Ok so Hilde has suggested to me that at least someone is indeed running that shit back. But are they writing a blog post???

I still think it’s worth wading into this one, because I had actually been planning to write something about the Tolentino “““alleged””” human trafficking for years, not only because the allegations are fucking insane, but also because the means through which Tolentino managed to evade the situation were also insane. So we’re doing this casual blog style, because I’ve gotta type this up before I’m supposed to leave to see my friends in like an hour or two.

Trying to read literally any take about the latest Tolentino controversy makes my eyes start to involuntarily shut. She apparently said something about how she shoplifts from Whole Foods and how “that’s praxisssss” or sth. idk. People started talking about how she’s privileged because she’s a rich woman who is shoplifting from Whole Foods and that’s… idk I mean Winona Ryder was rich and shoplifted and she was cool as fuck for it in my book. But idk. I was an avid shoplifter for years (DON’T CANCEL ME!!!!! I WILL COME TO YOUR FUCKING HOUSE AND KILL YOUR WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY!!!!!!!!) although I wouldn’t call it meaningfully “anti-capitalist” or whatever Tolentino said it was. It all sort of sounds to me like… I don’t want to use the phrase “nothing burger”… a nebulous hotdog.

But then my eyes run over excerpts like:

There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action

And I just think SHUT THE FUCK UP HOLY FUCK SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP and frankly if you have ever gone on air and said “getting ice coffee for yourself in a plastic cup is a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action” then I’m sorry but you deserve it when people come to burn your house down. But also the fact that Jia Tolentino has this childish all-or-nothing categorization scheme where your plastic cup is actually a pawn in a Manichean war over your immortal soul makes a lot of sense, because it allows her to excuse much worse behaviour. Hey! Everyone drinks out of a plastic bottle or cup now and then! That is a PROFOUNDLY SELFISH, IMMORAL, AND COLLECTIVELY DESTRUCTIVE ACTION! And therefore everyone is morally reprehensible, ergo it’s fine when I… oh I don’t know… do horrible sell-out SponCon for AirBnb,1 a company that is directly and actively making it harder for people with less money than Tolentino to afford to live.

It even makes it easier to, for instance, excuse the fact that your parents are human traffickers. Hey remember that one??? from earlier?????

In 2004, Jia’s parents got caught doing something very naughty:

Federal authorities say they have uncovered a scheme to lure Filipino teachers to the United States with false promises of jobs in Texas school districts, charging five people with conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and fraud.

Two former West Texas public school administrators and an elementary school principal also face charges that they sponsored work visas for dozens of the teachers in exchange for free trips to Asia.

The Friday indictment accuses Florita and Noel Tolentino and their company Omni Consortium of persuading the Filipinos to pay them $10,000 each, promising there were well-paying teaching jobs waiting for them in the United States.

The teachers also were told they would receive permanent residency status and could bring their families with them, prosecutors said.

Omni took money from 273 Filipino teachers since 2002, but fewer than 100 ever received positions with school districts, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandy Gardes told the El Paso Times for a Saturday story.

The immigrant teachers were housed in groups of 10 to 15 in unfurnished properties, and most had to sleep on the floor or on mattresses, according to court documents. The Tolentinos told the teachers they would be deported if they complained about not having jobs or tried to seek employment on their own.

[emphasis my own]

But Jia, when it became clear that this might come up as a um… blemish, perhaps, on her family story, wrote a sob piece about how this was all a misunderstanding, and how her family had been unfairly targeted.

The company’s open, earnest, lawful work [CITATION NEEDED] helping fellow Filipinos move to America for good jobs [CITATION NEEDED] in teaching had been swiftly reframed as hideous criminal activity [CITATION AVAILABLE].

[CITATIONS BY ME]

Wow, that’s crazy. Maybe someone should have explained all that to the woman who filed this application where she says the Tolentinos human trafficked her. Yeah, sure, the appeal was dismissed and it was found that she couldn’t meet the legal definition of someone who was “human trafficked.” But the decision issued doesn’t let the Tolentino’s “off the hook”:

The record clearly shows that agents of Omni have engaged in wrongdoing, including immigration-related violations and fraud. The AAO further acknowledges that agents of Omni used coercion against the applicant to discourage her from leaving their control and to limit her independence.

Sure, it didn’t meet the specific legal qualifications for the crime of human trafficking as so defined in the United States in a legal sense. But what we do know—that the Tolentinos lied to these vulnerable people about work opportunities, brought them to America, and then used coercive lies to keep them in their control—does fit most people’s understanding of what “human trafficking” is in a moral sense. This is a distinction that many people have trouble with: legal definitions are not fungible with common sense, ethical understandings, nor are they meant to be, they are meant to be practical for the purposes of administering a justice system. What the Tolentinos did was human trafficking as most people would understand it.

Multiple of these would-be teachers testified against the Tolentinos in a court of law—they certainly fucking believed the Tolentinos had wronged them!!! Again: these people each paid the Tolentinos $10,000 USD, for which most of them had to take on loans, and therefore debts, were given fraudulent visas for jobs that did not yet exist (and in some cases never would), and then when they arrived were kept in poor, cramped conditions and threatened not to leave.

People jumped to Jia and her family’s defense, which was fucking nuts. A lot of it was under the auspices of “listening to WOC” or whatever other stupid bullshit. Some even had the nerve to frame the Tolentinos as somehow BENEVOLENT in this arrangement. They were just helping out poor Filipinos and solving the US nursing/teacher shortages at the same time!

Yet again, the actual victims of the Tolentinos get completely sidelined. They’re made to be completely fucking invisible! “HELPING IMMIGRANTS”??? YOU MEAN THE ONES WHO FUCKING TESTIFIED AGAINST THEM?????????

The idea that this was all some big misunderstanding falls even flatter when you consider that this exact same situation then happened with another company alleged to be doing all the same shit. You can read this brief of a lawsuit filed by similarly exploited prospective Filipino teachers in neighbouring Louisiana that describes a version of the same grift the Tolentinos were up to. This wasn’t an honest mistake! This was a scam that multiple organizations were in on!

The economy the Tolentinos were involved in is a part of a wider net of migrant worker exploitation:

Researchers estimate that anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 teachers, imported on temporary guest worker visas, teach in American public schools nationwide. Such hiring practices are often framed as cultural exchange programs, but as Timothy Noah of the New Republic points out — in this case about Maryland’s Prince George County — ​“When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor — and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.”

This whole line you see in a lot of the narratives about how people like the Tolentinos were just trying to “help the system” by acquiring “much needed” teachers and nurses is also a crock of fucking shit that covers up another terrible truth:

School districts frequently justify hiring lower-paid immigrants by pointing to teacher shortages in chronically underfunded rural and urban school districts. And it’s true: In poorer areas, classrooms are often overcrowded and understaffed. But this dearth of instructors did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is an inevitable result of the austerity measures pushed through on a federal, state, and local level after the panic of the 2007 financial crisis.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, between 2008 and 2011, school districts nationwide slashed 278,000 jobs. This bleeding has not stopped: According to the Center on Education Policy, almost 84 percent of school districts in the 2011-2012 school year expected budget shortfalls, and 60 percent planned to cut staff to make up deficits.

Thus, we see a familiar pattern of neoliberal ​“restructuring” in American school systems: Cut public institutions to the bone, leave them to fail without adequate resources, then claim the mantle of ​“reform” while rebuilding the institutions with an eye towards privatization.

In many cities, newly laid-off instructors are left to languish while their former employers employ underpaid replacements to fill the gaps. For example, the Baltimore City Public Schools district has imported more than 600 Filipino teachers; meanwhile, 100 certified local teachers make up the ​“surplus” workforce, serving as substitutes and co-teachers when they can.

BUT ANYWAYS, WHOLE FOODS!!! OR SOMETHING!!!!!!

Will the Jia Tolentino fans get mad at me for this one? Do they even exist? Like, last time she got that big wave of defenders it seemed to mostly be “WOC” “fans” rather than Jia fans to me. idk! I never finished Trick Mirror because it wasn’t very interesting. Out of the single-concept collections of essays about examining the nature of their author’s self-delusions by an Asian-American woman to come out in 2019, it still somehow managed to come second.

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 MAY (FRI)

WE READ/NOUS LISONS BILINGUAL LITERARY PANEL
What: As we enter month four of the Blue Metropolis literary festival, LSHB and the popular francophone shop Librairie Un livre à soi collaborate for this panel feat. “reps from the Montreal literary world.”
Where: Librairie St-Henri Bookstore (4622 rue Notre-Dame Ouest).
When: 7 to 8:30pm.
Who: Reps unnamed, but tell Greg and Curtis we said hi.
How Much: Free, RSVP recommended. (Link)

SQUID #3 LAUNCH
What: This magazine? It’s being launched. For extra fun, try humming the theme song from the musical Fame but substitute the word “Squid” for “Fame.” Is that fun? Idk, I’m writing this at 12:32 a.m. on April 30.
Where: Cafe Montiran (near metro Mont-Royal)
When: 7pm.
Who: Sierra Duffey, Tamara Nazywalskyj, Samara O’Gorman, and more readers, music by Alysa Touati and Justin Miszaniec.
How Much: Free, RSVP recommended. (Link)

2 MAY (SAT)

POETRY SLAM DOUBLE FEATURE
What: The event description says. “If you’ve never been to a spoken word show, THIS is the one to see.” We can’t speak for that, but if you have been to one, you know what to expect. Go with God.
Where: La Basement (3716 rue Notre-Dame O.)
When: 8pm.
When: Tahina Rajwani and Lisa Shen, plus whoever has the balls to perform.
How Much: $15/PWYC. (Link)

3 MAY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—Episode 136 is on the theme of “Spelling” which probably means someone will start spelling out B-A-N-A-N-A-S and you will be well within your rights to stand up and start screaming about Dole and Chiquita until you are physically removed. (Computer, play “Method Man” by Wu-Tang Clan.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Tahira Rajwani and Lisa Shen. (Same lineup as the Throw Slam the night before, I didn’t fuck this up!)
How Much: Free. (Link)

5 MAY (TUES)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring local weirdos Sherwin Tjia and River Charette. Don’t be alarmed if there’s a brass band when you get there, they roll out eventually.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Sherwin Tjia and River Charette.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

7 MAY (THURS)

BENJAMIN MARRA: WHAT WE MEAN BY YESTERDAY, VOL. 2 LAUNCH
What: Marra’s probably best known for designing visuals for Lil B mixtapes, and what we’ve got here is a new collection (via Fantagraphics) of similarly skewed, purposefully crude adventure comics.
Where: Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Benjamin Marra, presumably.
How much: Free. (Link)

8 MAY (FRI)

CHOUETTE #5 LAUNCH
What: chouette was not one of the 34 anglo lit magazines we covered in our recent piece, which really tells you how deep this thing goes. So we can’t tell you much about them. But it’s here, almost certainly queer, and ready to mingle.
Where: Co-Op Bar Milton Parc (3714 Ave du Parc).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Belen Blizzard, Jeremy Zelken, and more TBA.
How Much: PWYC, $5 suggested. (Link)

10 MAY (SUN)

SSSSSSERIES 9
What: AKA, Susanna & Scott’s Badassssss Series, this one’s new to me: an experimental music and dance night, kind of a la the long-running Mardi Spaghetti series over at Casa maybe. It’s been around for a little bit now, but makes its first appearance here as the first half of the show features a recitation of Gloria Gervitz’s poem “Migrations” accompanied by dance.
Where: La Poêle (307-5333 Ave Casgrain).
When: 5pm.
Who: Susanna Hood, Annie Lafleur, Nour Symon, Michel Bonneau, Sam Shalabi.
How Much: $15 “or so.” (Link)

INSIDE MADPOETIX STUDIO
What: Some music, some spoken word poetry, plus an interview with the feature artist, that kinda situation. This one’s for ~the mamas.~
Where: Maison France-Montreal (429 ave Viger).
When: 6:30pm doors, 7:30pm show.
Who: Interview with Fatima Wilson, Brianna K. Ramírez, Barbedwire, and Chance Tshimanga, plus whoever has the balls.
How Much: $25 (Link)

11 MAY (MON)

LECTURES LOGOS READINGS
What: The long-running poetry series marks its eleventh anniversary this month with the usual packed bill and open mic.
Where: U.N.I.A. (2741 rue Notre-Dame O).
When: 7-9:30pm.
Who: H. Nigel Thomas, Jan J. Dominique, Kym Dominique-Ferguson, Marie-Célie Agnant, Oumou Diakité, Sylvia Goldfarb, and whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Event link)

12 MAY (TUES)

ARIZONA O’NEILL: OPIOIDS & ORGANS LAUNCH
What: Arizona O’Neill, of the Montreal O’Neills, launches her solo debut graphic novel.
Where: Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Arizona O’Neill, presumably.
How much: Free. (Link)

ON OCCASION: POEMS FOR THE PEOPLE LAUNCH
What: Hey, nothing says “for the people” like a Sina Queyras joint. A sizable collection of occasional poetry featuring some starry names like Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, and CAConrad, the Montreal launch will be a sampling of local talents.
Where: De Stiil Booksellers (351 Duluth Ave E).
When: 7pm.
Who: Misha Solomon, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Chanel Sutherland, Lena Palacios, Valerie Free, Constantina Gicopoulous, Ethel Meilleur, and Paisley Conrad.
How much: Free. (Link)

SLAM LA SOMPTUEUSE
What: A bilingual slam with, at press-time anyway, open slots for readers. Sign up in advance to get your moment.
Where: La Cale—Pub zéro déchet (6839 Rue St-Hubert).
When: Doors 7pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus features TBA.
How Much: PWYC (Link).

16 MAY (SAT)

LIRE QUEER READER FEST
What: Running from May 16 to 23, this one’s sort of a novel idea: a festival oriented around readers rather than writers, it’s essentially seven days of queer book club events held at various shops and spaces around town. That seems like asking local queers to do a lot of reading, but bless ‘em.
Where: Various
When: May 16 to 23.
Who: Various readers and organizers.
How Much: Free, though check the site for RSVP links to the various circles/clubs. (Link)

17 MAY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—Episode 137 is on a theme to be named probably two hours after this post drops, forcing me to make the first of 53 edits over the next month. (Computer, play “Perennial Quest” by Death.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus features TBA.
How Much: Free. (Link TK)

19 MAY (TUES)

HEADLIGHT ANTHOLOGY LAUNCH
What: What’s that coming toward us on this dark road? Egads, it’s the Headlight Anthology, which must mean another year has passed. Don’t inhale any of that white powder—it might be another of your old friends who has just turned to dust!
Where: Club DD’s (3958 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: Doors 8pm, readings 8:30pm.
Who: Readers TBA, plus some bartenders doing the whole Coyote Ugly thing.
How Much: Free? (Link)

22 MAY (FRI)

YIARA #14 LAUNCH
What: A vernissage for the latest from the venerable feminist arts mag. Celebrating that which “spills over”—which is to say, consider wearing a bib or smock-type situation to this one.
Where: Articule (6282 Rue St-Hubert).
When: 6 to 9pm.
Who: Sounds like more of a mixer situation.
How Much: The show is free, but the mag costs money. (Link)

COLE DEGENSTEIN: DEAR KENNETH LAUNCH
What: There will be comics, drinks, and, I’m given to understand, cake. The popular illustrator and tattoo artist launches his latest from Conundrum Press.
Where: Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Cole Degenstein, presumably.
How much: Free. (Link)

23 MAY (SAT)

ENCORE POETRY PROJECT OPEN MIC
What: The Encore Poetry Project hosts an open mic which is not at Encore Books & Records but rather a different place that sounds like a Viking toast.
Where: SKOL (444-372 Rue St-Catherine O).
When: 6pm.
Who: Jessica Bebenek, Dustin Ariel Segura-Suarez, and whoever has the balls.
How much: Free. (Link)

26 MAY (TUES)

AYLA VEJDANI: YOU x ME LAUNCH
What: A reading and conversation to celebrate the launch of Vejdani’s new collection of short stories.
Where: L’Euguélionne (1426 Rue Beaudry).
When: 6pm.
Who: Ayla Vejdani, in conversation with francesca ekwuyasi.
How much: Free. (Link)

27 MAY (WEDS)

FESTIVAL DE LA POÉSIE DE MONTRÉAL: ÉPIQUES VOICES
What: This is generally an anglo events calendar, and this festival (running May 21 to May 30) is predominantly franco. Eyes out for May 27’s bilingual Épiques voices1 reading though, featuring an English cohort and a French brigade.
Where: Café Cléopâtre (1230 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: Doors 8pm.
Who: Hoda Adra, Jessica Bebenek, Louise Dupré, Alexandru Fechet, Liz Howard, Kama La Mackerel, Domenica Martinello, Misha Solomon et des performances de Fortner Anderson, Kaie Kellough et Catherine Paquet & Dolce Saint-Arnold.
How Much: Free, though symbolic donations are welcome. (Link)

29 MAY (FRI)

LISA ROBERTSON & SHANZHAI LYRIC: RIVERWORK / ENDLESS GARMENT DOUBLE LAUNCH
What: Rave spot Parquette has been hosting an increasing number of literary events of late—which means it’s finally time to do a bunch of molly in the bathroom during a reading and tell Lisa Robertson how important her work really is or is not to you. It’ll go great! And if it doesn’t, we’ll get to watch the distinguished poet whip your ass in front of a sizable audience. That’s a win-win.
Where: Parquette (1345 Rue de Bellechasse).
When: 7pm.
Who: Lisa Robertson and Shanzai Lyric, hosted by Michael Nardone.
How much: Free? (Link)

And looking ahead to May…

We’ll get there when we get there.

1

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.

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

This week, we’re proud to share a “then and now” selection of six poems from the too-rare-to-die-in-a-horrible-bike-accident brain of the superlative Harper Galvin. The first three are taken from Galvin’s offensively out-of-print collection The Three Einsteins (2014, Poor Claudia), while the latter three are seeing the light for the first time here at Discordia. Enjoy!

THINGS THAT AREN’T REAL

Sometimes I think you’re inventing drugs in order to pad your list of your addictions. You need to stop insisting on the existence of things that aren’t real. The pathologically high value you place on my concern makes me feel like a grandmother, and not just your grandmother, but everyone’s grandmother. Exhausted by the constant rocking chair-sitting, storytelling, and baking of cookies, my depth perception is affected to the point where I try to grab objects in the distance using only two fingers because I think they are tiny. Just admit you’re addicted to dog tranquilizers like everyone else. (2014)

IT WAS ALL I COULD DO NOT TO TAKE EVERY CHRISTMAS DECORATION FROM THE FREE TABLE

I guess it wasn’t all I could do—I was still breathing—
wearing three decrepit plastic wreaths, I walked to the park 
where some teenagers in Navajo print T-shirts
smoked and said “There might be people out there  
doing exactly what we’re doing,”  
and my breath felt as geological as a petrified log’s.  

The teenagers were also like petrified logs,  
but more in the sense that rocks have  
no idea whether or not they’re monuments. 

“More fucking Christmas decorations,” 
You say once you find me in the dark, by the slide 
and I kiss the old pale scars on your forearm,
three horizontal and one vertical. (2014)

YOUR HAND IN SPACE

Your accidentally photocopied hand in the dark margin of an article made me like the photocopy, and then the whole room, and then everything else. When I lived by a train yard, I sometimes wanted to jump on a random train and ride it as far as it would go. This was stupid, because if the train didn’t cut my legs off, it would probably end up in Pittsburgh. If my hands looked like yours did in the photocopy, I think I would at least know where I wanted the train to go. Your hand floated in space with the white specks in the toner, your fingers actually touching the words on the page. (2014)

THE ARISTOCRATS

The perfume of rain on the grass in the cemetery in May, as I walk by listening to “We Want Some Pussy” by 2 Live Crew, is like one of those scenarios ancient Chinese aristocrats contrived to inspire a perfect haiku, such as eating a nectarine while boiling an adversary to death. Bob Sagat wrote a version of that classic joke, “The Aristocrats” in which one of the aristocrats flattens his cock and shapes it into a functional xylophone. That’s a different kind of aristocrat. The same way the cemetery is different when it rains on a spring morning than when someone sculpts their body into musical instruments there. I am sexually excited by things that are different from each other, and that’s why I haven’t killed myself yet. (2026)

WHERE WORMS COME FROM

The most magical part of my childhood was when my dad took me out at night to catch worms in the yard. I knew that Santa brought presents because kids at school told me so, but since no one talked about worms, their powers seemed potentially limitless. Santa didn’t come out of a hole in the ground every night to mate with other Santas, which also made him inferior to worms. Now I always tell kids that he does, because they will find out their parents bring the presents on Christmas long before they confirm that I’m the one who digs all those holes. (2026)

CROCUSES ARE MY FAVORITE FLOWER

Because they’re the first
to get sick of winter’s bullshit.
Winter, in its assortment of outfits
referencing every romantic song and movie,
that longing as if you could eat an elegantly nostalgic hat
promise of family followed by the presence of family.
A department store display of glittering tinsel and perishable liqueurs
that by January is a discounted bin
of talking toys with distressingly malfunctioning voice boxes 
and stale candy in shapes that symbolize things
that you shouldn’t be able to taste, though you do
like how an abstraction shouldn’t be an autonomous being,
a person on the horizon who’s always receding.
Maybe the opposite of a lie is a color occurring in nature.
Crocuses bloom on the world’s frost-grayed traffic islands
like the reflection of sunlight on water 
fisting a half-inflated lawn ornament. (2026)

HARPER GALVIN is the author of *The Three Einsteins*, *Ugly Time*, and *If What We Are Doing is Dancing* (forthcoming 2027.) Harper has both jumped out of and fallen into coffins at readings and once ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for eight years. They were commissioned to write a poem for permanent installation at Seattle’s Town Hall, but the first payment they received for a poem was two cans of an off-brand Sparks-adjacent drink called Tilt. 

