“Stone Cold” Steve Austin was a wifebeater. Bret “Hitman” Hart was a serial philanderer. “Big Poppa Pump” Scott Steiner tried to gouge out the eyes of a widely-beloved coworker, Diamond Dallas Page, during a backstage altercation. Jerome “New Jack” Young severed two arteries in the forehead of an untrained 17-year-old kid with a surgical scalpel during a match, nearly killing him. Cash Wheeler of All Elite Wrestling allegedly pulled a gun on a guy during a highway altercation. According to her mother, “Sweet” Stan Lane of the Midnight Express might be Republican congresswoman and gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert’s long lost father.

All of that stuff is real (except, probably, the Boebert thing), yet wrestling fans still love those guys. Meanwhile, the death of 71-year-old Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, arguably the biggest professional wrestling star of all time, in 2025 was marked by relatively muted tributes. These wan celebrations are reflective of Hogan’s dwindling stature within an industry he once defined. The last time the former 12-time world champion appeared on live WWE television, in January 2025, it was to celebrate a $5 billion broadcast deal between the company he’d helped build into a global behemoth and streaming giant Netflix: he was viciously booed throughout the segment by the 18,000-strong crowd at Inglewood, California’s Intuit Dome. In the wake of his death six months later, some publications openly wondered if any on-air remembrances by his former employer would be met with a similarly hostile reception.

There is always a sort of moral relativism at play in the way a fandom judges the sins of its idols. Wrestling fans are certainly well-accustomed to looking the other way when their favourites behave badly outside of the ring. Depending upon one’s own personal hierarchy of harmful behaviours, it would be easy to argue that Bollea’s various offences were of lesser severity than those of Austin or New Jack. And yet his transgressions clearly have a uniquely galling quality for how precisely they seem to poke at our collective resentments of the wealthy, the undeserving, the shameless grifters. The most instructive aspect of Hogan’s downfall is what it tells us about the changing values of contemporary fans—and of our endless broader culture war.

Hingeing an essay on the assertion that “[insert person/idea/thing] is America” is the sort of wobbly trope that would result in an instant D- on an undergraduate essay, but in the 1980s, that’s how Hogan was sold to the world by the WWE (then the WWF) and its architect Vince McMahon. Strutting to the ring to the tune of Rick Derringer’s “Real American” at a billed (and real-ish) 6’7, 300 pounds, the Hulkster was physically larger and stronger than most of the monstrous, often colourfully foreign heels he battled. But he was also greater of soul. By their nature, wrestling matches tell simple stories, and Hogan’s formula was simpler than most: first, Hulk dominates with basic punches, kicks, and slams; inevitably, his opponent cheats to gain an advantage and beats on the champion, subjecting him to a litany of painful holds and rule-bending blows. Hulk eventually draws on the passion of the crowd to fire up, shrug off the heel’s offence, and win with his signature big boot and leg drop combo. Despite Hogan’s agonized pantomime as he endured the villains’ underhanded tactics, the outcome of his matches was seldom in real doubt. He was better because he was stronger, and stronger because he was in the right. To root for the Hulkster was to root for the inevitable victory of a morally superior juggernaut, to be reassured of American supremacy in what would turn out to be the Cold War’s last gleaming.

In the 35 years that followed Hogan’s heroic apogee (he also had a short late-‘90s renaissance as the villainous “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan in World Championship Wrestling), he made plenty of money on the nostalgia circuit in both wrestling and pop culture. But as large swaths of the public have begun to look on the pages of recent American history as a record of capitalistic rot, Hogan’s own reputation has suffered in turn. The first real chink in his armour came with 1994’s United States v. McMahon (better known as “the steroid trial”), in which the federal government prosecuted Vince McMahon on trafficking and embezzlement charges. Hogan, who’d always insisted his gargantuan physique was the result of milk, vitamins, and prayer, admitted in the course of testifying (in his by-then former boss’s defence) that he’d been on the juice since 1976 but had recently gone off the stuff. And indeed, between 1994 and 1997, when the industry quietly agreed it was safe to let the boys start using again, Hogan’s body literally shrunk—and with it some of his aura. While Hogan’s biceps would recover, this first very public lie formed a crack in his façade that would only spread in the years to come.

In an industry of liars, Bollea was one of its most inveterate and absurd fabulists. From claiming that he’d been invited to become Metallica’s permanent bass player in 1986 to saying André the Giant died after Hogan bodyslammed him in the main event of 1987’s Wrestlemania III, he could scarcely get through an interview without dropping a bizarre new bushel of fibs. What might’ve been indulged as an endearing carny quirk from a thoroughly dotty legend was cast in a less flattering light by persistent accounts of his backstage politicking. He shrewdly negotiated contracts which allowed him creative control over how his character was depicted onscreen, and was notorious for using these provisions to avoid “putting over” (losing to) talents who threatened to rival his popularity, even when the occasional loss might have been good for the wrestling business as a whole. He tended to enhance his influence by forming close relations with the bosses: his friendship with WCW Executive Producer Eric Bischoff was widely blamed for unpopular creative decisions that hobbled the once-hot company in the late-1990s,1 and fellow wrestler (and future Minnesota governor) Jesse “The Body” Ventura never forgave Bollea for stooling on him to McMahon when Ventura attempted to form a WWF wrestler’s union back in 1986.

Given the mafia-like temperament of promoters and the degree of well-founded distrust between wrestlers of the era—a by-and-large fiercely libertarian bunch—it’s unlikely Ventura’s union would’ve taken root even had Hogan stayed out of the matter. But that it was Hogan, the wealthiest and most nakedly self-interested of the lot, who betrayed the effort rankled newer generations of fans. Smartened up by the plethora of backstage dirt available online, fans have increasingly come to see wrestlers not as boneheaded brawlers but as exploited artists. Since the steroid trials, American wrestling had increasingly begun to spotlight more athletic, less obviously-juiced performers like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels whose work borrowed from the up-tempo styles practiced in Mexico (lucha libre) and Japan (puroresu). Wrestling became simultaneously more high-impact and more balletic, with younger purists favouring elaborately choreographed epics over the simple pugilism of the form’s golden age. Hogan’s safe, plodding style became synonymous with laziness, his politicking seen as holding down hungrier, more talented workers. In these new fans’ minds, Hogan was about cynically making money, not art.

It didn’t really matter to them that most of Hogan’s peers shared his mentality. Wrestling is an appallingly taxing way to make a living, especially given the brutal touring schedule and concrete-stiff rings of the 1980s-era WWF.2 In the old days it had a tendency to beat the auteurism out of its practitioners. It was a mark of Hogan’s once-in-a-generation charisma that he was able to get the reactions he did while taking so few risks, and nearly all of his co-workers would’ve happily done his act if it came with a fraction of his stardom. Working a program with Hogan meant drawing the biggest paycheques most of them would ever make while taking the fewest bumps—receiving Hogan’s offence has been described by several opponents as like being gently buffeted by pillows. While the work of some of his peers has better survived the test of time aesthetically, too many of them wound up debilitated or in early graves long before the Hulkster did, carried there by drug addictions begun in hopes of deferring the pain that came from top-rope dives, high-impact slams, and tens of thousands of miles on the road.

Despite the qualms of pro wrestling aesthetes, Hogan was too great a star to be entirely rejected by the sports entertainment world, and he could usually be counted on to deliver a big crowd pop during his sporadic later appearances. But, by the end, the “Controversies” section of his Wikipedia page had begun to bulge alarmingly. There were the appallingly racist and homophobic comments captured on a sex tape leaked by his supposed friend, the shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge; his Satanic bargain with financier Peter Thiel to sue gossip blog Gawker out of existence for publishing said tape; a series of affairs and an ugly divorce; and, latterly, a full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump. It was this last offence that earned him the lusty opprobrium of that Inglewood crowd in 2025, a scene that underscored what a man out of time Bollea truly was, especially by the end.

If in 1986 the US president had been a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, a close personal friend of Vince McMahon, and had Hulk Hogan stumping for him on the campaign trail, it would’ve been the greatest public relations win anyone in the wrestling business could have possibly imagined. In 2025 it was simply awkward, with the company quietly distancing itself from the Hulkster just as it had the now-disgraced McMahon, whose name hung about the company’s neck like a millstone after a storm of nightmarish sexual abuse allegations finally forced his retirement the previous year.3 Thus did the Immortal Hulk Hogan, the Real American, die effectively in exile, a man without a country in a country that has never resembled him more than it does today.

It is difficult to see any popular figure of the past half-century outside the lens of the culture war. But, having now laid Terry Bollea’s life out on the dissection table, we must return to the question we began with: what made “the people” turn on him? Or, rather, what did the people get out of hating Hulk Hogan? It will hopefully be taken by the reader as a given that being a racist, even a private one, is a bad thing. Trumpism, while by no means the only poisonous strain of American political culture, is a blight on our time and a black mark on those who support it. And yes, those who betray their fellow workers to curry favour with management are without honour. Ultimately though, Hogan’s crimes are more those of a mascot than of a citizen. If any fusion of the public/private Hogan/Bollea chimera did real damage to American life, it was in the same sense that an overinflated parade float bulbously setting off a few car alarms and getting stuck on a traffic light is damaging to a city that is simultaneously being flooded, firebombed, and swarmed by killer bees.

What the fans in Inglewood and online really got when they jeered Hogan was the satisfaction and catharsis of watching a despicable onscreen heel get his comeuppance—and, in a respect that has always been the privilege of an audience turning on a performance, to be the instrument of that comeuppance. For many, it must have felt like an exercise of collective morality, some small way of rejecting the current state of affairs. But it was fighting back as a form of self-entertainment, taking place in a venue designed to convert outrage into spectacle. After Hogan’s segment, the audience didn’t turn on the event or WWE as a whole. Nearly all stayed to cheer their favourites and boo the heels. For the viewer just tuning in, it would’ve been hard to tell the difference between the “real” bad guy and all the other guys successfully playing the role of villain. What difference was there then? At the end of the night Hogan and his bosses got paid, just like they always did.

Originally published in slightly altered form on August 14, 2025 on Canadian Dimension as “A Real Man Without a Country.”

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from an artist who has earned our respect and affection. Today our old compatriot William Vallières (author of Discordia zine K no. 10, Februar, in 2024) shares excerpts from a series of epistles with the working title “The Lucia Poems.”

from The Lucia Poems

1 

Distance compels me to write what I couldn’t say in the moonlight, Lucia; mainly, that your very best handwritten letter’s closing sentiment was right: I failed to paint a single bird for the dormant rain in the sky.
	I shatter at the slightest impermanence. Just yesterday, I could call you up, and with your coach-leather bag you’d turn the corner and be standing there beside me, in an infinity of moments.
	Perhaps I think too much like a phenomenologist. 
	Today, the rain disturbed picnics and other reasonable events, sending the sherbert vendors to tasteful canopies.
	The days pass like tides pulled by the moon over the beach; in cinematic contemplation, contemplation, contemplation.
	Lucia, my grip.


2

You have no idea what I delete in a day. That’s why I’ll never have a book called The Florentine Nun.
	When was the last time you audited your failings, apposing questions to every listed event? I’m just asking for a friend. I’ve come to accept that things are unresolvable, like an oft-visited grave.
	It’s the unanswered questions that weigh, Lucia. The unasked are as blissful as the slightest rain of April.
	Soon it will be spring and everything will be next. The birds will choose their branches.
	Given time, excuses for not doing this and not doing that harden into fate.


3

I enter the bath like I enter scenery: with concomitant chamber-music.
	I remember you entering the river when it was morning and cold, your prized white scrunchy pulled by the current, freed to the sweep of future occasions. How you reached for it in vain.
	One day I turned and nobody was there, as if I had been tapped on the shoulder by a celestial preschooler. All the ideas of the world became wind, and people started losing their hats, sometimes even their heads, which rolled down the street like empty Coke cans, talking.
	When they came to recruit Odysseus, he played at madness, sowing his fields with salt.
	When you come for me, Lucia, look for me in the tub; I will be penning my most frothèd excuse.
	Always, your harried Diogenes. 


4

A world bent into my image would no longer be the world, Lucia, I can always hear you say: the jackhammer is part of the day, buddy.
	But I maintain: birdsong and Byzantine chanting form the baseline of reality; the rest is just attempts at the seriousness and the beauty.
	I set my specificities on the counter by the roses, and now they have flown like a flock out of Norway. I await the tender generalities of abstraction. The curtains sway, the window cogitates, nothing stays, not even memories. 
	It is the details—the finches in the cherry tree, the unfinished cheesecake—that break my heart, Lucia. The squirrel panicking for an acorn. 
	If only to exist. 


5

There’s a picture of a landscape on my wall, grazing sheep supervised by a nonplussed shepherd playing a reed flute at the end of the day, a picture I don’t dare touch even the nail of, for fear that the whole world might be suspended from it.
	 I thought lots, Lucia, like Boethius in his cell, trying to put the world back together. So much so that I built a life outside of this one, a world of gerunds, of bright immanent happening verbs. I was a fool in thirteen time zones, over several distinct epochs.
	Why must we build a cage around every truth, Lucia? To protect it like a shy bird on a curious streak? The heaven of truths is full; the picture, the word, they are graves. I am a corpse relating echoes to eternity.
	I was alive in your arms, once, when you called me Boogie.
	I held the burden in my hands and walked out into the sun. 


6

;skdm;kdnv;unew;dvnèeijfdv^083u4^083à=r8923ç90eugç0eindvèoinweûdghç2u35ç090oajknhud7cdjnùh34rb^woeir09i94u5iondfviunune0jç938r0wocsjpiduhcxj
;nk.wesidguivlbcnkdsjècopkwecdvsegesefesfe44808evjv;verfdcvbvirjnfikeo30efp3kgèbaifdsnv;unreèpoqdjhsg;uehdg;usjvnçweinfaèrowiuhad^89gyu3û5à3ujt^891h4èoei
        gnèewijgç0eiwmfsèavkdfn—apologies, I was cleaning my keyboard.
	There was something important I wanted to say. I could have sworn it was extremely important. Then the dust settled in, at first between the letters, then between words, then sentences.
	I lived my life under the assumption that perhaps I could outwit authority and live a delightful existence in a world of beauty. Was I wrong, Lucia? Was I a fool to dream of clear water when razor clams signed the shallows?
	Some things finally happen—Marc Bolan whispers “fusilli” in my ear, and the marmotte across the street crosses it to clover. Once in a while, I get a stupid, unjuicy lemon. 
	Words come back to me in fits, to unfrenzy.

WILLAM VALLIÈRES' work has appeared in *The Walrus*, *The Fiddlehead*, *Grain*, *EVENT*, *Plenitude*, and *Best Canadian Poetry 2019*. Translations have appeared in *Contemporary Verse 2* and *The New Quarterly*. His first book of poetry, *Versus* (Vehicule Press), was published in 2019.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

The incel’s manifesto was executed with about the same level of competency as his killing spree. The thing is not only completely ideologically incoherent—the shooter complains that capitalism is the source of “hypergamy” (the incel belief that women get to date men who have “higher partner value”—better looks, more money, etc.—than men do), believes women should be kept out of the workforce (wouldn’t this make “hypergamy” worse because most women wouldn’t have their own finances at all?), and some belief that trans women are part of some sort of a pipeline of driving men to suicide—but also simply badly written. At one point the author complains that women “[allow themselves] to become flagrantly corpulent and/or generally unclean.” This kind of laughable thesaurus-speak is how a lot of incels write, generally with the assumption that this verbosity comes off to make them sound like a sophisticated gentleman rather than revealing a mostly clumsy handle on language.

Katie Kitamura may write better than an incel shooter, but only just barely.

Kitamura’s acclaimed novel Audition was named a “Best Book of 2025” by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, NPR, Vogue, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, and Barack Obama (…why are we still paying attention to that man?), and is about a successful actress who encounters a boy who claims to be her son, an impossibility as she has never given birth. Thrills ensue, minds are bent. Riverhead Books’ press material calls it a…

…compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel […] rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

However, like the incel dope, Kitamura aims for a kind of grandiloquence that sounds like it’s trying to be “sophisticated,” only to come off as incredibly forced, even gauche. When Kitamura’s protagonist walks through a door someone held open for her, she does so “according to the imperative of mere courtesy.” When she doesn’t notice something, it’s because she “was thus discombobulated.” An affair becomes a “sexual entanglement.” Five dollar words are great and all, but you shouldn’t rack up too much of a debt if it’s not necessary. Kitamura does not have that restraint—women be shopping!!!!1!!!1!! Where a mere “approval” would do, she opts for “approbation.” Where she really ought to reach for “clear,” she grabs “delineated.” When it’s time to say “flattery,” she goes for “blandishments.” It’s not that something “lacked for complexity,” it’s that it “did not have the requisite dimensionality.” Remember when people on Reddit or 9gag or whatever used to write “fancy” versions of rap lyrics? This sounds like that.

I get the sense that this is what Kitamura thinks writing “is”: knowing a lot of big words and then using them to construct wordy sentences. As a result she produces some truly terrible prose. Take for instance:

I heard a teasing note in my voice, perhaps because I was not comfortable talking about Murata and I wanted to direct Xavier’s attention elsewhere. The flirtation was a habit, one that had quieted over the years as I grew older, but that could still at times awaken.

It was a habit, and it quieted. But then it… awoke? It would make more sense to say it had grown dormant, and then awoke. And then there’s the decision to call it “the flirtation.” “The flirtation”? Not only does that just sound bad to the ear, but “flirtation” usually refers to an instance of flirting, or a flirtatious relationship someone has with another person, it does not refer to someone’s disposition. Check Cambridge, Webster, Dictionary.com—that’s just not what that word means. It’s just Kitamura trying to make the sentence sound wordier—the correct phrase would be “the flirting was a habit.” Beyond correctness, it just sounds better. Or she could opt for “coquetry”! Or how about the line

Evidently sensing this—our desire to please, and perhaps even more, for continuance, we were only trying to maintain the equilibrium that we had attained—Xavier made his demand

“our desire to please, and perhaps even more, for continuance,” which has a lot of the same problems, right down an extremely ugly and awkward choice of form for a rather common word—“our desire for continuance”? How about “our desire for continuity” or “our desire to continue”? All of which is to say nothing of her awkward parallel between an infinitive (“to please”) and a preposition (“for continuance”). This is supposed to be a verbose, sophisticated narrator with heightened language, right? Why is she eating shit in nearly every sentence like this?

Kitamura loves to take normal words like “flirt” and “continue” and add unnecessary affixes to them to make them longer and sound smarter (I hear lawyers in court attempting this same gambit all the time, and it just makes you sound like an idiot). She’ll call something a “small act of domesticity”1 when it could just be called a “small domestic act.” But, see, the former “sounds” smarter because “domesticity” is a fancier word than “domestic,” and Kitamura is willing to sacrifice rhythm just to insert it here—“small ACT of do mes TIC i ty” vs. “small do MES tic ACT,” like with the previous example, her prose drags. The whole time I read this thin yet simultaneously bloated novel I felt the desire to reach for hedge trimmers. Trim “the similarity between us, which was more than the fact of our shared race” into “our similarity was in more than our shared race,” or “a period of extraordinary concordance in my marriage” into “a harmonious period in my marriage,” and so on. Listen, I’m not a minimalist—I love piles of adjectives and adverbs and long descriptions and digressions and meandering sentences and embedded clauses and parentheticals and I even love big fat words…2 but this is just bad writing. This is a high school student trying to sound smart in an English class essay.

How about this: “I had not been so closely attuned to Tomas in years, to the subtle weather of his moods, the cartography of his expression.” I find the comparison of his moods to “subtle” weather hackneyed on its own (and she could have used that “big vocabulary” of hers to choose a more suitable adjective like “equable”), but then she pairs it with “the cartography” of his expression. Weather is a natural phenomenon, cartography is making or studying maps. The weather analog to cartography, for instance, would be meteorology—since she is the one studying the natural phenomena in this sentence, it would make more sense to say she’s attuned to the weather of his moods and the geography or maps of his expressions, or otherwise to say that she’s a meteorologist of his moods and a cartographer of his expressions.

The book is filled with mixed metaphors like these. Kitamura describes “the apparatus of our marriage growing rickety”—when would anyone ever call an apparatus rickety? Yeah, I get that in a sense a “bridge” or something could be an “apparatus,” but then why not just say bridge? “The current of intensity running between Xavier and me. Its source was an imbalance of want.” “Currents” have sources, so I sort of get tripped up finding that the source of the current was… an imbalance? At one point the protagonist’s husband is “transformed by the breadth of his emotion, stepping outside himself and extending the boundaries of his being” and his enthusiastic wife thinks, “I wanted nothing more than for Tomas to stay inside the container of this feeling.” Wait, hold on, he’s stepping outside of himself… into a container? Man, even the second last sentence of the book includes the phrase “a chain of words, sturdy as a cable”—ARE THEY A CHAIN OR A CABLE??? And then there is perhaps my favourite:

the part [an actress plays] is only working if I lose sight of the shore. But at the same time, it’s important to be able to come out the other side, you have to be able to come up for air.

????? Lose sight of the shore, okay, but… Come out the other side?? COME UP FOR AIR???? What the fuck are you TALKING about?????? Only for this metaphor to come back a few pages later in order to get further extended and muddled:

I also thought that if ever an actor had lost sight of the shore then it was this one, he had stumbled deep into the interior, [also this is a fucking comma splice!] and I wondered if he worried that he would never find his way out, if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.

???????? If an actor loses sight of the shore, then he’s… in the interior? And the interior is like… a shield? But then it isn’t anymore if you’re lost in it? Because the shielding is… also like a… territorial border? Is he still at sea??? More importantly, will he be able to COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE or COME UP FOR AIR?????

Even when she pulls it off she still manages to hamstring herself. Kitamura’s narrator describes a scene in the middle of a play as sitting “in the center like a black hole or box.” I take it she means “black hole or black box” (which actually sounds nicer with the repetition of the word “black” in my opinion), and that’s actually not a bad parallel—a “black hole” contains “nothing,”3 and in a sense a “black box” contains “everything”—but the resulting sentence makes it sound like she’s comparing it to either a black hole or……. a box. You know, like a cardboard box. Sometimes I simply have no idea what she means: “I had been troubled by the silence that had constellated around the abortion.” The silence that did what?

