stacks of books, stacks of thoughts
what we've been reading / what is being read
Hi there,
Welcome to digging a hole. sharing creative processes and research [03].
On this lazy Saturday our arms extend towards our bookshelf and we’re looking back at what has been read in our house recently. Find below a list of books or texts accompanied by compact non-reviews = some sentences about what these texts mean for us or our research, how we read them or how they read us.
Commonwealth by Bryan Washington
(short story for Apartamento; read 100%)
It’s hard to find a good text in Apartamento, yet this short story, that also introduced us to Bryan Washington’s writing for the first time, is really really good. You will see it was the origin of of our small Bryan Washington funclub.
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood by Jackie Wang
(our book of the year; read 70% or 100%)
I so wished I had access to this book in my early 20s or even teens! A guide, a mentor, a friend - Jackie is everything a writing queer body could hope for. She's proof that academia can be (+ should be) personal and that writing for oneself always makes sense. I feel eternally grateful to Szy for buying it and am now happy to say this Almanac is literally engraved into our library. Also, ALL HAIL BLOGGING.
If you’re not familiar with Jackie, we invite you to listen to a conversation with her that 128 lit did recently: https://www.128lit.org/a-cosmic-talk
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
(read 100%)
I’ve been meaning to read more of Bryan’s work since reading his short story in Apartamento back in February. He’s also been surfacing in various places, so you can imagine the anticipation was grand. But I think I picked the best kind of entrance into his growing oeuvre. Family Meal to me sits next to our canonical recents like Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters and You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi which all centre relationships and change all the while affirming a queer reality we know from experience.
I swallowed the novel in one weekend during the long, lonely nights after work. This book is a trickster but a caring one. Its story reads like the opposition of polarity: I keep on changing my mind about the characters until I end up liking nobody but loving everyone.
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
(read 35%)
A fuel for imagination.
I wouldn’t recommend reading Leonora before going to bed though unless you wanna trip in your dreams (spoken from experience). The main character of this book is called Marian and she’s an old woman who gets evicted from her son’s house and put up in an elderly home. Marian has a best friend called Carmella who has a practice of writing letters to strangers and sending them to random addresses across the globe. I imagine Bo and I becoming Carmella (=me) and Marian (=Bo) when our skins had wrinkled and our senses had worn out. You will always have fun with Leonora Carrington.
this simulation sux by Deforrest Brown, Jr. & Ting Ding
(read 25%)
I was jumping around this publication at rile* for a little while before Szy decided to buy it because of a sentence we used in our first keeping each other in the loop. It’s a pocket book published by domain, a New York queer publisher with an aspiringly consistent design. What excited me most about the book was the overlays of text (see below) and the collision of the two authors it embraced. I’m a sucker for essay collections and I was curious to learn how Deforrest Brown, Jr. & Ting Ding reflected, in their expansive thinking, upon the strange years of 2020/2021. Now, having dipped a toe, I expect to twirl around this book for quite some time, especially when conquered by notions of endings, austerity and systemic transformations.
Problèmes de localisation by Élise Legal
(read 30%)
I was recently asked by a customer for a specific recommendation from the French section at rile*and I struggled answering which led me to browsing said section ferociously right after the person had left the store. I thus found Problèmes de localisation - a lovely piece of young writing which elevated my appreciation of the French language to a more contemporary level. Élise manages to write through the complexity of current capitalist erosion with ease, all the while contaminating the reader with a fresh appreciation of language at its situated, bodily best.
Lot by Bryan Washington
(read 20% = 3 short stories)
The freshest read. I slipped into Bryan’s short stories horizontally and only last Thursday, being held by recurring sleep, heat thickening by the hour. I’m in awe of how finely crafted his stories are all the while being carved from the roughest parts of the mundane. In the second story, which stayed with me most, Bryan shapes a sort of neighbourhood choir as a character with slippery agency, simultaneously the driver of the telling and having no flesh at all. I think I love his writing because it’s essentially relational, it doesn’t allow for anyone to exist in singularity. That and the hard work made visible.
On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim
(read 100%)
The stories that oiled my thinking patterns at the time, enough to sometimes slip and fall onto something that can be so simple and so surprising or that doesn’t lazily feed into the reader’s anticipation.
People Want Power by Mirene Arsanios
(online essay, read 100%)
I understand the violence needed to abolish violence, ask Luka if he wants milk.
A text sent to me by Bo, a few days after my sister had a baby.
Oh wow, wow, I just read this! Mirene Arsanios is a gift.
Świat we mnie, ja w świecie, W stronę planetarnego przebudzenia by Joanna Macy
(eng. title: World as lover, world as self; read 30%)
Dissects people’s relationship to ecology, talks about exploring one’s feelings of despair and empowerment in the eye of the ecological catastrophe. “Zaczęliśmy szukać sposobów na przełamanie transu i pomagać sobie nawzajem usłyszeć płacz Ziemi.” (my translation: We started looking for ways to break the trance and help each other hear the Earth's cries.) The elements like cries, despair or grief remind me of Monika’s texts and practise of “Soliliquy”.
31 Reflections at 31, Liberation is Breathwork, Let Us Blow It All Down by Ayana Zaire Cotton
(read here, read 100%)
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
(read 100%)
In Lieu of Solutions by Violet Spurlock
(read 0%)
A collection of poems from Violet Spurlock I came across in Russell E. L. Butler’s IG stories. They reposted a photo with a poem from this page because their song titles appeared as part of the poem. The two song titles mentioned are: I Don't Do Those Drugs and Modular Synths Make You Trans. Both are from Russell’s album A Talisman to Ward Off Dysphoria. We listen to Russell’s music a lot at home, I would blindly read, listen to anything that is or references their work.
happy reading,
xxx,
szy and ire