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

There I was, dusting my hands off after having dealt with that Lindy West shit, ready to write about something less Online, something less immediately topical or content mill oriented, when suddenly I started to hear something. Quiet at first, but getting louder and louder, until I could just make out... BAH GAWD, THAT’S LENA DUNHAM’S MUSIC!!!

LENA DUNHAM’S NEW BOOK HAS DROPPED AND EVERYONE’S ARGUING ABOUT LENA DUNHAM AGAIN!!! IS ERIS GONNA DO IT??? IS ERIS GONNA TACKLE LENA DUNHAM???????

No.

Moving on:

Who is “Zoomer” culture actually for?

A few years ago I went to see 100 gecs. And why not? I’m still hip and with it. I’m not closed-minded. I like what the kids like. I’m aware of it, I understand it, and I like it. Right? 100 gecs is one of the most exciting acts in contemporary music, one of the few that legitimately feel like they’re doing something “new” and “different,” even though they’ve spawned countless imitators. 100 gecs, a band that boldly embraces bad taste and merges some of the most heinous and reviled musical trends of the last thirty years (ska punk, brostep, nu-metal, etc., alongside doofy cartoon sound effects and deliberately cheap-sounding MIDI instrumentation, all boiled in the same soup) into a cacophonous blend of brainrot music that perfectly encapsulates the experience of modern hyper-culture. Right? It’s specifically made to be saturated; unlike previous counter-cultural music trends, the hyperpop 100 gecs represents deliberately, fatalistically, nihilistically prepares itself to be co-opted by mainstream culture. Right? I understand it. I get it. I like it. Here I am writing about it, here I am thinking about it, here I am explaining it. I’m in my thirties, but I understand and get and like 100 gecs. I even wrote a zine1 about my experience. I’m still hip and with it. Right?

A peculiar observation startled me at the 100 gecs show: I spent some time in the pit, which was mostly occupied by young transes in fishnets and cis girls who dress like porcelain dolls, and then I made my way up to the balcony, from which a bunch of paunchy Millennials were gazing down at the youthful frenzy. There’s an experience I think a lot of young men have of getting changed in the gym in the vicinity of old men—there’s a way old men look at young men’s bodies, nearly leering, envious, hungry. I don’t think it’s a sexual thing, at least not in the way you might think; it’s a desire to have a young man’s body again. There was a similar hunger I sensed in this crowd of gawkers, even though they were what may still be characterized as “young” in many contexts.

How do we characterize a Millennial? In North America I would say that a “real” Millennial is someone who has no real memories of the Cold War, someone for whom 9/11 was formative, and someone whose emergence into the adult world and employment was defined in and around the ‘08 recession. (Obviously these experiences are culturally-specific—for example, for most Millennial Arabs I know, the Arab Spring was a similarly defining experience. I was talking to Aamar about this very subject in the bar literally last week.) Perhaps more than any other, they are, infamously, a generation of people who desperately sought to extend their adolescence—this is the first generation to really embrace adult video gaming or to openly take an interest in shows ostensibly for children, beginning with Adventure Time and continuing to this day with shit like Bluey. (I have no idea if Millennials in the Arab world are watching Bluey or a Bluey equivalent, but maybe some of my Arab followers can fill me in.)

Millennials like me though, we’re above all that. Right? I don’t watch TV shows for babies. I don’t watch TV shows at all! There is no point in my life that I am clearly trying to regress to. Right? Right? Right? Right? Have I mentioned that I used to look like this and groom like this and dress like this and take photos like this with other guys who looked like and groomed like and dressed like this?

So anyways, Geese.

Geese is allegedly Gen Z’s “first great band.” That’s so fascinating, because Geese sounds like every trendy Millennial band I listened to growing up. I spouted off something to this effect back in November:

wrote a blog post recently—easily ranking among the best I’ve ever read—about the Geese phenomenon, which ties the hypebeast band into the history of psywar, Satanic forces (Michael Aquino makes an appearance), and the intelligence history of the internet and the nature of information dispersal/collection/control in contemporary life.2 He made a similar observation about Geese to the one I did:

Watching the Geese™ spectacle is amazing.

Look at how the American Millennial™ media class are trying to stay relevant with the kids while propping up a band that literally sounds like the condensed amalgamation of every heinous Best New Music™ album they were swindled into pretending they loved in the 00s. “This is the best new band of a generation, and they just so happen to sound like the music that I also cried to in my dorm room.”

Geese just kind of sound like The Walkmen, only the guys from The Walkmen really changed music in part cause a bunch of them were from Jonathan Fire*Eater, a watershed NYC indie band that can take a significant amount of credit for everything that developed over there after that,3 but never had the post-break-up promotional support to make their legend go very far (their label went defunct in 2005), and so they’re not on t-shirts and shit and the music hypebeasts don’t know who they are. Maybe Geese will be influential too, who is to say? I’m to say. Geese cannot and will not change music because Geese is not changing music, nothing they are doing is a “new idea in rock and roll” as America’s Worst Magazine dubbed it. They are re-packaging music, which is different from “reinventing” by the way. Whatever your feelings about the “post-punk revival” of the 00’s, it wasn’t actually jacking the swag of what came before it—do The Strokes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs actually sound anything like Television or Joy Division?4 The influence is obvious, but the product is distinct.

Another thing Geese sounds like sometimes is Radiohead. Listen to this song. It’s like an outtake off of In Rainbows.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to Geese’s Max Bassin himself: “I feel like I'm always really scared that we're just going to sound like Radiohead.” Yeah I’d say that’s a well-founded concern. And I’ve got bad news!

Obviously most stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum and people of all ages will consume stuff that’s ostensibly for one generational demographic, whatever and ever and ever, and there will always be a portion of the extra-generational audience that is excited to use this media as a peephole into a different generational experience, often out of envy at youth and desire to be “with it.” Consider HBO’s Girls (SIKE! I’m talking about Lena Dunham after all), about as “Millennial” a work as could be made. Of course there were glowing reviews of the show from critics outside the Millennial bracket (which figures, considering we were hardly old enough to go potty for ourselves, let alone write for major magazines). The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, a Gen X-er just two years younger than my parents, spoke favourably of the show, and failed to conceal her excitement about the generational transference when she enthusiastically called it a “powerful vision from a very young woman.” But it was clearly made for Millennials. Geese feels like something made for Millennials to watch Zoomers consume from behind glass. Is the meat given to the tiger in the cage before an audience for the tiger or for the audience to watch it dig into?

Geese feels like a product that has identified a niche: Millennials who would have liked to have been on that balcony watching the Zoomers listen to 100 gecs, but who tried and failed to like 100 gecs itself, because it was too alienating. That’s okay you boomer fuck. Here’s Geese!

What about all that Dimes Square shit? Is Honor Levy the voice of Gen Z? Well, is she? Well, is she? Well, is she? Why does it feel like it’s mostly Millennials asking that question or having that conversation or citing that title? Can Zoomers even read? When we say someone like Levy or the other Levy or Madeline Cash is the “voice of their generation,” who is that voice speaking to? Who is that voice addressing, and what does that audience want to hear? Why is that most of the “voice of a generation” Gen Z lit I’ve read reads so much like the alt lit I grew up with? I remember Common once asking whether “gangsta rap” or “crunk rap” was legitimately the “voice” of Black America or whether it was more specifically the “voice” that White America—that larger, more lucrative audience—wanted to hear. But that’s okay, because now we have the “real” voice of Black America, guys like Kendrick Lamar. That’s surely not just the evolved form of what White America wants, right? Right?

(You can read my expanded take on Kendrick Lamar here)

Courtney Love (not to be confused with Discordia’s ) said of Geese: “Do you feel like their team might be, like, elder Millennial Brooklyn people? Like, very Girls-y?” and this made Stephen Andrew Galiher at Vice very defensive, writing: “OK but most Geese fans are easily 17-30 years old, so miss Elder Millenials with that nonsense,” and adding, “I enjoy Geese. But that said, I feel like the makeup of their fanbase leans way more towards young Millennials and Gen-Z than Elder Millennials… Geese is more of a nice addition to our musical journey at this point.” Why so sensitive? Why does it obviously matter to you so much that people acknowledge Geese’s fans as being Zoomers? Discordia’s Courtney Loathe (not to be confused with Courtney Love) teaches post-secondary and says this is pretty overblown. “The kids at my school who listen to rock are listening to Deftones. They’re not listening to Geese.”

Are Zoomers even listening to Geese? Surely some are, but how many? I found a Reddit thread that asked for the ages of Geese fans. Obviously Reddit is going to skew a little Millennial/Gen-X, but this is ridiculous:

Look at this photo of Geese playing live:

Are these guys Zoomers?

Are they??? ARE THEY??????? I don’t know. I really don’t.

Millennials invented the “Problematic Age Gap.” Yes, people have raised eyes at May-Decembers and the like before, but it was Millennials who became totally obsessed with it. Here’s the thing: I don’t believe this for a second. It’s always sounded to me like a little too much protesting. The psychosexual once again rears its head. Like how a lot of racists harbour dark desires to fuck The Other, like how a lot of homophobes wind up on Grindr, I suspect that a lot of Millennials who say this kind of shit are repressing a burning desire to fuck Zoomers (if they aren’t already). I think this goes hand-in-hand with the whole age regression thing, some super-ego ratchet is being triggered that arouses a deep sense of shame about it all. Should Justin Trudeau have gone to Coachella??? Isn’t he TOO OLD????? REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We’re talking about a man who supported massacring babies here.

Anyways, everything old is new again, maybe not so much just to placate insecure Millennials as it is a function of post-algorithmic content, which is predicated on recycling, pastiche turned totally systemic, and Millennials are trapped in an infinite loop of repeated cultural trends that reinforce their own nostalgia and that more and more closely approximate their referents until we’re all unstuck in time.

Or go read:

Somebody told me I should prepare to write about ’s Adult Braces back in fucking January. I said I didn’t know who the fuck that was. Then I looked her up and I remembered who the fuck that was. She wrote that terrible-sounding Roxane-Gay-core book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (the title says it all) back in 2016. I wrote a takedown of Bad Feminist some years ago that I’ve considered updating to post up here, though at this point in time I’m far more interested in Gay for her suspicious political connections (which I wrote about here). Why would I waste my time with Lindy West?

Boy am I an idiot.

This is some very rich lit world drama, not simply because it is a very bad book—though it’s that too—and not simply because it’s slathered in salacious gossip milked from the teats of a trio of loudly-lowing lolcows—though it’s also that—but because it opens up so many fronts for cultural critique. Discordia contributor already wrote a fantastic piece about all this, skirting by some of the squeamishness many commentators have in tackling the subject of the psychosexual race drama unfolding underneath it all, and while I often like to opine on psychosexual race politics myself, I’m not going to step on her toes as she’s already summed it up nicely. Still, as put it, “we [have] somehow talked about this both entirely too much and not nearly enough.” West has given me a great opportunity to write at length about something I’ve been wanting to for years now: the over-therapeutized subject.

But first, an overview. A number of my followers tell me they specifically follow me so I can catch them up on lit drama they’d otherwise avoid, so here’s the skinny (not there’s anything wrong with the fat [which would be the longer version {Lindy West is a body positivity activist}]). I picked up a copy of West’s 2016 breakthrough book Shrill to take a look and provide some background and, despite the misogynistic tidal wave massing off our shores and making women’s issues feel as pressing as they’ve ever been, shit like Shrill is still basically fucking unreadable. West’s introduction to the copy I was reading was penned just after the 2016 election and saw the author questioning the extent of Russia’s involvement in Trump’s victory and wondering if they’d do an audit of the vote. Anything but blame Hillary or the Democrats, the ultimate actual authors of the American Tragedy.1 Then, after talking up the vital importance of reading a book like her own, she writes about how the big-boobed tree from The Last Unicorn2 is fat-shaming or something. You get the idea of the tradition West is emerging from. According to Slate, “West argue[d] that she has helped change the culture around issues such as fat acceptance, rape jokes, and Twitter misogyny even in the relatively short span of time she’s been writing about them.” Hey. Lindy. How’s that been going lately?

On to Adult Braces. The book is a very easy read as every chapter is about half a kw (kilo of words), which is especially handy as every time you think to yourself, “I couldn’t possibly read any more of this stupid fucking chapter,” you notice that you’re almost done anyways, so why not carry it through to the end? You chuckle at my comic exaggeration. Reader, I am not exaggerating. I am just going to write out the entirety of chapter 1 for you (for educational purposes; I’m educating you about this), titled “Alarm,” so you can see the sort of thing you can expect inside. I don’t want you to miss a word because I don’t want you to think I’m misrepresenting this. This is the whole, uncut chapter.

I was snoring on the green velvet living room couch, Carrots the cat purring on my chest, when a caustic beeping woke me.

It sounded like a twentieth-century alarm clock, not an iPhone—an old-fashioned, analog, gritty kind of beep. The time was 6:52 a.m. Sam and Kirsten were still asleep upstairs, and I didn’t want to wake them. As I searched for the source of the noise, it changed to a slow beep for a while, then switched back to fast beeping. Did Kirsten set an alarm because she wanted to get up and say goodbye to me, but then she accidentally left her phone down here? It had to be a phone. There was a little pouch on the dining room table. I looked in there, but it was just Sam’s wallet. No beeping phone. There was an iPad on the table. Maybe Kirsten’s alarm was going through the iPad? No, not that either.

I noticed a small cardboard box tossed in with the previous day’s mail. It was addressed to Kirsten and the return address said, simply, Good Stuff, and an address in Minneapolis. That seemed like good news, because a murderer wouldn’t put a return address, would they? The beeping was definitely coming from inside the box.

Okay, I thought, it’s a bomb. Sam had been getting death threats because she worked on And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot. It was not impossible that a crazed Sex and the City fan mailed Sam a bomb because they didn’t like how Miranda was treating Steve.

If there was a bomb in that box, I thought, because of Miranda Hobbes’s queer awakening, and I just let the house blow up with two of my favorite people and four of my favorite cats inside, I’d be really upset. So I gingerly picked up the bomb, took it outside, and set it on the front step. Certainly a bomb can’t penetrate a residential front door! I was a hero! Eat your heart out, Richard Jewell!!! I went back inside.

Satisfied with the morning’s counterterrorism operation, I started on my chores, packing and organizing to get on the road. I had to leave Kalamazoo by 8:30 if I was going to make it all the way to Duluth before sunset. After about an hour, I peeked my nose around the door and found that the beeping had stopped.

“I found a bomb,” I said. “I put it outside.”

“You found a bomb and you put it outside?”

“Yeah.”

Kirsten went out on the porch, then came back in, laughing and carrying the bomb. She grabbed some scissors and opened the deadly parcel (“NOOOOOOOOO!!!”—me, tackling her). Inside was an alarm clock. Kirsten’s teenage son, Gordie, had been sleeping through his phone alarm, so she’d ordered an old, loud, vintage alarm clock on eBay and the seller had mailed it still set and with batteries in it.

It wasn’t the first time I thought something was a bomb when it was actually a chance to wake up.

“One time, I got woken up by an alarm clock. Really says a lot about my life,” says Lindy West. Even for the paltry length of the chapter, this is too fucking long. Chapter 2 begins with Lindy getting upset about the gendered politics of the song “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. Somehow this leads to Lindy planning an actual trip to Kokomo (off the Florida Keysss) only to discover that Kokomo does not exist. You know that episode of South Park, back when it was still funny, where Stan’s grandpa locks him in a room listening to Enya until he wants to kill himself? Chapter 3 actually sort of picks up with a brief anecdote about how she once had a dentist who turned out to be a schizophrenic crackhead, but while that gem of an anecdote gets about 50 words, 350 words are then dedicated to what it’s like to have your head X-rayed by a dentist, a normal procedure to get done at a dentist’s office.3

But it’s chapter 4 where we are introduced to the biggest, meatiest controversy. Lindy’s husband, Aham, is caught publicly cheating on her by one of her fans with a girlfriend Lindy is unaware of. Lindy is beside herself. The rest is swiftly becoming blogosphere lore: Aham turns it on Lindy (they have a quiet polyamorous arrangement that the fan was unaware of, but he demands more investment in the polyamory or he walks); Lindy relents because she doesn’t want to lose Aham; Aham’s girlfriend moves in; Lindy is miserable, but then Lindy learns to Stop Worrying and Love the New Girlfriend. But who is Aham? Aham is a “he/they” stand-up comic and musician4 whose sister wrote a book about racism that once (or so I learned after very quickly skimming the Wikipedia page) led to a YA author saying her (Aham’s sister’s) “basic assumptions […] create an inhospitable climate for other racially marked bodies” because she used the term “Indigenous American.”5 That is to say that Aham comes from a family that seems to naturally enable annoying discourse.

For all intents and purposes, Lindy is completely fine with the arrangement. I know this because she tells us so in her book:

If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you. Also, it shows me you haven’t met Roya. She’s so good. […] What am I supposed to do—not have Roya? Because some strangers are convinced I’m secretly unhappy and they know better? Because I’ve written candidly about having complex feelings? Because these two skinny devils must be conning me since I’m obviously too ugly for them to actually want me? That’s what my “defenders” on the internet say. Are you sure you guys are on my side? Because it doesn’t feel like it!

The truth that no one can imagine is that I am—exclusively—the one who pushes my partners away.

…

Getting to sleep in the guest room? Sometimes Roya and I fight over it! Keeping the window all the way open all night long with my audiobook playing while hugging my stuffed cat Esmerelda? […] Embracing the pure pleasure of sleeping alone feels like a distillation of this whole journey. It’s what I want. I like it. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the concept of “Stockholm Syndrome,” but I just want to spend a minute reiterating the key point: it’s cognitive dissonance. The hostage thinks: this man is my friend, I like this man, and he likes me. But these observations cannot coexist with the obvious reality: if you’re such friends, then why does he have a gun, and why can’t you leave?

But Lindy is a modern woman. She has access to modern psychological care—she has therapists, at least four by my count from flipping through the book—and one imagines that the practitioners of this care must want what is best for their patient’s mental well-being. So where exactly are Lindy’s therapists during this whole process? One of Lindy’s therapists, Judith, tells her she has ADHD and sends her to get her “heart chakra” tamed by a hippy named “Rainbow.” Meanwhile, her couples’ therapist tells her of her polyamorous relationship that “three is more stable that two, if you think about it […] you can’t build a table with two legs.” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? “Ah here’s a specific situation where three things are better than two things. Ergo, relationships are analogous to this situation, because it is a situation where three things is beneficial.”

See, the reason this book is called “Adult Braces” is because Lindy had to get braces as an adult (duh) to fix her teeth which otherwise appeared to be fine from the outside. All of this therapy, these are the metaphorical other adult braces, these are the parts of her life that have “helped her become sane.” But, like with the table, braces are not a good analogy for this just because the resulting analogy agrees with how you’d like for reality to be. For a lot of people, therapy is a process of self-justification; it is focusing on the parts you wanted to hear and not the ones you didn’t. People assume this isn’t the case, because they ultimately come away from therapy having acknowledged “problems,” but for many the “problems” are conveniently those that they were willing to accept in the first place. (If they had no “problems” by their own estimation then they would have never signed up for therapy.) A therapist becomes in a way a sort of private God—when everyone in the world tells Lindy West she’s in a shit awful relationship, she doesn’t have to listen to us, because her infallible therapist tells her it’s fine (or she infers, because she wants to, that this is what the therapist believes), and her therapist has all the details. The rest of us merely have hundreds of pages from Lindy herself on the subject to go off on. What the fuck do we know? Surely a therapist must be the arbiter of all that is right and well-adjusted. Why don’t we all just become therapists? We too could become infallible. Of course, spend more than five minutes on social media and you’ll see that that is exactly what people would like to do, as they appropriate therapy-speak throughout their day-to-day lives in an effort to control the chaos and “understand” it “objectively” and just wind up digging themselves into a series of bespoke derangements.