There are other head-scratchers too, imprecise turns of phrase, fumbles like “the name of the restaurant was brief.” Or descriptions such as, “…different from the usual irritation and worry with which he would scroll through the news or his messages.” I have scrolled while irritated, perhaps I have even scrolled while worried, but I have never in my life scrolled with either irritation or worry, and certainly not both. What does it look like to scroll not while irritated and worried but with irritation and worry? Like, as an act, how is the scrolling meaningfully imbued with those emotions? It’s supposed to be describing a typical annoyed and concerned internet user but makes it sound like he’s regularly fucking frantic scrolling his phone like a maniac. Then consider the string of syllables that make up “…the usual irritation and worry with which he would…”—this set of words sags in the middle of the sentence like the gut of my obese cat. This is, once again, just terrible intuition for the rhythm of language. Even just off the cuff, here’s a better sentence: “unlike his normal air of irritation as he scrolled the news.” Nothing fancy! Anyways, shit like this is all over the place. “He ate with steady and controlled gusto.” Controlled gusto? “His movements were spiky and exaggerated.” Spiky? “He turned, with a wandering movement of the head.” What the fuck?

Or how about something like “a feeling of regret so pronounced it seemed to exert a gravitational pull, it seemed to pull me to the ground.” If the feeling had gravitational pull, it would pull you to itself, not to the ground, which already has a gravitational pull, Katie. Or:

absence was not the right word, it penetrated further than that, because we did not speak of it to anyone else

…huh? Is something only suitably called an “absence” if you talk about it? Or:

people always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place […] they forgot that not having children was also something that took place […] it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event

If not having children is “an event,” one which had “presence in the world,” then when did it take place? And even ignoring that, could you not say this about literally anything that didn’t or doesn’t happen? I never fucked Andre the Giant. By this logic, that was an event in my life, not fucking Andre the Giant. It has its own presence in the world, it was its own event, not fucking Andre the Giant. I don’t fuck Andre the Giant basically every day, so, if anything, this is a continuous series of events, I’m a total anti-slut for the late Andre the Giant.

And then there’s the repetitiveness. Not only is the prose incompetent, it’s also trapped in a cycle of infinite vocabular recurrence. In spite of every attempt on Kitamura’s part to slot in as many GRE words as possible, she still winds up using the same smaller-budget words over and over and over again. People are constantly “nodding.” I did a search for the word “nod” in all its variations and it is used forty-five times in one-hundred-and-forty-five pages. That’s like one “nod” for every three pages. People “stare” forty-seven times! This is also, as you might imagine, not merely lexically repetitive but situationally repetitive. Yes, the word “stare” and its derivative forms repeat forty-seven times, but this does not count circumstances in which people “stare” without using the word “stare”—characters “gaze” (twenty-three times) and “watch” (thirty-nine times) and whatever else. And hey, maybe this plays into the theme of, you know, acting and being looked at and all, but then what does nodding represent? And is whatever that theme is even more present in her novel Intimacies, where characters are described as nodding EIGHT-SEVEN TIMES? Kitamura has hardly any idea how to describe a character action that isn’t either bobble-heading or being locked in a staring contest. Or maybe they’re “turning,” which recurs eighty-nine times.

And yet the few times she’s not resorting to these stock descriptions of character actions, her choices are utterly bewildering, such as this part where the narrator details what can only be described as “being terrified of her husband aggressively eating nuts with sadness”:

He continued to cram nuts into his mouth and I thought that he must really have been hungry, he ate with a gusto that was not in and of itself off-putting, it was simply a man eating, and yet I recoiled, something in the crunching movement of his jaw was alien, it was briefly the face of someone who thought he was alone.

…which tried to sell me on as a moment of shock at seeing the emotional nakedness of her husband, but it’s just described so incompetently that it, like much of the book’s prose, requires you to stop a second to figure out just what it is that Kitamura expects you to get out of what she’s just written. The words feel as crammed together as the nuts in her husband’s mouth.

And then there’s the states! Everything is a state! Someone might be in a “state of heightened attention” or a “state of almost preternatural concentration” or a “state of unease” or a “state of agitation” or a “state of frenzied conviction” or, perhaps most hilariously, a “state of being a child.” For fuck’s sake, at one point she uses it twice in a row.

Perhaps for that reason I had been lulled into a state of unthinking complacency. As I continued walking down the street, through that soft rain, I began to wonder how long I had been in this state of excessive inurement.

And don’t fucking start with me with the “oh, well, you see, it’s because it’s about acting, and—” it recurs just as much in the aforementioned Intimacies. In fact, here it is twice in a row again in that book:

whether he would be in a state of shock or rage, whether he would be utterly silent or whether questions and accusations and counteraccusations would pour out of him, whether he would simply be tired from his journey, like a businessman disembarking a longhaul flight, or whether he would be in a state of physical collapse.

…and that book further contains the incredible sentence “a state of I know but I do not know.”4

Like with a lot of Kitamura’s choices, it usually isn’t the right one. Back to Audition, when her protagonist says “I left the restaurant in a state of considerable relief,” for instance, I think… is relief really a “state”? Isn’t it more of a reaction to the alleviation of stress that transitions into being relaxed? The sentence would make more sense as “I left the restaurant considerably relieved”—and, once again, it even just sounds better!—but then of course Kitamura doesn’t get to use those precious extra words she loves so much.

Words, words, words. Kitamura loves words. I thought I loved words, and I think I do love words, but I don’t think I love each and every one of them as unconditionally as she does. For her, there are never enough words and they are never in the wrong place. Sometimes she’ll basically just repeat the same ideas using near-synonyms—often, in fact! Howsabout “it was an emerald necklace, beautiful and extravagant” or “I had regarded his face with such scrutiny and attention” or “it was an echo or mirroring” or “she gave a small smile, vain and self-satisfied” or “I winced in pain and alarm” or “it was only a feeling, an intuition” or “I had given in to his story, his narrative” or “my hauteur, my arrogance”5 or “it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack” or “one person who wants into an absence, a void” or “she used language that was confusing to say the least, that seemed designed to obfuscate” or “they wore expressions of approval and general goodwill” or “he sounded thoroughly rational, not at all like the kind of person who could have believed so fervently in a fantasy.”

Her idea of adding nuance to a description is to describe two things seemingly at odds at once. Sometimes even preceded by the phrase “at once”: “at once present and neutral,” “at once there but also not there,” “at once startled and blank,” “at once wholly plausible and completely vague,” “at once absolute and condescending,” “at once sullen but also prideful and excited,” “at once abject and defensive,” “at once too obvious and too painful to address.” “Here, it is possible to be two things at once,” says Kitamura’s narrator. Yeah, no shit! STOP. You. Yeah you. Stop typing, I see you—no, yet again, this repetition is present in her other books too, I checked.

The words, words, words just wear me down. Instead of saying they “circled each other like prizefighters,” she says they “circled around each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and in a posture of constant assessment”—like, yeah man, this is a pretty cliché comparison, we all know what you’re trying to get at, you don’t need to belabour it. “The mind […] reaches for the most obvious explanation, and in the way of Occam’s razor, the most obvious explanation is often also the correct one”—yeah, got it, thanks Katie, we know what Occam’s razor is. “It mattered, the vocabulary, the way a word circulated through society, the context and atmosphere that was created around it”—holy shit!

Sometimes it’s just like…

I have a feeling that there are some… personal limits on display here. I checked the book’s Wikipedia page and read this:

Kitamura came upon the idea for the novel in the 2010s, when she read the following headline: "A stranger told me he was my son." She was careful not to read the article that accompanied it, because she was "interested in the illogical nature of the headline. The two terms, 'a stranger' and 'my son', seemed diametrically opposed, even mutually exclusive. I didn't want the mystery of that opposition to be resolved."

…what? How is that illogical? What mystery? Surely we can imagine pretty easily what the headline is probably alluding to. A woman gave up her son, and the son found her. Yet the headline shook Kitamura to her core. The words to her “seemed diametrically opposed, even mutually exclusive”—wow, she just talks like that in real life, huh?

I assumed while reading the thing that Kitamura must be, like… twenty-five, or something, young enough that she hasn’t been writing very long and has maybe not spent enough time going to, idk, talk to bank tellers or something to pull off this kind of register. But no. Kitamura is nearly fifty-years-old. And she’s been publishing books since at least 2006. That is fucking crazy. Does this writing sound to you like someone who has been doing this for twenty years??? The book is, to put it mildly after ALL of that, amateurish. The only thing “literary” about it is the way that it performs “seriousness” by being wordy and boring and severe and repetitive. But I get why people like it! I didn’t even get into this in this review because I was… preoccupied, but the story at the heart of Audition is extremely disturbed and twisted in a way that legitimately got under my skin in a distinctly different way than the prose did. But the prose battled me the whole fucking way. It’s presently being adapted for film, a medium where I suspect the material could succeed far better than it did on the page.

Something that only really settled in as I was finishing the thing was how much my reception of the book was coloured by its marketing, because the book is so boldly marketed as what it’s not, which has simply been regurgitated by the outlets covering it. NPR called the book “a tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller.” But that’s not true. The book’s just a psychological thriller with familial themes that “reads like” pretentious literary fiction. This is part and parcel a result of the whole “literature trend” thing that I keep harping on about.

There’s a premium now on capital-L Literature, and so now work is being shoehorned in that doesn’t really belong in there if there’s a sense it can be sold to the trend-mongering dipshit. This isn’t… really lit, is it? Maybe I should treat this as the thriller it is?

But I’m a “lit” guy, and this is being sold as “lit,” and this is a bad “lit.” The prose is overwrought and brutally stupid, and it would have done far better to drop the act and stop trying to be “respectable,” a charade worse than any of the performances in the book, which makes it nearly unreadable to me. The fact that it was selected by the Booker and Pulitzer judges would concern me about people’s ability to distinguish good writing if it weren’t for the fact that I already think those two in particular are just galleries for the hand-selected best-sellers that the publishers who submit them are seeking to advertise, and are likely far from competitions of merit. I don’t even think the judges read the books anymore outside of the press releases.

Audition
Fiction by Katie Kitamura
Assembly Press, 2025 (Publisher’s Site)

KITAMURA’S BOOK SURE SEEMS COMPLETELY UNEDITED. WHY NOT READ THIS ESSAY ON THE JOY OF BEING AN EDITOR?

And I am asking you once again:

GIVE ME GOSSIP

If you submit me juicy enough gossip that I haven’t heard, you’ll get free access to the Gossip Club for a month (email discordia.sucks@gmail.com and they’ll forward it to me). You just have to abide by the two gossip rules:

GOSSIP RULES:

1. Subjects must have at least one published chapbook or book, have a major award or achievement, or be published with decent frequency in Journals Of Repute. I’m not trying to clown on small-time amateurs here. And believe me, there’s a few of those I could give you an earful about. That said, I’ll absolutely love to hear about it anyways, I just won’t run it in the column.

2. No sex crimes. We’re doing Fun Gossip, No Downers—if you have a credible report of a sex crime then contact the police, the CBC, or a lawyer. A lawyer aside from Eris, anyways.

So with that out of the way, let’s begin. Let’s raise some money for the Discordia coffers.

Read more

The Rausing family were, for quite a while, the richest family in the UK.

Sigrid Rausing herself is your classic sort of liberal-minded, pretentious capitalist buffoon, a higher order of pathetic loser for whom it isn’t enough that she owns all our asses: she expects us all to validate her “culturedness,” “intelligence,” and “morality” too.1 Sigrid has a rich person vanity PhD in the humanities, patronizes the arts, and engages in all manner of “altruism” (more on whether that “altruism” is truly “altruistic” later). Much like one of her Canadian counterparts, the loathsome arms profiteer and patron of letters Scott Griffin, who we’ve clowned on before, Sigrid’s vanity also led her to pen a shitty memoir. Rich people with literary pretensions love publishing shitty memoirs because it is ultimately not much of a challenge to matter-of-factly write the story of Things That Happened To You. Of course there are absolutely brilliant memoirs out there, sure, but most are awful and boring, because the bar for completing a memoir manuscript is so low, and because it is a process in which most of the more difficult literary skills are, while not necessarily absent, inessential. Autoslop is the refuge of the rich pseudo-artist because it is just so easy. Wealthy industrialists hate work—it’s why they exploit other people to do it for them—and so this is just about the best we can expect from them most of the time.

The epigraphs for rich people’s memoirs are often some of the most telling parts. Consider Spare by Prince Harry, which begins with a Faulkner quote, and then immediately undercuts that decision when Harry proudly announces that he has never heard of William Faulkner and found the quote while lazily searching BrainyQuote. Harry doesn’t even consider how vacuous this confession is. I need to take a minor detour here, because you do need to read this.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?

Is it comforting to know that the British royal family has the mental life of a caricature of an English peasant from a movie about the 14th century?

Anyways—the epigraph for Sigrid’s memoir comes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, because of course it does, there’s no book more emblematic of her lower-end-of-middle-brow rich person tastes, a title most people experience as assigned reading in high school. (For what it’s worth, Sigrid’s book has better prose than Scott Griffin’s. But, for what it’s worth, that’s not worth much.)

And of course she had to buy Granta. Not just finance it, but outright buy it, and by the sounds of it she goes to editors meetings and helps make decisions on editorial matters, because…… well, I dunno, she was already a fake anthropologist, why not let her be a fake lit mag editor too? Buy Discordia, Sigrid! Buy me! I’ll let you pretend to be my wife (my real wife, unlike Sigrid, has a real PhD)! Sigrid even got to be a real fake editor after she tried to budget cut Granta to hell and a ton of her staff quit on her, forcing her to take on the top position herself. Her first order of business? An issue about big international issues.2 Stories about wars and humanitarian concerns, and about Iran, and China, and the “shadow” of the long-gone Soviet Union. Because Sigrid has a lot of important things to say. She’s not just Sigrid the chin-stroking “intellectual” and Sigrid the “literary figure,” heavens no, she’s also…

Sigrid the “Saint.”

As I mentioned above, Rausing likes to bill herself as an altruist, committing vast sums of money to philanthropic efforts. She’s all about that liberal human rights type stuff—you know, women’s rights, open democracies, press freedoms and all that jazz. Or, as we call it in my neck of the politics, “humanitarian imperialism.”

A lot of my readers, having brain worms like I do, will know what the National Endowment for Democracy is. In case you’re not a ‘noided nutcase like me, let me fill you in as succinctly as I can: in the 1970s the Church Committee wound up exposing a ton of extremely shady CIA and FBI dealings and brought the CIA under increased scrutiny. There were a lot of consequences of this, but one was the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a semi-autonomous NGO set up by the United States government, with the principal goal of taking a lot of the old underground foreign influence operations and laundering them through the façade of “respectable” “charitable” ventures. That’s to say that a lot of what they do today was done covertly over twenty-five years ago by the CIA. And in case you don’t believe me, here’s NED cofounder Allen Weinstein:

A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.

It has long been established that the NED’s goal is to help put a smiling face on regime change and influence peddling, existing somewhere between the US empire’s carrot (World Bank, IMF,3 USAID, etc.) and its stick (the CIA outright and the DoD).

The NED and Sigrid Rausing overlap a ton. Just how much is at least a little opaque (the NED will be the first to tell you that its actions and funding are not transparent), but basically wherever the Western bloc reaches an obstacle, there’s Sigrid Rausing to lend her weight (and the weight of her big, fat pockets) right alongside the NED. Whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, China, Russia, and so on, Sigrid will be there to tell you about how horrible the situation is and how the people are suffering and about how we really have to do something about it, how they lack all those precious “freedoms” we take for granted, and she’ll funnel as much money as she can into “helping” them. Does she take her marching orders from the US State Department like the NED clearly does? Perhaps not directly, but the funding overlap does reveal quite a bit of ideological overlap.

One thing that both Sigrid and the NED love is the journalist collective Bellingcat, an outlet that I (and others) believe is just a press arm of the CIA and western intelligence. As Foreign Policy put it, “Bellingcat Can Say What U.S. Intelligence Can’t.” The CIA just loves Belingcat. Former CIA chiefs have gone on the record describing how helpful Bellingcat was to them, saying such things as “whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work” (don’t worry though, even though Bellingcat is explicitly funded by the CIA’s ostensible cover funding apparatus, the NED, and just so happens to do a lot of work the CIA relies on, when the same former official was pressed on whether the CIA controls Bellingcat, he said “we have no ties to them” lol). Sigrid and the NED also both fund “freedom of expression” organizations like Article 19, which also collects funds from the US State Department, USAID, and the Ford Foundation (itself an infamous CIA front), as well as organizations representing other Western national interests such as Global Affairs Canada, UK FCDO, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and so on. There are also “freedom of the press” organizations such as Reporters sans frontières (Reporters without Borders), which not only receives funding directly from Western powers but also receives funding from specific regime change outfits such as the completely psychotic Center for a Free Cuba,4 as well as financial institutions like Société Générale, which profits off of loans to Western arms manufacturers. Both Sigrid and the NED and a lot of the aforementioned interests fund “feminist” initiatives such as the Women’s Learning Partnership, a foundation which was created by Mahnaz Afkhami, who used to serve in the Shah’s government and goes on TV to tell lies about how the 1979 Iranian Revolution was “to a significant extent” a reaction to advancing women’s rights.5 Both Sigrid and the NED also fund the International Commission of Jurists, an organization that was literally proven to be created by the CIA for the purposes of international propaganda, and so on, and so forth. You get the picture. These are all groups that seek to promote “liberal freedoms” like “rule of law,” “freedom of the press,” and “freedom of expression,” but in effect are mostly just tools of the West to chip away at the foundations of their geopolitical rivals by either disproportionately focusing on their enemy’s “illiberal” qualities, deliberately misrepresenting or skewing understanding of those qualities, or, failing that, making some qualities up.

Rausing is a Western liberal internationalist—she supports world “cooperation” and “peace,” but on Western terms: specifically, terms that either don’t impact her own bottom line or terms that conveniently make her richer. The social and economic models of the West (including Western ownership) must be exported everywhere, whether the people there want it or not. In fact, we’ll pay some of the people over there to tell us publicly how much they do really want it, and then we’ll blow them the fuck up with our bombs. Libs like Sigrid, in spite of having done invaluable work in creating the moral foundations to allow us to drop bombs on these people, will then solemnly shake their heads. Sigrid decries violence. She’ll accept the boost to her stock portfolio, sure, but it’s icky. But wait, what’s that sound??? Sounds like yet another enemy of the West who lives under constant siege is doing something untoward in order to desperately hold together the nation as the US forcibly starves it with sanctions! My God—these people don’t even have McDonald’s! Sigrid Rausing to the rescue! And we’ll do it all over again.

In her writing and interviews, Sigrid is constantly dry-humping concepts of international rights and their related statutes, often while lambasting those damn illiberal Saracens and shifty Orientals. Like here, for instance:

The notion that human rights is a western concern is an argument often used in China and in authoritarian Muslim states. […] Human rights for all, as expressed in the Universal Declaration and its successive additions, is a progressive ideal which all countries active in the UN ought to strive for.

But does Sigrid actually love human rights statutes that much? Or is she a dreaded fake fan? If you want to see how much “human rights” actually mean to Sigrid, you can hear all about how quickly she pulled the plug on just about every organization her trust supported that voiced even an inkling of support for Palestine in a piece she wrote in The Times titled:

An article so Zionist that Bari Weiss re-published it in The Free Press two days later.

In it, she complains about such organizations as “a group in Canada” that

almost immediately termed Israel’s actions “genocidal”, and described the country as a “settler colonialist white-supremacist state.” The statement ended with an echo of a United Nations resolution; an affirmation of “the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance.” It is a phrase which, given the context of the piece, we felt condoned the Hamas atrocities.

I would actually go further than the organization Sigrid is critiquing did and point out that the preamble of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Sigrid Rausing’s most favourite document evarrrrrrr ^ _ ^ (remember how she said the document is illustrative of “a progressive ideal which all countries active in the UN ought to strive for”????) says the following in its preamble:

it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law

Well, the rights of the Palestinians are not being protected by rule of law, which means, by the logic of the preamble to the Declaration—the preamble being the foundation of the foundation of international human rights law—the Palestinians have recourse to rebellion. I’m not going to pretend that international human rights law is perfect, but Sigrid certainly seems to think it is. So what does she make about the international courts finding Israel guilty of violating human rights? In her aforementioned essay, publishing in 2025—that’s right, 2025—Sigrid just dodges reckoning with that almost entirely. Instead she says, “The words settler/colonial/white supremacist don’t reflect reality, exactly—they are a slur.” Sure thing, Sigrid.6 Then she quotes Orwell yet again. Which is especially funny this time around, because, while I’m a noted Orwell Hater, the man was an anti-Zionist.

Then, out of nowhere she starts ranting and raving about the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and its anti-Zionism, and about how she knows all about this because of her aforementioned work for her vanity PhD in Estonia.

Yeah, anyways, about all that.

Sigrid the Scion.

I mentioned how Sigrid is an “anthropologist,” right?

Her PhD thesis, which was later published by Oxford University Press (geez, every PhD student’s dream, right? Shall we mention that the Rausings have donated hundreds of millions of pounds over the years to Oxford?), was on post-Soviet anthropology, drawing from her own field work while living in Estonia. Said work, and her later memoir documenting same (Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia) largely concern the “evils” of collectivization. Rather than debate that subject with you, reader, which would make this blog post a lot longer, I would at least like to point out something that Sigrid doesn’t seem to mention in either work, which is her family’s “interesting” history with the Soviet Union and what it stood to gain from collectivization’s end.

Some of Tetra Pak’s first great successes lay in exports to the USSR, after Hans Rausing, Sigrid’s father, negotiated a deal with the Soviet government. “The early foothold in the Soviet market proved valuable as the company continued to ramp up its capabilities.” Tetra Pak’s early pyramid-shaped milk cartons are now as iconic a symbol of the Soviet era in Russian society as the Young Pioneers necktie and Sputnik.

The “emerging markets” in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union were a huge business opportunity, especially as Tetra Pak already had their foot in the door. This expansion eventually made Tetra Pak “the largest foreign employer” in post-Soviet Russia as Tetra Pak partnered with the emergent class of Russian robber barons, such as the oligarch David Yakobashvili’s Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods, which slowly took over Soviet dairy plants and once-collectivized farms. Of course Sigrid sees collectivization as a great “tragedy” and propagandizes to those ends—the end of such a system was a prerequisite for the privatization frenzy her family partook in to the extraordinary benefit of themselves and all the other vultures, stripping the nation for parts, and contributing to millions of deaths in the process.

