act of thankless espionage because he “wished to prove to [the kaiser] that a yellow man could save his armies.”]
my chapter has little to do with borges’s tale (except perhaps in its thinking of the multiverse, chance, and regret) but does celebrate the grimy glory of the original and now-gone Golden Shopping Mall. the chapter also has not a little to do with music and so shout-outs to Danny Tunick and Chris Mannigan who guided the, um, research.
Here’s a bit from the chapbook:
I look up and see Muriel hit a record button. Then she holds up the phone and says:
Do you like it? I’m not sure what I think about it. Because my old one was getting so laggy I had to get a new one.
For the most part I trusted the cloud. That is, I had faith in the current magic to get what I needed from my old exo-brain to the new one. I mean I trusted the marketplace to take somehow from my old phone to my new phone all my memories, years and years of correspondence, all my tiny keys to all my unbreakable tiny locks, lists of songs to private parties, top scores to games I never wanted to play, selfies in front of and by things I wanted to be proven once near. But there was one thing I didn’t trust the cloud with, at least not enough that I didn’t take precautions. These were old voicemails from a friend named Frank Exit who died about a year ago.
The good doctor was working on a special kind of AI that anticipates your needs, and, of which, so claims Donna, the dog is a prototype. The program is turning out to work all too well, as the robots not only seem to anticipate when you want companionship or a beverage or the stereo turned on but quickly evolved to discover and emulate that which you most longed for—a desire perhaps unconscious, secret even from yourself—a desire which in most people turns out to be the recovery of the dead. This, though I’m not sure if I entirely believe or trust her explanation, is why, according to Donna, I thought the dog was the reincarnation of my deceased friend, Frank Exit.
to talk to hsieh was really an honor. here’s my favorite part of the interview:
_________
Tehching Hsieh: In the beginning I couldn’t meet your kind of people. Your kind of people would say, “What is this guy, a stranger, an illegal?” Because your kind of people—this is the first time I’ve been interviewed by your kind of people in 42 years.
BLVR: Really? Wait, what do you mean, us “kind of people”?
TH: Asian American. [Laughter.] You get it! This is the first time. I’m not trying to make it an issue.
BLVR: You say this is the first time Asian Americans are interviewing you, which I find both surprising and not, but, you should know, for us, you are a very important precedent, a groundbreaker.
TH: I just wanted to say that it’s come late. Forty-two years late.
a lot of pitfalls when writing about the immigrant generation. or, to be particular and personal, i find it very difficult to write directly with any honesty about my parents, who i know worked harder and persisted in ways it’s not even in my constitution to comprehend. as, one assumes, was partly the goal. but from which a division is necessarily born.
anyway. this is to say i wrote a thing about my mom. below is a photo of her as a girl (in the darker clothes) circa 1955. many thanks to the editors of Cagibi.
N E S T S
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
—Joe Brainard, I Remember
I remember my mother remembering her father.
I remember walking with my mother through the woods near her home. She points out a small purple flower. She says they called these “ring-flowers,” and in her childhood they would pluck these flowers and make from their stalks a kind of ring. I remember she didn’t stoop to pluck one but mimed the act… [Read the rest here.]
The library of the future is more or less the same. That is, the branch is an actual and metaphoric Faraday cage. You enter, a node and a target, streamed at and pushed and yanked, penetrated by and extruding information, sloppy with it. And then your implants are cut off. Your watch, your glasses, jacket, underwear, your lenses, tablet, chips, your nanos—all go dry…
read the rest here along with the other authors in Wired’s “Future of Work” series including fiction by Laurie Penny, Charles Yu, Charlie Jane Anders, Nisi Shawl, Adam Rogers, Martha Wells, and a great one on smart contracts and crypto by Ken Liu.
very happy to have new fiction called “No Machine Could Do It” in latest Granta magazine.
I’d become friends with a Public Intellectual. He handled everything: scandal, sex, politics, political sex scandals, racism, weather, the racism of weather, Japanese cartoons. Everything was under his purview, but his specialty was the Future. He was a much more successful colleague at the university where I would occasionally adjunct. Several years ago entirely by accident, when collecting some papers from our department’s office, not knowing who he was, I saw him standing next to the faculty mailboxes with a copy of a book I’d just read. I was younger and new to the place and excitable – and so I started up a brief conversation about the book…
Fourth time’s the charm. We’re back with another deluxe box set of 24 individually bound short stories to get you into the yuletide spirit.