I’m not anti-therapy, but I do think a number of forms of therapy should be approached with a grain of salt. I actually know a number of people who have stayed in shitty relationships because their therapists never explicitly made it clear they thought they should break up (not the therapist’s job to tell you this), and they interpreted the lack of condemnation as condoning. Another problem is that therapists often place too much of a premium on making you “feel better,” but sometimes it’s actually worth it to not feel so good—to feel bad for bad things you’ve done, to pay penance. There are things you have done that you should feel kind of bad about. It may not make you “feel good” but there are good reasons to “feel bad” about things (worse still, some therapists inadvertently make patients “feel good” about bad things they are yet to do). A structural problem with therapy is that therapists often rely on the freely-chosen patronage of their patients, and so it is in their best interest not to upset them, not tell them things they don’t want to hear, not delivery anything which may be construed as criticism, etc. (this is sometimes excused as being for the benefit of good practice but I have my doubts). Therapy can do you a lot of good, but it can also give you excuses to be either an Aham or a Lindy—someone who uses therapeutized consciousness to either excuse taking advantage of others or obscure being taken advantage of.

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.

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

Scrag Show

« The so-called “starver” groups (House of Scrag, Heap Pyogene, etc.) increasingly display millenarian tendencies sympathetic to anarcho-primitivism and ecofascism, but more concerningly fundamental and coherent opposition toward the necessity of ethical anthropophagy. Though self-confined to below-ground infrastructure (eg., the penal colony at Fort Alden gold mine), we see probability of topside activity increasing in line with ideological drive, nutritional deficiency, and dermal absorption of the addictive stimulant known as clot. Deployment of tactical fence-testing units is underway. »

—Major Claudean Engaloys
Chief Anti-Pattern Strategist and ethnopharmacological reporter
Compliance Base Hawk Junction

Compliance has rigged me out with high-visibility coveralls that are meant to be water and flame resistant. They’ve also equipped me with a high-tensile rappelling harness, mountaineering cords, a vented helmet with a light, screen, and hearing protection, licorice-flavoured oxygen canisters, a respirator, and fifteen pounds of quickdraw packs. The ration and first aid kit weigh almost as much as my child, who is still hooked up to the dialysis machine and will not be accompanying me down the starver holes, no matter how much she whines for her pater.

I don’t care for functionality so much as relish the thought that I am bedecked in actual, non-river-scrubbed clothes for the first time in half a decade. I can’t even be annoyed at the fact that I have to ask for use of the G.I. bath—that it was not a courtesy Major Engaloys thought to extend me, knowing full well the abominable living conditions of my familial knoll-site.

Four grunts attach themselves to the lintel of the communal shower room to supervise my scrubbing of crevices, but their mild, listless presence bothers me less than the inch-thick centipede that crawls out of the drainpipe mid-rinse. After ten minutes under water, one of my observers clangs his baton on a drainpipe to signal that time is a-wasting. I turn off the taps sluggishly, to enjoy the final trickle of water. One of the grunts passes me a towel—white, stained, fluffy, with the logo of a long-defunct hotel on its tag—before he tells me that my personnel carrier is leaving in twenty-five.

While conducting a final equipment check, I run my fingers over the clot in my possession. I keep it in a small pouch around my neck. I must assume Compliance knows I have it, and allows me my meagre hoard because I’ll need it for brokering with the starvers once I’m down among them in the mines. Otherwise, Compliance has just blinded their god-eye to my growing dependency on the tarry drug.

I have decided my nugs will be more secure sealed away in the pocket of my ballistic nylon coverall when I catch one of the grunts eyeing me again. He begins a furtive approach, scrubbing at his mustache when he speaks, which I realize is to garble his recorded transmissions back to Compliance.

“Bandy?” he asks.

“Wrong person.”

“No, do you bandy? Like swap. Trade.”

“Is this sex stuff? I saw you humping tile while I showered.”

“Not what you think. I’m on the lookout for clot-splodge. The others didn’t notice, but I saw. One of your areolas is darker than the other. You’re bent. Bent like me.” He smiles.

I sniff, straighten my shoulders under my twenty kilos of rigging. I hadn’t felt naked before but I do now. “What is it you want?”

“That’s your daughter in the med bay? Don’t trust that she’ll be looked after up here in our barracks. Shock troops get shit rained on them from all angles. Big, man-portable shit pieces. Sanity’s the first liability in the field. But I’ve got pups too, not much older than yours. I don’t shivoo with the others, the pederasts and the metho-junkies. I can look after her is what I’m saying. One of my own, like.”

This offer—his dog eyes, the duct-tape tattoo tracking down his neck into his dirty collar—sends my guts rancid. Of course she’s not safe here—did I think she would be? And this scurvoid’s offer is blackmail that Compliance will ignore and a hundred other men will demand their cut of once I cave. The second I’m absent, they’ll help themselves to her. My child.

He snaps his fingers, other hand up in his moustache. “Hey. Hey farmwife. You bandy or not?”

I grab his fingers and snap one, enunciate clearly into his mic, “I don’t trade with clot addicts, I don’t speak with clot addicts.” He whimpers like a gelding on the floor, thrashing his feet. Compliance, it seems, doesn’t care either way.

*

When I bid my daughter farewell, I slip a substantial chunk of clot into her kit. “Don’t touch it with your skin, but trade it if you have to. By the gram. You can make shavings with the vegetable peeler. Buy some protection.”

She gives me a suspicious look, opens the kit, and puts the entire stone in her mouth. I slap her so hard it flops out and pinwheels behind her dialysis machine. I am aware that this is possibly the last memory that I am leaving her with. I tell myself that object lessons in self-chastisement will serve her in the long run. Better neurotic than catatonic, is what I always said to Villwock in our arguments re: parenting ideologies. That was before I reported him to Compliance, and he got sentenced to scuttle the mines with the starvers.

Her eyes water until I scoop her, only momentarily kinking the venous line running her clean blood back into her, and she giggles. With her arms around me, she munches on a mouthful of my uncombed hair, I lose myself in a radial of maternal feeling. It lasts barely a moment. I put the clot back in her kit, and tuck said kit under the pillow of her gurney. When I leave the med bay, I don’t turn back once.

*

I am able to sleep on the air transport amid the sound of skypulping airfoils—adrenal fatigue leaves me with no other alternative than a system crash. The tiltwing doesn’t have far to go though, and soon enough I am being ushered down the loading ramp onto thedrop point: a shed the size of an outhouse on the otherwise empty steppe

One of the pilots tells me to wait until the tiltwing has dropped all of its payloads in the surrounding area. She assures me that the surface mining infrastructure has been exhaustively mapped out with LiDAR and won’t compromise the integrity of the tunnel networks I’m about to enter.

“We just want to soften up the starvers for you. Clear you a path,” she says enthusiastically. “Mollify before you occupy!”

The sound of her maniacal laughing is washed out by a thumpy takeoff. I am left alone on the barren grid to die. The smell of choke damp is everywhere.

I register movement inside the pit brow and reach for my machine pistol as Lieutenant Brasenose sticks his nose out, inching sideways with his hands up, cackling timidly. He’s also rigged for an ill-omened subterranean dip.

“They didn’t give me a weapon. Not even a knife,” my liaison officer complains.

“Why—” I start.

“How I’m supposed to protect you from hordes of paleo trash is beyond me. My bare hands, my strength of character?” he is saying.

I consider shooting him now—most pleasant option, especially if he’s lying as he likes to, and is armed—but the shroud of surveillance drapes me sweatily. Compliance sent him along to irritate me or—or—for some useful purpose.

“You’ll need to lend me something,” Brasenose says, shimmying closer. “Spare a projectile? Har.” He smiles weedily at me. His teeth are so white and even. I’ve always wondered where he got them.

“No,” I tell him.

“I convinced Compliance that you’d be dead within the hour without a speleologist, case you’re wondering. Ta da.”

We have an hour before nightfall, by which time my pilot friend promised she’d be finished with her mollifying. I want to spend that time with my fist in Brasenose’s gullet and my knee on his throat, ripping his tongue out by millimeters. But he’s stronger than me and he’s freshly clot-freaked so I’ll need to wait till he sleeps. I thumb my pocket-clot furiously while he takes my frigidity as forgiveness.

“Do you know anything about what to expect down there?” He frames his boast as a question and somehow manages to add a suggestive turn to it. “The terrain? Compliance’s history of rare earth element extraction and the competitive licensing structure that undergirds it?”

I look around for a place to flop down that will not invite him to also flop. “No. Do you?”

“My team led the first Compliance-managed starver incursion. I know the area like the back of my non-asswiping hand.”

He wiggles his broad, orc-like feeler demonstratively, but he is looking at my face with a goo goo drip in his grey pearloids. He used to always flinch and look in the opposite direction when I caught him ogling me, but now he does it openly. He is two meters tall, with blonde hair he’s obviously vain about; he’s grown it long enough regulation requires he comb it back into a bun. Any minute now he’ll take out his horsehair brush and give it its one hundred gloaming strokes.

He gestures at the hoist house: “We’ll make camp here till dark, and take the south ingress point. Let’s talk environmental assessment procedure. Lots of algal blooms and metalliferous tailings down there. Chance of ammonia clouds too. Compliance’s decarbonization efforts have turned everything into a potential life-snatcher.”

The clagtrail of a daydream helps me imagine how his pretty teeth will cut up my knuckles when I cave them back into his hard palate. Maybe my wrists too. I badly want to put my fingers into his thalamus and squeeze his amygdala like a muscat grape. Not least because, as he goes on, I see why Compliance sent him. He knows what he is talking about.

Brasenose spends an hour describing the terminal swellings of various mutated mycorrhizae, and their effect on human lymph systems, while I watch the sun turn into a flat red button behind the scrim of dust hanging over the horizon. The night heat is coming up, and with it my weighted blanket of malaise.

Normally, I’d be bickering with the child over the last inches of flavoured water. Now she is fending without me. Will that moustached freakio attempt to interface with her? By giving my child her own clot-chips to bargain with I have made her a target, too. Both pistol and dog—her quotidian security tools—were left behind at the knoll-home when Compliance airlifted her to the Med Bay. I pray she sources herself a firearm before she licks the clot herself.

Brasenose’s encyclopedic recitation continues as I gnaw on my poor decisions. The culpability feels slightly more practical than the murderous bloodrage. I miss my child’s damp torso, hugging me.

*

When the sun melts behind the ridge of brown cloud, and the distant thumps of the bunker busters cease, Brasenose kicks away a dry-rotted wooden manhole, flicks on his headlamp, straps and restraps his gloves, and crawls headfirst down a thirty-degree adit. I follow cautiously, but the dirt slides under my weight and all my effort goes into braking my palms so I don’t slide face-first into the man’s jellied crack.

Ten meters along, a few down, the tunnel flares and Brasenose rears up to his knees to start tearing out his comms. He stashes it within a toothy vug in the wall above us, then gestures at me to do the same.

“Compliance doesn’t set foot down here. Too chickenshit about dusty lung. They basically took the goldbricking infanteer’s word that the signal craps out past the upper threshold. Look no further as to why.”

I peer into the vug. In my headlight, the amethyst sparkles occultly, like a palace for a flower fairy. Without light, nothing ever sees this beauty. Behind Brasenose’s wiring, there are other dusty coils, earbuds, torn-apart transmitters, general commstrash. I try to coil mine neatly, at least, so I’ll have all the right bits when I come back. If I come back.

“What about evac?” I ask dumbly. “In case… things?”

“You’ve been intentionally misled about surface-starver relations, not least of all by me. They are perfectly sensible and commercially reasonable. Come on. We’re burning eventide.”

We continue for a few more meters in the featureless dark and suddenly we can stand. The dirt changes to shale aggregate, and Brasenose puts his two fingers into his mouth and produces a pintail whistle. Within minutes, two sooty bipeds limp up from the deep crepuscular gloom. They are naked as bog corpses. Brasenose removes his respirator and presses his lips to the first starver for an open mouthed kiss. She glides her hand over his waist and caresses upward until she has bisected his chest with a whetted keratin spur. I flinch, expecting gore, but no wound opens under her touch. The second starver repeats this odious ritual, then sways toward me.

“Copy what I do,” Brasenose says, “They’ll gut you like muskellunge otherwise.”

The first starver’s face is shark eyes and a sunken leer that has no fat to fold into a smile. I flinch away and she laughs, lunging after me. When she corners me, she gives me her toothy kiss and runs her talon up my plumb line. A small whit of clot is passed through to my mouth, and then sucked back. I am supercharged with adrenaline and my extremities slump into numbness.

The second one pokes his tongue and I tolerate that, too. He tastes the way maggots smell when left to flambé in the sun. Bile burns my sinuses. Brasenose begins to disrobe, but keeps his respirator on. He is in good shape for his habits—his slightly distended breadbasket shows signs of toned attention. I notice that one of his pilose testicles droops a good inch lower than the other.

“You too, Britt. Skivvies off.”

I protest, thinking that the equipment I have lugged all this way is there to keep me alive. Leaving it by the mouth of the cavern seems like confirmation that I will never return to the surface. I’m paralyzed by the thought and ignore Brasenose’s directive.

The male starver gives me a hard shove on the shoulder and bares his teeth at me, some of which have been filed down and are showing pustulant signs of infection.

“Don’t be dumb,” Brasenose singsongs. “They are ‘Compliance’ down here. You can’t set at naught the lawgivers when they outnumber you a hundred to one.”

I drop my rations pack and pare down to Brasenose’s respirator-only ensemble, my clot pouch notwithstanding. I thumb out the two from the little sporran around my neck. I see how this immediately placates the starver envoys, who relax into the posture of dressmaker mannequins. Brasenose is saying something that sounds like “troglofauna” to the lady starver—all I know is that they have a deranged chuckle at my expense.

She bids us to follow her along a steamy couloir ending at a rack and pinion elevator. Brasenose insists on taking the rear and I simmer loathsomely under his gaze. As we descend deeper into the shaft, the temperature lifts, like it’s rushing up to meet us.

My eyes are adjusting to the darkness as we emerge out of the elevator into a haulage drift. I wonder how close by the pilot’s penetrator ordinance has hit. How structurally sound these ceilings. After thirty seconds I’m runnelled with sweat. My concern turns to what the humidity is doing to my respirator. There are faint sounds of human activity at the other end of the drift, followed by a point of nascent illumination turning the kaleidoscope of black into a blurry gradient of movement.

The narrow opening we reach looks like it was blasted out, carved out by primitive implements. My calves and forearms are scored with nicks from the effort of squeezing through. We emerge into a karstic landscape overrun by cave popcorn, carmine-coloured liverworts. A hundred yards away, a throng. What must be a half-legion of starvers are clumped around an elevated ledge brocaded by flowstone formations.

This “stage” is lit by carelessly arranged stockpiles of climbing helmets—some bearing resource extraction wordmarks, some brandlessly black and recognizably Compliance-issue. One by one, with much sound and fury, individual starvers are filing out of a grotto entrance deeply set into what passes for stage left. From this distance, they look like filaments of boiled yuba skins sauntering upright.

A weak waterfall creates a curtain of water that trickles into a plunge below the stage. One of the parading starvers slips, cracks her hip and skull on the jutting edges, and slides algal into the drink. Cheers erupt and echo throughout the cave.

The next starver in the string quickens her pace to close the gap. I can make out five more besides. It takes some time for me to understand what is happening—it beggars comprehension, but I am actually witnessing a starver runway show.

“Corn smut goes next,” our chaperone bosses, edging Brasenose and I through the crowd, towards the grotto. She clutches my hip, which, while not exactly plump, looks positively podgy compared to her bulging iliac crest and the skin hanging from it.

Her speech is impaired by a Marlex patch sutured to her tongue: “If you can’t fit through the keyhole, gonna embowel you, fatso.” For the first time since the world turned into an ash heap, I consider the size of my ass. Narrower than Brasenose’s ribcage?

I push up close enough to Brasenose to mutter, “Have you done this before?”

“Every time,” he affirms, straightening his spine and brushing his palms pridefully down his hips.

“What happens?” I ask, but Marlex scolds me by pincering my tricep with her bony talons. She nudges me forward.

The throng makes way. Disgust folds their features. Brasenose hops pertly up the stone steps; as I follow, someone darts forward to bongo my gluteals before leaping away. This act of beasting is followed by heinous peals of laughter. I don’t turn around to see which dungeon freak did it. I just follow Brasenose into the grotto, dripping at the pits in the mouth-warm heat.

In the wings of the cave, the last performing starvers are almost out of the gate downstage. A few of them spit at the sight of us. Brasenose and I can’t make out what is being expressed beyond the sheet of water, which is indeed shaped roughly like a keyhole.

He raps the small of my back, letting me know he’ll take point. Behind me, I can hear ragged breathing. A starver is being assisted by our two envoys. One is female and half the size of her handlers—a skeletal system of bony winches and tackles that sounds like a creaky piano being tuned. A man sturdier than her but still smaller than the envoys slots into place behind her, wheezing.

Marlex hands Brasenose two cubes the size of visitandines. I do not see where she has extracted these samples from and don’t want to know, but Brasenose hands me one. It’s almost like a fragrant Vieux-Boulogne.

Brasenose chomps down on the block of cheese—it’s hard to guess what source they are culturing down here other than bat milk, or human—and gestures that I gobble my portion with a swish of his hand.

I want to ask whether I’ll be disembowelled for eschewing the bacteria cube, but Brasenose continues his pacing around the subterrain without glancing at me again. It’s Marlex who keeps her gluey gaze trained on me. I swallow her gouda whole with my tongue pressed to the bottom of my mouth. The flavour is nutty, buttery, and earthy with truffle-spore. I find myself wanting more even as I anticipate my bowels bloating with gas. Finally, satisfied I’ve swallowed, Marlex signals us to troop out onto the catwalk.

Brasenose does some preliminary breathwork as his antecedent passes through the keyhole. He is huffing kundalini fire as he fidgets with his nostrils. When the starver throng notes we’re next, their chant stumbles. A few jeer, but Brasenose is sucking in his gut and shimmying through with his knees bent.

When he makes it—a little slip on the wet-weed rock, but no fall—Marlex butts in line and walks through before me. She runs ahead of him and hooks Brasenose by the respirator hose, leading him offstage. He is welcomed with ringing cooees of approbation. I feel, upsettingly, an absurd need to achieve this response for myself.

Up close, the keyhole looks slightly wider at waist-height, helping only exceptionally leggy femmes or deeply tiny men. I go through crabwise on tip toe. Silence from the throng. I fear the damp rough touch of the flowstone. But then I’m through, and none of the starvers are looking at me.

The legion has turned its gaze to the man perched on a crag twenty feet above us all. A dishy frontiersman in banderoles of animal flesh, ripped from the shivers of time, daubed in offal-mucilage, oxblood-toned ribbons girdling his torso so as to suggest some kind of primitive hunger-regalia.

He observes my scant achievement, all my gristly joggling, with a familiar forbearance. Villwock, my child’s father, apparently now lord of the starvers and clot king, says, “My former fleshwife herself. Welcome to the House of Scrag, sweetmeat.”

P.S. Keep an eye out for another excerpt from the novel in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #82, coming later this spring!

PAIGE COOPER's debut collection of short stories, *Zolitude*, won the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was listed for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the Danuta Gleed Award. She was the 2020 editor of *Best Canadian Stories*. Her novel *Nulligravida* is forthcoming from Flying Books in 2027.

JEAN MARC AH-SEN is the author of *Grand Menteur*, *In the Beggarly Style of Imitation*, and *Kilworthy Tanner*. His work has been published in *McSweeney's Quarterly Concern*, *Hazlitt*, *The Comics Journal*, and *The Globe and Mail*. He writes the "Reading Habits" column for *The Toronto Star*.  

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

New talk of revived Romanticism (of which I’m agnostic), on this platform and elsewhere, has perhaps opened up the return of an ideal of l’art pour l’art—of art for art’s sake. Though what happens when this finally gets noisy enough to jolt against the contemporary creative industries’ obsessions with clean, digestible identitarian storytelling, is anybody’s guess. And as happened with the exquisite decay of the original Romanticism, l’art pour l’art eventually becomes a byword for art as a grandly artificial performance—for The Decadence, which worked once as tragedy, and has made its fitful return as farce in our high days of fascism, body modification, and the cynical camp of internet-speak. But of course, even the greatest of believers in art-for-art’s-sake, the divine Oscar, was himself one of English literature’s great fountains of apothegmatic wisdom.

What I’m trying to say is that among the many things literature does, teaching us how to live is surely one of them. I don’t mean it does this didactically, or simply, or in any form reducible to prescript. If it could do that, we’d have pamphlets, and not plays; we’d have treatises and catalogs and manuals, but no lyric poetry, and no romances. Ironically, all those more didactic genres used to be more artistic themselves. But now we’ve mostly lost them, just like we’ve lost the art of the sermon or the chronicle or the epistle. Despite the blazons in your local bookstores, ours is a time lacking in real genre. Perhaps this even further obscures the old reality, that alongside consolation and inspiration, what we’re seeking when we read is communion with some kind of genuine tutelary spirit. With a teacher. And Shakespeare is one of our greatest teachers.