The aforementioned Yakobashvili, an organized criminal with connections to the murderous Bauman syndicate, profited from a massive corrupt dilution of workers’ and pensioners’ shares in farms and scammed countless farmers out of their land, beating or killing those who resisted or protested. The Peasants’ Front took to the streets in opposition, with banners bearing slogans such as “to the peasants—to the people!” But never mind all that. Sigrid, living in POST-SOVIET Estonia just a year after her family’s deal with Yakobashvili, a place which was at the time facing the very same rapidly rising poverty and mortality rates as a direct result of these explored processes, can only focus on Soviet collectivization for some reason! Why’s that, Sigrid???

Here’s another episode in world history that perhaps is owed a closer look with particular scrutiny toward the Rausing clan: the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. The potential of Sigrid’s father’s involvement in the killing was once put forward by Hans’s daughter-in-law, Eva Rausing, shortly before her sudden and untimely death in 2012, just before a planned meeting with Swedish prosecutors to give them more details. Eva was crazy, of course—and don’t take my word for it, take Sigrid’s! She wrote a whole memoir about the affair—as she so often does when her family might be implicated of wrong-doing!—titled Mayhem, though it should be titled Guys, My Dad Definitely Did Not Have A Hand in Killing the Prime Minister (and I Did Not Kill My Sister-in-Law).

Eva might not have known or remembered that by 1986—the year of Palme’s murder—the headquarters of Tetra Pak had already left Sweden. The reason for the move was the radical political plan to change the ownership of Swedish industry via union-controlled foundations. These trusts would hold shares that industries of a certain size would be compelled to issue on an annual basis, financed by up to 20 percent of revenue, until the union foundations would own 52 percent of the companies, giving them ownership control.

…

Eva’s idea, therefore, that Olof Palme had constituted a threat against the company may have been true in the 1970s, but by 1986 it certainly wasn’t true anymore. And every newspaper editor in Sweden knew that.

This is a massive lie by omission and Sigrid knows it. Firstly, Sigrid for some reason ignores the primary reason Tetra Pak left Sweden, which is repeated in the first, like, twenty sources I found on the subject, which is that the move was principally motivated by tax reasons. But also, as a family of Swedish billionaires, large chunks of the Rausings’ personal wealth were obviously still within Sweden, as well as non-insignificant portions of the company. Tetra Pak’s technological core remains in Sweden, as its R&D is still based out of Lund.

Ruben Rausing had emigrated to Lausanne in 1969, and in 1981, Tetra Pak followed, both relocations prompted by tax reasons [see there’s that tax thing again —Ed]. The R&D operations stayed behind, with Lund and Sweden remaining the intellectual heartland of the business.

Tetra Pak’s R&D is tied to industrial infrastructure based in Sweden. The embedded productive capacity maintained there, including all of the valuable intellectual labour they had cultivated which would have been more familiar with the entrenched system, and it would have been a lot harder to relocate all that than it would be to move some factories (and you’d still risk having a lot of your established R&D brainpower move to other companies). And, again, if you think the richest man in Sweden didn’t have substantial domestic investments beyond this, then I know some Hot MILFs in Your Area That Just Want To Fuck if you’ll just give me your credit card info.

Obviously the Rausings are innocent, otherwise why would Sigrid decide to misrepresent the facts so brazenly?

Yes, Eva was literally a crackhead, and on one hand this may lead one to think it’s possible Eva dreamed the whole thing up as a drug-addled delusion, but on the other hand we should consider that, if these allegations against the Rausings are true, it would take a particularly unhinged person, a particularly weak link in the chain holding in the Rausing secret, to crack and let the secret out—a mentally-unstable drug addict, for instance. Anyone who would put herself in such jeopardy by threatening to expose the secrets of a family she believes has already killed someone—someone far more important than her—to protect their interests would have to be at least a little bit crazy, if not a lot crazy. And ultimately what are the odds that a woman who had been abusing these drugs since 1983 would suddenly administer herself a fatal dose within a year of trying to make this information public? And why did her husband, Sigrid’s brother Hans Kristian, then hide her body from being discovered for two months? Because of Kristian’s deceit, the report that the death was “drug-related” would likely be largely inferential—there’s no way toxicology conducted on a body that has been sitting that long could provide results conclusive enough to suggest those ends.7

When Sigrid writes such things about the fate of Eva as

I see my complicity, my guilt. I see my tiredness, my hopelessness; my false moral superiority, my finger wagging, wagging. I regret everything.

…is it a Freudian slip? What is she really talking about here, hmm? Because so much of this bloated, pointless, repetitive memoir starts to make a lot more sense through a… certain lens. There’s a narrative that starts to emerge, one that Sigrid really wants to hammer home, which is that Eva, poor Eva, she was… suffering, you know? She had it really bad, this poor, suffering girl, so when you think about it, maybe she’s… better off now? Put that way, let’s say that there was someone complicit in or at least aware of Eva’s death as more than just an accident—could that person maybe find comfort in these thoughts? Maybe not so unlike someone who personally gained a lot from a process involving organized crime, asset stripping, mass privatization, and millions of deaths in the former Soviet Union finding comfort by retreating into a mind palace to imagine how much worse everything was before?

Anyways—obviously the Rausings had a lot to lose because of the Palme administration. Not to mention, after he died, they had a lot to gain! Sigrid neglects to mention that, since Palme’s death, Tetra Pak’s investments in Sweden have greatly been expanded, aided by the more moderate and neoliberal-friendly policies of Palme’s successors.

Sigrid the Synthetic.

Sigrid’s father sold his shares in Tetra Pak (at that point having vertically-integrated with Swedish food processing company Alfa Laval to become Tetra Laval) in the mid 1990s. He made a new food packaging company after the move, and to be honest I think the whole thing was a farce motivated by some European anti-monopoly shit Tetra Pak was facing and that this was a fake breakup, but that’s beside the point.

Hans’s kids now share his fortune as consolidated in investment companies such as Alta Advisers. Unlike their cousins, whose investments mostly remain in food supply chains, Sigrid’s side of the family favours more abstract and technological investments. You can see from Alta’s Form 13F that Sigrid Rausing and her siblings have significant investments in several companies developing AI, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and fucking Palantir—all of these investments having either been established or significantly grown since the AI boom and take up many of the largest investment slices in the portfolio—as well as investment companies such as Vanguard Scottsdale, which is itself heavily-invested in AI.8

Hey. Wait a second. AI. Sigrid Rausing. Sigrid Rausing whose magazine, Granta, as mentioned in our previous piece, is at the center of an AI scandal.

Sigrid wrote a now widely-circulated (and widely-mocked) open letter about how “we’ll simply never know for sure :)” whether the winning story used AI or not. As I explored in the previous piece, while false positives are certainly possible, we actually have a pretty reasonable basis to make the claim because there is a ton of evidence outside of the story itself, derived from my research into the alleged author himself. But to list them in brief:

• The author’s LinkedIn page in which he posts about his use of AI and opines on AI’s utility.

• The author’s submitted author photo, which is obviously heavily-modified from his actual appearance, likely using AI to do so.

• The fact that his Facebook page features literally thousands of poems allegedly written by him, which all feature the same AI hallmarks and all trigger AI detectors.

• His countless aforementioned LinkedIn essays trigger the same AI detectors.

What is Sigrid’s evidence? Why, she asked AI, of course! And AI told her there were no issues.

You know who else is heavily-invested in AI? The Commonwealth Secretariat, the economic sister organization to the Commonwealth Foundation which gave the prize in question.9

In fact, the Secretariat partnered with Intel not long ago to create an “AI-driven policy toolkit” called StrategusAI.

The cost of developing one government policy or strategy can range from US$250,000 to US$1.5 million in consulting fees, and development can take from six months up to a year, not including implementation phases. This investment will be more cost-effective and efficient with StrategusAI.

Intel already partners with the Secretariat on a joint digital learning programme to demystify AI among senior officials across the Commonwealth and raise awareness of its potential applications in various sectors

Having AI formulate policy decisions raises concerns on its own, but consider also that an AI developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat and Intel could be given “subtle” biases which lead it to recommend policy solutions that are in the interests of a neoliberal organization like the former and corporate interests like the latter. What is embedded and unseen, whether intentionally or not, can make certain lines of inquiry basically fruitless.

But who would ever trust an AI to make such policy decisions? Many would be cautious to implement such toolkits, especially as, in spite of the cold market rationale of the neoliberalism embraced by so many of the states this stuff is peddled to, these ultimate conclusions are still considered to be broadly “human.” But what if you could demystify that “human” quality? What if you could convince people that distinctly “human” features are just a bunch of idealistic nonsense? What if you could “prove” that the most fundamental expressions of the “human” soul could be entirely accomplished without the “human” part at all? For instance… writing an award-winning short story?

I’m not here to debate the merits or lack thereof of AI-assisted art, but this is a preoccupation of most AI companies, and why people like Sam Altman (barely human themselves) are constantly trying to “prove” that AI can write short stories. Undermine people’s preciousness about these creative acts, and you can break the humanistic will and subordinate it to a Silicon-Valley-driven AI technocracy:

Whether AI will ever be able to do all this isn’t really the point. Perhaps it will! But the point is how we perceive it. If people continue to broadly see value in the “human” in the “humanities,” then this process of AI technocratic normalization is a lot more difficult.

An AI-invested organization gave an obviously AI-generated short story a prize—I even made the claim in my previous piece, which I think is pretty clear, that one of the judges who judged the competition used AI to do so—and an AI-invested billionaire hosted the AI winner in her vanity magazine. There is an obvious benefit for those invested in AI to have people become cynical about whether or not “human” outputs are really at all more valuable than machine ones. You understand the question I am posing. Was this result the entire point? Consider these words from D.W. Wilson’s post about the scandal in :

in light of this crisis, I don’t know if I believe myself anymore. My students lost out to AI-generated text; they see those texts under Granta’s venerable masthead. And nobody with any clout seems willing to call this out as bullshit. Can I look these young writers in the eye with confidence and tell them they’ll get there if they keep on keeping on? Writing is hard. AI promises to make it easier. That allure is strong. And here before them: evidence that it works too.

What if creeping fatalism like this is the intended effect?

A major hitch in all this theorizing is that Rausing doesn’t just like to support initiatives that are good for the imperialist bourgeoisie such as herself; she also likes to support initiatives that flatter her. Rausing would certainly like to feel like an inspiring humanist, and “AI” seems contrary to that goal—ultimately, if something was too difficult to reconcile with Rausing’s pride, she would probably make it secondary. However, as I have also demonstrated, Rausing is a master of fabricating an elaborate tapestry of the self, and it isn’t beyond reason to consider that she could find a place in this tableau for Sigrid the Synthetic, Sigrid the Futurist, Sigrid the forward-thinking maverick who saw what humanity needed before they did. The rest of us, cautious as we are about AI’s development, don’t see the big picture—we don’t understand what’s best for us. Ultimately, that’s the underlying principle of being a “philanthropist” in the first place, right? Believing that you have a better sense of which causes are important than anyone else in the world. You have the money by accident, yet you deserve to shape the world with it to what you think is right. Olof Palme’s plan to democratize the corporations of Sweden could have changed the world, but “someone” had him killed. “Someone” thought they knew better. Freaks like Sigrid Rausing and her family think of themselves as “humanists” but they’re nothing of the sort. Her incomprehensible mountains of money keep her from ever knowing one pebble of what real “humanity” is. She “cares” about the rest of us the way she “cares” for her lawn with the blades of her servants’ lawnmowers.

Sigrid is having a massive temper tantrum because not only did the result of the Granta controversy not go the way she’d expected: a lot less “well I’ll be! guess we all ought to rethink this whole ‘being human’ thing, huh?” and a lot more “HAHA! FUCKING MORONS!” Then she wrote her smug little yesmen-approved open letter and was evidently shocked when everyone savagely mocked her instead of seriously considering the “deep wisdom” she thinks she’s in possession of because she throws money at “benevolent” regime change fronts. Now, wiping the egg from her face, she is storming out of the ruckus in the hen house entirely. She has thrown the Commonwealth Foundation under the bus, and has had Granta announce that THEY ARE NEVER PARTNERING WITH THE COMMONWEALTH FOUNDATION AGAIN, OR ANY OTHER THIRD PARTY!!!!

The 2026 selection of the regional winners of the Commonwealth prize caused a great deal of controversy, based on the speculation that one or more of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated, accusations that were strongly rejected by the authors.

For the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships. We will keep the Commonwealth prize shortlisted stories on our website in the public interest, and wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work.

It’s very possible imo that this tantrum may end with Sigrid deciding FUCK ALL OF YOU!!!!! and pull support for Granta entirely. Only time will tell!

So ends this chapter in the AI Lit Wars saga.

WHAT CAN CHALLENGE THIS AI FATALISM? IS IT… A NEW ROMANTICISM????

On our Fellow Travellers posts we always start by saying that “Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything.” But the title of ’s new collection, For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything, might be closer to the nut of it. These three microfictions from the book explain more…

Casting Couch

Kiefer put the fleshlight down upon his prong. “What is this supposed to be, anyway? I don’t even feel anything.” The director told him to look in the mirror and feign excitement. “I don’t think I belong in this country,” said Kiefer. “Yes,” replied the director. “That’s exactly what I’m going for.”

Keanu put the fleshlight down upon his prong. He knew he was rich and suddenly felt as though he would never be let into heaven. “Am I a good person?” he implored the director. But the director wasn’t inclined to give him any kind of answer. Any answer at all.

Kanye put the fleshlight down upon his prong. “Gosh, I can’t wait for life to start, you guys!” But life just wouldn’t get started. It had evaded him for so long, and now he had a fleshlight upon his prong. He was playing the lead role in a Shakespearean tragedy he didn’t even know the name of. The leading lady was played by a beetle. The senators were all on their way to slay him. And here’s the director, asking him to do it all over again.

Help! I’m Gay and I Accidentally Got into Heaven!

I just ran into the sky’s sidewalk. A big fat person sitting up there. It’s odd, how the world once moved me. Then I found out I’m allergic to stars. How will I ever manage this transition?

The Acid Police

So that afternoon we all said fuck it in unison and took to the streets. We weren’t sure what we were protesting exactly, only that it felt necessary at the time. It wasn’t long before we were surrounded by a crew of baton-wielding ballerinas wearing wingtipped slippers. The batons crunched down upon our skulls. Weirdly no one lost consciousness. We all knew it was the police in disguise.

We eventually managed to escape the ballerinas and found a nice cozy dumpster to hide in. Suddenly life felt so wholesome. Tony suggested rat poison.

—Don’t listen to this defector, Blair erupted. If we cease inventing visions to chase after, what’s left? Utter randomness? How fulfilling is that? I elect we make Tony himself ingest the rat poison—then if he lives, he has to carry all this garbage with us into the next vestibule. A new stratum. There has to be something we haven’t experienced yet. Let’s go out there and find out what it is – or at the very least invent it before it finds us!

—I second that emotion, shouted the one with the beard.

And so it was decided. A life on the run, with all the curls that come with it. As a collective, we would have to learn how to invisibilize ourselves.

We climbed into the van, sped off or rather moved slowly through all the requisite checkpoints, past the dancing bear and into the mini-mart parking lot.

—I’ll take a bottle of suicide water, I ordered. No gas.

I had an ominous feeling about the forthcoming roadblock, and since it was now me behind the wheel, I had to decide what to do about it and fast. Before I had a chance to make up what was left of my mind, an angel descended. He wore a transparent satin dress that showed off his tufted genitalia and a halo made out of firecrackers that wouldn’t stop exploding. Thankfully, God had also thought to adorn him with one of those headset microphones so we could hear his words through the crackling explosions hovering above him.

—I’m just here to answer any questions you might have about the afterlife.

We looked amongst ourselves, but couldn’t find any discarded question marks. The angel must have sensed this accretion through our silence, because he soon proffered a desultory moan, as though that would provide some recompense for our perpetually stalled insights.

A sheet of lightning was hurled from the skies to make the cops up ahead disappear. I knew I’d soon be dead, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. So much stimulation fatigues me, until I feel I can go no further. An imaginary line is drawn. It becomes a unit for measuring the despairing of my trust in others; particularly the ones I willingly surround myself with. At the end of the line lies our mutual goal, a picture that becomes more blurred each time one of us, as an individual, looks in that direction. At the end of the day, it is best to ignore it altogether. We’ve managed that. If only what we were left with, the question of our collective self, could be so simple.

I really wish that angel had had more to do. But it is not God’s role to give out presents. That is the role of someone else—someone who, like God, is no longer here.

TRAVIS JEPPESEN is an American writer based in Berlin, Germany. His recent books include *Settlers Landing*, a novel, and *For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything*, stories.  

Buy Settlers Landing

Buy For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

I’ve done a loose series of “how to” articles over the past 18 months on the rudiments of handling live literary spaces—how to run a reading, how to read publicly in a way that puts your stuff forward in its best light. This being Discordia, they’ve been sort of performatively grouchy in terms of their tone, and I’d planned on doing another in the same style on editing a journal. But I dunno, at the moment I feel a bit fragile due to personal life stress, and disheartened by a lot of the new books I’ve been reading lately. I do pick up stuff I know I won’t like for the purpose of giving it a productive drubbing, but I also feel it in my gut when something I have hopes for disappoints me—a hollowness into which the rest of my ambitions for the day inevitably slide, leaving me lying in the dark like a sickly Victorian woman whose only prescription has been leeches and more leeches, wishing I had even a modest gift for the guitar. Today, at least, I can’t stomach the notion of spitting bile over it all—I fear I’d only cough up my heart’s blood instead. So I suppose what I want to do is write here about editing and publishing in a way that reminds myself why I’m so drawn to working on other people’s stuff, to connecting art that makes me feel something with an audience that I believe will appreciate that work. Unlike the other articles, there isn’t a lot of proscriptive advice here. It may yet be of use to others exploring what working in publishing might mean for them, or of understanding why someone would want to do such a thing at all, but more than usual, I’m speaking to myself. And for that reason, I’ll have to start by reminding myself how I got here.

First part: On being “an editor” as an identity

Like most people who get into publishing, my first ambition was to be known as a writer. However, like nearly every example of this type of person, being known as a writer superseded writing as a practice. I needed something to be other than a burnout who worked at a grocery store by day and invented elaborate drinking games with his friends by night, and “writer” seemed a plausible enough option. Going to poetry readings (even bad ones), without exaggeration, changed my life. I met lifelong friends; blossomed intellectually; discovered ways of being in the world that I hadn’t previously dared to hope existed; really committed to a smoking habit; fell in love (or something like it) a few times; learned to nurture; experienced shattering disappointments; failed key responsibilities; made gross errors in judgement that I will regret the rest of my days; became, I hope, a kinder, more intriguingly wrinkled, and less destructively self-loathing person. Living as a “writer” was in short a ticket to a comprehensive, albeit belated, sentimental education I’d been too shy to embark upon. It is a process I describe in past-tense but experience in the present.

It has not, however, resulted in a great quantity of poetry.

I rate myself as an adequate talent; the sort of guy who could theoretically produce a handful of affable poetry collections that would not embarrass me and would be cherished by my friends,1 but would not be much read outside those circles or beyond a few months of their publication. Maybe I will eventually produce something anyway—as Derek Beaulieu has noted, what I’ve described would constitute a modest success by the standards of modern poetry publishing. The greater issue is that, while I like my poems well enough to write them on the infrequent occasions an idea occurs to me, I don’t actually produce enough of them for being “a writer of poems” to make sense as my primary thing in life. This is because, in my experience, what makes a writer (in the sense that writer constitutes an identity) is not the desire to be a writer, or even a talent for writing, but rather the helpless compulsion to write.2 (The same logic can obviously be extended to other callings, like painting or arson.) The most consistent writers I know are people whose claws leave deep gouges in the floorboards whenever they are dragged away from their desks3 by banal obligations like paying the rent or attending their own funeral. I by contrast will usually happily leave my writing chair and bike across town to be present at the gala opening of a beer can.

What I have discovered, and this is very much the sort of “old head wisdom” that is both blitheringly obvious and surprisingly difficult to internalize until you discover it for yourself, is that your real calling tends to be something you don’t need to whip yourself into doing consistently. Instead, it’s something that feels instinctively satisfying to perform on its own terms. For me, the work I do here at Discordia mostly meets this criteria, even when it is basically drudgery (e.g. formatting the fucking Jay’s List every month). I love the pursuit of and flirtation with potential Fellow Travellers; the feeling of spotting the simple structural change that makes a guest contributor’s essay truly sing; the look of four-to-six finalized articles in the scheduler and a good crop in progress in the drafts folder; the box of fresh zines from the printer’s; hell, whenever I use a burner account to post links to our stuff on various annoying subreddits I even experience the same sense of manful self-sacrifice I feel helping a hoarder friend move house or volunteering to empty camp toilets. We’re still a very disorganized shop, and I am guilty of assuming my collaborators can read my mind and mood to a degree I’m told is unreasonable, but this role fits me such that the hard work of it requires little coaxing to undertake.

None of this precludes my continuing to write creatively (I’m a frequent contributor to this very blog, for example), but I have found a degree of freedom from the imposter syndrome that once haunted me by defining myself in a role more suited to my nature—though the simple yearning to be read and heard in my own right will never go away. Whenever the subject of being something other than a writer comes up, I often find myself recounting an incident from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, in which a fierce young man named Espinoza who has pinned his entire identity on being a writer has an extended dark night of the soul after beginning to suspect that 1) he actually has little in common with the other members of the Madrid writing community and 2) that his own creative writing kind of sucks:

And it was the beginning of his loneliness and a steady stream (or deluge) of resolutions, often contradictory or impossible to keep. These weren’t comfortable nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal. Instead he concentrated on his realization that he would never be a writer and on making everything he possibly could out of his newly unearthed bravery.

As a result of these realizations, he is able to re-focus his formidable will and ambition on academia and quickly becomes an eminent critic (albeit in a very narrow field).

What I have found behind the doors unlocked by the key that was my own attempt to be a writer are what I think of as my real creative gifts: a capacity to bring people together; to identify talent; to understand what an artist is aiming for and to help them find a path towards its realization; to support them when their faith in their own abilities falters in the face of our era’s unfathomably bad taste. These are all fundamentally socially oriented qualities, and this speaks to the alignment between the nature of the role of an editor (which cannot exist in a vacuum, much though many editors may despise the talent they work with) and my own nature. A former friend once diagnosed me with cruel charity as a supremely skilled social mimic who would never be anything if I didn’t shake the tendency and learn to be myself. The critique was acutely observed but ultimately off the mark: I am always myself, but am at my most fully realized when working within and toward things greater than myself.