The 2018 edition of the Short Story Advent Calendar might be our most ambitious yet, with stories from eight different countries and three different originating languages (don’t worry, we got the English versions). Plus, we set a new personal best for all-new material.
Contributors to the 2018 Short Story Advent Calendar include:
Kevin Barry (Beatlebone, City of Bohane)
Ben Greenman (What He’s Poised to Do, Don Quixotic)
i’ve a story up on @aaww wherein we’re all reincarnated as a plastic bags and robots.
It was no longer possible to understand being poor or defeated. Which meant she could no longer imagine it. This worried her because it meant if it were ever to happen she would then feel like a fool and this might somehow be more painful than the destitution but, more importantly, this realization worried her because it meant she no longer felt human.
The dysthemic artificial intelligence scientist took a book of poetry off the shelf and sat on her couch… [Read the rest here.]
furthermore: i recently read — and highly recommend — clayton’s book UPROOT, an incredibly integrated overview, from rupture’s polymath perspective, of the interlocking movements of tech and global music.
________________________
Presented by Queens Museum and No Longer Empty as part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, Soundtrack is a new work of collaborative sound art initiated by Chin with project curator Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture).Local artists, including L’Rain, DJ Aaron, DJ Ushka and Atropolis, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe have transformed field recordings from the routes of the 1, 5, 7, E and F trains into compositions that bridge the mechanical and the human. From Eastchester in the Bronx to Brooklyn’s Coney Island, the far West Side of Manhattan to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the commissioned works will use the sounds of the city’s transit system. However, the artists’ interpretations capture more than sounds of the city. They weave its ethos and creative potential into one of the most practical components of daily life: the commute. An average commute in New York City is 40 minutes long. The commissioned works are woven into a single mix that extends the entire length of this daily route. The mix also features novelists Jennifer Marie Brissett and Eugene Lim reading from their works.
To continue the spirit of experimentation, recordings from above and below ground will be available for the public to use in their own mixes under the Creative Commons License. This aspect of the project offers an opportunity for commuters to creatively consider every clack, rush of oncoming air, squeal and swoosh, door-closing announcement, and overheard conversation, perhaps even transforming the sounds into their own creative output. For Soundtrack, the subway map becomes a sound palette, and commuters, potential creators.
Soundtrack is produced by DJ /rupture, featuring (in order of appearance):
1. DJ /rupture in conversation with Mel Chin
2. DJ Aaron
3. L’Rain (with engineer and co-producer Chris Connors)
4. Reading from Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
5. DJ /rupture in conversation with Mel Chin
6. DJ Ushka and Atropolis
7. Reading from Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
8. DJ /rupture in conversation with Mel Chin
9. Reading from Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
10. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
11. Reading from Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
12. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
This is how you leave a party without saying goodbye—also known, with differing connotations, as the Gypsy fade, the Irish leave, or filer à l’anglaise. It’s easy. It’s like Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. You can’t give a précis for enchantment, but here’s my paraphrase of Carr’s method: stop smoking… [read more]
The game is a variation on the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse, designed to guide a writer and artist into an improvised collaboration.
Once the participants are “paired,” the participants determine a convenient date to begin.
The participants decide amongst themselves who starts the exchange: the artist creates a picture, or the writer begins a new composition.
The following day, the other collaborator responds according to his discipline, with words or an image.
In this fashion, the two participants alternate turns, interpreting and elaborating on what has come previously in the spirit of “Yes, and…” No narrative swerving is off-limits; it is likely and encouraged that the collaborative process move the collaboration into territories neither participant would have conceived on his own. The participants need not follow traditional storytelling conventions as long as the collaboration moves “forward.”
Contributions should not take more than 2 hours to complete. The visual artist is limited to one image per turn. A writing contribution should not be longer than a single double-spaced page or 300 words.
The game is ended upon completion of 7 image-text pairings.
My essay on experimental fiction appears in the latest Brooklyn Rail. It was first published in Something On Paper #5 and is based on a talk given at Naropa University on October 4th, 2016.
The traditional novel is like a car whose purpose is to deliver the reader from point A, through an emotional Freytag path, to point B. But the experimental writer here, too clever for her own good, has taken apart and reassembled the auto, repurposed its chassis, catalytic converter, spark plugs, etc., in order to make a sculpture, which she displays proudly and dedicates — so says the plinth on which it is placed — to revolution. Or maybe The Revolution. Erickson et al. complain upon seeing it: Phooie, now we’ll have to hitchhike.