What does he teach? In the largest sense, an all-embracing doctrine of the human imagination. Humani nihil a me alienum puto. Shakespeare’s stage is not just a place for history, or myth, or human action, or human drama—it’s a sacrosanct little world, in which the imagination is allegorized for our observance. Theatrum mundi; all the world’s a stage; yes, yes, all well and true and good. But also—the stage itself is the world. The theater is The Globe. And it’s only via such an imaginative space, made local for a moment, that we can begin to understand the larger world we’re living in. I’m sympathetic to the historicizing impulse of current Shakespeare scholars. It’s fashionable and practical to shrug off the idea that Shakespeare had any universal insight into human life, or any special sense for portraying the deepest levels of our emotional existence. Yet he did—he practiced a telescopic art, as universal as the great world religions and the epic poems of all times and places. Like many artists, I can’t abide by a practiced academic doubt for very long. So I contend: Shakespeare is our professor of the imagination—of its bounds and diversions, its dead-ends and heights—and any poet of the imagination requires from us a properly imaginative response. The intentional fallacy is of little use here.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the first truly great Shakespeare plays, even if its strangeness has often made it seem slight to commentators. Though published in quarto in 1598—the same year as the landmark posthumous Folio “Works” of Philip Sidney—it was probably written several years before that, in the mid 1590s. The quarto title page had it as “a pleasant conceited comedie” and bragged of its performance before the queen, the Christmas before. The play languished in (relative) obscurity after Shakespeare’s death, until in the twentieth century people began to revive and stage it with interest again. I’ve not been able to shake the sense that this has something directly to do with modernism. The late Victorians and modernists had already reevaluated and canonized several more “difficult” early modern poets, John Donne being the most famous. And just as Hamlet has something of the post-modern about it (like Quixote, it frequently seems even more post-modern than anything the twentieth century ever produced), Love’s Labour’s Lost has something almost properly modernist in it. Exhaustive language games, multiple registers, stylistic critiques, meta-jokes on contemporary poetic styles and practitioners—embedded within its comedy is the early Shakespeare’s first full declaration of his own poetic powers, and a critical statement on the poetry of his day. These things are inseparable, since one of the things Shakespeare succeeds in doing with Love’s Labour’s Lost is to indicate just how far beyond the poetry of his own time he’s preparing to take his work.

If our rough timeline of the Shakespeare plays is correct, and Love’s Labour’s Lost was likely written somewhere around 1595, this places the comedy in the middle of that period in which Shakespeare was beginning to stretch and test his full poetic genius for the first time. The three parts of Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus (which I firmly believe to be a purposefully bad play and a satire on Thomas Kyd), and the apprentice comedies, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew—all were behind him. At this point, Shakespeare was probably twenty-nine or thirty years old, with at least some three or four years under his belt as a playwright (and renown in London, due to the spectacularly successful narrative poem Venus and Adonis of 1593—his most popular work in his own lifetime), and surely many more as an actor. His next narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, was similarly quite successful. Briefly, he had the ear of the nobility of his day, and was yet to become primarily a playwright. It’s reasonable to assume that, at this point in the decade, Shakespeare was still very much thinking of himself not just as a playwright, but as a poet in the traditional sense, and throughout this time he was surely involved in composing the Sonnets (the posthumous printing of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591 had kicked off a revived vogue for Petrarchan sonnets that absolutely obsessed the Elizabethans of the ‘90s).

Love’s Labour’s Lost likely reached the stage around the same general period as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These plays are, respectively, Shakespeare’s most exquisite exploration of the romantic language of his day; his first great attempt at a tragic character; and, in the Dream, the defining statement of himself as an artist—the moment wherein he declares the point of all this playing, and begins to articulate the nature of his art, something which is evolving in its understanding beyond only poetry, unspooling towards a larger, more profound vocation. In Bottom’s magnificent waking monologue especially, the Shakespeare of the Dream is beginning to understand just what he’s trying to show people about the nature of representation, and the nature of the imagination. It unfurls the first clue to that vision of the world he’d begun to communicate to the world. For the rest of his career we see him working this further out, through the best of the histories and comedies, the cosmic horror and doubt of the high tragedies, the problem plays, and finally the late tragicomedies (sometimes called the Romances), where he almost seems to come to something of a resolution regarding this vocation, at the end.

That is, Love’s Labour’s Lost arrives in his first truly fecund period, and is not only Shakespeare’s first great comedy, but his mature statement on English poetry as he found it—and probably found it somewhat lacking. As in Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost is filled with sonnets. Though in a much more ironic sense, the sonnets of Love’s Labour’s Lost are never very good, and such is clearly the point (though this didn’t stop them from being anthologized several times during the decade). The failure and subsequent achievement of the characters to use language well is a kind of covert meta-structure in the play. And as one of the two or three works of his which stem from no clear source material, Love’s Labour’s Lost is so basically plot-free, it’s the Elizabethan equivalent of a “hang-out” movie, where characters come and go and get involved in little tricks with each other, but in which actions never seem to point to any particular denouement. Even the play’s conclusion is a peculiar one (of which more later), yet by the end it makes a complex statement about what actually makes great poetry.

As the play begins, the King of Navarre has convened his courtiers Dumaine, Longaville, and Berowne, to announce their withdrawal from the world, swearing off the company of women for three years, in pursuit of scholarly renown (“fame” and “honour” says the King). So, declares the King, “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; | Our court shall be a little academe, | Still and contemplative in living art” (1.1.14-16). Part of the beauty of the play is that they never really get to begin their project. The King and his courtiers are glorious, bone-headed fops. Only Berowne has any brains—he’s one of Shakespeare’s first real gentleman wits, the first of the type that finds its later height with Mercutio and Benedick and even Prince Hamlet. Berowne is far from keen to swear to three years without women, sleep, or good food, and his series of sophistical attempts to get out of his oath are brilliant examples of an empty poetic rhetoric:

Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain

Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:

As painfully to pore upon a book

To seek the light of truth, while truth the while

Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile;

So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

Study me how to please the eye indeed

By fixing it upon a fairer eye,

Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,

And give him light that it was blinded by.

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,

That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.

Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others’ books.

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,

That give a name to every fixèd star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

Too much to know is to know naught but fame,

And every godfather can give a name (74-94).

Berowne’s voice here is very close to several of the Sonnets. Shakespeare is reveling in his own virtuosity, in his ability to twist and turn the conceits of Elizabethan poetry inside out, often with little concern for meaning. This is delight in the pure form of the Renaissance lyric, and Berowne is its perfect vehicle, since Berowne is himself all form, all rhetoric and wordplay. As the Shakespeare of the Sonnets does, Berowne picks up words just to see how many times he can use them without destroying their meaning (“Light seeking light doth light of light beguile”), making “eye” and “light” and “while” and “blind” into a constant, dazzling chime on that bright, open vowel. Fair eyes and stars, looks and books, are all classic clichés out of the love tradition begun by Petrarch—but they’re moldy conceits, at that point in the 1590s more than two centuries old, which the Elizabethans had made faddish again, and which Shakespeare never stops parodying throughout the play. These are also the same clichés with which the dour Romeo begins Romeo and Juliet, and which the far more naturally poetic Juliet teaches him to move beyond, in order to be worthy of her love.

Indeed, this is something of a theme across Shakespeare’s great comedies (and Romeo and Juliet is a comedy, for its first half): the best female characters are generally far better poets, and far wittier, than the men are. Even in a nearly-equal exchange, like that of Much Ado’s Beatrice and Benedick, it’s more than clear who would win in a direct contest; while poor Rosalind in As You Like It is so clever she’s forced to literally write the script for Orlando to woo her with. Love’s Labour’s Lost is no different: almost as soon as the King and his courtiers swear their oaths and declare that any man will be punished if found in the company of women, Berowne reminds the King that the Princess of France and her ladies are already on their way, to handle her father’s monetary complaints. Soon enough the Princess is arriving with her ladies—and their task in the play will be to outwit, humiliate, and finally teach the men just how silly it is to retreat from the world into sterile scholasticism. The Princess is herself a rather brilliant wit, while her chief lady-in-waiting, Rosaline serves as a ready foil for Berowne.

Here I must confess to some personal fantasies about Shakespeare’s names. Since Berowne is just about the closest any male Shakespearean character comes to sounding like the sprightliest Sonnets, it’s hard for me not to see him as an occasional surrogate for the author, composed just as Shakespeare himself was falling in love. Which is not to say that Shakespeare puts himself into his play (just as making Hamlet and Iago poets nearly as great as himself doesn’t mean he sees himself in them; they’re more likely ways for him to characterize and feel out to the furthest those departments in his own self—certain aspects of his own poetic understanding). Yet I still have my suspicions. Throughout Love’s Labour’s Lost, much is made of Rosaline’s “darkness,” just as Shakespeare does with the “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets. Of course this was also a Renaissance commonplace, that dark hair was less fair than light—yet one nebulous enough that plenty of arguments have been made about its racial implications (for instance, there’s a persuasive body of scholarship on the “Dark Lady” as an Arabic, Indian, or sub-Saharan African woman, while another tradition puts forward Aemilia Lanier, an Italian poet of Jewish heritage).

Yet neither am I saying that Rosaline is literally a stand-in for the woman Shakespeare apparently loved. But the name shows up in other places: Rosaline is, after all, the name of the woman whom the dejected Romeo is pining after at the start of his play; and it may not be for nothing that Shakespeare gives his most ingenious comic heroine the name Rosalind (at least once emended in the play to Rosaline, to jokingly complete a bad rhyme). All I’m saying is Shakespeare has a marked tendency in his love stories to portray a dull young man enchanted by a woman who raises him to her level, and teaches him to use his language more carefully. Indeed, in Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare seems to use Berowne to think through and satirize his own tendency towards mere verbal fireworks, which of course dovetails perfectly with a satire of the courtly Petrarchan revivalist poems of his day, as in the attempts of Navarre and his courtiers to write their own hackneyed love-poetry. Poetry which the ladies subsequently dismiss (as Shakespeare was possibly dismissing many of his contemporaries), as mere “bombast and as lining to the time.” That is to say: only good for stuffing.

While the courtiers court the ladies and write their mediocre sonnets, the verbal games of the play refract through the parade of “lower” characters as well—below the courtly level of the aristocratic war of the sexes, there runs a slew of different comic types: Don Armado, the old Spanish knight; his witty page Moth; Costard the rascal; Dull the constable; Jacuqenetta the maid; Nathaniel the curate; and finally Holofernes, Shakespeare’s immortal parody of the kind of humanist schoolmaster whom the author himself surely suffered under as a young grammar-school student in the provinces.

The arrival of the first of these, Don Armado, is presaged by Navarre: “A man in all the world’s new fashion planted, | That hath a mint of phrases in his brain” (169-70). Berowne agrees, and calls him (in jest), “A man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight” (183). Armado has been imported to Navarre to be entertainment for the courtiers. The knight is ridiculously old-fashioned, a kind of proto-Quixote who has arrived far too late for the glory days of chivalry. His own language is full of archaisms that would’ve seemed comically out-of-date to Shakespeare’s audience. And yet, as Navarre and Berowne’s introductions suggest, Armado is also an unstoppable coiner of new terms—like Holofernes, he exists in part so Shakespeare can make vicious fun of the fad for neologisms which possessed English grammarians and scholars throughout the sixteenth century, leading to the derisive term inkhorn, for their pretentious Latin borrowings and pointless formalities.

The knight arrives with his page, called Moth (or Mote), and already we have two contrasting models for “lower” forms of wit. Armado is only vaguely capable of cleverness; mostly he’s Shakespeare’s caricature of an outdated striver who misunderstands eloquent language to mean only haughty archaic terms and painfully ineffective new ones. Moth, however is a natural wit. The following section may suffice to exemplify the page’s nimble dance:

Armado: Boy, what sign is it when a man of great spirit grows melancholy?

Moth: A great sign, sir, that he will look sad.

Armado: Why, sadness is one and the self-same thing, dear imp.

Moth: No, no; O Lord, sir, no.

Armado: How canst thou part sadness and melancholy, my tender juvenal?

Moth: By a familiar demonstration of the working, my tough signor.

Armado: Why tough senior? Why tough senior?

Moth: Why tender juvenal? Why tender juvenal?

Armado: I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender.

Moth: And I, tough senior, as an appertinent title to your old time, which we may name tough.

Armado: Pretty and apt (1.2.1-18).

We can see how wit sometimes gets started at the basic level of synonym (for the rhetoricians of the day, the figure called synonymia). Yet Shakespeare shows us the difference between mere piling up of synonymia on the one hand, and the actual translation of metaphor on the other. “Tender juvenal” is not bad on Armado’s part: “tender” is right for a youth, and “juvenal” suggests both the Roman satirist Juvenal and the juvenile Moth himself. But the following phrase, “…congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender…” is inert pointless verbiage, an unknowing parody of scholarly and clerical language, overflowing with blots from the inkhorn. Armado is so in love with his own vaunted terms for things, that when he does get started on metaphor, he can only inflate and inflate past the point of sensibility, as when he declares that “The heaving of my lungs provokes me to ridiculous smiling,” or when he invents a new name for the afternoon, calling it “The posteriors of the day.” He’s always technically accurate; he simply has no understanding of the register he’s attempting to use.

Moth, however, is a true native of the world of words:

Armado: My love is most immaculate white and red.

Moth: Most maculate thoughts, master, are masked under such colours.

Armado: Define, define, well-educated infant.

Moth: My father’s wit and my mother’s tongue assist me!

Armado: Sweet invocation of a child — most pretty and pathetical!

Moth: If she be made of white and red,

Her faults will ne’er be known,

For blushing cheeks by fault are bred,

And fears by pale white shown.

Then if she fear or be to blame,

By this you shall not know,

For still her cheeks possess the same

Which native she doth owe (90-107).

Armado’s charge, “Define, define, well-educated infant” is one of the most sublimely silly moments in Shakespeare. And yet Moth’s simple little extemporal poem in ballad measure is by far the best of any character’s compositions within the play. It has all the plain diction of a good Elizabethan song: it wouldn’t be out of place among the tunes of Thomas Campion, or Ben Jonson’s “Celia” lyrics. In the figure of this poor page, attached to his pompous knight, we see Shakespeare neatly implying how little wit has to do with one’s station—and also how little it has to do with any “higher” diction. Moth is perhaps only clever, but he far outdoes any of the other low characters, each of whom represent some particular department of wit gone wrong. Dull the constable, for instance, is singularly unable to understand even the slightest joke, while Costard the knave is at least able to pun, yet suffers from a stunning tendency to confuse words for things, as when Berowne gives him his “remuneration” for delivering a letter to Rosaline, and the fool thinks it must be the Latin word for three farthings.

This tendency towards misunderstanding the purposes of figurative language reaches ridiculous heights in the schoolmaster Holofernes, who is seemingly incapable of saying anything without larding it heavily in Latin phrases and piling chains of synonyms on top of each other, in a parody of Erasmian copia (or rhetorical amplification through epithets, held to be the best and most-abused virtue in sixteenth-century rhetoric). Holofernes is an entirely self-important pedant, a parody of Renaissance rhetoricians. Or, as he declares his particular “genius” to be:

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it (4.2.82-89).

Holofernes comes the closest here to genuine literary language, and yet of course it’s all in a faux-humble pride at his own ostensible brilliance—and even then, it runs long. Confronted with Berowne’s poor Petrarchan sonnet, he turns critic, and complains to his follower Nathaniel, the curate:

You find not the apostraphus, and so miss the accent: let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but, for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odouriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention? Imitari is nothing: so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider (144-151).

“Let me supervise the canzonet,” is up there with Armado’s “Define, define, well-educated infant” as one of Shakespeare’s greatest moments in making sublime silliness out of his characters’ absurdities. True, Holofernes knows his literary history—he knows Ovid, Shakespeare’s own favorite poet—and talks passionately about poetic value, completely dismissing “imitari” (also imitatio, a translation of mimesis, the doctrine of art as imitation, inherited from Aristotle and made universal in the Renaissance). Holofernes at least knows that poetry is useless without what he calls the “jerks of invention,” the capacity to create or produce some new meaning, beyond the mere imitation of form or action, beyond even the capacity for achieving “numbers ratified” (numbers meaning the metrical line in poetry). But when he turns to write his own extemporal poem on a deer, or “pricket,” which the Princess has hunted down, he isn’t a very good poet himself. And even before this, he fails to articulate new meaning, and instead gets stuck in language games with Nathaniel and the constable, Dull:

Nathaniel: Very reverend sport, truly; and done in the testimony of a good conscience.

Holofernes: The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

Nathaniel: Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least: but, sir, assure ye, it was a buck of the first head.

Holofernes: Sir Nathaniel, haud credo.

Dull: ‘Twas not a haud credo; ‘twas a pricket.

Holofernes: Most barbarous intimation! yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.

Dull: I said the deer was not a haud credo; twas a pricket.

Holofernes: Twice-sod simplicity, his coctus! O thou monster Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look! (1-24)

Poor Dull has simply misheard Holofernes’ pompous “haud credo” (“I think not”) as “auld grey doe” and yet he gets the full Holofernes treatment, as the schoolmaster’s rhetorical flourishes simply drown any possible meaning in verbiage. Holofernes is addicted to his figures, and hammers on and on at them, relentlessly, taking both copia and synonymia and lowering them to the level of a linguistic vice. This is not the proper use of language, Shakespeare keeps saying throughout Love’s Labour’s Lost, parading these characters as they wander in and out of his plotless plot, in a labyrinth of wondrously dumb and excessive language, which Moth witheringly declares “a great feast of languages.”

Indeed, the parade of the low characters becomes even more explicit as they stage a grand pageant in the final act, portraying the Nine Worthies of ancient legend—heroes like Pompey, Hercules, Judas Maccabeus, et al.—for the entertainment of the aristocrats. Only Costard and Moth survive the performance unscathed, since among the low characters they make the fewest attempts to use a “high” poetic language, whereas Nathaniel, Holofernes, and Armado are viciously mocked by the nobles, and firmly put back in their place—effectively censored by the play’s dramatic engine, for failing to understand the right uses of language.

Simultaneous to this, Shakespeare has slowly brought his aristocratic war of the sexes to its high point. Once the courtiers write their miserable love poems, they eavesdrop on one another, and each discovers the others breaking their vows to avoid women. At this point, Navarre and his dejected courtiers turn to Berowne, realizing their “little academe” has already failed in its sterile project, and beg him to exercise his wit. Berowne does so, in the finest rhetorical performance of the play, slipping into a speech and reaching a climax in which all the Petrarchan mannerisms and Renaissance clichés the courtiers have unsuccessfully experimented with are finally yoked together in a proper salvo of dramatic blank verse:

Have at you, then, affection’s men-at-arms!
O, we have made a vow to study, lords,
And in that vow we have forsworn our books.
For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,
In leaden contemplation have found out
Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes
Of beauty’s tutors have enriched you with?
Other slow arts entirely keep the brain
And therefore, finding barren practicers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil.
But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices (4.3.311-26).

Berowne has tied everything back to the courtiers’ exchanges at the start of the play, and is beginning to draft some genuine, compelling poetry. Particularly in that cadence, “And abstinence engenders maladies,” we even get a slight premonition of the more darkly ironic tone Shakespeare had mastered by the time Hamlet. But Berowne continues, reaching his full crescendo:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world:
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.
Then fools you were these women to forswear,
Or keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools (338-50).

This is a rhetorical victory for Berowne (and, in a way, for Shakespeare as a poet). He has fused the clichés of Petrarchan poetry, the wealth of mythological and poetic Renaissance commonplaces, with an accomplished rhetoric, and in so doing he gives the men the inspiration they need to move forward and finish the action of the play. There are perhaps some comparisons to be made in these lines with Shakespeare’s early rival Marlowe, who first mastered and delivered that powerful, high dramatic blank verse to the Elizabethan stage. Some, too, with the Euphuism of John Lyly, who had charmed Elizabeth’s court with his elegant plays in the 1580s. But it’s hard to imagine Marlowe’s steady rolling cadence, or the constant deliberate symmetry of Lyly, ever managing to produce something as essentially stately and graceful as this. Shakespeare is still working within the bounds of the prior blank verse tradition: each line is essentially an enclosed syntactical unit, even those lines that run over to the next. (The progress of Shakespeare’s verse through his career can be traced as much by his increasingly broken line as by its subtle tendency towards the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval over the Romantic and High Renaissance.) Here there’s an even, fluid mix of registers, characteristic of the 1590s, while the structure and form of each thought are kept within the polite bounds of the verse as he’d first received it. It is late-Elizabethan classicism, pure and clear. Sidney himself couldn’t have done much better.