Second part: On Discordia

The editorial board of Discordia is an amorphous and fluctuating collective whose membership is opaque even to me. But in terms of its outlook on what we’re actually doing in publishing, it could probably be divided into three rough camps whose attitudes strike me as distinct if not exactly contradictory.4

Eris is the dominant voice both in terms of public output and behind the scenes as the project’s founder. He and those editors who most closely share his philosophy are both profoundly idealistic about art and profoundly fatalistic about its prospects in the twenty-first century. To quote him in a moment of despair that is revealing of both his doubt and his uncompromising ambition, “Everything is damned already, no one will be mustered, there is no one to assemble, no one to give themselves to the cause, to commit to a project or ideal and to believe blindly in it, to have faith in it, to give up reason and rationality and simply act.” In essence, nothing short of art as a force of occult transcendence will do: “To make your own reality through force of will that may with sufficient [belief] burst forth and overtake other people’s realities, to make truth into Truth.”

At other times he is somewhat more measured, but given such standards it can be hard to look at his own successes as a critic and what we have managed as a print press and think much has been accomplished given the state of the wider literary world, or even the local scene here in Montreal. Small wonder his preferred mode is being on the attack as a lone harrier striking public blows against the institutions in hopes that revealing their hypocrisies will loosen their hold on whatever power remains in a decaying industry. (And also because it often feels good to hit things.) This aspect of the project has become our signature—chances are if you’re reading this, your entry point was one of Eris’s takedowns.

A second perspective within the collective focuses on Discordia’s pathway to truly transforming Canadian literature via its potential to eventually become a trade publisher on the scale of, at least, a Palimpsest, a Book*hug, a Goose Lane.5 The small press establishment such as it is is rickety—everyone in it is overworked and underfunded, and that there has been in many respects a consolidation among the small presses in terms of house style has opened up a wide lane for creating a genuine alternative. Is there not room in the field for something shocking? Something antagonistic? Fiercely loyal though we are to our DIY model, there are models for scaling up. After all, it took editors and publishers with vision and distribution to give air to most of our heroes: Bob Cobbing, Kathy Acker, bpNichol, Grace Paley, Mordecai Richler, Samuel Delaney, etc.6 Should we not commit as much as we can to giving the talents we identify as Our Guys, the Jack Brides, the Meghan Harrisons, as broad a platform as possible?

It probably makes for good editorial balance that I find myself in a third position roughly equidistant from the other two, less out of any disagreement with either and more because I have a carefully cultivated tendency not to dream too much. The world around me has always felt too brittle to go far beyond what I can directly account for. I can’t say whether we have it in us to be a trade press one day, financially or in terms of personal stability; and there is always the risk an astringent critic (or group of critics) runs of becoming so defined by their astringency that most of their other qualities and potentialities are occluded in the final analysis.7 And so my own approach is to think small, one zine, a few posts at a time, but to plan meticulously on that scale. Whatever Discordia will become, I bend myself to making it the most it can be in the moment, knowing that this is the surest way to ensure that what it is is worthy of the aspirations we each have for it—that our readership expects of us.

This also lends itself to a mindset of appreciating the good stuff as it happens. Painstakingly retyping the transcript of a recording of an off-the-cuff conversation between my friends that made me feel fairly overwhelmed at my own luck to have such remarkable comrades; and seeing that sense affirmed by the responses of our readers. That Phil Hall, as close to the embodiment of what’s worth honouring in the Canadian avant-garde tradition as there is, letting us publish a full sequence of his new poems; getting to watch from the side of the stage as he sang to a rapt audience mostly discovering him for the first time; receiving even now his waves from Otty Lake in my inbox from time to time. Clearing out some of the thickets in another of Eris’s 7,000-words-in-three-hours assaults so his flame would burn bright and clean; and then printing some of the best of his poetry. Making Joshua Chris Bouchard write horoscopes, and then seeing him perform them live in Toronto next to a fortune teller’s table he’d hauled halfway across the city just because he knew the bit of extra set-dressing would complete my peculiar little vision. Publishing so many names from what had been my own personal rolodex of the Good Ones in barely over a year and a half; finding a few new Good Ones even in the dregs of the slushpile. Being told by Opal Louis Nations that my email asking for some poems and drawings, which happened to land on his 84th birthday, was the best news he’d had in some time. Still hearing the spirit of an old friend cackling in the rafters.

Discordia Review has occasionally been accused of cruelty. I don’t think that’s been the case, and I wouldn’t particularly want to be a part of a journal that bullies people for their personal foibles for the sake of a cheap thrill. But we do have a nasty streak, and so in that light it might seem incongruous to say that I what have aspired to most in my work with the press is to provide hope—hope and iron. Hope for those readers who wish to form a more discerning and opinionated audience for writing that offers the public no platitudes; iron for their conviction that what seems to them to be bland bullshit is bland bullshit and that there is no moral reward for eating it. Hope for new writers pressured to bend the knee to the expectations of grants and institutions and write from inside a box that was built to kennel them; iron to forge their own weapons to make their own way. Hope to those great talents who have been working in relative obscurity for years and who are doomed to be themselves whatever it costs their career prospects; iron to give the products of their imaginations a more tangible substance. Hope to those long-timers who have spent their decades contributing to blazing, necessary traditions that younger generations are unknowingly being denied contact with; iron to ensure the work of their lives endures. Whatever starts here multiplies with each person who joins our cause, and in however many make something of their own that shares at least the principal that there is something in art that is deeper than a hobby, more worth risk than the promise of an allowance.

It’s 6:36 AM and I’ve been writing since just before midnight, and I know if I’m doing this sort of chestbeating routine it’s time to crawl into bed before I do any further damage. So let me tie it off here: As I once said to a young person who asked me how one gets a career in literature, “You probably can’t make a living in writing. But you can make a life.” And I’m living one.

As always, if we’re missing something, or you want your event included, please message @discordia.review on Instagram to propose an inclusion. Doing so in advance if you already know what’s up next month is even better.

2 JULY (THURS)

mRb SUMMER 2026 LAUNCH
What: Do we know why the “R” in “mRb” is capitalized? Have they considered going full KoЯn with it? mЯb has kind of a look to it, is all we’re saying. Anyway, new issue, probably fulla fucken book reviews and whatnot.
Where: Teesri Duniya Theatre (Cité-des-Hospitalières 251 Avenue des Pins Ouest, #148).
When: 6pm.
Who: Natalie Doonan, Guy Rex Rodgers, and Chanel Sutherland.
How Much: Free. (Link)

3 JULY (FRI)

SHOW UP FOR METONYMY
What: Despite poster’s call for “dontations” (which I presume is when you refuse to give a specific amount to a cause), it seems the long running small gay publisher could use some quick cash. A quartet of readings, followed by “karaoke vibes,” which I presume just means “karaoke.”
Where: Articule (6282 rue St-Hubert).
When: 7 to 10pm.
Who: Nora Treatbaby, Adjani Poirier, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, and Felix Chau Bradley. Hosted by Sultana.
How Much: PWYC, $20 to $40 suggested. (Link)

THE OPEN BOOK MIC
What: Not a lit specific open mic (music and comedy are also permitted) so I’m not going to repeat this listing four times here, but know that it repeats every Friday till every angel gets its wings.
Where: Café Eevee (1251 Rue St-Zotique E).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

4 JULY (SAT)

PHOENIX ASCENSION PARTY
What: I dunno man, but there’s snacks. CAW!
Where: Librairie Phoenix (5928 rue Sherbrooke O).
When: 6 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever is willing to set themselves on fire and be born anew, I guess.
How Much: Free. (Link)

THROW! POETRY SLAM
What: Poetry slam, first Saturday of every month. No info online as of yet, but it’s presumably happening.
Where: Le basement. (3716 Notre Dame O.)
When: 9pm.
Who: Dunno.
How Much: $10. (Link) Summer break

5 JULY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic. Vol. 140 is on the theme “Tumultuous”—I feel like “Tumult” would be the more correct grammar, but who’s to say?1 (Computer, play “Bouquet of Barbed Wire” by The Ex.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Kat Charles and David Bateman.
How Much: Free. (Link)

7 JULY (TUES)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring MTL-by-NYC-by-MTLer Imogene Mahalia and Ottawan Fellow Traveller IAN MARTIN, who will be accompanied by David Currie, with whom MARTIN’s written a new above/ground chapbook.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Imogene Mahalia, IAN MARTIN, and David Currie.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

JO WALTON: EVERYBODY’S PERFECT LAUNCH
What: Did you know the only writer other than Ursula K. Le Guin to win Best Novel at the Hugos, Nebulas, and World Fantasy Awards lives in Montreal? Well she does. Anyway, she’s launching a book.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Jo Walton.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

9 JULY (THURS)

STEPHANIE BOLSTER/MISHA SOLOMON: above/ground ZINE LAUNCH
What: Speaking of above/ground, the tentacles of Ottawa chapbook impresario rob mclennan continue to creep into Montreal as his press reissues a vintage Stephanie Bolster chap alongside a new one from Misha Solomon that responds to Bolster’s original.
Where: Librairie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7 to 8:30pm.
Who: Stephanie Bolster and Misha Solomon. Hosted by Sarah Burgoyne.
How much: Free. (Link)

11 JULY (SAT)

QUEER + TRANS BOOK + ZINE SWAP
What: Queer + trans book + zine swap = ? Anyway, it’s happening! Presented by Dick’s Lending Library + Sheer Spite.
Where: Parc Lafontaine, corner of Sherbrooke + Papineau.
When: 2 to 5pm. (Rain date: same time Sunday)
Who: Whoever has the books + zines.
How Much: Free. (Link)

CHERIE HART: IT HAPPENED ON HARVARD AVENUE
What: Launch of a mystery novel set in Westmount, where this launch happens to be. See what you can deduce from that.
Where: Chez Nick (1377 ave Greene).
When: 5 to 7pm.
Who: Cherie Hart. Also snacks.
How Much: Free. (Link)

13 JULY (MON)

BOOKMATCH
What: Get half-cut at LSH—your $45 gets you a glass of prosecco, two glasses of wine, a $5 LSH giftcard and some time with a staffer, who will try to “set you up” with a book you’ll like. Personally I like to imagine you get all three glasses at once and everyone is walking around the store with their hands full.
Where: Librairie St-Henri Bookstore (4622 rue Notre-Dame Ouest).
When: 7pm.
Who: Whoever has $45.
How Much: $45. (Link) SOLD OUT!

16 JULY (THURS)

STÉPHANE LEBLANC-RAINVILLE: NINE BAGS OF GOLD LAUNCH
What: Some historical nonfiction about a peculiar treasure hunt in nineteenth century Moncton.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Stéphane LeBlanc-Rainville.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

POETRY TRIVIA NIGHT
What: Encore Poetry Project (the ones what do that window display at the bookstore) are doing a lit trivia night. The answers are: Leonard Cohen, B), Ocean Vuong, Accent Open Mic, True, Oscar Wilde, C), Leonard Cohen, Nicky Taylor, 34, Billy-Ray Belcourt, False, Anne Carson, Encore Poetry Project, enjambment, A), and Leonard Cohen. Good luck!
Where: Champs (3956 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 8pm.
Who: Whoever’s got the time on their hands. Hosted by Misha Solomon.
How much: Free, prizes to be had. (Link)

19 JULY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—theme is “Luck.” (Computer, play “Opposite Day” by Andrew Bird.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Sena the Queen and David Koloszyc.
How Much: Free. (Link)

AHOY #5 LAUNCH PARTY
What: Local trilingual lit journal continues its plan to reconstruct the Tower of Babel in the low-ceilinged confines of the beloved Word bookstore.
Where: The Word. (469 rue Milton.)
When: 7pm.
Who: “Some of your favourite local writers.”
How Much: $10, or $20 with copy of the mag (link).

21 JULY (TUES)

KŌHEI SAITŌ: CAPITAL FROM ZERO LAUNCH
What: A new introduction to Marx’s Capital, goes the spiel—Saitō’s translator Brian Bergstrom will be in attendance.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Brian Bergstrom.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

maisonneuve 100 LAUNCH
What: A hundred episodes used to be enough for a sitcom to enter the Valhalla of eternal syndicated reruns. Presumably something good also happens to magazines that achieve this nice round number.
Where: Co-op Bar Milton Parc (3714 av. du Parc).
When: Doors 7, show 8pm.
Who: Aurora Stewart de Peña, Eternity Martis, Katia Grubisic, Waseem Haja, and more.
How much: Free. (Link)

26 JULY (SUN)

“EGG THE POET”: yolk 5.2 LAUNCH
What: yolk brings back its popular “egg the poet” event in which the audience is invited to throw eggs at the readers, only this time you don’t actually get to use eggs, just water balloons. What is this, wolk magazine?
Where: Outdoors in the Mile End, RSVP for location.
When: 3:30 to 7pm.
Who: Contributors and whoever likes to get wet.
How much: Free. (Link)

BIRTH SCREENINGS 8: SILAS JAMES & EM ZEV
What: “Influenced by ‘90s underground spoken word/noise performances,” expecting talking, violin stuff, quotidian samples, probly some feedback. Followed by an hour of animated short films.
Where: White Wall Studio (here-ish).
When: 7pm.
Who: Silas James & Em Zev.
How much: $19.50. (Link)

31 JULY (FRI)

SLUTTY & SOLIDAIRE / FUNDRAISER
What: A rave in support of feminist co-op L’Euguélionne featuring four DJs from T.I.T.S. Collective.
Where: Espace SAT (1201 boul. St-Laurent).
When: 10pm to 6am.
Who: venus in bed, Jasleen, San Farafina [Moonshine], and Atity.
How much: $37.61 regular, $45.86 last chance. (Link)

And looking ahead to August…

We’ll get there when we get there.

The source of the petulant whining this time around is one David… Bezmozgis? How do you even pronounce that? Lemme just take a look at…

What? No. No fucking way. You’re kidding. This is an AI summary, I don’t think we can trust—

LMAO. Well, let’s just say nominative determinism theory is about to be vindicated yet again.

Anyways, David Brainless is mad because The Ex-Puritan put out a call for submissions for a special issue concerning “Resistance and Hope.” The issue says it hopes to be, as Brainless reports, “a creative folio of political education that consolidates ‘Resistance’ as armed struggle against US-led imperialism.” Further,

Ms. [Bahar] Orang [the issue’s guest editor—Eds.] writes that she deplores “zionist (sic) demand[s] to ‘condemn’ this group or that group” and wishes “to affirm [that] revolutionary violence [...] is a historically accurate, materially grounded, and ethically sound position to hold.”

Brainless isn’t a fan of this kind of talk. He’s mad specifically because the call shouts out Palestinian resistance, which Brainless takes issue with, and has used the opportunity to publish an article in The Globe & Mail, one of the country’s biggest newspapers with six million active subscribers and which was literally founded by one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, to spotlight an indie magazine with a few thousand followers on Instagram and a total of $22k in government grants over the last ten years which probably still runs into the red after paying its contributors. This has engendered, as I’m sure Brainless expected it would, a (proportionally massive) harassment campaign—not only of The Ex-Puritan but even of the League of Canadian Poets simply for having shared the call, which is, you know, just their job.

Brainless spends most of his ink whining about how this is disrespectful to all the casualties on October 7th or something, also going so far as to mention all the alleged “gender-based violence” which took place. Sure, 300 of those casualties were explicitly soldiers, we still don’t know just how many of those casualties were the result of Israeli friendly fire (many of which were reportedly not accidental), no one can confirm anything about these alleged sex crimes because Israel forum shopped the shit out of an assessment they knew was primed to consider every single case put forward to them as a confirmed sexual assault before even investigating it1 (which certainly doesn’t make me confident about the veracity of the claims!), a lot of those killed lived in settlements and kibbutzim specifically set up to be a “living perimeter” to keep the Palestinians in place, and that, in retaliation, the Israelis have since killed dozens and dozens of times the alleged casualty count of October 7th (and frankly I think it’s probably a lot more even than that!), including ten times the proportionate killing of children (3% of Israeli casualties on October 7th were children, vs. 30% of Palestinian casualties after October 7th), which I’m sure will be “rebutted” by the claim that Hamas “uses human shields,” in spite of said claim being debunked by both Human Rights Watch and mainstream journalists like those at the BBC, and in spite of the fact that Israel itself has been accused of using human shields by Amnesty International.

In a… interview cited by Ms. Orang, Mr. Omar said that “it stands to reason that if the outright intention had been to indiscriminately kill, the number of Israeli casualties in the initial days would probably have been significantly higher.”

Well, I don’t see what’s so appalling about Orang’s statement, that’s just true—given that 30% of Israelis are under 14 years of age, the casualty statistics do not suggest Hamas targeted children in the attacks. This certainly suggests an attack that wasn’t prioritizing civilian casualties. Still, maybe don’t raise your kids as a “living perimeter” (I want to make clear that this isn’t “my opinion,” this is the language used by the settlers who live there) around an open-air concentration camp?

That a writer in Canada can pitch an editor on an issue of a magazine whose purpose, at least in part, is to lend intellectual cover for the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7

Isn’t this entire article lending intellectual cover for the atrocities committed by Israel on… always? Check out the ways that Brainless deliberately obscures the truth in order to accomplish his ideological goals:

Canadian Jews represent 1 per cent of Canada’s population but they are now the objects of nearly 70 per cent of hate crimes.

You can read these reports on “antisemitism” yourself and find that the majority of what they’re calling “hate crimes” are literally just saying “Israel is bad and I don’t like it.”

For those who feel differently and have an essay for ISIS or a haiku for Hamas, The Ex-Puritan is accepting submissions until Aug. 7.

Brainless wants readers to assume that Hamas is on par with some kind of Salafi jihadist group. Hamas and ISIS aren’t remotely the same thing, Brainless. In fact, Hamas fought an entire war against ISIS.2 But let’s focus on something Brainless does get right:

You might ask why you should care about an issue of a literary magazine most Canadians have never heard of.

Sure. The Ex-Puritan is not a famous magazine. I’ll be honest, it isn’t even a very good magazine. I might even call them pretty fucking annoying.

But anyways, famous or not, the fact that most Canadians have never heard of The Ex-Puritan doesn’t really matter. Most Canadians also haven’t heard of Malahat, Fiddlehead, PRISM, etc. The Ex-Puritan is not necessarily a “small dog” in Canadian lit magazines, they’re well-known if this is a topic you keep up with, but most Canadians (most people, really) don’t read literary magazines to begin with and couldn’t tell a James Wood from a James Woods. This obviously bitter and petty attempt at a slight on Brainless’s part is meaningless. David, if they’re such a non-entity, then why are you writing an article in The Globe and Mail about them? I have no idea who David Brainless is, but he has a Wikipedia page and an op-ed in a major Canadian magazine, he’s obviously someone, otherwise I wouldn’t be fucking writing this! If I wanted to insult David, I wouldn’t sneer and pretend he’s a nobody, because then who am I for taking shots at him? Besides, I can just post this photo of him instead.

Frankly, the mandate for the issue up for discussion felt to me like a bunch of virtue signalling. In spite of the issue’s claims to be grounded in some kind of “materialist” revolutionary politics—certainly a lot more tolerable than the magazine’s usual wussy lib bullshit (see: above)—this is still pretty obviously immaterial. It’s fucking poetry in an indie magazine. Calm the fuck down. This is LARP. The Ex-Puritan wasn’t going to accomplish anything with this issue of their magazine, but now, thanks to Brainless, they kinda will, even if they lose their funding and get harassed out of existence in the process.

The general Canadian public doesn’t know about The Ex-Puritan. But most of what people are going to see here—even your standard Globe and Mail Readers—is yet another example of Zionists trying to bully people. A ton of Zios are presently harassing Ex-Puritan and the LCP, but these people are merely a very vocal (and nasally) minority. What people like Brainless don’t understand is that they are only shooting themselves in the foot. They’re so fucking butthurt about people supporting Palestine that they impulsively react by sitting down even harder on the issue to try and smoosh it, but all it does is go further up their asses. It would honestly be a much better tactic to simply ignore it, especially to something no one is paying attention to or cares about, but they just. can’t. help it. And part of that is the extreme amount of copium they’re imbibing. At least 61% of Canadians now hold “unfavourable” views of Israel. I’m sorry (not really lol) but you’re never putting the cat back in the bag, and it will only get worse. International opinion is swinging wildly against Israel. In many influential countries, Israel’s unfavourability now dwarfs South Africa’s in the 1980s. And as America’s international influence wanes, Israel will slowly find that its most stalwart supporter simply will not have the pull it used to have. Those who know my political commentaries know that I am not an optimist, but I think the truth here is, for once, quite optimistic in the long run: Israel as we know it, Israel as a “Jewish state,” will cease to exist in our lifetimes. What that means and what it will look like is anyone’s guess, but of this much I am certain.

But that’s the big picture. The little picture, the localized one we’re talking about in Canadian media, still sucks. A wanton bully like Brainless, someone “unintentionally” directing hate mobs toward a barely funded indie lit magazine from within the pages of one of the most widely-read newspapers in the country, can do whatever he wants and face basically no repercussions. The Ex-Puritan may have to take its email down because of all the harassment they’re going to continue to receive, while David’s inbox, meanwhile, will probably be full of these same pervs harassing The Ex-Puritan telling him how “brave” he is for stomping on a tiny independent bug with the power of his institutional print magazine boot. Those who think people like Brainless are assholes, a demographic which dwarfs Brainless’s supporters in sheer numbers, will likely stay out of it.

AND FOR MORE CANADIAN IMPERIALIST SHITHEADS:

1

An excerpt for those of you without institutional access; a worthwhile read:

I’m mostly just reporting on what people tell me. Maybe we’ll do more of these, maybe we won’t, maybe the fallout will be too great a pain in the ass to continue! Time will tell! But in case we do continue:

GIVE ME GOSSIP

If you submit me juicy enough gossip that I haven’t heard, you’ll get free access to the Gossip Club for a month (email discordia.sucks@gmail.com and they’ll forward it to me). You just have to abide by the two gossip rules:

GOSSIP RULES:

1. Subjects must have at least one published chapbook or book, have a major award or achievement, or be published with decent frequency in Journals Of Repute. I’m not trying to clown on small-time amateurs here. And believe me, there’s a few of those I could give you an earful about. That said, I’ll absolutely love to hear about it anyways, I just won’t run it in the column.

2. No sex crimes. We’re doing Fun Gossip, No Downers—if you have a credible report of a sex crime then contact the police, the CBC, or a lawyer. A lawyer aside from Eris, anyways.

So with that out of the way, let’s begin.

