A breadth-first blog post.
Perhaps in future we can narrow our scope.
I had so many good intentions about making a substantive Substack statement on March 1st. It felt like an auspicious date. Unfortunately, as you know, Life Happens, and so here we are on March 9th!
At this stage my audience is almost exclusively people I have already spoken to about my tentative and fumbling steps towards balancing “having an online identity attached to my writing” with “not encouraging my stalker”. For those who do not fall into that category: I am extremely open to feedback on what you want me to talk about here. Comments and conversation are highly encouraged. Something, something, engagement, something.
For now, since we’re just starting out, I’ll avoid delivering every thought that comes into my head. Let’s begin gently, with some recent inspiration:
“Was I In A Cult?”, a podcast about cults and “cultic relationships” hosted by Liz Iacuzzi and Tyler Measom. Unfortunately, it’s an iHeart production and thus riddled with ads, but the interviews are fascinating and they reference a lot of other podcasts, books, etc. that I have on my things-to-check-out list.
“Love bombing, gaslighting, and the problem with pathologizing dating talk” by James Grieg for Dazed. In particular, this line got the ol’ brain wheels turning:
But if you think of yourself as a moral patient and anyone who hurts you as a moral agent, it means that anything you do to them becomes fair game, because you are constitutionally incapable of inflicting harm, and they are constitutionally incapable of experiencing it.
“Deaf Republic” by Ilya Kaminsky, a book of semi-narrative poetry from 2019. The premise: in an occupied country, soldiers breaking up a protest murder Petya, a Deaf child. At the moment of the gunshot, the citizens of the country lose their hearing, and begin coordinating dissent by sign language. I borrowed this from my local library (it’s a beautiful book, and includes illustrations of sign language) after seeing a tweet from Kaminsky in 2020 doing the rounds in February. He’s an Odessa-born Jew whose family fled to the USA during the collapse of the Soviet Union, so you can probably guess his work is, how do we say… highly relevant. If you feel up to going through an emotional wringer, I recommend his Twitter feed; he’s been translating and sharing the work of Ukrainian poets, many of whom are still in Ukraine. You can read a sample of “Deaf Republic” at The New Yorker, complete with hand-drawn sign language gifs. A particular quote:
ON SILENCE: The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.
“My Bed” by Tracey Emin, a 1998 sculpture made from – do you want to guess? – the artist’s actual bed. She had the whole thing – overflowing ashtray, dirty underpants, used condoms and all – installed in the Tate, unchanged from the state in which she rose from it. I perennially cycle back to Art: What Is It? as a topic of contemplation, and this genre of sculpture – assemblages, readymades, found objects – make for particularly fine fodder. See also: the infamous “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp. “The Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self” by Morgan Meis for Image goes into some of the controversy surrounding “My Bed” when it was first released.
“In Search of Lost Art: Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau”, by Elizabeth Thomas for Inside/Out, the Museum of Modern Art’s blog. A 2012 article about one of the great works of assemblage sculpture. Merzbau was Schwitters’s studio as well as a sculpture; unfortunately, it was located in Hanover, Germany, and was bombed flat in 1943. (Schwitters, fortunately, had left several years earlier to escape the Nazis.) Only a handful of photographs remain:
But these photographs only capture what the Merzbau looked like in one particular instant. For many artworks, that would be enough—but the Merzbau was not just a static painting or a sculpture, but a whole environment, and one that was in constant flux. One day the Merzbau could have a new column of debris stacked in the corner, the next day a new grotto dedicated to an artist friend. Photographs can’t quite capture the Merzbau’s expanding and shifting nature.
My Beautiful Death by Gillian Genser, for Toronto Life. A 2018 memoir article; I read it at the time of its original publication because it went viral. Genser is a sculptor who creates works using primarily natural materials; eggshell, driftwood, bone. The article describes the unforeseen consequences of working with blue mussel shells; specifically, heavy metal poisoning. Genser is, to the best of my knowledge, still alive and still creating; she released La Pieta, carved from driftwood, shell, and bone, in 2021.
Do you find these things inspirational too?
Knowing what I find inspirational, what do you infer about me?
What will you create from them?
These are not rhetorical questions. I would like to know your answer.
I’ll be back - perhaps in a week or so - to tell you about other things. In the interim, you might consider sharing this post, or following me on Twitter, if that’s not too gauche. I can assure you I will not be a fixture on your feed.
As a reward for reading my nonsense, please enjoy this rather lovely photograph of wildflowers watching a sunset.
Until next time.
—Tacks