Of course, the comedic beauty of the play is that Berowne’s rhetorical victory doesn’t translate to a dramatic one. After vowing at the end of the fourth act to leave behind their ridiculous ascetic project and woo the ladies of France instead, Navarre and his courtiers utterly fail to do so. First pretending to be Muscovites visiting the ladies’ tents, the ladies figure out their plan immediately and play a joke on them, swapping their masks. Following this humiliation, the courtiers and the ladies settle in to watch the low characters’ Pageant of the Nine Worthies, only for a messenger from France to arrive, announcing that the Princess’ father has died and she must return home at once. And here is where Shakespeare somewhat hauntingly subverts the expectations of an ending. When Navarre and his courtiers approach the ladies, declare their contrition, and pledge themselves to them, the women do not immediately accept them. Instead, they demand a year of penance from each suitor before they will agree to marriage. As the Princess demands of Navarre:

…A time, methinks, too short
To make a world-without-end bargain in.
No, no, my lord, your grace is perjured much,
Full of dear guiltiness; and therefore this:
If for my love, as there is no such cause,
You will do aught, this shall you do for me:
Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world… (5.2.865-73)

Berowne for his part is charged by Rosaline with employing his wits in to cheer up the sick. Then the ladies prepare to make their journey, but first Armado returns, to bring in the figures of Heims and Ver (winter and spring), and suddenly the final moments of the play are no longer given to the drama itself but to two peculiar songs of cyclical nature. I’ll quote these eclogues in full, since they aren’t too long, and since they’re such remarkable pieces of poetry. First Ver’s song:

When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
“Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are plowmen’s clocks;
When turtles tread, and rooks and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks;
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
“Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear. (968-85)

Then Heims’ song:

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
“Tu-whit to-who.” A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
“Tu-whit to-who.” A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. (986-1001)

The last words of the play after this are Armado’s: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way; we this way” (1002-3).

There’s far too much going on in these poems for me to handle it all in a post already running long. From the start of the play, the artificial academic world of the men was opposed by the presence of the women, who represented a sort of injunction towards genuine sexual union and existence in the social world. By the time the messenger has arrived and announced the King’s death, their courtly world of aristocratic word-games has been thoroughly punctured by something like the reality principle: the necessity of death has interrupted the comedy, and forestalled the possibility of a normal marriage plot. Shakespeare’s peculiar solution to the frustration of the traditional comedic end is to bring out yet another stage in his succession of subtle reminders to the audience. Not only have we seen the courtly figures of the play brought down from the heights of their verbal games and sex wars by the serious intrusion of death—he now hauls before his audience two figures of the alternating seasons, as if to say that underneath all this language and human action, there remains the endless cycle of nature, humming along beneath it.

It’s an astonishing vision to sum up such a high comic play: the songs of Heims and Ver are rugged and simple—resolutely not the songs of aristocrats and elegant poets, but country songs, conjuring up that old medieval England that always lingers in the back of Shakespeare’s mind. They belong more to the world of breviaries and calendars in the late Middle Ages than to any elite Renaissance court. They’re also far more subtle than first glance suggests. After all, it’s the cuckoo, in the season of green and life, who sings “a note of fear” and “mocks married men,” while the owl in the cruel winter keeps the working woman company. Shakespeare mingles in a note of discord with the pastoral, just as he mingles a glint of hope in with the wasteland of winter. The poems are, of course, directed at both the noble characters and the audience itself. In a way, they almost remake and refute everything we’ve seen up until these last moments. It’s a prime example of Shakespeare’s uncanny art: all along, we’ve been laughing along to a ridiculous play about rhetoric and verbal artifice, full of puns and comments on the poetry of its day—only the for the final statement to come from the lips of the seasons themselves, reminding us what goes on underneath it all. After giving us examples of so many lyrics and styles and registers, what we end with is Shakespeare at his most elegant, simple, and apparently natural.

What we’re meant to make of this is far from clear. But by this point, Shakespeare has shown his exquisite sense of his own powers in so many ways: outdoing his contemporaries, showing their fads to be trifles; delivering a series of subtle criticisms of the styles of his time, replete with examples of the whole past century’s failures at rhetorical performance; then setting up the final act of the play with a full and virtuosic example of that rhetoric in dramatic poetry. Yet at the end, he takes a left turn into these two quiet, bare songs of simple nature, with their strange notes of disquiet mixed in.

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” says Armado, and indeed the fall from comedic heights to the fact of death is a harsh one. But where the courtiers have been sent, the audience has been sent too: off from the golden world of the stage, back out into the “real world” where they must scramble to find some meaning and come to the right use of their divine gift of language. “You that way, we this way,” as if to say that, being actors, they must inevitably reach the end of their fiction. While we, poor things that we are, will go out into the world again. But remembering, perhaps, that the games of language are a wonderful artifice, while underneath it all—perhaps even behind death itself—the world goes on. And though it may seem bent on causing us pain, it also provides for us, in the strangest of times. We can’t understand it, except in brief, in a pair of simple songs sung on a stage. Then it’s back out into the world again, and we can only hope we’ve gained just a little more wisdom, to help us figure out how to live in it.

This piece was originally posted on Vita Contemplativa in October 2025. We thank Sam for the opportunity to republish it here. Visit Vita Contemplativa to subscribe.

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Towards the end, Hillegonds asks, rhetorically, “I wonder what Boudinot would say about his students today, in the Age of AI.” Fortunately, Boudinot is still alive and available to answer such questions, and sent a short response to LitHub, which declined to publish it. In the interest of giving Ryan a platform to respond, we’re pleased to present it here as an op-ed. Enjoy.—Eds.

What I Would Say to My Students Today, in the Age of AI

by Ryan Boudinot

“I wonder what Boudinot would say about his students today, in the Age of AI.” --Timothy J. Hillegonds, A Singular Pursuit: Why All Writing (and All Writers) Matter More Than Ever Today, Literary Hub, March 19, 2026

Thanks for asking.

For starters, I’d tell them that they’re already smart enough to express themselves without assistance from a machine. I’d say that the aspects of their work that are perceived as imperfections offer the most promising opportunities to learn. I’d tell them it’s important to produce as much bad writing as you possibly can as quickly as possible. I’d wish them as much fulfillment from their writing as I enjoy myself.

You might divide your writing life into two categories: transactional and experiential. I think the question of whether to use AI depends on how your writing sits within your life in relation to these categories.

Transactional writing is writing that you do in exchange for something. This can be money, sure. I’ve done a lot of transactional writing. In recent years, I’ve written for tech companies about cybersecurity, agentic AI, infrastructure modernization, other stuff. In exchange for this sort of writing, I’ve earned a living. I long ago abandoned any kind of hang-ups I had about this sort of work. I find any opportunity to work on sentences all day a privilege and a pleasure.

Another kind of transactional writing is writing for social status, praise, or esteem. Or even as a mechanism to convince yourself that you’re cool. I’ve done my share of this kind of writing, too. The trap, I think, in writing for such intangibles, is to base your motivation on whether or not to continue writing on how your writing is received. A book that sells few copies, an article that sparks a backlash—these can be reasons to tap out and try your hand at something else. I’ve known a fair number of writers who’ve decided to give up writing when their work didn’t succeed in the ways they’d hoped or imagined. I totally get it; I’ve tried and given up on lots of things. I don’t play guitar anymore. Go ahead and quit and make yourself happy some other way.

Experiential writing is writing that’s disconnected from any expectation that anyone will ever read it, and which, despite this, still feels worthwhile. The entirety of the reward lies in the interior, in the process itself. I’ve found certain philosophical traditions informative when writing in solitude with no expectation of payment, publication, or an audience. The Bhagavad Gita advises us to disconnect from the fruits of our actions. Marcus Aurelius counsels us to not care what people in the future will think of us, as they’re “the same annoying people you know now.”

If you want to use AI as part of your writing process for transactional reasons, sure, whatever, knock yourself out. AI has a lot to offer for writers who are focused on getting something external in exchange for their work. I hope that the novelist who uses AI to “help them write” their work gets totally famous with lots and lots of money and lots and lots of people who send them heart emojis on social media all day long.

Artificial intelligence is irrelevant to writing as a process of inner investigation and accessing holiness. I’d no sooner turn to generative AI to “help me write” than I would ask it to help me have sex or taste food.

Writing novels is super fun. I love doing it. The activity is its own reward. Since I hit a nerve with that essay I wrote eleven years ago, I’ve steadily made more stacks of paper with words on them. I assume they’ll never get published. I intend to produce as many more manuscripts as I can before I die. Writing is a far more fulfilling activity than I could have imagined years ago. There’s no way, at this point, that writing could conceivably disappoint me. I don’t need my writing life to be anything different than what it already is. I consider myself tremendously blessed that written expression is something that I even get to enjoy during my fleeting tenure on this planet. Writing is an act of unconditional love. I wish upon anyone who decides to take up the practice such bliss.

That’s what I’d say.

Ryan Boudinot's most recent novel is Broken Utopia, published in 2025 by Publication Studio. He is active on Substack, where he is serializing his memoir, How to Get Good at Losing Your Job.

What’s eating contemporary literature? Why, it’s the spectre of the Donner Party! It seems like you can’t turn a corner these days without running into a book about people eating people, almost all of them by women for some reason. There’s Tender is the Flesh, Butter, The Eyes Are the Best Part, Nothing Tastes As Good, The Lamb, Girl Dinner, Hunger, which is not to be confused What Hunger, The Starving Saints, The Dead Husband Cookbook, Indigent, The Summer I Ate The Rich, Natural Beauty, The Butcher’s Daughter, The Centre, This House Will Feed, Bloom, Trad Wife1—and these are only the ones I’ve come across, God knows how many more are out there in the wild languishing at the bottom of the publishing glut or coming out via small presses or self-publishing. I haven’t read a single one of these, and—apologies to their authors—I’m not going to. The press from most of these books comes off basically the same. WOAH!!!! EATING PEOPLE?????? Picture me yawning as the poor publishing intern tries to read the copy to me in a spooky voice, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. I’m not going to say it doesn’t succeed in making me grossed out—sure, it does—but it is not “shocking.” I get grossed out when people eat “savoury oats.”

Most of these novels seem to dwell in some way on femininity and its relationship to the body and to certain social norms (part of what has been branded as “femgore”). Bodies so objectified they become literal food (I liked it better when Atwood did it in The Edible Woman), or the inversion of those who are objectified eating other people’s bodies, or breaking the taboo that, um… women aren’t supposed to eat people or something. It’s just not proper! You’re a lady! Spit that mouthful of human liver out this instant! In some cases it’s melded with a class element (and I liked that better when Jonathan Swift did it—with more of a sense of humour—three hundred years ago) or a religious element (the Eucharist is like CANNIBALISM!!! WOAH!!!!!! I strongly suspect Caitlin Starling of The Starving Saints is a Protestant by birth2). Boring, boring, boring. I might be more inclined to be interested in any of it if it weren’t so heavy-handed about its themes from the moment you read the blurb. I think of ’s rant about contemporary horror:

Critics and academics ruined horror. Absolute losers (I count myself among this group) looked at the work of perverts and wanted to justify their interest. It’s not the tits, or the blood, or the catharsis of violence. It’s commentary about the schizophrenic effects of modernity.

Bad enough to have to put up with all this sophomoric BS, but so much worse when you then also have to contend with the same metaphors over and over and over again. I encountered a book in the bookstore called My Year of Meats and I just immediately thought “yup, that’s a cannibalism book” and I don’t think it even actually is after having looked into it, but the fact that I looked at it and immediately had this assumption reflexively come to mind is what led me to write all this—what the thought itself, right or wrong, suggested, and how it felt to think it. All of this cannibalism work is so obviously positioning itself to “shock,” but if you’re looking at a bunch of products on the shelf and one of them immediately makes you think “oh is this one of those cannibalism ones?” then by definition I cannot call that “shocking”; in fact it feels more like “shopping.” I can tell that these chips are probably going to have too much flavour powder because the packaging is so “in-your-face” and the font has all these pointed edges, and I can tell this book is probably about cannibalism because the title has a starkly-worded reference to hunger or food in it. Very transgressive, yes, just like Monster Energy Drink™. It’s branding.

Cannibalism is as obvious a metaphor as it is efficient—we are “consumed” by many things, and we “consume” many things. Our human bodies, our meat suits, when objectified, become easily likened to products, and the products made up of organic matter which you use most wholly are obviously the ones you literally consume and digest—to use someone can be easily turned into a metaphor by using someone entirely, eating them. Add an ironic twist, and the subject of the metaphorical consumption can be the one doing the consuming—objectified women eating men who objectify them, poor people eating rich people, non-white people eating white people, etc. etc. etc. Then consider wellness culture, the way we are made to manage our own bodies, the emphasis on our literal diet—women especially are made to feel as though they eat too much or eat wrong or eat what they’re forbidden to. Then there’s consumption in the macro sense, in the sense of the things we as a society consume in abundance and the anxiety about that consumption, or perhaps concern for the eating of animals, and so on. And so “cannibalism” as a metaphor can easily rope in myriad critiques and comments from all angles on capitalism, gender dynamics, sexuality, ecology, race. It’s extremely easy stuff, and it is instantly legible to middlebrow readers for what it is; can often be explained in whole in one sentence; and, in spite of the repetitiveness/obviousness of these deployments, still reads as “incisive” because the central metaphor concerns one of the greatest cultural taboos.

Here’s a cannibalism metaphor for you: these fucking books. They’re shamelessly eating one another. How shameless? Well, a recent femgore book got pulled because it turned out it was written with an LLM.3 But of course it was. What else can we expect in a landscape of literary production where the attitude seems to only ever be more! more! more! We are in a cultural accumulation crisis. One factor of this crisis is the ever-expanding surplus of completely mediocre MFA students,4 the indigestible gristle of the writing world, who are being boiled alive for whatever the system can get out of them. They are nothing if not wanting for creativity. One of the many ramifications of this is the near-instantaneous oversaturation of just about any emergent trend. The flooding of the market with more and more shit increases the value of anything that can be instantly recognized and sold as “a thing,” something legible enough to be fed into the recommendation ecosystem of social media, book clubs, if you liked X you’ll like Y chains that platforms like GoodReads pride themselves on as they help turn literature into mere “stuff,” mere lifestyle brand bullshit. The system rewards “templates,” and “cannibalism” is now just another one of those templates.

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

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

BOOTSIE HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

[Consider reading the following story with special “Virtual Cat” accompaniment.]

MY CAT IS IN LOVE WITH ME I swear to god. Sometimes she stares at me with like, prolonged eye contact. She’s got a little cute smile when she does it too. Her name is Bootsie. Sometimes Boots. Other times, Bootsie the Cutie. Or Boo Boo. When I’m drunk I call her Boots Ootz Ootz Ootz Ootz. (Like dubstep.)

We named her that because she has these white socks on her hindlegs, like thigh high stockings on your wedding night.

Occasionally she’ll casually mention things she wants to do or see. Sometimes it’s like, “I haven’t sat in the windowsill for a while. Do you wanna come and watch birds with me?”

The day she started talking was really insane. Honestly I thought I was going crazy. You know how she learned to speak? Sesame Street. I’d put the TV on in the mornings before I went to work, to give her something to look at, to keep her company. Bootsie likes to gaze at small birds. I figured she’d like BIG Birds too.

Her first words to me were, “I’m baby.” But it evolved quickly. When I retrieved her plushie banana from deep behind the couch she yelled, “Banana home! Banana’s hoooome!” Weeks later, when she pawed at the back door, I said, “Hey Bootsie— whatcha want? You wanna go outside? Yeah?” She replied, “Of course I would like to. It would be nice to.”

Sometimes she licks herself around me. She’ll lick her arm and look over, as if to say, “Look how sleek my fur. Look how long my limbs. Look at the sheen of me. I’m so nice to lick.” I swear to god she’s flirting with me but that’s crazy. She’ll show me her belly, like an invitation. “Look how safe I feel around you,” she murmurs. “I can show you everything.”

Bootsie brings home a mouse to torture. “I love their stupid sounds of distress,” she says. When I point out that when she was a kitten she made similar cries to her mom, she notes, “But I’m not their mother. I’m their monster.”

Over time I think Bootsie got too smart, honestly. One time she complained for hours—about her stale food, the room temperature, how I spend all day on my laptop not paying attention to her.

“Why are you in such a bad fucking mood today?” I asked her, and she shoots me this look. “What do you want from me?!” she says. “I’m trapped here, on Earth. In this fucking body! And YOU won’t have sex with me, even though we sleep together every night. Do you know how crazy that makes me?”

I nod. “That’s fair. I’m sorry. But you’re a cat.”

Bootsie snarls. “Is that all I am to you?”

A week later I find it, hidden deep behind the couch. My medication. Bootsie must have knocked my pill bottle back there. Almost like she did it on purpose. I hadn’t taken them for months. But today I start again.

Later, Bootsie strolls in through the kitchen cat door. “Meow meowr mrr meow mrr,” she says, then frowns. “Meowr?!” She sees the bottle, the blank, uncomprehending look on my face and begins to howl.

BULLY 4 U

THERE ARE THINGS YOU’VE BEEN putting off for whatever reason. I understand. I get it. That’s why I’m here.

You wanted to change the battery in your laptop. You have the new one, the right tools, even a YouTube video showing step by step how to do it right. And yet... you find it hard to start.

So you finally admit it—you’re powerless to do the things you know you want to do. You need help. A person who can almost force you. And so you call me.

I come over and I’m very gentle. I smile and encourage. I break things down into tiny steps. I walk you through it. You and I watch the video and I pause it while you pry the laptop open. In this way we get to work, and we get it done.

The next week you want to install a new shower rod and curtain. The week after that you want to mend some mittens.

Then one day I come over and you serve me tea. We chat. You want to show me this hilarious YouTube video about a parrot that purrs. You ask me about my life, my family, my other clients. You are paying me a hundred bucks an hour. We’re not getting anything done.

“Stop stalling!” I snap, and you sit upright, like a pointer dog, hairs on your nape stiff, and you get right to it.

When you’re done, I apologize. “I’m sorry I yelled,” I said. And you shake your head. “It’s okay. It worked.” It did work.

The next week I raise my voice again. And it works again. And I apologize again, for yelling. “I shouldn’t be shouting at my clients,” I tell you. But you are glowing. You got to work. You got it done.

The next time I raise my voice I stand up, and tower over you. “Help me help my client!” I say. “I need my client to get to work.” You scurry over to your spreadsheet and begin doing your taxes. As I growl threats under my breath like a grumpy boss, you don’t just do this year’s taxes, as we had planned, but chart a budget for next year too.

I start wearing leather. I get a weathered jacket. Then pants. Soon I am covered in dark skins, orbited by musky unmistakable aromas. This seems to encourage you.

I double my prices, and you pay it. You reason that you’re so much more productive, you can afford it.

I make you strip nude and do humiliating poses for my camera. “Don’t give me a reason to send these to your family,” I say. “Finish everything on your To Do List and these photos die with me.” You nod. You get to work. You get things done.

At work, you get a promotion. I am full of praise for you. I’m so proud of you. Eventually you become the manager, and I make you hire me. After a team meeting I come into your office, alone, close the blinds and have you show me all the things you’ve been putting off. Then I rub your neck while you work, making sure you don’t slack off, only squeezing you gently when you linger on Instagram too long.

Years pass. You become CEO. Then, one day you tell me you’ve been putting off doing one last thing—having a kid. So we get to work. We get it done.

AFTERLIFE

LAST WEEK I TRIED TO KILL myself and succeeded. I saw the tunnel. I followed the light. I ended up in this nice waiting room, like at a dentist’s. A chirpy Blonde comes over with a clipboard and takes me into a private room. On the monitor is a view of me hanging from the maple tree. “What a mess, huh?” the Blonde says. “What did you think would happen after you died? Where did you think you would go?” I put my hands on the table and open them. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I really didn’t think that far. I just wanted to leave... I was just so tired.”

“Well, by killing yourself, you’ve put yourself in a lot of karmic debt,” she tells me. “Your story stops here unless you do some work for us.” The next day I’m floating high above Toronto. The job is to talk two other people into killing themselves. Right now I’m a ghost. No one except psychics and crazy people can see me. But some people—those for whom suicide is a possibility—are on my unique wavelength. They can hear me, faintly, like a radio signal, like it’s their own thoughts, when I speak. I talk to five people that first day but I can’t tell if they can even hear me.

The Blonde tells me to be patient. I tell her that I had expected the job to be to save people, to talk them OUT of killing themselves, and she laughs. “In the Afterlife,” she says, “the only currencies are souls and emotions and memories. When people choose to live, those memories stay with them. But when they suicide, they come here. After a human lifetime where everything COSTS something, what made you think everything in the Afterlife should be free?”

Over time I get better at whispering into the ears of people on the edge. I discovered for me that the soft sell works better than a rebuke. The suicidal especially are susceptible to compassion. “Oh my darling,” I coo, “being human is so hard. No one would blame you for anything you need to do to make the pain stop. Be kind to yourself. Let go. My dear, you don’t have to stick around for your family. They’ll understand. It might even be easier for them. You can free them by freeing yourself. You’ve been a good soldier, baby. You gave this life a good go already. You’ve given enough. Not every life works out.” That night, he slits his wrists and the Blonde receives him like a warm mouth.

I discover I’m pretty good at this job. It’s like the reverse of a suicide hotline. Soon, they have me training other ghosts. For every ten souls I harvest, I am rewarded with one hour on Earth in possession of someone’s body. Usually they’re insane or psychotic, but oh, the smells, the scrapes, the weight of them.