Read more

Sire on Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century by Derek Beaulieu (nonfiction)
Andrew Wu on Suicide by Édouard Levé, trans. by Jan Steyn (fiction)
Sire on ouch ouch ouch by Ev Ricky (illustrations & poetry)
Veeda Khan on It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Meltzer

Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century
Nonfiction by Derek Beaulieu
Assembly Press, 2026 (Publisher's Site)

Reviewed by Sire

The most arresting observations in Derek Beaulieu’s new self-help book for poets come early on. In the chapter “There is No There There,”1 Beaulieu does some quick cocktail napkin math on the economics of poetry publishing, and what the numbers can tell us about the genre’s presumable readership:

Five hundred copies [the average print run of a poetry collection] for 40 million people means that a good-selling book of poetry will have a readership of less than 0.0001 percent of Canada’s population. One ten-thousandth of 1 percent. […] For American authors, the situation doesn’t scale. The population is roughly ten times that of Canada, but the print runs for poetry are not ten times higher; they remain about the same at around 500–1,000 copies.

Following on from this premise, Beaulieu notes that, of the estimated $12,475 grossed from the sale of said 500 books, an author on a 10% royalty deal will make approximately $1,249 after the publishers, distributors and bookstores have taken their cuts;2 that even this paltry sum is an optimistic scenario given how few titles actually sell out even a single printing; and, looming above all this, that poetry makes up a mere 0.12% of total book sales.3

I can’t imagine there are too many non-delusional poets working towards a traditional publishing deal who are unaware of the general bleakness of the financial picture awaiting them, but it’s useful to have the ice cold water of your earnings will top out at like $5 a week tossed in your face from time to time as a reminder of how absurd it is to allow ‘careerism’ to dictate your choices as a poet. And for the audience of beginners and hobbyists that Beaulieu seems to be catering to with Do It Wrong, it’s not a bad idea to establish reasonable expectations early.

In his own practice Beaulieu is an extremely prolific experimental poet, and it’s consistent with that ethos when he concludes that, since you’re not going to sell anything anyway, you are therefore free to do whatever you want to do. (In fact, Beaulieu laudably makes available free of charge nearly everything he’s ever published.) The underlying message here is that gatekeepers have no real power once you realize there is practically nothing behind the gate that you cannot acquire on your own. Publishers don’t like your stuff? Make some zines and give them away. Depressed by your lack of readership? Burrow deeper into the community of fellow (similarly profoundly unread) writers. Prizes are a scam, winners chosen by exhausted compromise, laurels of thin air on scalps of thinning hair. There’s a lot to these basic premises that a Discordia reader can sympathize with.

In some ways, this all makes for a nice antidote to the Save the Cat!-style writing manuals that purport to instruct aspirants on techniques for producing commercially viable work while (in reality) stuffing their imaginations into boxes. But Beaulieu’s blandly optimistic tone is too similar to these For Dummies handbooks for comfort. In many respects, something like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet could also be described as a “self-help” book for “creatives,” but for all that book’s tenderness and pragmatic statements about the writer’s life, its great, defining quality is the seriousness with which it treats poetry. Upon being shown the works sent to him by the ‘young poet,’ which the reader can infer are of middling quality,4 Rilke’s remarks are tactful and generous, but he refuses to praise the poet unduly—one senses that to do so would be a betrayal of both his correspondent and of poetry. What he gives instead are his own ideas on how to see and to feel in such a way that, whether one has a genuine talent for verse or not, one can live in a condition of humble sensitivity that is conducive to poiesis.

By contrast, despite obviously being an obsessive who has moulded his life around his art, the Beaulieu of Do It Wrong mostly sounds like he’s talking about a hobby of little real consequence beyond signposting one’s own quirkiness.5 (I yearned for the prickly grievance farming of Stuart Ross’s cult classic Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer because, in addition to being funny, it was clear how much it burned his ass to see hacks have more success than the genuine talents—most notably himself.) As with most contemporary artists, Beaulieu has been forced to spend nearly as much time teaching in creative programs and hustling for grants and patronage positions6 as he has working on his own poetry. That’s why even when he tries to get serious about defending the importance of the genre, he can’t help but answer like the creature of the system that he is. Beaulieu checks off the required references to the supposed positive economic impact of Canadian artists (despite having established the puniness of poetry’s current stature); to Indigenous peoples (via a shoehorned-in two-pager on what ‘thinking like Natives’ can teach us about community); to Representing Identities, and so on and on. Witness the worst advice in the entire book:

A young queer student once asked me to read their manuscript and offer feedback. I shared with them that I was surprised, because their writing sounded like something I might write—and I’m cis-bodied, straight, male, and middle-aged. I suggested they consider how they could use a vocabulary, a structure, a POV, and a means of writing that is indelibly twenty-first century 2SLGBTQ+.

“Toss these sestinas. I want 90 new free verse poems about Sonichu on my desk by Tuesday!” he might as well have said. You can tell how proud he is to have acted so progressively in cramming this poor student right back into the ID Bucket after they’d made an effort to write outside of the framework established by their Feeld profile’s bio. One can write true poetry in an “indelibly twenty-first century 2SLGBTQ+” vein, but you’re also allowed to be a queer who locates your style in other elements of your identity and experience. If anything, by pushing this student into adopting a more recognizably queer-coded affect, Beaulieu’s advice is as likely to prevent the emergence of a unique style as it is to encourage it.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke notes that, while he’s ostensibly offering advice to his correspondent, he is really speaking to his own younger self, trying to tell himself things he wishes he could’ve known, advice he even now wishes he could take. I don’t know if Beaulieu is writing ‘to himself’ in the same way (or if he realizes that’s what he’s doing), but if he is, he has fallen somewhat short of the intimate honesty of his greater forebears in the field (a number of whom are helpfully cited in the book’s recommended reading list). He’d have had a better book if he’d rid it of some of the pro forma-sounding liberal truisms larding it down and gave it more of his own strangeness, his own philosophies of poetry beyond, ‘It’s fun to do and it’s okay if you don’t win any awards.’ The book is better when his gift for free association, the sort of unreasonable synaesthetic logic all poets must have to some degree, peeks out:

I strive to write books that move and shimmer like the landscapes in my dreams. I imagine towering letters along the horizon-line viewed for an instant through the flickering of a copse of birch trees, street signs reflected in oily puddles on the sidewalk, poems trapped in the methane bubbles of Abraham Lake.

What a beautiful way of articulating why his own muse has led him toward the concrete, iconographic visual poetry for which he is known. Surely this sort of thing is more likely to fire the imagination of a young poet than bland pablum about poetry’s great worth to the economy or the meaning of an A+ grade. There is good advice to be found within Do It Wrong, and we would all do well to heed Beaulieu’s exhortations toward greater generosity and communitarianism. But overall, it’s more likely to make you want to give a poet a wedgie than to become one yourself. — Sire

Suicide
Fiction by Édouard Levé, Trans. Jan Steyn
Dalkey Archive Essentials, 2025 (Publisher’s Website)

Reviewed by Andrew Wu

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?

Édouard Levé (1965–2007) was a French artist and author. Self-taught, he produced a handful of books and series of photographs. His writing is meanderingly, almost mockingly objective—for example, Oeuvres is simply a list of hundreds of his ideas for possible works of art (some of which he eventually realized.)

Levé’s last work, Suicide, is a novella in which an unnamed narrator conveys to the reader a description of his friend, an unnamed you who committed suicide two decades prior. In March 2008, Suicide was published (in the original French) by Éditions P.O.L. In 2011, Dalkey Archive Press released an English translation by Jan Steyn, and in 2025, it was reissued as a part of Dalkey’s Essentials series. Before the mundanities of publication, translation, and distribution, in October 2007, ten days after sending Suicide to his editor, Levé hanged himself.

Suicide begins with the narrator recounting the act itself: his friend is to play tennis; he tells his wife he forgot his racket; he returns to his house; he shoots himself in the head (specifically the mouth, we later learn); his wife finds him a few minutes later; in her grief, she accidentally knocks over (and thus closes) the comic book that had been opened to specific pages that were to serve as a suicide note of sorts. The remainder of the novella comprises a series of the narrator’s observations about his friend—some banal, some tragic, some short and salient, some long and winding and full of digressions, all inevitably, irrevocably colored by the first act and the title. We learn in one paragraph that the friend spoke both French and English, and in the next paragraph that the narrator believes his friend’s death gave his life “coherence,” and in the next that the friend had not backed down from a confrontation with two aggressive drivers, and in the next that the friend’s “quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable.” The title forces us to grapple with these details, some of them trivialities, as if they were vitally important. How relevant to his suicide is it that the friend thought it “better to listen to rock in a foreign language”? (Perhaps it is!)

We know also that there is a degree of unreality to the narrator’s observations. He cannot know some of the things he claims to. He says so explicitly, when describing the act: “I have never gone into this house […] I’ve replayed the scene hundreds of times, always in the same settings, those I imagined.” Other times we may infer he is guessing, though confidently so. “You would no doubt have needed to see these people for some time in order for the present to replace the past.” (No doubt, surely.) In life, the narrator and his friend were not so close, so how could he know so much? “I was more attached to other boys … [you] used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious.”

Mysterious indeed: one of Suicide’s themes is the way in which the unknown is more attractive than the known:

Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

The friend dreams up imaginary holidays; likes the idea of new destinations until he arrives; thinks the lives described in books more real than his own; believes his parents wanted him due to “what they imagined [he] would be” rather than who he was. This theme is mirrored at every level of the novella’s construction. The narrator’s friend, after all, “died because [he] searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.” Life is known, predictable; death is not. It is the unknown, too, that compels the narrator to revisit all these facts and stories of his friend—no one really knew why he shot himself. It is all patchwork guesswork. It is, indeed, in part, what compels us to read the novella, that unknown, that Levé hung himself and can never, in interviews or writing or future art, recontextualize or explain or elaborate upon Suicide.

Given the circumstances, one might come, as the narrator does, to associate the unknown with the future and the known with the past:

Religious and mythological painting would take you back to a past that was known and without surprises.

You wanted to know your future […] You would be able to consult the future like you could remember the past[.]

But it’s all muddled, isn’t it? Because, to the narrator, the past seems also mutable. “The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form,” he says, in one of the novella’s most unforgettable passages. You think you know someone; in a flash, a heartbeat, they prove to you that you really knew nothing at all, and you are forced to reconsider, through a glass darkly, their entire being.

Such contradictions are the heart of Suicide. The past is fixed yet mutable. It cannot be changed except by the act of interpretation, yet the act of interpretation can change nothing at all. The narrator cannot know what his friend thought and believed, but speaks as though he were intimately familiar with him. They were not close in life; they are close in death. There was a suicide note of sorts, in the form of a specific set of pages in a comic book; it is addressed only once, briefly, after the initial description of the suicide, when the narrator describes how the deceased's father engaged with the book: “[he] bought dozens of copies, which he gave to everyone […] he is looking for the page, and on the page for the sentence, that you had chosen.” In the same way, too, we are given far more information than is necessary to understand the narrator’s friend’s suicide—“better to listen to rock in a foreign language”—and as such we are given nothing at all.

To attempt to make sense of these contradictions, this overflow of information, is futile, and simultaneously, the only thing we can do and the only thing worth doing. Such is the labor of literature and of life. For to those who grow old, sense-making is a slow, arduous, yet rewarding process—a few meaningless encounters here bloom, decades later, into a romance; a paragraph from a book read as a teenager resurfaces as one enters their fifties; the seemingly contradictory wisdom of one’s father and mother unify themselves in adulthood; the tendrils of life, long as they are, have the chance to organize themselves neatly, to weave themselves into tapestries that proclaim to the world, this is who I am.

A premature self-inflicted death, then, forces a sudden reckoning. Those meaningless encounters will never bloom. That paragraph will never resurface. One’s parents will be locked in eternal conflict. The tendrils of life, cut short, are interpreted not as curving here and there, seemingly at random, so that they might eventually come together in some beautiful form, but rather as pointing—all of them, in some way or another, forever and ever—toward suicide. — Andrew Wu

ouch ouch ouch
Illustrations and Poetry by Ev Ricky
Self-Published, 2025 (Artist’s Website)

Reviewed by Sire

looking
at all
the specimens
going,

OUCH
OUCH
OUCH

This slim self-published volume of full-colour self-portraits and minimalist poetic narration by Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Ev Ricky7 was produced as part of a residency at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine, a fascinating (and gnarly) collection of books and anatomical ephemera from the past few centuries of experimentation.

Ricky’s compositions are modelled on images from the master anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri.8 In addition to breaking new ground in the medical understanding of the human form, the art in Vesalius’s book also frequently depicts his hideously mangled subjects in allegorical poses that perhaps served as memento mori, reminding clinicians that these dead remains were once (and may yet be) vessels of spirit just like themselves, that they should be treated with care.

Ricky’s updated takes are in a sense making this same argument on behalf of the modern patient, rendering that invisible experience of pain with vivid cartoon logic: a pair of disembodied hands inside throat and pelvis wrenching the esophagus; bloody hooks lodged in the musculature of the upper back to keep the figure's ass from collapsing around their feet like fallen drapery; the discrete organs of the bowels and womb fused into a thorny mass. The drawings vary somewhat in style (some more draftsmanlike, others crude) but most are marked by bold washes of colour, as though to represent the way intense sensations pulse and throb beyond what it seems possible for the physical body to contain.

Despite the painful subject matter, and because of it, ouch ouch ouch is marked by a great sense of tenderness and compassion. The human figure’s solitary suffering is interrupted by a little yellow dog, whose simple needs and affections demand attention—though the visual signifiers of pain remain (a head full of shattering glass etc.), there is also a mingling of auras (and even swapping of features) with the other creature that resituates that pain within the greater experience of living. Ricky’s conclusions are oblique, and the artist doesn’t try to force a happy ending onto their account of ongoing chronic pain (even romantic companionship is introduced as “the gift / of a productive cough, / the woman who gave it / to me dying laughing / to a song in the kitchen”), but the final images seem to evoke both transcendence and endurance.

Ev Ricky has long been at work on their debut graphic novel I Wouldn’t Lie to You (working title), a book I expect to significantly raise their profile both regionally and abroad. But in the meantime, ouch ouch ouch offers further proof that they are among Montreal’s most intriguing comics-adjacent artists. The book is now in its second printing9—contact Ricky for purchasing details through their website. — Sire

It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin
Nonfiction by Marisa Meltzer
Simon & Schuster, 2025 (Publisher’s Website)

Reviewed by Veeda Khan

Despite her stardom as a singer, actress, and socialite, Jane Birkin is perhaps better remembered for the objects associated with her than any particular artistic success. In the Anglosphere at least, one tends to think of fashion: the bag, the bangs, the jeans and white t-shirt. If enough curiosity strikes, or if one crosses the Pinterest recommended photo threshold to the point of actual interest, maybe there is a desire to find out more about the woman. And maybe that desire prompts one to pick up a book and not just do a cursory Google search. And maybe that book is It Girl, by New York Times columnist Marisa Meltzer. And maybe, once one reads it, one realizes the English Wikipedia article would’ve probably sufficed.

Concise and unaffected, and drawn exclusively from public sources, It Girl dutifully tracks Birkin’s rise from English debutante to household name. Born to a Royal Navy spy and an actress, Birkin has been a socialite since she was a teen. She dated three male artists, with whom she had three artiste daughters, who all splintered out into high-profile careers: Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg are both actress-musicians, while Kate Barry was a photographer-turned-philanthropist. Such a diversity in artistic endeavors should come as no surprise. Birkin herself filmed seventy movies, directed one, recorded thirteen albums, and modelled many, many clothes.

Despite its rich subject matter, It Girl is a slim book, covering cradle to grave in just over 200 pages. Being concise is not a bad thing, but it’s clear that It Girl is more interested in interpersonal drama than exploring Jane Birkin as an artist. The emphasis is not on her endeavors, but rather the lovers behind them. I’m sure this is the easier narrative, if somewhat cliché, but even these relationships are presented as though they exist in a vacuum. Meltzer fails to meaningfully engage with Birkin’s cultural moment. Contemporaries Birkin herself envied are often namedropped—Fanny Ardant, Charlotte Rampling, and Brigitte Bardot to name a few—but their allure, much like Birkin’s, is relegated to physical attributes. It is difficult to parse Birkin’s cultural contributions at large when the culture itself is so ill-defined. These social considerations are not just a question of aesthetic evolution (although ye-ye, French chanson, and French New Wave are integral to the construction of Birkin’s image), but provide necessary context on the patriarchal society in which Birkin rose to prominence.

Among the many ideas that remain underdeveloped in It Girl, the most glaring is Birkin’s perpetual juvenility. Meltzer considers this a mostly personal aesthetic choice, spurred by early career coquetry in service of Serge Gainsbourg, the 40-year-old songwriting giant Birkin met at 22 and dated for the next 12 years. But how does Meltzer’s benign explanation of Birkin’s image square with the fact that Gainsbourg would, later in life, take his fascination with the “Lolita” trope to ever greater extremes? And how do we account for the fact that Jacques Doillon, her partner between the years 1980 and 1993, has been accused of sexual battery by three women? There’s obviously more to consider here than daughters and movies, especially considering the way her image persists. Sure, she may no longer bear the brunt of the criticism (the burden seems to have been most recently offloaded to Olivia Rodrigo) but her coquettish legacy endures in both pop music and high fashion. Since her ideals, both the ones she represented and the ones that she herself held, do not exist independent of their circumstances, they deserve a little more prying than the cursory Google Meltzer appears to have given them. The author seems generally uninterested in a deeper exploration, writing that “Birkin will be remembered for her proximity to volatile men.” If that’s the case, is it even worth remembering the woman at all?

Well, yeah. She’s cool as fuck. But you don’t need an NYT columnist to give you the details. Unlike other actresses of her era, and despite her deep shame and insecurity, Birkin was an open book. If you want to know more about her, your best bet is hearing it straight from her own mouth. Watch Jane B. par Agnès V. on the Criterion Channel. Read both volumes of her published diaries. Watch her bad sex comedies and her good Rivette films and her okay Doillon ones. Listen to her fragile soprano on Ex-fan des sixties with the English translations of the lyrics by her former lover Serge pulled up. Even Charlotte Gainsbourg’s fairly mediocre documentary gives you more insight into her life than this superficial biography. Jane Birkin’s influence is everywhere, there’s no denying that. If you decide to develop a sudden interest in the woman behind it, then go look for her. She’s not hard to find, and she deserves the effort.

CONTRIBUTORS

Veeda Khan reads and writes in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Zone 3, and Dreginald. She is a 2026 NBCC Emerging Critic Fellow.

Sire is a real piece of work.

Andrew Wu is a writer, pianist, and biostatistics graduate student based out of Boston. He is the co-recipient (with composer Holden Mui) of an Emergent Ventures grant, which supports his life’s ambition—to learn, perform, and record all of Holden’s piano music. His favorite song is “Moon River.”

Interested in reviewing for Discordia Review? Check out our review guidelines and then email us a pitch.

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from some artists who've earned our respect and affection. Today Jordan Williamson brings us two dispatches from the lighter side of total alienation.

The Trials of Rescuing a Cat While on Probation

I thought about what to tell my P.O.
I fulfilled community service picking up trash
with a claw-like device outside the library 
on Tuesdays between 10am and 2pm.
Plots are a strange matter. The fire department 
put out one of those life nets,
presumably for the cat to jump to safety.
Cat killer! Cat killer! they shouted
wailing balls of snow and ice
from a Zamboni dump pile.
This complicated things with the cat.
Cooler heads did not prevail. 
I had come this far— suspended in a tree, 
wrangling the little piss-missile.
She was impossibly strong,
had the chaotic will of thirty, or forty cats.
I desired only to return home
and take something out of the freezer.
I was feeling a little misunderstood.

1996

The president was in the Rose Garden.
You never saw any roses.
Ralph Lauren released his Rodeo Drive collection,
a backpack exploded at the Summer Olympics.
They continued until somebody won the long jump.
Our teacher went off early with gestational diabetes,
she came back with a baby.
There was a lesson to be learned there,
we learned math instead.
Swapped the old Dodge Caravan for a new one.
Cereal was part of it.
You either had the best time, or it was awful.
Your friends sucked or they didn’t suck.
People sewed their own curtains, people sewed.
You woke up to a man on TV
cooking a roast in a sweaty little oven.
The smell of the phonebook was part of it,
scrambled porn was part of it.
Nylon was having a moment.
Ellen hadn’t come out but Friends was heating up.

JORDAN WILLIAMSON is a poet from London, Ontario. His recent work has appeared in BAD DOG MAG, PRISM International and The Malahat Review.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

RELATED

Eris and Tara McGowan-Ross are The IDF (Indian Defence Force)

Tara: I recently got hatemail on Substack about my name because I was claiming Indigenous ancestry but have this super fucking Celtic name. And like, I don’t quote unquote “claim” Indigenous ancestry, I’m a fucking status Indian. And I do believe that there’s something very important to the idea that it’s not like there’s just this fraction of me that’s Indian, it’s more like a layer of me. I’m not only this “percentage” allowed to have the family that I do, and the familial experience that I’ve had, and like the, the…

Eris: The cultural experience…

Tara: …right, the cultural experience that I do, which has been very Indigenous from the moment that I was born. So anyway yeah this person was being all fucking shady about it and I’m like, bitch, that is an Indigenous name actually, it’s an Indigenous name because it’s my name, fuck you, you know?

Gwen Aube, who is white: Did [redacted name of an annoying Indigenous Canadian writer] do this to you?

Tara: No, it was just some, like, underachieving guy who thinks the reason why he doesn’t get the things that he wants is not because he’s bad at those things but because DEI or whatever, you know, and it’s, like, no, I have what I have because I’m way better than you and that’s why.

Eris: I think there’s too much of a stream of cultural conservatism among a lot of Indians today, these attempts to return to a certain concept of traditionalism. Often this “traditionalism” is partially understood through Western media about Indigenous people, because we have this weird feedback loop where so much of our culture was destroyed to the point that I think a lot of what has been supposedly “rebuilt” has been constructed out of cowboy movies.1

Tara: Right, it’s like when people are talking about their traditional outfits and it’s a ribbon skirt and it’s, like, that’s a post-contact outfit, this is my traditional food it’s fucking fried bread, it’s a post-contact food, etc. And I get especially kind of [fed up noise] about it because it’s, like, “let’s return to this traditional thing that just happens to be the earliest, by European standards, verifiable record we have of whatever Indigenous people were doing.” And those are really a document of people who were in the middle of getting genocided you know? I’ve had so many trad Native people be like, “It’s traditional to dress modestly or whatever, and I’m like, “My ancestors had their titties out shut up.” They’re talking about a snapshot of the moment that Western cultural imperialism was beating us into the ground during, like, the greatest genocidal act in human history. That’s not actually traditional, it’s just a historical moment.

Eris: And recognizing that our traditions actually changed.

Tara: Yeah.

Eris: They grew and changed over time. And I think that’s also why I hate all the discourse around “traditional knowledge” and “traditional ways of knowing,” because the fact of the matter is that Indigenous people did do science. That is how they found those things out, and they passed those things down through stories, yes, but that knowledge was discovered through experimentation, through something not so different from the roots of the Western scientific tradition in spirit.

Tara: It wasn’t magic!

Eris: It wasn’t like you just wake up and know something, like how a goose knows what a hawk looks like.

Tara: “Indigenous ways of knowing” such as knowing “Jeff died eating that so maybe don’t.”

Eris: Knowledge of the healing properties of plants and medicines clearly speaks to an extensive history of trial and error, which requires a deep “scientific” culture of curiosity and inquisition and experimentation that so much of this “traditional” discourse erases. It’s effectively primitivist. “Yeah, this knowledge just came into me from the Earth.” Like, no, it didn’t! People discovered these things through their ingenuity!

Tara: This traditional thing is my dad’s constant struggle. When my dad was trying to launch his music career2 he felt like he really had to downplay how Indigenous he was because he wasn’t going like [briefly imitates a stereotypical Native chant] hi-ho-wy-ya, hi-ho-wy-ya or whatever in his music, he was like yeah I’m a city kid from Montreal and that’s an “Indigenous experience” because we are normal people and we live here.

Eris: I mean, so much of my fucking life is feeling guilty about whether or not my experiences are, you know, “valid” enough. You know, my my sister grew up on on the res and was much more immersed in that world than I am. So there’s always that feeling of constantly having to remind myself that, yeah, all of these are kinds of Indigenous experiences.

Tara: Yeah, yeah, I feel like there’s a certain kind of healthy entitlement that I’ve got that you can borrow if you want.

Eris: I feel like my sister has always seen me as less Indigenous. Or has treated me that way. Maybe I’m projecting.

Tara: That sounds like kind of a childhood story you gotta let go of now.

Eris: Yeah yeah yeah…

Tara: Yeah, it sounds like something that made sense when you were eight that doesn’t have to make sense anymore.

Gwen, still white: I admire your like bullheadedness about this, it’s clearly something that you’ve fought for and that’s cool.

Tara: Thank you!

Eris: Actually, you know, she came to visit recently and I realized that I still have this relationship with her where, like, I’m always trying to show her that I’m also Indigenous, and so we’ll like be sitting there and she’ll be talking about all this cool Indigenous stuff she’s doing or whatever, and she’s doing this Indigenous artist’s fair or something. I told her, “oh, I was booked for a reading focusing on urban Indians,” and she was just… [voice dripping with condescension] “Ohhhh, look at you…” And I was so sad! I feel like she’s being doing this my entire life…

Gwen: Why does she feel this way about you?

Eris: I think there’s some bitterness because she grew up without my dad and I grew up partially with him. Because my dad left us too, but she never even had him…

Tara: Fuckin’ Indians…

Eris: …classic Indian experience, I guess, right? But, yeah, I grew up with more of him around and she basically didn’t grow up with him around at all. I think she resents that about me, even though he wasn’t… he wasn’t always the best dad growing up, let’s say, he didn’t have the best role models for it, and he didn’t stick around for me either… but I think she still resents that sometimes. Again, maybe I’m projecting, but I think that she knows that there’s something I want from her experience, which was that she grew up on the res, that she has that connection to our roots that I don’t, and so she could always wave that over me, like “you may have grown up with the thing that I wanted my entire life, but I know that I have this thing you will never have, the thing you want more than anything in your fucking life.” And yeah it is. There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more than to have that, and to be able to feel authentically Indigenous.

Gwen: “The unlived life…” as [Sire] says.

Sire, racially ambiguous: [indistinctly in the background, finishing the quote] “…will have its revenge.”3

Eris: The unlived life, yeah, it’s the one thing that torments me. Every single day I think about it. Every single day I also think about the fact that like if I have a kid, the fact that I’m condemning them to feel like even more of a fraud than I am, because I have a white wife.

Gwen: You have a phenomenally white wife.

Eris: I know. But I think about the race aspect a lot. Back when I was dating [redacted]…

Gwen: Was this the five-foot liberal?

Eris: Yeah, the five-foot liberal. I felt like, hey, if this got serious and we wound up having kids, if they didn’t feel Indigenous, at least they might feel Jewish. Or Filipino. Or Korean. Or any of her identities. At least they might have some strong sense of identity to cling to, to feel more connected to. But they’d probably just feel phony about those too. My wife has every right to feel authentically Newfoundlander, that’s a rich cultural identity, but even she feels insecure about that connection, maybe that’s just…

Tara: …oh my God that reminds me so much of a story...

Eris: Yeah?

Tara: So I made like one Indigenous friend when I went to university in Montreal, and it’s funny because he is so much more pushy about the Indigenous thing than I am. He has super fair skin but has been using like bronzer and tanning beds since he was a kid so that he would look more Indian and extremely downplays all his other ancestry, which is like, Nordic. And his name is literally Karl Ove Knausgaard.4 He is so fucking from Norway it’s ridiculous but he downplays it like crazy. And now his kids, with a white woman, are gonna get to have the whole, “Well, my dad’s Native…” because he has built this entire other identity up around it. Which, I mean it’s not like it’s not accurate, but it’s almost like the inverse of your sort of situation. This guy has sort of formulated an Indigenous identity that had very little to do with his actual Indigenous culture…

Eris: Okay, interesting…

Tara: …which is the actual Indigenous culture of…

Eris: A Pretendian Indian!

Tara: Like yeah! The actual Indigenous culture that I have access to is that of a dude who wore like little peacoats and a short hat in Montreal for his whole life you know. This guy’s mother, which is his Indigenous side, is a bureaucrat in the Norwegian government. Literally the Nordic system! But he’s got this other identity that he has constructed specifically because he felt like he didn’t have access to his mother because he couldn’t get along with her, and that’s the identity that he’s like handing off to his kids... which is none of my business [laughs].

Eris: Yeah… I get so anxious thinking about my kids and what their relationship with Indigeneity is gonna be like, like, it stresses me out so much…

Tara: Um, you could just like not actually have any biological ones and just like, take some of the spares…

Eris: It’s just, like…

Tara: The foster system is full of spares!

Eris: It’s true, it’s true…

Sire: There’s nothing wrong with just picking something off the rack…

Tara: [evil laughter]

Eris: I want to have at least have one biologically. The plan is I think I’m going to adopt one kid from my community…

Gwen: That’ll make the other one feel greaaat…

Eris: Well, I hope that they might be able to sort of like exchange with each other, but the other thing is I also feel like I need to produce a biological child too because of the sort of genocide that my family has survived. I feel like somehow that if I don’t “propagate my seed” that, like, I’m also doing a disservice…

Tara: Pretty Jewy of you…

Eris: I knowww…

Gwen: Don’t worry, if you die we’ll jerk you off.

Eris: [laughing] Indian Defense Force?!

[general hysterics]

Eris: But I mean, you know, I would just feel so bad, like I was betraying so much of my like ancestry by not like continuing the line a bit further, because they had to just crawl through the fucking… I just, I know too much about my family’s direct history to not.

Tara: Like I’ve never in my entire life ever ever ever had the impulse to have a child ever even for one second, and I think that it’s very interesting. There’s a stand-up comedian who said this thing where it’s like, reproduction is the coolest thing that my body can do and I’m not interested, even though it’s like being a bird who’s like, “Ahh, I’ll walk, it’s fine.” It’s like this insanely cool thing that I can do, and there’s this feeling that it’s like being a stock boy of being alive, you know, like at least I did something that’s basically kind of important. Like if you run out of ideas, if you can’t manufacture your own meaning yes you can because you have a uterus.

Gwen: [transly] Thanks, thanks a lot.

Tara: We’re talking about me, you have to appropriate everything, you’re trying to take it all… I’m joking.

Gwen: [laughing] Appropriating womanhood.

Sire: That was crazy we almost got through a conversation for the first time on this trip that didn’t [pinching nose] concern transness.

Gwen: There was— I’m sorrrryyy…

Tara: But yeah I mean like but there’s so much pressure to have kids when you’re Indian.

Eris: I feel the same way…

Tara: We could have kids.

Eris: Yeah let’s do the IVF thing.

Tara: Yeah I’ll give your wife an egg, I’m not using them.

Eris: I’d take one of your eggs, yeah.

Tara: I’m actually not kidding.

Eris: I would 100% be down to do that.

Tara: Fabulous!

Sire: Do we have any latex gloves around somewhere…

Tara: [to Gwen] We’re gonna need some of those hormones and a funnel…

Eris: This is gonna be an extremely dark little anecdote here, but whenever I think about having kids, I think about how my great-grandmother, in order to like keep her kids alive, had to like prostitute out her daughters when they were kids. They were so fucked up that when the government came to get them they got sent to Warrendale Child Psychiatric Hospital instead.

Tara: Oh my God… that’s...

Eris: Yeah, brutal. So it feels like if I don’t produce it’s like those girls went through all that for nothing. Like that will to survival was so strong, I need to pay some respect to that by producing something continuous. You know?

Gwen: Umm but [Eris], you do it through your poetry…

[general laughter]

[later]5

Eris: A lot of identity-oriented work turns me off because I often find it very dishonest, even pandering. There is a tendency to swallow down a lot of critical or unflattering thoughts about your own people, some of it internalized racism and all of that, or to avoid confronting anything too uncomfortably, or to be anything other than optimistic, and I think that’s the thing that Darius James got a lot of flak for. He’s both extremely angry about racism and the history of injustice but he’s also, I think, willing to prod at some sore spots without providing comfort or validation. But I think that a lot of the best work on identity is the work that does that.

Tara: You can’t make good work on identity without going there.

Eris: And that’s why I think most identity literature sucks, because you need to be willing to step through that, you need grit and texture and complexity. For example, the reason why I love Mordecai Richler so much is that the thesis of his work is basically, “Why does everyone hate the terrible Jews so much?” And it’s that thing where, if you’re going to talk about identity in those terms, you have to grapple with the fact that everyone has that natural self-resentment that comes out in a resentment of their own community. That doesn’t mean you “hate” yourself or your community. There’s this feeling that because love is always, I think, and I don’t know maybe it’s just me projecting my own feelings here, but love of anything is always sort of married to some frustrations with that thing, you know? Because the things you love are always things you’re going to in turn idealize, and there’s that struggle in love between idealization and reality where you will constantly expect more from the things you love in various ways, even when you love them unconditionally. And I think a lot of people try and choke down those frustrations and like…

Tara: You know… sorry, go ahead, I just I have something to follow up on that whenever you’re done, sorry.

Eris: I’m almost done, yeah. I think one of the big things I hate about, for instance, a lot of Indigenous literature in this country, is that I just don’t see anything genuine in it. It also often feels like it’s written for white people to show them…

Tara: It’s absolutely written for white people.

Eris: It’s written for white people to like show them what we are, and because of that it feels like it flinches away from certain unflattering representations of ourselves, or at least doesn’t prod them very deeply, and it becomes dishonest. It feels like what we would like to show them. It feels like PR.

Tara: You need to read Pitiful by Brandi Bird though.

Gwen: Oh yeah, you were talking about this.

Tara: It rips. It’s really good.

Eris: [barreling through] If you want to show me how much you really sort of like think about and care about and love our community, I don’t believe it unless you’re willing to point to the things about it that disappoint you, the things that upset you, the things that frustrate you, the things that make you uncomfortable, or are more complicated.

Tara: [also barreling through] I don’t think Brandi Bird’s politics are perfect, because they’ve been MFA’d hardcore by the UBC program, but like also I think that there’s time yet to get them back, you know? But like okay just to circle back around for one second to that, like the love thing. I heard someone say that the the moment that characterizes love as an emotion is not when you find things about people that you like; it is the moment that you decide to suspend judgment about the things about them that you don’t like. Basically by definition we don’t love people because of the things about them that we like we love them because of the things about them that we don’t like that we are we are willing to carry. Everybody sucks in some way you know? At what point do you enter into what I have been calling an economy of goodwill with them, where it’s like “we’ve built up enough goodwill that I can cash it in for these things about you that honestly fucking drive me nuts but like I love you so much that it’s a very fair exchange.” We don’t love people or things because they deserve it, we do it because it’s a biological imperative. We must.

Gwen: [Exaggerated fawning sigh] There’s a specific, just, sigh, that you make me do…

Eris: Yeah, you just did it, I heard it.

Tara: It was God speaking through me.

Eris: “You’re so wiiise…” Honestly though, you will make a great Elder.

Tara: Thank you!

—04/05/2026, The Wormhole, Hamilton, ON

MORE TARA MCGOWAN-ROSS

Project Hail Mary
Fiction by Andy Weir
Ballantine Books, 2021

Reviewed by

I was accused of a being a hater. So I am. Everyone in the packed multiplex screening of Project Hail Mary was thoroughly enjoying themselves, except me (and my wife, she wants that on record—good for her). It wasn’t just the cringe-inducing humor, which “wasn’t for me” as people have begun to say since critical discernment has become so unfashionable. This movie, while clearly meant to be about the present climate catastrophe, was incongruously caked in the too-sweet feelgoodism of the hegemonic say-nothing-unpleasant agenda. It was impossible for me to hold my tongue. I felt like I was being trolled, dared to take issue with the movie’s evasions, so that I could be labelled anti-people-enjoying-themselves. Is this what people mean when they say they’re being gaslit?

Project Hail Mary, based on a novel by Andy Weir (who has been described by Eris on this blog as a hack-nerd infection on the SF genre), is a first-contact buddy comedy, featuring a sentient alien rock creature and a dorky human. It imagines an inverse climate catastrophe to the one we are experiencing in nonfictional reality, although clearly meant to signify (via wish-fulfilling fantasy) just that. The sun and neighboring stars have been colonized by interstellar, energy-consuming, alien micro-organisms, triggering rapid onset global cooling which will destroy civilization and most life on Earth in a matter of a few decades. One nearby star is unaffected, 12 lightyears away—Tau Ceti (setting of the far more enjoyable Barbarella). Cue wish fulfillment: Unlike our real world climate crisis, the nations of the world cooperate and give their scientists the resources to solve the problem. Astrobiologist turned middle-school science teacher Ryland Grace is improbably placed on the three-person crew sent to Tau Ceti to discover the reason that star hasn’t succumbed to the microbes in the hope that this information will save Earth. He is the only member of the crew to survive the voyage. When Grace arrives at Tau Ceti, he encounters and befriends Rocky, the alien rock creature, who is undertaking the same mission on behalf of his planet, and who is also the sole surviving member of his crew, thereby setting up a feelgood human-alien, overcoming-odds-together, friendship dynamic that is too saccharine for the senses to tolerate.

Imagine spending day after day on a spaceship with an alien who you’ve befriended, after departing a planet that, if an Astrophage didn’t show up in our system and start eating the sun, would otherwise be locked into catastrophic heating, and having that just seem to you like the routine course of history. The psychologists on your planet say your species’ unevolved brain has difficulty conceptualizing something so abstract as long-term terminal risk,1 and the astronomers say the reason we haven’t seen any signs of intelligent life in our galaxy is because at a certain level of technological development, intelligent species inevitably destroy their environment and plummet into civilizational decline. You don’t mention any of this to your friend the alien, or ask him anything about his own civilization. It’s not the sort of subject you or anyone else is supposed to talk about. That’s Ryland Grace—a creature of our own morbid-stage capitalism where there is (still) no alternative, despite climate catastrophe, the sixth mass extinction, Gilded Age-level inequality, rampant predatory grifting, and wholesale governmental incompetence.

For all the many vacuous movies Hollywood has given us that aspire almost to be about some pressing social issue, Hail Mary manages to feel particularly evasive. Is it not a movie about climate disaster? Is it not a contact story—a genre about time travelers and alien encounters which have historically served as a wrapping for subversive content? (Consider Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, where as a kid I encountered my first defense of the guillotine.) Hail Mary is neither of these things, but its passing resemblance can’t help suggest something is being self-censored (whatever, just a little civilizational polycrisis). Obviously, we are living in a period of cultural decline and the movies of the last two to three decades (not coincidentally coinciding with the rise of the big-budget nerd movie) are one of its glaring symptoms, so what was I expecting? In a less stupid era, a screenwriter might have had the awareness to recognize that SF genre convention called for at least a satirical nod at the course of human civilization. Consider the above mentioned Barbarella, a spoof whose SF premise is primarily an excuse to display Jane Fonda in skimpy spacegirl attire (along with some wonderful psychedelic sets), but whose titular character is from an Earth in which war and violence (and unfortunately physical sexual relations) are relics of the past. Maybe Rocky’s species the Eridians have put war behind them? Grace never asks.

After watching Hail Mary, I became curious about Weir’s novel. Surely the novel couldn’t possibly be as evasive as the movie, could it? Was it so equally cringe and devoid of substance? Was I hate-reading Andy Weir? I was indeed. I did it to satisfy my curiosity about the contemporary popular SF literary landscape.

Was the novel a slog to get through? The only thing Weir asks of the reader is the ability to withstand cringe. I almost don’t want to provide examples because it’s too horrifying. The book is written in the first-person voice of Grace, a nerd-identifying character, who says things like, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” He also says “dang,” “darn,” “heck,” “fudge,” and “bull puckey” because he’s a school teacher, and that’s Weir’s attempt at giving the reader a character. Thankfully Hollywood toned this down a little, because I can’t imagine even YA readers (who I assume this book is for?) would find this funny.

Does Grace ever broach the subject of the precarious state of human civilization with Rocky? I seem to have missed it. At an early stage in the two aliens’ encounter, before they established a means of linguistic translation, Grace uses a clock to indicate to Rocky the time of their next meeting. Grace declares that he’s going to be careful not to be late for this appointment because he doesn’t want Rocky to get the impression that “humans are untrustworthy.” Then he adds immediately, “I mean...we’re pretty untrustworthy, but I don’t want him to know that.” OK so that’s how Grace feels, and he’s going to withhold this information from his friend?

At the very end of the book there is a very tacked-on and vague description of the civilization Rocky hails from. Depicting any sort of civilizational contrast or alternative (whether better or worse) is pretty clearly not something Weir is interested in or capable of doing, lest he risk writing a more interesting novel and offending potential customers.

Before reading Hail Mary, I had no prior familiarity with Weir, except that I knew he also wrote the book that the movie The Martian was adapted from. All I remember about The Martian is Matt Damon’s character using the word “science” as a verb. I recall cringing in the theater when I heard it. Stranded on a planet without food or air he can breathe, the movie’s hero declares, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this!” Sciencing (I’m glad to see that my spellchecker still flags that) as a verb is quite obviously Weir’s modus operandi, the thing that fills him with childlike excitement. Grace wakes up on his spaceship with no memory—why? Apparently so Weir can devote the first quarter of the novel to his protagonist’s experiments with a pendulum, stopwatch, and measuring tape to figure out where he is.

I’ve selected an exemplary passage of sciencing to give a sense of how this works (or doesn’t) as literature. Late in the book, Grace figures out that he can locate Rocky’s ship in the deep dark expanses of space with some of the gizmos his ship is equipped with (you don’t really need to know what they are):

I have everything I need for the best radar ever! To heck with my built-in radar system, with its measly emitter and sensors. I have spin drives and a Petrovascope! I can throw 900 terawatts of IR light out the back of my ship and see if any of it bounces back with the Petrovascope—an instrument carefully designed to detect even the smallest amounts of that exact frequency of light!

You can see how exciting Weir finds this from all those exclamation points. Late in the third act of the novel, when Grace decontaminates the fuel tanks a second time, I was really worn down by Weir’s sciencing. That’s because, with few exceptions,2 the science in the novel isn’t particularly interesting. Whereas science fiction often takes imaginative leaps with its science, Weir’s version is more or less textbook stuff, give or take some incidental fantastic elements—incidental because Weir feels he must explain the fantastic elements, to make them sensible, to incorporate them into the type of science we learn in high school. It’s an exceedingly literal version of science. This is science teacher fiction, not science fiction. It’s the literary equivalent of Thomas Kuhn’s “normal science” (boring experimentation, as contrasted with the revolutionary science of the “paradigm shift” when the old theories are discarded and everything has to be rethought). It makes the book read like a transcript of Mythbusters.

On to the climate-action fantasy, which Weir has to insert this storyline because it’s what gets him to the crowd-pleasing climax where Grace and Rocky save the world. In this background plot, Weir gives us a politically neutered ripoff of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.3 The world is placed under the dictatorial control of a stern Norwegian administrator, which I choose to read as a fantasy desire for serious European—as opposed to ridiculous, incompetent American—international leadership. If you are paying attention to the present day results of liberal leadership in Europe (and I’m referring specifically to the rise of neofascist political parties and their now openly admitted selective support for international law), then this prescription feels underwhelming, but let’s move on.4 Grace gets plucked out of his classroom, put aboard a fighter jet, and flown to a scientific meeting taking place on an aircraft carrier. It’s very “gee whiz,” but there’s a meaningful juxtaposition of imagery here: Science, schools, and the military-industrial complex—an inversion of our upside-down world which undervalues science and underpays teachers while spending billions on war. But I don’t think that’s Weir’s intention at all. I think what he’s trying to say is this: History has given us the Nerd, and if you only let him science, he will solve all of your problems (it’s the Bill Gates outlook that every problem is a technical problem waiting to be solved). A longish speech which Weir puts in the mouth of the Norwegian on the fifty thousand years of misery preceding the Industrial Revolution reveals the poverty of Weir’s imagination. It was high school B-grade level and so dull, so lacking in any interesting historical detail, that I wondered if maybe I was missing something? Maybe I had to keep in mind that Weir’s fantasy is narrated through the mouth of an idiot, Grace, whose selective mastery of science trivia comes at the expense of all other domains of knowledge. Weir does poke fun at Grace for his social idiocy (that’s one endearing quality nerds possess, the self-deprecation), and, given Grace’s ignorance, any character attempting to communicate with him would have to simplify things. So perhaps Weir means for Grace to be an unreliable narrator, an idiot witnessing future-history? No, that would be too clever. There’s no counter-narrative voice. You never get the sense that Weir’s interests extend too far beyond science textbook trivia either.