We don’t harvest very young kids—their memories are small saplings. But 15- to 18-year-olds is a fruitful demographic. They’re overwhelmed by puberty, and every word we whisper has the feel of forever to them. Over time, I become manager of a crew of 25 suicide whisperers. I get a 20% cut of every soul they take, and once I’ve accumulated 10,000 souls, I am eligible to reincarnate, and this time as someone whose life is nicer, easier, rich, white, in a country that rewards those things. Finally, on October 17th, 2034, at 6:18 in the morning, I am born June Abigail Morrison at a hospital in North Vancouver, Canada. I have an older sister who I idolize, and my parents are both physicians.

I live my life with no memory of the Afterlife, my former crew, or the 10,000 souls I spent to get back here. I grow up spry and strident, becoming the kind of girl who will one day do burlesque. But on October 17th, 2050, I have the worst sweet sixteen birthday party in the world and as I’m crossing the Lion’s Gate Bridge I hear a voice. It sounds like me, but it might also be someone else. Whoever it is, they understand whatever I might need to do.

These three pieces are part of the new zine put me in your pocket and pull me out when it’s safe, a self-published collection of 12 very short stories. Email Sherwin to purchase a copy.

SHERWIN SULLIVAN TJIA has written some weird ass shit over the years with Insomniac, Coach House and Conundrum Presses. For many years they invented, organized and emcee’d quirky events, like the Queer Slowdance in Toronto, Strip Spelling Bee, Crowd Karaokes, and other participative events, all with the goal of making the world less lonely, and more lovely.

Their charming invention, the “E-Z-PURR: The Virtual Cat!”, an audio recording of over an hour of cats purring, is available on Spotify and Bandcamp and all proceeds go to making the lives of cats without parents nicer.

Sherwin’s Links

Facebook
Instagram
Patreon
Buy E-Z-PURR: The Virtual Cat! on Bandcamp
Stream E-Z PURR

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

Alright, here we go.

Features & Interviews

As of March 2026, Discordia Review has nearly 4,000 subscribers and gets 50,000-100,000 visits per month, and we are looking to expand our pool of guest writers. Discordia Review is primarily a literary journal, but our remit is pretty wide: music, politics, visual arts, the psychedelic, the sordid, the high strange, and a lot more fit under our umbrella. Discordia’s founder and primary critic is , and while you should by no means feel required (or even encouraged) to ape his style, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with his tone to get an idea of what our readership is accustomed to.

Here are some typical examples of what our staff writers put out:

• “Maggie Nelson’s new Taylor Swift/Sylvia Plath book is an embarrassment”

• “Reading is hip again because nobody can read anymore”

• “This town ain’t big enough for 34 *41* lit mags”

Here are some examples of recent guest posts we’ve admired:

• ’s “Why is everything melting?”

• ’s “theory of the hack”

• ’s “The Horoscopes of Josh”

• ’s “Procedural Seeing: the Archive of Nothing in Particular”

• ’s “MAGA Minaj, Muhammad Ali, and the costs of Black canonization”

Most of our guest feature posts run from about 1,000 to 4,000 words; longer posts are possible (Substack has no strict upper limit), though in some cases we might suggest serializing very long pieces.

We are highly selective. The Discordia editorial board consists of five members and it takes only one veto to reject a submission. Harsh, yes, but it keeps our objectives and quality consistent. In the event your pitch is accepted, you will be assigned an editor to discuss your plans and settle on a loose delivery schedule. Once the piece is delivered, your editor will also perform a proofread, and may have a few suggestions to consider as you revise and edit the piece.

While we offer a token payment of $10 for Fellow Travellers posts (our guest artist series) in order to help those who rely on arts grants to be able to claim us as a “paid” publication, we do not currently offer a standard payment for other types of featured posts. If you are in a situation where being able to list Discordia as a “paid” publication for your critical or journalistic work would be helpful to your career, we may be able to work something out.

Email your pitches for features to: discordia.sucks@gmail.com

Note: While we are most interested in original material, we are open in some cases to re-posting articles which have already appeared in other venues (e.g. your personal Substack). Please mention whether a piece has been previously published in your query email.

Book Reviews

Discordia Review is seeking to expand its coverage by publishing more book reviews. We are seeking both capsule reviews of around 500 words for a periodic review roundup, and longer reviews of a single book or set of thematically-related titles to be published as standalone pieces (1,000 to 3,000 words, generally).

We are primarily interested in reviews of books published within the past three years (or those which have been notably reissued within the same timeframe). For reviews of older titles, please send a pitch explaining why you’d like to cover the book now and what your approach will be—we might for example be interested in a close formal analysis of a classic book of poetry, or perhaps an examination of a work that has taken on greater resonance in the current political moment. (For example, Raúl Zurita’s poetry in this moment of renewed right-wing government in Chile.)

We are looking for work that is biting, funny, irreverent, and mostly casual in tone, though experimental reviews are welcome too. As we feel that part of the crisis in today’s review culture is an absence of, well, critical reviews, for your first piece we would encourage (but do not require!) you to write something at least somewhat negative to sorta “make your bones,” if you will.

Although our work is sometimes political, your work doesn’t have to be. When we do put out political work it is left-wing, though it is not necessary to share our political opinions to write for us on literature and art. But we won’t put out anything with an explicitly right wing thesis. We also do not tend to be interested in stuff that deals heavily with identity politics / representation politics, and we hate buzzwords: no “bodies,” no “spaces,” you get the drift. There are PLENTY of places you can go to with that kind of work. This isn’t one of them.

While we offer a token payment of $10 for Fellow Travellers posts (our guest artist series) in order to help those who rely on arts grants to be able to claim us as a “paid” publication, we do not currently offer a standard payment for other types of featured posts. If you are in a situation where being able to list Discordia as a “paid” publication for your critical or journalistic work would be helpful to your career, we may be able to work something out.

Email your pitches for reviews to: discordia.sucks@gmail.com.

Pitching

When pitching Discordia Review, we recommend using the following format:

• Briefly introduce yourself (and your experience if any) and talk about how you found Discordia Review

• Give us a synopsis of the piece you would like to write for us

• Attach/link two or three writing samples; we will consider pitches from first-time writers, but in these cases more of the weight will be on the pitch itself, so we advise taking time to really craft it

(If you haven’t sent many pitches before, this guide from Defector may be helpful!)

Our authors publish under either their real names or pseudonyms if they don’t want to take too much heat for their hot takes, you can choose either if accepted.

Onward and downward, as you were.

—The Management

When I was fourteen I think I listened to one of Nirvana’s studio albums basically every time I showered, which, if memory serves, was about once every two weeks. I listened to enough Nirvana that my stepmother once insinuated that Nirvana was the reason I was depressed, but, in reality, the music mostly just convinced me to never try heroin, and really just stay away from downers altogether, even to the point that I developed a stimulant dependency probably out of a sheer desire not to be opiated. The Sacklers won’t get a dollar out of me! Although I did significantly contribute to the coffers of whoever makes Vyvanse, and, additionally, I think I probably paid for a Hell’s Angel’s kid’s college tuition.

Nirvana is a great band. Uncontroversial take, right? A handful of the greatest rock records ever made, some great (and weird) extended material, and an incredible episode of MTV Unplugged that basically justified the entire existence of that stupid fucking show. There at the forefront is Kurt, the greatest poster boy for suicide since Young Werther, The Last Great Rock Star in the truly classic sense of “Star.” And yet, tragically, someone who also failed to live up to his own pretensions. Kurt Cobain was a guy who clearly saw his colleagues as being more, say, The Breeders, Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, even Beat Happening—one of his great career regrets was not being able to attend the International Pop Underground Convention—you know, the tasteful stuff. But that was less Seattle and more Olympia, Seattle’s cooler sister. It didn’t matter how many Riot Grrrls Kurt boinked, his kind was always going to be shit like Alice in Chains. A good band, yes, but… Beat Happening they are not. Beat Happening fans read poetry and shit. Alice in Chains fans do donuts in strip club parking lots. This forms at least part of the problem. Still, Nirvana was able to achieve something those Olympians never could, a kind of superstardom since unrivalled, swimming in both commercial success and critical acclaim. As pointed out in a note a little while ago, you can even look back to shit like contemporaneous MTV footage to see just how mythological Nirvana already was even just off the heels of Nevermind, like in this MTV Year in Rock special from 1992 (fast-forward to three minutes in):

The initial post-Nirvana rock acts weren’t necessarily a problem. Even some of the more “watered down” pop-leaning fare like Gin Blossoms were actually quite good bands—Polaris was literally sound-tracking a children’s show and put out an incredible album while doing so—but this wouldn’t last. Even some of the more tolerable early mainstream rock acts to be so clearly heavily-influenced by Nirvana, like Weezer, Pearl Jam, and The Offspring, quickly descended into becoming some of the most annoying bands of all time.1 Dave Grohl’s own successive project, Foo Fighters, after a couple decent albums likewise plummeted directly off a cliff and sank into a sea of bloated buttrock. It’s like there was a memo to every band influenced by Nirvana: please remember to start sucking now.

Who were the big acts leaning on Nirvana’s influence going forward from there? Nu metal shit like Linkin Park, bland radio alt rock like Three Days Grace, and post-grunge phonies like Nickelback. Crap! Crap! Crap! They even contributed to a sample on the first truly terrible Jay-Z album. Then consider the now-canonical rock bands of that same era—do the most celebrated offerings from bands like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, Modest Mouse, or Radiohead sound anything like Nirvana? More guitar-oriented bands like The Strokes were looking back before Nirvana for inspiration from bands like Television.2

When I think of my favourite guitar bands who produced most or all of their work in the post-Nirvana era—Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Women, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sunburned Hand of the Man, The Flaming Lips, Dismemberment Plan, Tortoise, Sparklehorse, Broken Social Scene, Silver Jews—there isn’t a lot between them that bears much of the mark of Nirvana. Or at least not sonically. Kurt’s greatest contribution was probably not the actual music he put out, good as it is, but the influences he promoted. I know plenty of kids—myself included—for whom a tour through the “favourite albums” pages of Kurt’s journals became a sort of musical education. Leadbelly, Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese, Butthole Surfers, Public Image Ltd., MDC, I got all that shit from Kurt. I reckon a lot of the best music of the new millennium has been made by people who loved Nirvana, got turned onto that kind of stuff in the process, and went on to make stuff themselves that sounded more like Kurt’s influences than what he made himself.

It’s sort of the curse of the band’s overexposure as well, right? They were just too popular, they inspired aspirations from a lot of dumbasses as a result who likely worshipped Kurt (especially after his death) and wanted to be just like him without necessarily actually understanding what he “was.” Exposure can really nerf your influence! It’s sort of like how

The Rolling Stones were a way more influential band than The Beatles.

No matter how hard The Beatles may try to win their propaganda war against The Stones, your ears can hear the facts for themselves: who did rock music sound more like following 1970? The Beatles or The Stones? Line up the biggest rock acts of that decade, for good or for ill: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Neil Young, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Allman Brothers, AC/DC, and so on and so forth. Throw them onto Maury Povich. Who’s the father? Come on. The entire punk movement, meanwhile, was basically predicated on pissing on everything ever associated with The Beatles—“phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust.”3 Who was still holding the line for Beatles influence in the 1970s? XTC? ELO? Fucking Badfinger? If anything their influence was most seen in schmaltzy 70s cheesy crap like Paper Lace.4 This situation would not improve for decades, and in fact when a band does heavily cite The Beatles it almost feels like a novelty, like when Oasis did it (but even they have more of The Stones in them, really), or when people were saying Kevin Parker sounded “just like” John Lennon. It’s quaint.

Still, The Beatles have one thing The Stones don’t, which is their own record label to assign the single task of rewriting music history in The Beatles’ favour—the twelve-hour Beatles catechism that is their Anthology documentary that played on BBC, along with the innumerable books and compilations and tie-ins and promotions, all working toward a narrative of a spotless Beatles historical record and their position as The Most Important Band Ever. Growing out of all that like a tumour is the oft-repeated claim that The Stones were just a band hanging off The Beatles’ coattails, particularly memorable in Jann Wenner’s Lennon Remembers, a rambling extended interview in which John, in his typical narcissistic manner, spouts off in reaction to his anxiety that The Stones were still “cool” while The Beatles by the 70s were absolutely not. Here’s Lester Bangs just a couple years after Lennon Remembers, in 1975:

I am constantly hearing people say, with minor perplexity, that they can still play early Stones albums, but old Beatle records (like old Dylan records), and particularly Sgt. Pepper, gather dust on the shelves. As with Dylan singing about Hattie Carroll, the Beatles celebrating the explosion of Love as a Way of Life amounts now to an artifact, just as today’s Heavy Statements will prove to be just about as ephemeral.

The snide Beatles partisan position is to always point out how “interesting” it is that The Stones “stopped evolving” after The Beatles broke up—the insinuation being that The Stones were merely copying whatever The Beatles were doing—but if The Stones copied The Beatles as much as these people suggest, then you’d think they’d be fungible, so why did The Stones still have cultural capital in the 70s when The Beatles didn’t? The truth of the matter is that the only time The Stones truly came close to “imitating” The Beatles was on Between the Buttons (and I still find The Stones’ use of vibraphone and harpsichord to round out their sound on tracks like “Yesterday’s Papers” to be as incredible as any of the best moments on Rubber Soul). Ignored in equal measure is how The Beatles themselves followed The Stones in turn, such as on the rather Beggars-Banquet-esque Let It Be. I personally prefer The Beatles at their loosest—the aforementioned Let It Be or songs like “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “The End,” “Hey Bulldog,” “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”—or, to put it bluntly, when their energy comes closest to being like The Stones. And evidently most of music history agrees with me, whether it wants to admit it or not—use your ears, the truth is in the music. The Beatles ideological apparatus, fueled by residuals from teeny-bopper chart dominance and the hagiography of post-assassination John Lennon, feeds you LIES. Ringo Starr did not deserve to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist!

Hey Eris, you say, you mentioned Between the Buttons as derivative of The Beatles but didn’t mention Their Satanic Majesties Request, which critics generally agree borrows even more heavily. Mm. Yes. Well, you see, I might make a bit of an exception there, because the thing is

Their Satanic Majesties Request is a much better album than Sgt. Pepper’s.

I’m obviously not the world’s only guy to prefer Satanic Majesties. We are a small but vocal and passionate minority. Some of us even go on to start entire bands predicated on the idea that Satanic Majesties is a great album. Their Satanic Majesty’s Request is a more interesting psychedelic rock record than Sgt. Pepper’s because The Beatles are ultimately not loose enough to pull off real psych rock. It’s a very good record—a terrific record, really—but it’s a pantomime of the kind of psychedelic rock the band was trying to emulate. They just don’t have it in them.

Throughout Sgt. Pepper’s recording, McCartney allegedly claimed “this is our Freak Out!,” referring to the album by the Mothers of Invention. I would like to go back in time and remind McCartney that Freak Out! is not an album made up of tightly-written pop ditties, and it ends with the twelve-minute long sound-collage/jam that is “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.” Yes, I’m aware that, during the Pepper sessions, The Beatles recorded “Carnival of Light,” something of their own attempt at this, but, notably, every source we have on this infamously-unreleased track says that it totally fucking sucks. Even George Harrison and Ringo Starr thought it sucked so much that they vetoed every attempt to release it—and think about all the crap those two did release. But of course it sucks. The Beatles are not that kind of band. You watch a documentary like Get Back and you see how The Beatles jam, and it’s really just them pushing rope until they arrive at “a song.” It’ll often be a great song, mind you (you get to extensively watch “Get Back” get composed through this process, and it’s heart-stopping), but their jamming is a process of refinement and not spontaneity, which means they fundamentally lack the highest virtue upon which truly great psych rock sits: can you lose yourself?5

Satanic Majesties is a more authentic psychedelic rock record in this respect. The thing is far more indebted to The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and Jefferson Airplane than it is to The Beatles—Beatles sycophants would do well to remember that The Beatles didn’t invent psychedelic rock—in fact, Airplane’s Marty Balin was a noted fan of the finished record. It also deals with actual psychedelic subject matter rather than something like, say, Pepper’s “When I’m Sixty Four” or “Getting Better,” which are cute little radio songs for grandmas. The only songs on Sgt. Pepper’s that comes even close to resembling anything on Their Satanic Majesties Request, either in form or content, are “Within You Without You,” “Good Morning Good Morning,” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” Hell, “Fixing A Hole” sounds more like something off of Between the Buttons than any song on Between the Buttons ever sounded like anything by The Beatles. If anything, there’s far more of Freak Out! on Satanic Majesties than on Pepper.

Some of the conspiracy theorists look to the “similar” cover photos—Michael Cooper, the photographer for both records, was already the Stones’ unofficial photographer before he took the photo for the Sgt. Pepper’s cover. The Beatles references on the Satanic Majesties cover are just a nod to the Rolling Stones reference on Sgt. Pepper. What’s more, the cover for Their Satanic Majesties Request is just cooler. The record itself, both a parody and celebration of psychedelic rock, is an all-consuming journey for the senses (that’s right, senses plural—I smell that shit, and it smells good!!!), and when I listen to it I feel like I’m flying through space on a little Day-Glo space ship with Timothy Leary, only he’s not annoying and I totally, like, get it, maaaan. It makes me understand hippies, something I consider almost impossible in my day-to-day life, and emphasizes one of The Stones’ greatest strengths, which is their ability to totally transport a listener and embody an ethos or an age—when I listen to something like “Gimme Shelter,” for instance, I can feel the turmoil of the late 60s—and I don’t feel like there’s anything by The Beatles, in spite of their ostensible identification with that period, that does much of the same, something which immediately comes across in Julie Taymor’s jukebox musical Across the Universe, in which the attempt to colour in a “typical” story of “The Sixties” with Beatles music just sort of falls flat.

The Stones’ is a legacy of defeat on all fronts. They are condemned to live in the shadow of a band that in truth they were doing very different things than, and Satanic Majesties continues to receive mixed reception. It hasn’t helped that, since then, Keith Richards has chosen to agree with the critical consensus that Satanic Majesties is a Pepper rip and that it sucks, something Beatles partisans point to as all the evidence they need. I would like to rebuke this position by pointing out that Keith Richards’s brain is a wad of chewed up gum frosted with cocaine, and that he additionally referred to Pepper itself as “a mishmash of rubbish.” Richards is completely off-base with that one, obviously Sgt. Pepper is a remarkable record, but for all of its four-track innovations I do think the album’s actual quality is pretty over-hyped when compared not only to Satanic Majesties’s unequaled psychic depths but also earlier albums like Pet Sounds and Velvet Underground & Nico, which did more to make the album a “work of art” than Pepper ever did, and even just other Beatles records like Rubber Soul or Revolver.

And for further reading:

We interrupt your regularly scheduled gnashing of teeth and rending of garments to announce that Discordia Review has three live shows coming up in support of our latest print edition, Fellow Travellers No. 3, which features the writing and art of Clark Allen, Nevada-Jane Arlow, Miles Forrester, Jonathan, Zak Jones, Mickie Kennedy, Emilie Lafleur, and Opal Louis Nations, as well as the first physical printing of The Heel Manifesto II: Defund the MFA. Selected items from the Discordia Review Press back catalogue will also be available at each show.

MONTREAL / SUN. MAR 22 / 7 P.M.

First off we’ll be home here in Montreal with A MACHINE FOR LIVING IN, an “anti-house reading” at an empty apartment near Metro Frontenac. Guests will include Discordia favs Sherwin Tjia, the Mononymous Jonathan, “Joe” Bagel “MacNeil,” Tara McGowan-Ross, and Nevada-Jane Arlow, plus a few surprises. DM @discordia.review on Instagram for the address, capacity will be limited. $10/PWYC, $15 with a copy of Fellow Travellers No. 3.

HAMILTON / SAT APR. 4 / COME BY ‘ROUND 6 P.M.

Our first show on the road will be in the true Centre of the Universe, Hamilton gOddamntario. Our merry van of Montrealers includes Gwen Aube, Jack Daniel Christie, JM Francheteau, Mona Gendron, and Tara McGowan-Ross, descends into the The Wormhole, where we’ll be joined by local stars Eleanor Abrahams, Birdie Gerhl, and heavenisms. Come by around 6, hangout, watch a reading start up at some point not too too long after. All hell’s coming with us!

DM @discordia.review on Instagram or ask a local punk for the address. Free show, though we’ll pass the hat for gas money. Poster by Jack Bride!

TORONTO / SUN. APR. 5 / 8 P.M.

Toronto, Toronto, Toronto. Like an Easter Egg syringed with sodium pentothal and DMT, like a the Gathering of the Juggalos With Bifocals, FELLOW TRAVELLERS is here to give meaning to your life. Gwen Aube, Jack Daniel Christie, JM Francheteau, And Tara McGowan-Ross will be joined by Toronto greats including Nevada-Jane Arlow, “Horoscopes” Joshua Chris Bouchard, Jack Bride, Miles Forrester, Meghan Harrison, Zak Jones, and Sophie McCreesh. Come and see, come and see.