What to make of this combination of cringe, sciencing, and totally pointless climate-action fantasy? Where does it stand in relation to science fiction literature? My first impulse was to argue that this isn’t science fiction at all, and that it should best be understood as a member of a specific genus of identify-affirming cultural products which proliferate as convenient forms of commercial exploitation: This is a nerd novel, a pretty cheap and easy-to-produce type of commercially-targeted nerdsploitation. Weir’s cringe and the sciencing function as nerd iconography, a means of branding the novel for its audience. This helps to explain why Project Hail Mary feels so un-funny, so not-for-me, and devoid of any substance for anyone who doesn’t identify with nerd subculture and comes to the novel expecting something more in line with science fiction’s literary tradition. But I have a worrying thought that I am on the wrong track and that I’m not seeing the whole picture. As I write my concluding thoughts, an alternative explanation occurs to me, and it points to something odd, scary, and possibly sinister. Here goes: Weir’s innocent, clueless optimism in sciencing doesn’t feel contemporary. There’s something eerily old-fashioned about his boyish, gee-whiz!-I’m-going-to-ride-in-a-fighter-jet-and-look-for-IR-light-with-my-Petrovascope! excitement. It seems closer to Back to the Future’s re-creation of the 1950s than our own times. I hesitate to reveal my suspicion because I know it sounds insane, but I cannot believe that a human individual in our age could have written this book, except for the fact that the author clearly has knowledge of contemporary events. I feel like I have encountered an anachronism. Perhaps Project Hail Mary is indeed science fiction literature, but a type of science fiction that the contemporary fan of Wells, Dick, Ballard, Haldeman, Gibson, etc. only knows secondhand from the genre’s historians? My suspicion is that this novel was written by some sort of unextinct holdover or freakish recapitulation of SF’s pulp era, from back when nerds held sway over the genre and science fiction was unpolluted with countercultural and radical ideas. But how could such a reversion, this thing, Andy Weir, whatever it is, possibly survive in our present climate? My effort to explain the Andy Weir phenomenon has resulted in more questions than answers. I can only offer speculation. Was he made in the lab, as a publishing industry conspiracy to cleanse SF of radical ideology? Perhaps Weir is some sort of nostalgia bot, like the Abraham Lincoln of Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You? Or maybe we are suffering from the decaying of time Dick foresaw and sought to warn us about in Ubik? Whatever Weir is, we should all be alarmed.

— Cade Jameson

Cade Jameson is an ex-community college sociology instructor. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and dabbles in writing science fiction. Follow him on Substack.

“We saw it as an opportunity, but the community saw it as a loss. And I think, in retrospect, we should have seen that that’s how they would have seen it.”

Yeah man! You think?

Look, Scott, there’s a reason a guy like Paul Vermeersch, who is quoted in the CBC story as one of the loudest of the complainants, was incensed. Not only are small presses like the one he edits at (Hamilton publisher Wolsak & Wynn) always happy with the modest boost in sales awards can provide, he’s also personally one of the most accomplished poets in the country who’s never won the thing. His odds of winning a Canadian Griffin at some point are like 1 in 9; his odds of winning the International Griffin, despite his considerable talents,2 are like 1 in 9,000. During the prizeless period Vermeersch put out his first selected poems, often a moment when judges take the opportunity to reward a body of work—on some level the guy must feel like $65,000 fell through a hole in his pocket. I would bet most of the 20 members of the poetry community who joined him at the town hall nurse similar hopes in their hearts, and even the obvious hacks among them have at least gotten to enjoy a few canapes at the annual Griffin gala (AKA “poetry prom”).

I covered the Griffins at length last year, and for those interested in catching up on the history of Scott Griffin and his Trust, and its relationship to the poetry community, that’s probably the place to start.

But for those on the go, the points can be summarized like so:

• The Griffin Trust’s material contributions to Canadian literature are fairly minor, despite the eye-catching sum the prize bestows on one poet each year.

• Griffin has nonetheless been able to purchase the reverence accorded to a patron quite cheaply for a man of his immense wealth, and effectively on spec: few directly benefit, but most pay homage either so as not to damage their own prospects or out of a genuine belief that his philanthropy is a great boon.

• Though he’s got no meaningful gift for writing, he’s boorish enough to have named a prize after himself so his name can be stuck on the covers of the country’s and the world’s most acclaimed books of English-language poetry.

• He made a substantial portion of his fortune from weapons manufacturing (specifically LAVs sold to the Saudis), and only knocked it off after critic and habitual boat-rocker took a very unpopular stand against him.

• No amount of money can elide the fact that Scott Griffin is just another rich prick.

Unlike the recent successful boycott against the radioactively Zionist Giller Prize, the grumbling over how Griffin chose to operate his prize was fairly apolitical. It really did come down to these writers fretting that without the award’s anointing of a champion each year, the already fringe position of Canadian poetry will become fringier still. (This despite the dwindling but still robust infrastructure of government arts grants, as Emma Dollery recently explored.) It’s interesting that despite not having the sort of moral lever offered by the Gillers’ complicity in genocide (and who’s even going to notice if Canadian publishers boycott a version of the prize that seldom shortlists Canadians anyway?), Griffin was still sensitive enough that an awkward Zoom call was sufficient to get him to cough up another $65,000 to make them like him again. Did Margaret Atwood finally threaten to pull a Lysistrata on him?

So let’s say this. I don’t see many of the living writers I most admire ever seeming presentable enough to win this new old prize, but I will hope someone genuinely excellent who cleans up alright like Bardia Sinaee or Brandi Bird can snag the thing. As I noted in my previous article, I don’t really begrudge any writer who accepts money from the award (or from any of the Trust’s other tendrils). I would simply request they refuse to be thankful in their heart to the foundation and instead think of the money as their take from a lawsuit settlement against a poisonous oligarch, a bank error in their favour they’ve chosen to leave shrewdly unreported. Leave that ring unkissed! The fact that a particular artist is given that money absolves Griffin of nothing—I’ve had multiple Griffin winners and short-listers tell me privately that Griffin has been personally contemptuous and even insulting to them in person, and that they sensed that not only did he not really “get” their work3 but that he seemed resentful at having to cut them cheques for it. And even were he more sophisticated, we know where his wealth came from. What a fine benefactor we’ve got.

If there was any real risk of people really speaking their mind about the man in public, he’s likely put it to rest with the restoration of the Canadian prize. But the one thing that I hope this notoriously thin-skinned man knows is that everyone around him is wearing a mask whenever they encounter him and what most of them are actually thinking would freeze his pulse. From behind my own mask, I’ll speak some of the words: Scott Griffin is a churl. Given a pen, he is as likely to write a good poem as a llama with a trowel is to reconstruct Machu Pichu. Given a good book, he is as likely to be able to read and understand it without going cross-eyed as the aforementioned llama chewing on its trowel. In nearly every picture he has the cringing, imploring stare of a man who’s just pissed himself. Despite his hoard of blood money he couldn’t get a TED Talk, so he got his hapless PR flacks to get him booked for a TEDx Talk, “a TED-like experience” which is true in the way that putting your finger in your own butt is a sex-like experience. The Africans he claims to have helped fucking hated to see his plane coming. He’s stupid and I don’t like his hair. Nobody does.

RELATED

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from some artists who've earned our respect and affection.

This week, we’re joined by Montreal multidisciplinary artist Skylar “dangertape” Aung-Thwin, who shares a short poem.

There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.

The Temptation of the Saint in Me at the Market of Fleas

At the supermarket
Hungry for things beyond my understanding
Where a spatchcocked chicken 
Looks like a fertility goddess. 
Paranoia romances me 
Into thinking I’m being sold
Not just quick-dinner but
The shrink-wrapped
Pear-shaped proportions of balance. 

I graze these aisles for inconvenience;
To face the Urges
Like the Temptation of the Saint in Me
At the Market of Fleas
Where everything is cumbersome
& ripe with the cross-contaminated meaning
Of many a hoarder’s love. 
Instant heirloom, minute-meal
It’s half a dozen in One and 6 in the Other

Crying different types of egg
Abundance screams in green-wash:
ORGANIC? FREE-RANGE?
OR FREE-RUN?
GRAIN-FED?
RESTAURANT-STYLE?
(I reach at random for CAGE-FREE)

SKYLAR ‘dangertape’ AUNG-THWIN paints w/ sound and sings w/ color and draws w/ words… She assumes you. 

“The Temptation…” was originally published in Skylar’s zine (l’un) ONE (comme) VS/AS (contre) OTHER (l’autre). Check the link to read it, and explore more of her visual and literary work.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

RELATED

Thank you.

TOTALLY UNRELATED

ALSO UNRELATED

I have a pal who is one of the most avid readers I’ve ever met—his appetite is large and expansive. He doesn’t stick his nose up at genre fiction, nor does he shy away from the heavier lifting of literary classics. He took a minimum-wage weekend job, on top of his nine-to-five, at a bookstore an hour away on the subway from his house—trudging there even through the thick of winter—for no reason other than that he loves? to be with? the books? He’ll talk literary smack for hours, lay down strong opinions on this or that, and if you’re ever at the writerly events in Montreal you probably know him. He just loves the written word: the little sicko even claims to enjoy copy-editing.

When I first met the guy, I asked him, almost automatically, if he was a writer. Why else would someone be so obsessively bookish if he didn’t harbor ambitions to write one of his own? To my surprise, the answer was a pretty resounding no. As it turns out, he really hates writing.

There is something beautifully humble in the idea of loving a thing without needing to make yourself central to it, of being passionately devoted to an artform that you don’t necessarily want to take part in creating. And I mean love in the holistic sense, which undoubtedly contains a healthy streak of toughness, of criticism.

I can’t help but wonder: is this a dying practice? Purely anecdotally, I think yes. Throw a stone in Montreal and you’ll hit four sculptors, three bedroom DJs, two little poets, and a partridge in a pear tree. But people like my friend are rarer…or at least I haven’t met many of them.

This is telling, I think, of a larger cultural phenomenon that I’ll attempt to decipher below. Namely, that we seem to treat the desire to make art as inherently more valuable than the desire to receive it. Mix that with the “everyone’s a winner” attitude of a democratized art scene and you get too many artists, not enough engaged audiences, and a compounding pile of work that nobody asked for and nobody can get through.1

Unsung heroes

I hate to say it, but all roads seem to lead back to “This town ain’t big enough for 34 lit mags.”

The article asked what I consider to be a very good question—one about the Montreal literary scene, to be sure, but also one that extends far beyond it. If there is so much anglo literary content in this city, and I’m not reading it, and apparently my friend isn’t either, and judging by his essay neither is Sire (at least not, by any means, all of it), then who the hell is?

As Sire deftly noted, literary magazines often seem to exist more for writers than for readers: “it has always been the strangled purple hard-on of writers for seeing their own names in print that keeps the printers printing.” Suddenly I was all a-flurry about this. Seriously—who are we writing for? Can we really be doing all of this just to see our own bylines flickering briefly on a webpage (in print, if you’re lucky!)?

’s response to the 34 lit mags article actually touched on the subject of the audience more directly, albeit briefly. She disagreed with the idea that too many literary mags are the problem, and instead shifted the onus onto the readers of Montreal’s anglo literary scene. We should be reading more, and demanding excellence from our mags, she wrote.2

I don’t want to get into the weeds of an old discussion, but I bring it up mostly to thank Darby for putting me on to a Fran Lebowitz interview that has been rattling around in my head ever since. In it, Lebowitz notes that while much has been said about how the AIDS epidemic decimated a generation of artists, less attention has been paid to the fact that it also wiped out a generation of extraordinarily discerning audience members—the connoisseurs, obsessives, and deeply engaged viewers who formed an essential part of the cultural ecosystem. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship,” she says, “is as important to the culture as artists.”

In other words, the relationship between artist and audience is a feedback loop. Artists need audiences— healthy, discerning, careful, cutting, active audiences are the unsung heroes of the artworld.3

Romancing the looky-loos

In my reckoning, being a discerning audience member is a critical and active task not that dissimilar from figuring out what it means to be a good artist—in other words it’s a very philosophical question that involves a lot of thinking about the meaning of things/life/art and the rules that you set out in order to get at said meaning.4

Art critic David Hickey, in his essay “Romancing the Looky-loos,” identifies two different types of audience members: participants and spectators, or what he refers to as “looky-loos.” The latter he degrades as “nonparticipants, people who did not live the life—people with no real passion for what was going on.” Basically, looky-loos are people who watch/read/consume because their object of consumption has been verified as important, often via some kind of institutional nodding.

The essay opens on an interview with Waylon Jennings, who explains that he began his musical career by playing for people in his community:

“They seek you out in little clubs because they understand what you’re doing, so you feel like you’re doing it for them [...] My real people, they get jealous because their girlfriend thinks I’m cute and try to kick my butt. They get envious because singing pays better than roofing and try to kick my butt. But, basically, they understand that I do this job for them.”

He goes on to talk about how, when he started getting really famous, his shows filled up with looky-loos instead. “You’re playing for people who want to be like you, and you can’t trust these people. Because to them, whatever you do, that’s you, and that’s cool [...] You don’t know who you are anymore, because it was the people in those little clubs that gave you that understanding in the first place.”

I love this interview because it gets at two things I deeply believe in. The first is a kind of existential question about what art is for—an essential question for any discerning audience member to ask themself.

In my view,5 all forms of art are a kind of metabolization and reflection of human experience. Creating is an act of honesty, of specificity, of connection to the world and to other people. When I read a book/listen to music/watch a movie, I find myself asking: does this feel like a genuine reflection of an experience? Does it capture a mood, a story, or a character in a way that contains real textures of life?6

Sometimes the experience is one of identification: that feeling of, ohhh, that poem is the perfect distillation of the specific flavor of loneliness I’ve felt walking down St. Laurent at three in the morning on a Friday night, the only sober person for miles. Other times it’s listening to Honky Tonk Heroes and getting the distinct sense that Jennings put his honest heart into the music-making, and I can, through listening, catch a glimpse of the emotional textures of being a Texan-born free American man living and loving around the South in the ‘70s. In both instances there is a quality of specificity and honesty, difficult to describe but impossible (when you have the hang of it) to miss, that becomes paradoxically universal. I can identify with the feelings in Jennings’ music even though I don’t know the first thing about being a Texan-born free American man living and loving around the South in the ‘70s.

Which leads to the second thing. Hickey writes that what separates the men from the boys, the participants from the looky-loos, is that the latter seems to place the artist on a kind of pedestal of talent from which he can do no wrong. This is not real love. Jennings on the subject:

“They already hate me a little, just because I’m me and they’re them. That’s why they always go on about how talented you are. Because they hate you. Because if they had this talent, they would be you. The fact that you’ve worked like a dog, lived like a horse thief, and broke your mama’s heart to do whatever you do, that don’t mean diddly-squat. To them, it’s talent. Supposedly, you got it, and, supposedly, they don’t.”

In order for a piece of art to really have that specificity and authenticity I am talking about, it needs an audience who understands the scene and who calls an artist out on his bullshit—one who is invested, deeply, in the health of the artform itself. The audience should be on equal footing with the artist. You could even say that the artist works for the audience.

With that formulation in mind, it figures that, as Lebowitz puts it, “the culture should be made by a natural aristocracy of talent. It doesn’t have to do with what race you are, or what country you’re from, or what religion… it should have to do with “how good are you.” She also says that we have “too much democracy in culture and not enough in society.”

With which I wholly agree: for sure everyone should have the right to water/shelter/medical attention etc. But why should everyone expect to publish a book? And why should everyone want to?

Choosing to be an artist is, or should be, a profoundly difficult path. It’s innately lonely: necessarily, you separate yourself from the warm, safe embrace of being one amongst many, and, by extension, put yourself at the mercy of the very group you’ve just separated from. Part of the job description is willfully choosing to become incredibly vulnerable to a sea of strangers, exposing your guts (your work) to them, and asking them whether they connect, why, why not, and what’s pretty or ugly or stupid about it all. Being a writer/artist who is offended by or afraid of honest feedback (in all its forms, whether that be savagely critical, glowing, or everything in between), is like being a doctor who doesn’t want to see blood. You signed up for this, honey!

In that sense, creating work for the public is less glamorous than it is absolutely fucking terrifying—the kind of hard work that requires effort, bravery, and a very thick skin. The power lies in numbers, the power lies with the audience, and it’s a totally valid, essential place to be.

You can still love an artform, be seriously involved in an artform, be actively shaping an artform, without having your name pasted on it. But this kind of participation comes with its own set of responsibilities and reciprocal honesty. It involves an active pointing of attention, supporting things that you believe in and protesting against things you don’t. Discerning audiences should be talking to each other, forming the metrics of their own taste, voicing strong and sometimes impolite opinions, and demanding from their artists—with readership, attendance, vocalized thoughts—what they have, by being artists, promised to give: an honest investigation of what it means to be alive.

Grant bait, ooh ha ha

I’m originally from Cape Town, South Africa, and I’ve lived in a few other cities around the world. Nowhere but Montreal have I encountered the phenomenon of people almost reflexively asking, at parties, whether you “have a practice.” Back home, while we have no shortage of other pressing problems, too many artists and too much mediocre art is certainly not one of them. I suspect there is a particular soup brewing in Montreal’s anglo literary scene that has led to a structural deprioritization of the audience and an unusual amount of written material.

It’s no secret that Montreal’s cheap rents and bohemian reputation have long acted as a magnet for creative and layabout types. According to Statistics Canada, nearly half of Quebec’s English-speaking population was born outside the province. I would venture to say that a significant proportion of these anglophones are assorted cultural drifters who have washed up here to write a novel, make a film, or figure themselves out.7

Further, with its layered provincial, municipal, and federal funding opportunities—not to mention organizations specifically dedicated to English-language artists—Montreal offers one of the densest public arts funding ecosystems in North America. In other words, it has a remarkable ability to attract people who arrive already primed to produce culture.

But maybe that is part of the problem. Perhaps, in Montreal, arts funding has quietly replaced the audience as the primary recipient—and arbiter—of art.

Practically speaking, this makes sense. If you would like to survive as a writer or small publication in this town, there’s a much higher chance of you getting your daily bread from government grants than from a purchasing public. So the material incentive to appeal to your audience is practically zero. In fact, the CCA offers a funding stream, Explore and Create, that is specifically for artists who are just starting out on a project. I personally know at least two people who have received grants for book projects that they never even ended up publishing. You can literally get money from the government for a book that will stay beneath your bed.

Also, while the CCA includes in their principles a note about an “arms-length” relationship to the government, to thwart the possibility of politics getting in the way of free-thinking, the projects are judged by a miscellaneous group of “peer” assessors, who might be anyone, from an emerging artist in Winnipeg to a millionaire collector in Vancouver—alongside, of course, several ambiguously titled bureaucrats. These are certainly not the dedicated participants that Hickey speaks of.

I’m aware that an obvious counter-part to this grant system is the free-market based style of the American arts scene, which comes with massive caveats like the fact that publications end up having to sell out to private funders for advertising, and Lord knows that can’t be much better than the Canadian government. That said, as Hickey once pointed out in an interview with C-Magazine circa 2013, the lack of easy access to funding does nurture a kind of zeal/competitive nature in artists that are determined to make work no matter what. He says, about a Canadian student of his,

“...all she has to do is blink and they give her money, as they should. Leah’s magic, but I think you all have it too easy. I’m friends with Douglas Coupland. People feed him with little spoons because he’s so valuable to ‘Canadian Culture,’ in which I’ve sensed a certain lack of ferocity.” (Emphasis my own)

According to this comparative study on arts funding around the world by the UK government, Germany and France actually spend more than Canada on their publicly funded art each year, and both are generally regarded as countries with robust artistic and cultural production. Perhaps this is just a folly of perspective (I bear witness to so much more of the cultural production in the place that I live, but it’s only the really good stuff that makes it across the pond), but maybe there is also an argument to be made for more funding? Under such a model, artists might no longer be chained to a scarcity mindset—no longer scraping the barrel, shuffling and begging, for limited supplies—and might feel freer to use other metrics to determine success, like making work that genuinely speaks to the audience, taking real artistic risks, or pursuing projects that would otherwise be difficult to justify.8

Regardless, what I’m saying about Montreal’s relationship to funding still stands: somewhere along the way, the tie between artist and audience, that necessary feedback loop, has been severed. Instead of creating for a discerning audience, artists end up forming their projects into ideas that fit the tastes of the funding body. It’s more likely that an artist or writer who knows how to do the government-speak of grant writing gets their shit funded. I’ve even heard the neat slang “grant-bait” thrown around for work that checks all the application boxes or participates in sanitizing a digestible image of Canadian culture.

BONUS: If it is or does [blank], it juuust might be grant bait!

• “Reveals” an already obvious structural inequality

• Has an artist statement longer than the actual work (all biographical data, no form or content)

• Is all content no form (squarely in the tell-don’t-show category)

• Contains one or many of following words/phrases: reimagining, queering, intervention, holding space, embodied, liminal, cultural memory, tenderness/care, hybridity, fraught, interrogates

• Contains at least one mention of trans-(insert any suffix, e.g: generational, disciplinary, continental, sectional etc.), or inter-(insert any suffix.)

• Concerns someone’s immigrant grandma and her cooking

• Meditates on the horrors of climate change

• Offers speculative socially conscious uses for AI / other Big Tech

I quote Lebowitz again, talking specifically about the New York ballet after its most discerning audience members were killed off in the ‘80s, but that I think we can apply with confidence here: “Everything has to be more blatant, more on the nose, broader, because obviously they’re [the non-connoisseurs] are not going to pick up little subtleties [...] it’s all dumbed down, dumbed down, dumbed down, all the way down.” In Hickey’s reckoning, we’re all becoming involuntary looky-loos because a lot of the loudest work, the work with money behind it, has not been formed by a discerning audience but by an institutionalized process.

Who wants to be a connoisseur of work that feels unspecific and dumbed down? It’s hard to be a passionately caring audience member when you feel you are being patronized. And so the pedestal is set up, with the artist, as “thinker,” holding court above, and the audience watching dumbly from below, eyes glazed over, force-fed work that feels broad, dull, and disconnected from the experiences of the people receiving it. Under these circumstances, it’s natural that nearly everyone would rather be atop the pedestal, would rather be an artist.

The terror of not being perceived

There are also tech advances and the internet to think about. The fact that every one of us has at our disposal the means to create and disperse whatever art we want to (if we try), paired with the kind of widespread main-character / narcissistic syndrome that social media has seemingly created—of course we’re doomed to think all of our life stories belong in a book. I mean, personally, every day of my life is a freaking movie.

And on that note, I’ll leave you with one local Montreal thought. A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me this article, an interview with the founders of the Rodaisun poetry journal that has been popping off at the moment. It’s unclear whether this was the fault of the interviewer, or the Rodaisun ladies themselves, but both my friend and I were deeply annoyed that everything in said interview was posited as a sort of radical move. Writing poetry about eating a sandwich, publishing only your own writing, “Moleskineering”—all supposedly very edgy, very avant-garde.

It brought to mind a quote I saw at a David Wajnarowicz (incidentally one of the creative kings that we tragically lost to the AIDS epidemic) retrospective at the Whitney all the way back in 2018. I believe it was pulled from his memoir, Close to Knives, and went something like this: “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions.”

At the time I read this, during the wee stages of my twenties, the quote felt extremely moving—yes! Bring your bedrooms into the museum, I thought, viva la revolution. Except now I’m thinking about how Wojnarowicz wrote it way before the onslaught of Twitter, of Instagram. He wrote it as a gay man from the ostracized position of a much more conservative America. The truth is, our relationship to privacy has profoundly shifted in the last 10-20 years. Everybody is posting pics of their bedrooms on their feeds, and Substack is riddled with diary excerpts.

Perhaps we need a new definition of private. Or perhaps it’s keeping private things private, now, that’s a radical thing to do. In the age of the influencer, the celebrity politician, the relentless push to make every thought, feeling, experience into a form of content, we seem to have forgotten that non-performative means of contribution, though invisible to the public eye, are completely essential, fulfilling, and honorable ways of being. Unfortunately, it now takes strength and bravery to withstand the contemporary terror of not being widely perceived.

We live in a world where we don’t need any more content. More is not more! There’s too much! What we need are readers, viewers, listeners, participants. People willing to devote sustained attention and feedback to something outside of themselves. To put a simple bow on all these rambling words: it’s the health of the audience that we ought to be worrying about—a healthy audience is a healthy art world.

Emma Dollery is a chill guy, pool shark, fan of film and literature. Follow her on IG @reasonablechiller.

MORE ON THE MONTREAL MAGAZINE GLUT

Orbital
Fiction by Samantha Harvey
Jonathan Cape, 2023

Reviewed by DJ Sandler

In 2024, upon winning the Booker Prize for her book Orbital, Samantha Harvey dedicated her award to “all those who speak for the Earth and not against it; all those who fight for the Earth and not against it.” Among the ranks of people who believed they were fighting for the Earth and not against it we might include Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, Elon Musk, Vladimir Lenin, and Jesus Christ. This sort of language, which affects an aesthetic of progressive politics but lacks its substance, is not confined to Harvey’s speeches: it is also an essential component of Orbital, which details 24 hours in the lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station and is riddled with platitudes about our collective humanity. The book has received near-universal acclaim: Alexandra Harris of The Guardian writes: “Russian, Japanese, American, British, Italian: [these astronauts] offer themselves as emblems of human cooperation,” and James Wood of The New Yorker describes Samantha Harvey as “writing like a kind of Melville of the skies.” Personally, I think that the best encapsulation of Harvey’s prose is a quote from Orbital itself. In a reverie about Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, Harvey writes, “Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image. Anton has never really understood that claim…in truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen.”

In Orbital, Harvey sets out to render all of humanity from the Philippines to Cape Town to the Irish countryside—to restate the clichéd premise that all of humankind is a family, that we’re not so different after all. But, in practice, Harvey leaves out the very humans she seeks to portray: though her writing thrives when she describes landscapes, it falls flat whenever she considers her characters. These shortcomings largely stem from Harvey’s poetry-prose stylings, which serve to make her protagonists’ realities abstract. She continually schematizes the astronauts’ thought processes and describes their relationships with each other and the Earth without any physical grounding. She seems to delight in making language intangible, in using abstract similes and metaphors, and generalizing concepts like war and climate change to the point of vacuousness. Harvey is far from patient zero of the poetry-prose epidemic: her contemporaries (Kaveh Akbar, Ocean Vuong) are also attracted to vague similes and clichés, and also use these devices to Weekend at Bernies their inert books to life. But while Akbar and (even more so) Vuong have their detractors, Orbital has been met with universal praise. One has to wonder why at a time when the literary world was turning on poor Ocean, Harvey’s book was lauded as the single best English-language novel of 2024.

It is a shame that so few critiques have been made of Harvey’s writing, for it is rife with clichés and vagueries—empty language used to cover for its lack of true humanism. Take, for example, Harvey’s fixation on the novel premise that the Earth is, if you really think about it, a bit like the mother of humanity:

…the earth [sic] is a mother waiting for her children to return…

They look down and they understand why it is called Mother Earth.

…[her] only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year.

Maybe there’s another parent planet—earth [sic] was our mother and Mars, or somewhere will be our father.

Repetition can be an effective literary tool, but what Harvey chooses to repeat is arbitrary and insubstantial, and she does little to augment, complicate, or reconsider those clichés she is so ready to reiterate ad nauseum. This device reveals nothing about the astronauts and nothing about the Earth; rather, it serves as a neon sign reading Theme Here, a sign which we markedly do not need in a book whose plot is essentially: six astronauts look at the Earth. Instead of fleshing out her characters and their relationships, Harvey leans heavily on thematic and “poetic” language which sounds nice but is essentially devoid of meaning. Harvey doesn’t always pull her metaphors and similes out of a phrasebook, though. From her mind we get such gems as, “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream of it stalking through their quarters,” an instant cliché that, for some reason, the author still finds it necessary to explain after the fact. (What then, we might ask, is the point of a simile?) Or, “a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child”, which brings to mind Shakespeare’s famous quote: “Shall I compare thee to a day, because a day is beautiful because it is like a summer’s day?”

All this said, the presence of inane similes and repeated clichés isn’t disqualifying on its own—rather, it is Orbital’s superficial pretense of humanism and lack of depth which raises my hackles. Orbital is rooted in an aesthetic of meaning but says nothing of substance. Throughout, Harvey writes about her characters with dripping sentimentality to obscure their obvious one-dimensionality. An example of the cloying yet deeply impersonal conversations which take place aboard the ISS:

Do you know what I’ll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don’t need, that’s what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf. A rug.

Roman laughs. Not alcohol or sex or – just a rug.

I didn’t say what I’d do on the rug.

True, Anton says. You did not, and don’t please.

What would you do? Nell asks.

Chie winks. Yes, Pietro, what would you do?

Lie there, Pietro says. And dream of space.

I’ll give Harvey credit here: there is a romance to the idea of a character returning from space only to lie on the rug, continuing to dream of his celestial journey. This idea becomes markedly less romantic, however, when “space” is all there is to him—given how little interiority Harvey gives Pietro, it would be surprising if he did anything other than dream of space. Taking a cue from the large number of lists in Orbital, I’ve compiled what the reader knows about Pietro by the end of the novel:

• He loves space

• He has a daughter

• He went to the Philippines for his honeymoon

• He is a nice man1

Lists play a surprisingly large and unsurprisingly arbitrary role in Orbital. Just as “niceness” and “the Philippines” serve to characterize Pietro, so too does “list making” serve as characterization for the Japanese astronaut, Chie (some examples of Chie’s lists: Reassuring Things, Surprising Things, Maddening Things, etc.). Even the use of “thing” here demonstrates Harvey’s refusal to deal with the physical world, and the undefined and non-committal nature of the book as a whole. Harvey describes Orbital as a space pastoral—indeed, every beautiful passage in the book is either a depiction of Earth from above or a description of the mundane activities which the astronauts and cosmonauts partake in aboard the ISS. But even these moments are marred by empty questions and Harvey’s indecisive writing style. For instance, this description of a spacewalk Nell, the Irish astronaut, goes on:

She was outside for hours – almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter-pick of debris, plucking from space a few of these tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.

Putting aside the vagueness of “whatever you are tasked to install or repair” here, Harvey demonstrates her ability as a choreographer. She puts Nell in a specific location which is visually comprehensive and brings the reader in beside her. Then, pulling the rug out from under the reader, she retroactively tacks a moral onto Nell’s spacewalk, though not a definitive one: the amount of times Harvey writes “maybe” or “perhaps” makes perfectly clear how little conviction she has in her own aphorisms.

In addition, the second person (as seen above) is used as a synecdoche throughout Orbital, though not in the way that I believe Harvey intends. Harvey’s intent in using the second person is evident in the context of Orbital’s constant moralizing—the “you” serves to put the reader in the shoes of these astronauts, to show that we aren’t so different after all. But the second person also offloads the work of creating characters onto the reader, insisting that we backfill these empty shells of people with our own hopes and dreams. Instead of showing that we are all similar, the second person shows how easy it is for us to pin our personal desires onto empty vessels—how easy it is to write on a blank page.

Every one of Orbital’s astronauts is a series of signifiers and shortcuts. Early on, Harvey writes,

They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging. That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship. Whatever they were before they came here, whatever their differences in training or background, in motive or character, whatever country they hail from and however their nations clash, they are equalized here by the delicate might of their spaceship. They are a choreographing of movements and functions of the ship’s body as it enacts its perfect choreography of the planet. Anton – quiet, and dry in his humour, sentimental, crying openly at films, at scenes outside the window – Anton the spaceship’s heart. Pietro its mind, Roman (the current commander, dextrous and capable, able to fix anything, control the robotic arm with millimetre precision, wire the most complex circuit board) its hands, Shaun its soul (Shaun there to convince them all that they have souls), Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience, Nell (with her eight-litre diving lungs) its breath.

This is a perfect example of Harvey’s inability to do more than sketch her characters. She distills her protagonists into a series of attributes, a list of adjectives, but only rarely is she willing to consider their actions (and even then, only to reinforce those attributes she has already given them). Harvey’s claim that space collapses these characters into one being is ineffective as she has provided very little differentiation to collapse. It’s fitting, too, that in this paragraph each character is described as a body part, for none of them are full-fledged human beings. Each astronaut stands in for their function, both in the spaceship, and in the text.

Harvey’s heart is clearly in the right place in critiquing the inanity of war, the malignity of borders, the importance of coming together despite differences of nationality, religion, ability. But in having these astronauts stand in for their countries in a project of universalism, the astronauts and cosmonauts become nothing but their nationalities. Instead of transcending borders, Orbital reinforces them, so much so that in reviewing the book, it is necessary, for lack of other notable characteristics, to distinguish the astronauts by their home countries.

While I think that Orbital is undeserving of critical acclaim, the book’s vague language and humanist aesthetic make it more than just a mediocre book (albeit, one which describes the Earth beautifully). Rather, Orbital serves as a vehicle for expressing a Western centrist agenda— the one espoused by US Liberals, the current UK Labour party, and the Renaissance party of France among others. Harvey’s characters are the perfect subjects for these centrist ideologies—they are empty, easy to cast in over-simplified narratives about race and nationality while ignoring the complicated realities of colonialism and poverty. Harvey repeats over and over the liberal party line: all human beings are the same and what is good for one is good for all. In Orbital conflict exists without a cause: it is no different than the hurricane which the astronauts watch passing over the Philippines. Harvey’s greatest political enemy is the concept of evil, and her politics are vague, moralistic, and unimpeachable (war is bad, racism is bad, climate change is bad, we are all a family).

In this way, Orbital and its cohort mimic the self-congratulatory nature of center-left parties, allowing its reader to feel a sense of moral superiority while believing only in vagueries. This sort of liberalism is notably non-humanist, as it turns political struggles into internal ones; it turns the consideration of others into a consideration of one’s own virtue. And reading books like Orbital makes liberals out of us all. Harvey evinces a worldview where anyone can cast themselves as the hero. Take for example, the quote above which describes each astronaut as a part of a body. The issues with this quote don’t end with its ineffectiveness—Harvey is essentially restating a political vision created by Mussolini. Fascist corporatism viewed different corporate groups as part of a body which worked together to forward the interests of the tyrannical state. The fact that Harvey’s writing can affect an aesthetic of humanism, while staying palatable to those who maintain the most brutal political ideology there ever has been is further proof of the emptiness of her language.

This strategy runs parallel to the center-left rhetoric so popular in the West now. Liberal parties increasingly rely on vague, moralistic language to obscure their hypocrisy. Each of these groups claims to be their country’s peace party while supplying aid to genocidal regimes and committing massacres abroad (Gaza, Yemen, place a pin anywhere in the Middle East and you’ll undoubtedly hit the site of a bomb dropped by a Western liberal powers). How do they do this? These parties abstract the idea of “war” to the point of meaninglessness, where one can be against the “war” that Hamas is waging against the Israelis while supporting the “defense” of Israel against Hamas. They can cry “racism” whenever it’s convenient and simultaneously take money from corporations like Amazon, Uber, and Google whose racist practices are well-documented. These abstractions are so ubiquitous it’s no surprise we find them in our literature and that books like Orbital are propped up by our mainstream literary institutions as timely and humanistic. This is not to say that Samantha Harvey is attempting to justify Western evils—I have no doubt that she is well intentioned, no doubt that she believes in the power of peace, the power of cultural exchange. But because Harvey espouses these ideals in a way so abstract that nobody’s actions could possibly be challenged, all her moralizing is arbitrary. Harvey lives in a world in which we are all subjects, she writes, “And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.” And this is the whole problem with Orbital. What Harvey needs to understand is that in the real-world human beings can be actors; that when we talk about exploitation, climate change, and war, these are not instances of humanity angstily or accidentally shooting itself in the foot, rather these are imperialist decisions made for monetary gain. With Orbital, Harvey flattens humanity to the point of exculpating those most responsible for our current situation and, in doing so, overlooks the fact that we do not all suffer equally for the injustices of the few.

—DJ Sandler

DJ Sandler is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is currently working on his first novel. Follow him on Substack.

As always, if we’re missing something, or you want your event included, please message @discordia.review on Instagram to propose an inclusion. Doing so in advance if you already know what’s up next month is even better.

1 JUNE (MON)

MOMENTS & MIRACLES
What: Apparently aligned with the long running Lawnchair Soirée reading series, this is a poetry/music open mic taking place amid an ongoing photography and line-drawing exhibition.
Where: Galerie Espace (4840 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 7pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

2 JUNE (TUES)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring poet and visual artist Ev Ricky (who should be familiar to long time Discordia readers) and writer M. Gnanasihamany.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Ev Ricky and M. Gnanasihamany.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

ROLLIE PEMBERTON: WAYS OF LISTENING LAUNCH
What: Pemberton (AKA Albertan rapper Cadence Weapon) drops by Montreal to launch his new book on “building a deeper relationship with music in the streaming era.”
Where: Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Rollie Pemberton, in conversation with Peggy Hogan.
How much: Free. (Link)

4 JUNE (THURS)

LISA RICHTER: SUBLUNARY LAUNCH
What: The suspects don’t get much more usual than the trio of extremely busy local poets backing up visiting Toronto writer Lisa Richter, launching her third collection.
Where: Librarie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7pm.
Who: Lisa Richter, Jessica Bebenek, Misha Solomon, and Gillian Sze. Hosted by James Hawes.
How much: Free. (Link)

5 JUNE (FRI)

BELLITRIST
What: This is… a reading series that takes place in a Brazilian jiujitsu studio? I’m imagining a poetry version of Man on the Mat, which sounds profoundly satisfying actually. Anyway, we like kurichka of course, some well-known names here. Pity about the 2pm call time though.
Where: Carlson Gracie Montreal (275 Rue Sherbrooke O).
When: 2pm.
Who: Jordan Abel, Gail Scott, Clint Burnham, kurichka.
How Much: Free, comes with complimentary Gatorade. (Link)

THE OPEN BOOK MIC
What: A new one to me, though it seems they’ve been running this weekly show at Café Eevee for a while now. It’s not a lit specific open mic (music and comedy are also permitted) so I’m not going to repeat this listing four times here, but know that it repeats every Friday till the stars grow cold.
Where: Café Eevee (1251 Rue St-Zotique E).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

6 JUNE (SAT)

SLAMPROVISE THIS! SLAM POETRY MEETS IMPROV COMEDY
What: It is difficult to imagine a less appealing combination than this. Le Basement should be sealed in a concrete sarcophagus like Chernobyl. (Before or during the event, I don’t care.)
Where: La Basement (3716 rue Notre-Dame O.)
When: 7:30pm doors, 8pm show.
Who: “Dave,” “Christian,” “Dzuy,” “Katia,” and “Charity.”
How Much: $12, or $5 for QWF members, the lucky dogs. (Link)

7 JUNE (SUN)

META MOOD: IN THE MOOD x METATRON PRESS
What: Some of the usual Metatron Press suspects link up with Toronto-based movie writing mag In The Mood to help launch Kawai Shen’s new book. Seems to be happening in the midst of one of Parquette’s 24hr raves, so this is presumably part of the chillout section. Also a fundraiser for Mouvement Transfeministe.
Where: Parquette (1345 Rue de Bellechasse).
When: 2 to 5pm.
Who: Kawai Shen, Sennah Yee, Kate Brooks, Alex Manley, Katie Lo Innes, Marcela Huerta, Gabrielle Marceau, Ryan Akler-Bishop, and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch.
How much: $17.31 (Link)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—millions of believers around the globe are rejoicing now that the theme (Speculation) has finally been revealed. (Computer, play “Building a Mystery” by Sarah McLachlan.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Kate Nugent and Brain Chatter.
How Much: Free. (Link)

9 JUNE (TUES)

SKYLAR AUNG-THWIN: IN THIS SIGN LAUNCH
What: Skylar, AKA dangertape, launches a book based on her study of Irish typography. One of the city’s most distinctive young visual artists (and, depending on when you read this, either about to be or just became our latest Fellow Traveller), this one should be worth a look.
Where: Quai des brumes.
When: 5 to 7pm.
Who: Skylar Aung-Thwin, with music by Bryan Li & co.
How much: Free. (No post, but here’s their IG)

DANIEL ALLEN COX: I FELT THE END BEFORE IT CAME LAUNCH
What: Montrealer Cox launches his “memoirs of a queer ex-Jehovah’s Witness.” Or relaunches it, really: the hardcover came out in 2023, so this is an event in support of the paperback edition.
Where: Librarie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7pm.
Who: David Allen Cox, Tamara Jong, Ellen Orme Adams. Hosted by James Hawes.
How much: Free. (Link)

10 JUNE (WEDS)

ALECSANDRA KAKON: THIS IS WHY I NEED YOU LAUNCH
What: Concordia/Dawson prof launches her new novel. Argo’s fairly snug, so come early if coming.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Alecsandra Kakon.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

11 JUNE (THURS)

CHIMERA OPEN MIC
What: Another mic that’s been going on for some time now that I’ve never gotten on the list before (yeah yeah fuck me), this bilingual night operates out of NDG’s Librairie Phoenix.
Where: Librairie Phoenix (5928 rue Sherbrooke O).
When: Signups open at 6, show is from 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

12 JUNE (FRI)

TWO READERS (& MUSIC?)
What: Unclear whether the yolk mag-affiliated apartment reading series has dropped the & Music from this month’s agenda, but in any case the first act announced for this month is American author Jen Beagin (Big Swiss). Beagin’s other Montreal engagement (see next entry) is already sold out, so if you’ve a yearning to see her move quick.
Where: Address provided upon RSVP.
When: 7pm.
Who: Jen Beagin.
How Much: Free. Looks like they’ve set up a somewhat complicated arrangement for RSVPs—fill out the Google form on this site and you’ll get an email when signups are open.

13 JUNE (SAT)

AN EVENING WITH JEN BEAGIN
What: The aforementioned American author drops by LSH for a talk.
Where: Librairie St-Henri Bookstore (4622 rue Notre-Dame Ouest).
When: 7pm.
Who: Jen Beagin.
How Much: Free, RSVP recommended. (Link) SOLD OUT!

15 JUNE (MON)

KEVIN JAGERNAUTH: THE LONGEST DEATH LAUNCH
What: Launching a new noir-inflected novel upstairs at Sparrow (I didn’t even know Sparrow had an upstairs), reading + chat type thing.
Where: Sparrow (5322 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 6 to 8pm.
Who: Kevin Jagernauth, in conversation with John Casey.
How much: Free. (Link)

RODAISUN PRESENTS: MEASURE VOL. 2 LAUNCH
What: “Jazz poetry from 25 writers,” this event launches the second volume of a collective project made up of writing from participants in the occasional Writer’s Block series, in which audience members are invited to free write while various jazz and electronic musicians provide ambient tunes. The Rodaisun trio will be hosting, and the show will be followed by DJ sets till close.
Where: Sparrow (5322 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 7pm to 3am.
Who: A whole fuckload of people, some DJ business.
How much: $6, or $15 with issue. (Link)

17 JUNE (WEDS)

BILL GASTON: SPYING ON AMERICA LAUNCH
What: Veteran writer (and, per his bio, Vietnam draft dodger!) Bill Gaston launches his new travelogue memoir. He’ll be joined by his son Vaughn.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Bill Gaston, with Vaughn Gaston.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

19 JUNE (FRI)

BOOK BAZAAR / FUNDRAISER
What: Not officially announced yet, but word is the small bookstore co-op L’Euguélionne is doing an instore fundraiser on the 19th and 20th—deep discounts (up to 70%) on selected stock, plus a mini-thrift sort of situation.
Where: L’Euguélionne (1426 Rue Beaudry).
When: 10:30am to 6:30pm, June 19 and 20.
Who: The staffers I guess?
How much: Free. (Link TK, keep an eye on their socials)

20 JUNE (SAT)

FOIRE DES LIVRES DE GAUCHE
What: Mostly franco left wing books popup, but I see some more anglo reps on the exhibitor list, so on the list it goes.
Where: La Courtepointe (220 rue Villeray).
When: No time listed, but presumably during the day?
Who: Various exhibitors.
How Much: Free. (Link)

ANTIDOTE
What: Stub entry here—I’m told this is a “big” poetry reading event, but in what respect it is “big” I don’t yet know as no details have been released. Await with baited breath further reports on this Patagonian moment for literature to come.
Where: Librairie Phoenix (5928 rue Sherbrooke O).
When: TBD
Who: TBD
How Much: TBD

21 JUNE (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—as with the first one this month, no theme or guests have been announced at press time. (Computer, play “Finding Out True Love is Blind” by Louis XIV.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus I dunno some features probably.
How Much: Free. (Link TK)

And looking ahead to July…

We’ll get there when we get there.