The show’s at the Arraymusic space at 155 Walnut Ave, $10/PWYC at the door, $15 with a copy of the issue. Poster by Jack Bride!

Onward and downward, as you were.

—The Management

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

What makes for a good “literary scene”?

Recently, wrote a piece on the blog about the glut of literary magazines in English Montreal (the updated count is approaching 40), which has been nothing if not controversial. While we received plenty of positive feedback, there have also been some reactions that were… shall we say less than glowing? So great was the throbbing pain in some folks’ asses that someone vandalized the spreadsheet Sire made for that piece1 and someone else paid money to spam our Instagram page with thousands of bot followers, presumably out of a desire to get our account flagged or fuck with our engagement, acts so flagrantly juvenile that… well, you’d think whoever concocted them would actually be Discordia fans!

But to our haters, I ask you: when was the last time there was such fervent and lively discussion in the Montreal lit scene about a topic everyone seemed to have a divergent opinion about? The piece has thus far spawned several reaction pieces, including one by , one by , one by (which we published on her behalf), and one upcoming by , all discussing the piece and its feedback from different perspectives (and multiple people have now approached me “joking” that they might write a response too—I say go ahead!). At the JRG Open Mic last week multiple people approached our editors to either discuss their feelings about the piece or to remark on how they had encountered spirited discussions about it out in the wild, and, by the time the mic was shut off, it seemed as if it was all anyone was talking about. I had a friend this weekend tell me that someone was talking about the piece all the way out in New Brunswick. When was the last time literally anything at all in this community caused excitement or reaction? Controversy? Discussion? Anything? When was the last time you truly felt invested in a conversation the scene was having?

Sire expressed his belief that there are too many literary magazines in this city that don’t do enough to justify their independent existence along aesthetic lines,2 and he offered plenty of constructive criticism to those ends—mostly suggesting these magazines begin to take stronger stands for matters outside of “identity politics” and venture to write pointed manifestos outlining clear stances (something Discordia has advocated since its inception). That and there was some light ribbing. Admittedly, Sire did at least confess that he thinks a lot of the poetry being produced by the Montreal scene is not very good. If I’m being honest, I don’t disagree. But Sire loves this city and this “scene” and so do I, and we want—and Discordia as a collective wants—to make this scene better. How do we do that?

Well, if you believe yolk magazine Director of Marketing Jeremy Audet in his response to Sire’s piece, the answer is to cool it with the criticism, unless that criticism is about matters of “representation,” and reduce friction within the community to the point of making it completely smooth. So says Jeremy:

Creative writing, like all disciplines in the arts, will always benefit more from quantity than not. It generates a positive feedback loop: the more people write, the more engaged the community; the more engaged the community, the better the writing; the better the writing, the more people write.

…with the implication throughout the rest of the piece that the most hospitable environment to creating as much quantity as possible will thereby give rise to the best art. This, according to Audet, can only be nurtured if we resist conflict, derision, acidity, what have you. Two issues emerge:

1. Jeremy is effectively utilizing a kind of “supply-side economics” model. Decrease regulation via the curtailing of aesthetic criticism and you will drive creative growth because of a lack of constraints and with creative growth emerges an expanded market which will eventually yield better goods. This did not work for the economy, and it won’t work for art.

2. More importantly, it simply is not how healthy arts scenes have ever functioned historically—how many arts movements actually yielded quality simply as a sheer result of maximizing quantity? It runs completely counter to the logic of cultural history.

Harold Bloom has gotten heat over the years for his many controversial opinions, but he was right when he said “literature is not a sewing circle.” The conditions which have produced the great literary works of history were not ultimately “copacetic”—they were marked by tension, by conflict, by competition. To say that a principal “maxim” (to borrow one of Audet’s several malapropisms) of the arts is “community” is a facile analysis. Yes, the arts have often been encouraged by “community” but these “communities”—at least when producing actual art that meant anything—were often tribal in nature. The New York School, the Imagists, the Objectivists, the Confessionals, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, the Realists, the Surrealists, the Infrarealists, the Romantics, the Symbolists, the Decadents, the Naturalists, the Augustans, the Neoclassicists, the Futurists, even alt lit3—pick one, pick any. All were marked by some form of antagonisms toward aesthetic tendencies outside their own—hell, often even within their own too (see: this footnote I once wrote about the conflicts within the Romantic movement). Klimt and his friends built a vibrant community of artists in Vienna, but that movement was not called the Vienna Everybody’s Valid, it was called the Vienna Secession. Antagonism borne out of passion for aesthetic sensibilities will not limit the literary movement in this city, it will help make it more expansive, and it will make it more alive. If you’ve read Marx, if you’ve read Hegel, if you’ve read Nietzsche, and so on, it should be clear how many diverse analyses there are on why conflict within culture is both inevitable and necessary. A progressive cultural direction is one which will be marked by conflict, indelibly. Otherwise, you’re just in an arts and crafts club, or a community group in a hospice where the terminally ill find something to occupy their time before they die.

We want to encourage the literary scene to vehemently voice aesthetic disagreements, to stand by principles that amount to more than “I’m [insert identity here].” Audet’s desire, on the other hand, is to shut discussion down—his piece was titled, after all, “Nobody Asked for This,” thereby suggesting that one should only do or say things which are explicitly “asked for,” which do not provoke controversy or offence or “I’M NOT MAD” counter-blogs. This, to Audet, is the core of a healthy arts scene: never doing anything that makes anybody upset. Wow! Great idea, Jeremy!!! Writers: if you have half a brain then you already know that that doesn’t constitute sound artistic advice, and would discount most of the greatest works in art history. Don’t be concerned with what people “ask” of you. To quote Wilde: “the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want… he ceases to be an artist.” Art and criticism isn’t about what people want from you, it’s about what you think they need.

We have no access to objective meaning in this life, but if we do not provide our lives with meaning ourselves, if we do not subscribe to values we put our faith into, we wither as nihilists. The same goes for art. If you fall victim to aesthetic nihilism, to the idea that art is merely “subjective” and “everyone’s taste is valid” then you rob art of its vitality. Just like life, it doesn’t matter if you have any actual access to objective Truth, you have to live like there is a meaning to life, and you have to write like your aesthetic principles are important. And just like we ought to fight for what we value in life to truly appreciate and understand it, we must fight for what we value in art too. We must become irrationally absorbed by obsession with our artistic missions, and in coming together in conflict set our competing visions against one another, to rally for what we stand for against what we do not, against what we consider bad aesthetic principles—because if we do not, then it will all be for sheer, dead craft.

Sire’s piece has, to my surprise, divided the Montreal lit scene right down the middle. You, the writers of Montreal (or wherever you may find yourself facing such a fork in the road), must ask yourselves what your priority is as an artist. You have two options. Choose their path and you might have a better chance at getting a book deal, getting a smattering of awards, etc. If you’re lucky following this path, you might even earn a “career” in writing. But know this: no one will spend a second reading your work after you die. You’ll be lucky if your books get read more than a year after publication. Copies of your books will fill boxes in your basement storage until an inevitable flood destroys them. On the slim chance that you “make it,” you will be confined to a lifetime of bland cocktail party talk while your work takes part in no “conversation” at all outside of milquetoast bookclubs, doomed to be forgotten.

This is writing towards death.

Or you can choose our path. You don’t even have to like “us,” you can reject Discordia’s values almost entirely,4 I’d be happy if you did—so long as you did it on aesthetic grounds. Refuse to play nice, make an aggressive stand for what you believe in as an artist, and you will have a far more exciting and impassioned artistic life, you will be a living part of the progressing story of the arts and a throbbing fibre of its sinew as it rides history, and, if you’re extremely lucky following this path, you may one day make it into the halls of Writer Valhalla, where at least someone will continue to read your work after you die. And it will have been because you were a part of something that stood for something.

This is writing towards life.

If sensibilities of the arts that are not your own don’t offend you, then you don’t actually have sensibilities, or at least not very strongly-held ones. Dig deep. Find what you believe in most in your art, and once you’ve discovered it, fight for it. Do not contend with the mediocrity of the aesthetic nihilist, do not sell your work short because it’s all just “subjective.”

Fight! Get in my face! Give me something to chew on with more substance than some pandering careerist HR-culture lecture about the importance of representation without aesthetic content, of the necessity to surround oneself with overly-gracious banality, or some quasi-neoliberal desire for “quantity” with the expectation that that must, mathematically, eventually yield quality. Do you have aesthetic principles? Then prove it to the world and to yourself. Form a movement, and write a manifesto in defence of your values, or a screed poised against us or literally any other movement in this city. Organize around shared aesthetic virtues. And fight about them, too. This will bring us the scene we deserve.

This is the “discord” that Discordia demands. Reject writing towards death! Write towards life!

Post-Script Gossip

[Exaggerated sigh] Okay, okay, you want to know about the underlying scene gossip. I know my readership.5 Well, myself, Sire, and others all tried to get in touch with Audet (whom none of us know personally) to tell him we thought his read on the piece was all wrong. I knew I’d be writing a response but felt I should at least approach him for his disagreements and opinions (I’ll be honest, I think there were stronger arguments for some of his positions than he actually made in the piece). I thought this would at least allow him some fairer representation in this continuing clash. But no dice.6

Audet refused to name us in his piece, but did include Discordia in his defensive list of local publications at the end of it. Few if any of his descriptions managed to challenge Sire’s actual critique, but the line about us reads as follows:

Which was obviously disingenuous considering it’s at the end of a piece with a title that literally suggests we ought to shut the fuck up. Further still, Audet even deleted a comment I tried to leave (twice) directing readers to the original piece in case they wanted to see the full discourse and make up their own minds.

A bit cheeky of a comment, sure, but ultimately inoffensive. And again, how can it be that Audet thinks Discordia asks “vital questions” when he thinks those questions shouldn’t even been read? The whole thing was immensely cowardly, if not simply childish—and this is me talking, have you seen how childish the shit I do is? When Audet DM’d me about it, I didn’t mince words. At this point I was simply at my wits’ end.

I really don’t know who the several people are that were hurt by the piece, but I believe they are out there. We don’t really name any of them outside of the spreadsheet, yet I hear that for at least a few people being named on the spreadsheet alone constituted some grave offence. But the thing about publishing is that it is quite literally the act of making something public. It’s not like Sire raided anyone’s diary, or even cited any particular writer as being “bad” (I certainly would have, but Sire has more tact than I). This publishing data is being combed by Google as we speak. More nefarious hands than ours are already on it. We used these names to do local publishing math. Ultimately, it’s unlikely anyone will even take note of your name on our spreadsheet in the first place. You’ll live.

So there you have it, the story of Discordia and Audet, of which I think I reserve the right to complain, and so I have. The great irony is that Audet is actually (allegedly) doing with Canto, his new magazine (press?), something in line with what we suggested, in that he is tying his outlet to a specific form, the long poem (though it would be nice to see a manifesto emerge from his cohort alongside it). To the rest of the people mad at a piece that hardly takes the time to name or shame any specific writers or magazines, I paraphrase the great poet Carly Simon: “You’re So Vain (You Probably Think This Blog Is About You).” Cue music.

RELATED

1

Really he should have minded the share settings lol

Sire: Well, yes, but the vandalism ended up being kind of an improvement really.

2

Mind you, he also pointed out that this may not be sustainable when one considers just how big the scene actually is. I’m not going to name names, but a number of the larger IG accounts affiliated with the magazines and presses around town do not fare well when the data is scrutinized. The actual community in town reading local lit may be as few as one thousand. Seen below: a cropped portion of some analytics on a local lit mag’s Instagram following that suggests that the majority of their followers are probably bots.

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

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

Lou Reed vs. Lester Bangs

He was going to kill him.

Lou Reed had not slept in four days,
and it was going to be about three more
to get done what he had to do.

Lester Bangs had gone too far this time—
even further than when he had referred to Lou
as a fat pig. Lou Reed understood that
he was a fat pig at the time,
but so was Lester Bangs,
and this time he was going to die.

Lester Bangs was going to die,
and Lou Reed was going to kill him.

He was going to be murdered by Lou Reed.

He understood Lester wrote for a living
and was expected to court controversy,
but that didn’t matter anymore,
because he was going to be dead soon.

Lester Bangs was going to be dead,
killed by the hands of Lou Reed,
who released Rock 'n' Roll Animal
in 1974,
which everyone agreed was a venerable 1974
live music powerhouse,
in which he (Lou Reed) played live,
searing rock and roll music and also
pretended to inject heroin onstage.

But the microphones recording the audience
at the concert failed to record,
so the applause you hear on the vinyl record
is actually John Denver’s audience carefully
spliced in, with a specific “flare-up”
generated at the specific moment of Lou
Reed’s arrival onstage—

and now he was going to murder Lester Bangs.

Lou Reed would asphyxiate Lester Bangs
until he turned purple and died
and also rip his tongue out, and then Lou Reed was
going to stomp upon Lester Bangs’
fat fingers with his large, engineer-style
motorcycle boots.

Those fat fingers that typed up all this
nonsense that paved the way for all of
this violence and terror.

Just like how he, Lou Reed, paved the way
for generations of music culture via his
rock and roll group: The Velvet Underground,
sometimes featuring Nico (singular, mono nomic)
and Doug Yule.

He was going to stomp on Lester Bangs’
fat fucking face.

Lester’s bones would crack and splinter,
and probably green goo and pus and
black ichor and slime would squelch and
squirt out from the viscera and
torn flesh that would now be all that was
left of Lester Bangs’ shattered visage,
making the room smell bad and
thereafter resemblant to a charnel house.

Lou Reed wasn’t exactly sure what it
would make the room smell like.

What he was exactly sure of was that the
deeds he now premeditated to soon
commit would far surpass any
sadistic impulse he had previously depicted in
his gritty yet vulnerable lyrics and songs
concerning the denizens of New York City
and Soviet-era West Berlin.

Lou Reed resembled a vampire.

He had not slept in four days and he was going to
stay up three more.

He was staying up until
Lester Bangs was no longer breathing,
and no longer alive or with us in the
corporeal form.

Lou Reed would not rest until
Lester Bangs was dead and in hell and if
anyone else had a problem with that—even God—then
he would go up to heaven and kill God,
because he was Lou Reed and Lou Reed
said so.

He passed up CBGB’s and the Mudd Club.
At one point he even realized he was outside of
seminal guitarist Robert Quine’s
apartment, who he would soon also want
to kill—
but this was not that time.

It was time to kill Lester Bangs, and
everyone knew it.

It was a hateful thing.

It was a hateful thing that Lester Bangs
wrote about Rachel,
and now he was going to pay the ultimate price.

Lou’s motorcycle boot would soon find
Lester’s head
and stomp his nasal cavity until it caved
inwards, as though his motorcycle-booted heel
had jammed in
ice-crusted snow, but with a sloshy sound
of crunching bone and tendon and spinal-column fluid.

And then he would pull his teeth out
and wear them on a special ring
or even a necklace.

Maybe his next album would be called:

I fucking murdered Lester Bangs
and his teeth are around my neck in a necklace.

Perhaps they're on a keychain.
It's none of your fucking business
where Lester Bangs’ teeth are.

I’m Lou Reed and I murdered him.

Not that Lou was not conflicted.

He realized that Lester also wrote how Lou
indeed revolutionized a new style of
guitar playing,
particularly on White Light/White Heat,
whose distortion feedback emulated the
alto saxophone of Ornette Coleman,
which reverberated through the streets of
Manhattan in 1959, where it was taken in
by a young Lou Reed who had snuck into
the Cotton Club. But still, 
no one reminded Mount Vesuvius about all the virgins
that had been microwaved when it started barfing lava
and besides he was Mount Lou Fucking Reed.

Just then we cut to Lester Bangs.

Lester realized that he was sorry, and
more importantly he realized that
he was in danger.

In short, Lester Bangs did not want to die.

Lester Bangs was a rock and roll writer
who proved that you could take enough
cocaine, speed, and cough syrup
to write about whatever the fuck you wanted.

And here he was living the dream,
except that he was about to be murdered by
his dearest
and most fantasized-about idol.

He picked up the phone and began to dial,
but just then the door burst open,
and an angry Lou Reed entered into
Lester's apartment.

“Lou, I'm so sorry.”

That’s ok, Lester.
It doesn't matter.
You are going to go to hell now.
I'm going to send you to hell.

If God decides you should go to heaven,
I will go up to heaven and I will kill God as well.
I am Lou Reed and I believe this.

“I understand, Lou.
I understand you can rend my heart
and my head with your large boots.”

Yes, I'm going to do that, Lester,
and then I'm gonna put your teeth on a necklace,
and I'm gonna call my next album:

I killed fucking Lester Bangs
and his teeth are on a necklace

Or perhaps it's a keychain.
Or perhaps it's none of your fucking business
what I do with Lester Bangs' teeth,
who I just murdered.

“Lou.
Please don't. Please.
I actually really like Metal Machine Music now.
The section around minute 8,
on side 3—
that's my favorite part.”

“Bullshit.
You have not listened that far.”

“Yes I have.
The feedback part where your guitar goes
ooo eee ooo eee oooo owowowowo.”

“Wow. You really have listened. Alright,
just once I will not savage you.

But I will use
my psychic junkie poet powers
to foretell that you will overdose on
Davron
in the year of 1983,
just after being interviewed by an adolescent
who aspires to be a rock journalist as well,
as well for some retarded reason
he will make your biography.”

I have not read the biography of Lester Bangs,
but I have read some collection of his
published and unpublished writings and reviews.

Personally I find the unpublished work to
be better, and some of the most infamous
works by him—such as “James Taylor
Marked for Death”—to be somewhat
overrated and not that great.

However I'm sure it's a time-and-a-place
thing, and it’s hard to adequately
comprehend his posthumous influence,
real or imagined,
on things like Vice magazine
and other bullshit.

I think that Lester had a lot more to give to
the world,
and it's kind of tragic.

Regardless of whether or not Lou Reed in
some form called forth his premature demise—
which we also can’t really hold against
him considering it was a different time,
and that Lou Reed at the bequest of his
parents had undergone electroshock therapy,
which would, noted, influence his later
output—

Due to my respect for both Bangs and
Reed I will limit any further speculation
(this may be amended for opportunities of
future publication and I retain full
publishing rights to the materials and
concepts herein).

THE LAST MALE POET is a tool, the last male poet is a weapon. There were many other poets like it but this one is yours. Hail Discordia!

Follow the LMP on Instagram.

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

I am an absolute slut for databases. When I’m not at work, entering data into one of several cataloguing systems, I am probably procrastinating doing something else by tinkering with my personal databases.1 So when I learned that Sire2 was collecting data on Montréal litmags and their contributors, my eyes lit up. I messaged him immediately and, before I knew it, I was spending that evening and the following day throwing together the database you can read about in his recently published article.

Some irritated ink has been spilt over said piece, and I will be the first to admit that it has some weaknesses. For one, it is entirely possible that our city’s litmags are more diverse than contributor data can reveal. A single poet can write in multiple styles. Who knows, maybe Kat Mulligan is the most polyvalent poet in the recent history of the Montréal lit scene.3 I am also not a statistician by any stretch of the imagination. Was a Jaccard index the best tool to use for the job? Fuck if I know.

So when the article came out, I expected that my rather hasty efforts would be heavily criticized. What I didn’t expect was the kind of response that characterized the article as a bad faith attack on our shared community. Although I had no editorial input into the content of Sire’s article, he did send me a link the night before it went live. If I believed that the critique presented therein amounted to a cynical hit piece on people I consider my friends, or on my community, I would have at the very least asked him to remove my name. Was it written in a provocative, sardonic tone? That much is obvious. But I find it surprising that any writer would rankle at a little sarcasm, especially when it comes from someone who clearly loves the community that they’re criticizing. True, the rhetorical style employed by Discordia and their ilk isn’t to everyone’s taste, but so what? If we can’t acknowledge that there is a role to be played by the poetry heels among us, we risk stagnation. I for one have benefited immensely from the people in my life who tell me what they see just how they see it. It’s clear to me that Sire’s article is along those lines, a good faith challenge to a community that he and Discordia have been as much a part of building as anyone else.

There is no outside

A lot of the backlash against the article focuses on the supposed lack of good will on the part of the author. This seems to be based on a broader view of Discordia as being part of a separate, more cynical, Montréal literary community. Undoubtedly, this is due in part to their own messaging. Stating that one of your aims is to cultivate an “outsider ethos” does tend to have the effect of making people view you as an outsider. Unfortunately for their self-image, even the most transgressive outsider must locate themselves relative to some kind of mainstream. For Discordia, that mainstream is our beloved Montréal literary community. A fact made clear by the reality of the scene described by Sire himself.

As the article mentions, there are no aesthetic clusters of writers within the city. Poets that publish in Discordia-esque litmags also publish in more “mainstream” mags. Those that feature at one event tend to also feature at others. For my part, I’m proud to say my first poetry publication was as a part of yolk’s In Transit series, and I don’t see myself being published in Fellow Travellers anytime soon. Nevertheless, I have featured at both a Discordia event and at the aesthetically aligned JRG Open Mic. For those who have never attended the latter, I can assure you that, despite the pro-forma allowance of booing, it is as much of a supportive atmosphere as any other literary soirée I’ve ever attended. For better or for worse, there is only one Montréal literary community and Discordia plus associates are active, contributing members to it.

This, in my opinion, grants them the right to comment on the state of the scene without having to continually field accusations of bad faith. You may not believe that Sire or Discordia respects you or your journal, and they might not,4 but if you believe that they don’t respect the community, or creative writing in general, because of their tone, you might need to spend more time with non-writers. The kind of person who doesn’t respect creative writing is more likely to come in the form of a bad Tinder match who, sitting across the table from you on a first date, responds with “cute” when, in a moment of bad judgement, you admit that you’re a poet. They are less likely to come in the form of someone who writes five thousand word articles on how more 21 year olds need to write manifestos. There are easier ways of getting attention.

Does that mean everyone has to like them or their style? No, and if we did they would probably be annoyed, but the accusation that the Discordia editors are nothing more than trolls dismisses out of hand the very real work they have put into the community.5 Like most other journals, they also host events and publish emerging writers. So tell me, where’s the good will in overlooking that? Or do we only offer good will to those who are nice to us? If so, I would like to remind everyone that a community made up of only people we like is not a community, that’s called a friend group. You can call them assholes all you want, I know I have, but there is still a valuable role to be played by the invested asshole.

Love hurts

Beyond the accusations of bad faith, the part of the responses I object to the most is the claim that criticism has to be pleasant in order to be constructive or effective. I’ll put it plainly, what makes a critique constructive is its specificity and actionability, not its tone. What makes a critique effective is its ability to inspire change in its addressee. I will return to effectiveness later, but it is difficult to argue the article wasn’t constructive. If Sire had simply written a point by point breakdown of why all the journals in Montréal sucked, I could understand why people were crying foul. Instead, he pointed out a trend regarding what he saw as the lack of a clear aesthetic direction behind a lot of the journals in the city and then provided what he believes to be the solution.6 To reduce that to a personal attack or infighting is frankly bizarre.

Seeing as the article has only been out for a few days, whether it will be effective in the way I defined above has yet to be seen. Maybe 34 new manifestos will be published in the coming months and Discordia’s detractors will end up looking silly, or maybe nothing will happen and everyone will forget about this. Regardless, I think it is at least a little ridiculous to insist that criticism can only be effective if it is delivered in a manner that spares the feelings of its target. The history of literature is filled with sharp wits that could be described as acerbic, bordering on mean. These people were probably disliked by many but were equally beloved by others, and history tends to see them as having provided some value to their respective communities.

A wonderful example of this kind of person is poet and critic Randall Jarrell. One of his contemporaries noted that “nobody loved poets more or better than Randall Jarrell,” yet he was also acknowledged as having “a cruel streak [...] when he attacked poets he didn’t like.” Nonetheless his contributions to his community are fêted, or at least they are in the Poetry Foundation article where I got this information from.

I stumbled upon Jarrell’s name rather coincidentally through an associative chain that began with Anne Sexton. I’ve been on a really big Sexton kick recently, not only reading her poetry, but also her collected letters, biography, and the memoir written by her daughter, Linda. In the process of doing all of this obsessive reading, I discovered that one of her early mentors was Robert Lowell. I haven’t done nearly as much reading about Lowell (yet) but I did stumble across Jarrell’s name while doing some googling. Turns out he and Lowell were roommates at Kenyon College in Ohio. Admittedly, I haven’t read much of Jarrell either but I believe his approach to criticism demonstrates my point. In his review of W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety,” Jarrell worries that Auden has gone from “one of the five or six best poets in the world” to “a rhetoric-mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” Writing about the poets Witter Byner and Leonard Bacon, he has this to say, “Mr. Bacon and Mr. Byner are traditional in the sense that an appendix is traditional; they are the remains of something necessary under no longer remaining conditions.”7

Now, do I think that the Discordia editors are the Jarrells of the Montréal literary scene? No, but none of us are exactly Wystan Auden either. Which raises the question, why do we take ourselves more seriously than one of the most famous poets of the 20th century? For his part, Auden himself is supposed to have quipped “Jarrell is in love with me,” in response to one of his critical essays.8 This is what Discordia is offering us should we choose to take them as seriously as they take us, and I would argue they take us quite seriously. Truly, who else is going to spend their evenings going through back issues of The Imagist? Critique, no matter how snarky, and no matter how much the Poetry Heel might insist otherwise, is an act of love.

More than that, what strikes me the most reading Jarrell’s critiques is how fun and alive they feel. Do we not want that sense of vigour in our own community? I know I do. Going to Discordia events like the Bonfire of the Poets is not just fun because you get to role play being a punk, a large part of the joy is watching the hosts roast the fuck out of the features. Did you know that one of our most celebrated locals self- published a fantasy novel when she was a teenager? I didn’t, but someone on the Discordia team had to spend at least some amount of time doing research to find that out. Do you do that when you host a reading? Or do you just recite their bio and say something as bland as it is kind?

A note to conclude

Personally, some of the most valuable criticism I have ever received has been extremely blunt. For instance, I once wrote a poem dedicated to my friendship with a poet whose opinion I value greatly. When I showed it to her, one of the first things she pointed out was that one stanza reminded her of John Green (derogatory). Did this hurt my feelings? Maybe a little bit, but who would it have served if she had pulled her punches? Certainly not me or my poetry. I didn’t need her to say she liked the poem to believe she cared about our friendship or my writing. I have plenty of other evidence that she cares about our friendship and respects me as a writer. She didn’t need to wrap her words in silk to demonstrate that.

Which is not to say that there isn’t an argument to be made in favour of not being a dick, and I don’t want to overstate my alignment with the Discordian ethos. You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, as the cliché goes, and frankly I’m more of a honey person. Plus if you’re always an asshole, people might, I don’t know, automatically dismiss you as an asshole and miss the point you were trying to make. I hope it’s clear that I believe we owe it to ourselves as a community to give Discordia a fairer shake, but I also think that it is incumbent upon Discordia’s editors to apply their own principles to themselves and regularly reevaluate if their techniques are suited to the moment.

That being said, what the fuck are we going to do with all these flies? Community is certainly necessary for any human endeavour but, on its own, it isn’t sufficient to produce art. To create art you need friction and a little bit of pressure. Some of this must come from inside the artist, but even that internal voice must come from somewhere else. If it didn’t, what would be the point of editors, open mic hosts, zine fair organizers and whatever other gatekeeper you can think of? One thing that distinguishes creative writers from the rest of the typing public is the desire9 to place our work in conversation with the work of other creative writers. Which raises the question, what are we talking about? It’s clear to me that Discordia & co. want the conversation to be about aesthetics, but I am not sure about everyone else.

Rebecca Lawrence Lynch is a Montréal-based poet, editor, and database slut. Her work appears four times on the Airtable database she built for Discordia’s previous story. Follow her on Instagram at @alliterativebychoice.

ELSEWHERE IN OPINION

When Nicki Minaj outed herself as the Black Queen of MAGA, my first thought was of Muhammad Ali. My second was of Barack Obama.

Let’s start on December 21, 2025, when Minaj pressed the button. On a day when many were descending into a flurry of festive celebration preparations, Minaj left her child and her sex offender husband at home to pledge her allegiance to Donald Trump at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest. The festival’s founder and original headliner, Charlie Kirk, had unfortunately been assassinated several months prior. But the show had to go on—and, if anything, it paved the way for Minaj to have a star moment she desperately craved. When one life ends, another begins. Thus, at AmericaFest, Minaj officially announced her MAGA-fication: the cooning heard round the world. She popped those blue contacts in, took the hand of Jackie Kennedy-cosplayer Erika Kirk, and shouted that Trump was handsome, JD Vance was an assassin (which she had to immediately apologize for, given Erika’s husband’s recent assassination), and declared herself Trump’s “number one fan.” Don’t worry about the fact that as recently as 2016, Minaj—an immigrant herself—had rapped the words “Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home”; and in 2021, had advocated against Trump on behalf of immigrant “children being taken away from their parents.” That was a different time. And as she said to Erika Kirk, “It’s okay to change your mind.”

My father was fifteen years old when Muhammad Ali changed the course of his life. It was 1977. One autumn day during this year, Ali visited a gym near Altgeld Gardens, Chicago, my father’s housing project. Originally built for Black World War II veterans between 1944 and 1945, Altgeld Gardens was one of the first housing developments in the United States. But, as was commonly the case in the mid-twentieth century, the government repurposed the Gardens into a refugee camp for Black Southerners fleeing the skidmarked sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Having segregated Black people from the rest of the city, the Gardens were then promptly allowed to descend into neglect. By my father’s birth, they were covered in lead paint, filled with asbestos, surrounded by landfills and factories, and entrenched in poverty. Altgeld Garden is so encircled by shit that it has earned the moniker “the Toxic Doughnut.”

The Toxic Doughnut was an education desert, forcing my father to earn a scholarship to a distant private school. The Toxic Doughnut also had no jobs, so my father spent his evenings travelling to and working at a shop in the city, where he earned money to pay his family’s bills. He slept on the train home and returned to school in the morning. In his few days off, he boxed. And at this, he excelled. He quickly rose through the local ranks, coaches flocking to him in hopes of hitching a ride. My father was not set on boxing his way out—but it was certainly an option.

One day, as on any other, my father went to the gym to prepare for an upcoming bout. But soon after he began sparring, a commotion erupted from the entrance. My father and his friends paused, squinting towards the source of the noise. And from the front of the gym, Ali emerged. My father had barely processed that he was in close proximity to The Greatest when Ali introduced himself and hopped into the ring.

“So, how you doing in school?” Ali asked my father and his friends.

My father played it cool. “I’m doing okay.”

Ali promptly told them to quit boxing.

“Imma be honest with you guys,” Ali said. “This is a real hard way to earn a living.” The gym went silent. My father’s coaches, lining the ring, began to openly seethe. But he continued. “I would strongly suggest you guys stay in school and give it up.” It was too unsustainable, he explained—and success was short-term, if achieved at all.

Then, despite his fame and stature, Ali sparred with my father and his friends.

My father loved boxing. But who was he to ignore the advice from The Greatest? And as the interaction percolated in his mind, he began to reconsider things he had previously brushed aside. “Many boxers were violent,” he told me, “and the coaches were illiterate. I’d kind of noticed this stuff before. But Ali’s advice brought it home.”

My father decided to quit that night.

Three years later, he earned a full-ride scholarship to a university six hours away. Ronald Reagan would also become president that year and decimate my father’s town with his War on Drugs.

And four years after that, Ali would support Reagan’s campaign for reelection.

You wouldn't know how Ali's decision affected my father and his home. But I can't forget. And when Minaj cooned for President Donald J. Trump, I saw nothing different.

Ali didn’t have great reasons for endorsing Reagan. He didn’t even have reasons, plural. There was only one. “He’s keeping God in schools,” Ali said. “And that’s enough.” Minaj’s professed support for Trump is rooted in a similar sentiment. Though Minaj is Christian—unlike the Muslim Ali—she has stated that she was drawn to Trump on the basis of religion. And on behalf of him, she will continue to speak up for Christians “wherever they are in this world.”

I am not equating Minaj and Ali. But they did both coon out. And while Ali will never be remembered for this, Minaj will.

Our memory of Ali is disconnected from contemporary accounts of his behavior. Though Ali was adored by the Black community, it was clear well before the Reagan era that his political behavior would never follow a straight line. Ali spent the early 1960s becoming renowned for his civil rights activism, nurtured in part by his relationship with Malcolm X, a fellow member of the Nation of Islam (NOI). However, their friendship imploded when Malcolm X discovered that Elijah Muhammad, the NOI’s leader, had engaged in sexual misconduct. Elijah effectively excommunicated X from the NOI, whilst Ali aligned himself with Elijah. By the time X was assassinated, the two had not spoken in months. Though Ali came to regret this and disavow the NOI, he remained Muslim for the rest of his life, and accordingly held both Black radical and socially conservative views. Boxing took a heavy toll on his body and mind, and as the 1980s approached, his mental deterioration also likely began to influence his politics. At the time of his Reagan endorsement, comrades expressed public disappointment. In private, concerns abounded that Ali had been taken advantage of in his reduced state.

Barbs’1 conversations have been similarly empathetic towards Minaj. As with Ali, Minaj did not drop the MAGA bomb unannounced. The Barbs have been in the bomb shelters for some time. Minaj has behaved increasingly erratically over the past decade: affiliating herself with sex pests; going on Queen Radio tirades; comparing herself to Harriet Tubman; bullying any female rapper that dares to approach a mic; and doubting the efficacy of the COVID vaccine on account of the swelling of her cousin’s friend’s balls. Thus, when Minaj soft-launched her Republicanism via a United Nations speech about Trump’s love for “Nigerian Christians” (i.e. Nigerian oil), the Barbs were not entirely astonished. But they also knew that Minaj grew up in an unstable home with an abusive father, is now coincidentally married to a sex offender, and is suspected of having a serious drug problem and mental health issues. They also knew that her significant influence on music and culture would soon be erased by her decision to support the Cheeto-in-Chief. When Ali posed with Reagan jokingly punching him in the face, perhaps Ali’s friends and family felt similarly.

To be clear, Ali is a civil rights icon who suffered from Parkinson’s. Minaj is a mentally ill rapper married to convicted sex offender Kenneth Petty—who she lovingly refers to as a “soulmate” and “wrongfully accused.” Everywhere that the Pettys move, Mister Petty must walk from block to block with a clipboard, knock on each door, and ask each neighbor, “I’m Nicki Minaj’s husband. Will you sign this so I can live near y’all?” And as they halfway-recognize the name “Nicki Minaj,” they sign it, and then they go into their house, Google him, and see that he attempted to rape a sixteen year old girl at knifepoint. And none of this is occurring within 2,000 feet of a school. Minaj has a vested interest in befriending politicians. She wants Mister Petty off the registry. She is no Ali: though she associates with the formerly incarcerated, she would never risk imprisonment for her views. She is a broken person seeking a green card and a presidential pardon. Despite his, at times, contradictory views, Ali displayed a degree of moral consistency throughout his life that Minaj has never slightly mirrored.

But whilst she is not a civil rights icon, Minaj is not “just” a rapper either. Minaj had a monumental impact on rap, the music industry in general, and the perception of Black women in the public sphere. Because she is now so well-known, the public often forgets that she navigated an industry inhospitable to her and overcame nearly insurmountable odds to become a household name. Though her Queen Radio rants are full of falsehoods, she is right about one thing: she ran so that Cardi B, Latto, and Ice Spice could drag themselves along. And thus, many Black girls have seen themselves—and found comfort in—her success. I have distinct memories of listening to her debut album Pink Friday on my iPod nano after fights with my mother and bawling my eyes out. When I got suspended in high school for “cyberbullying” (i.e. posting an Instagram roast of some Cookie Monster pajama-wearing white girl who was obsessed with my Black boyfriend and kept threatening to “beat my ass”), Minaj pulsed from my headphones as I sat in in-school suspension. I listened to Minaj through many abusive relationships, and as I memorized her lyrics, I gathered the strength to end them. Many other Black girls can say the same. There are hundreds of us. Thousands. Millions. This is not to say that only Black girls —or all Black girls—have this relationship with Minaj. But for many of us, it was her voice that mentored and accompanied us through the transition from child to adult. Thus, though her MAGA turn is not entirely unsurprising, it is devastating. Unlike my father’s experience with Ali, Minaj never spoke to me personally. But she might as well have.

I return to 1977, my father and Ali. Reagan would formally launch his campaign for president within two years. In 1980, he won, and for the next four years, went on to put “God in schools,” Black people in jail, and Americans in a handful of Latin American and Middle Eastern countries. My father’s community descended further into poverty as a result. But the Toxic Doughnut’s troubles did not end there. Because when Reagan went on to campaign for his second term and Ali travelled the country stumping for him, Obama descended upon Altgeld Gardens.

People often joke that Obama just read The Communist Manifesto to get some black beret pussy. However, Obama’s community-loving radical schtick went beyond the doors of Columbia University. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, Obama prepared the extracurriculars section of his Harvard Law application by heading straight to the Gardens, one of the most disadvantaged housing projects in the Chicagoland area. At the time, Altgeld Gardens was incubating the environmental justice movement, led by community organizer Hazel Johnson. Obama wanted a piece of the pie, and he joined Johnson in her organizing. He has since called this period “the best education I ever had.” I’m sure it was. Several thousand undergraduate students receive degrees from Columbia University per year, but there’s only one Toxic Doughnut to make your name in, and you better snatch it up when you get the chance. Obama took a book from the middle-class activist playbook: embed yourself in “the community” and use the grassroots momentum to push yourself into the halls of power. So that’s what he did. After several years of South Side organizing, he was accepted into Harvard University Law School, began working in corporate law, eventually ran for the Illinois Senate and then became president.

Though he now has no relationship with Altgeld Gardens, Obama has paid lip service to the South Side ever since. He even recently returned to Jackson Park, a nearby neighborhood, to build his Obama Presidential Center. Unfortunately, the Center’s construction has been heavily contested by local community members due to its potentially destructive impact on local wildlife and housing prices. Despite the fact that the Center has still yet to open, some nearby residents are already facing displacement. Several miles south, Altgeld Gardens still sits between a dump and a toxic river. Cancer occurs at significantly higher rates than the rest of the city. I would not trade places with any of my family members who live there. Maybe the Obama Center will reach out for a collab sometime soon. I’m not holding my breath.

It’s funny: Obama and Ali just about crossed paths. In another timeline, perhaps this would be celebrated. But in ours, it does not fit neatly within their legacies and has thus been minimized in their lore. And Altgeld Gardens, as per usual, is left on the scrap heap of history.

The public has a funny way of thinking about Black figures. Obama and Ali are unimpeachable. Meanwhile, Minaj’s transformation of the music industry has already been forgotten in favor of painting her as an irredeemable bird. In our world, Black figures are only allowed to be angels or demons.

Our inability to see nuance in Black political figures is a result of the racism entrenched in our politics. It is also partially due to the assumption that, as the downtrodden race, all Black people are for the people. Our Black icons either clear that high bar, or are sent to hell. In reality, it is entirely possible to shield oneself from racism with money whilst being very greedy. But Black people cannot exist within grey areas in the public’s immigration. The ones we love become saints. The ones we hate, we forget.

This canonization of Black political figures is not only racist, but fundamentally unhelpful: it erases the things about them we do not like, or—depending on the scope of their crime—erases their legacies entirely. When we force Black people to be icons, stories of their complexities that could be instructional disappear. We cannot learn from what we have decided no longer exists. Furthermore, when our icons disappoint us, we are actively demotivated: energy that should be going towards the world just outside our doors is sucked into internet debates over whether Beyonce’s attempt at an Afrobeats album negates her use of slave labor in Sri Lanka. Before one knows it, one is exhausted. And within community organizing spaces, folding chairs collect dust. Though we view Minaj—or, dare I say, Kanye West—as coons and Ali and Obama as kings, they all exist within the same lineage: fallible individuals whom we lazily idolize and therefore refuse to learn from in the ways we should.

Imagine if we saw our Black icons for who they were. How would this reorient our understanding of the world? Ali’s support for Reagan was likely influenced by brain trauma from boxing: a sport that paid him handsomely to abuse his body. Who else does this? Football players, maybe? But sure, a Super Bowl halftime show is revolutionary. And despite his radical views, Ali devoted a significant amount of his time to socially conservative religious politics. Co-extant radical and conservative attitudes are still common amongst Black people, despite what Harvard-educated pollsters may have you believe.

So let us turn to Minaj: a woman who fled poverty as an immigrant child, was raised in a violent home, and then spent years being abused by various partners and her professional industry. She now allegedly surrounds herself with pill-popping rapists. Is this really an uncommon response to her experiences? Minaj has also spent the last few decades existing as a migrant in an increasingly xenophobic country. No wonder she wants citizenship. Do you think other people would not kiss Trump’s ass for the same opportunity? And Obama? Our first Black President bombed Pakistan with artificial intelligence-guided drones before “AI” was a household term. But my friends in Palestine really like him, because he’s the only president who told Benjamin Netanyahu to go fuck himself. Nothing is simple. When we delude ourselves to the contrary, we lose.

It saddens me that the same people saying “Fuck Nicki Minaj” take inspiration from clowns like Kendrick Lamar. Do you think Kendrick Lamar went through any fewer loopholes than Minaj to not pay his taxes this year? It is easy to clown her. It is harder to hold her failures and accomplishments at once, and alongside those of her peers. But we must accept that nobody is perfect, and that everyone will disappoint us. Even Zohran Mamdani, a fellow African king. He may not have disappointed you yet. However, he will. Everyone will. That is life. But it is not the end of the world.

I have a Muhammad Ali poster somewhere in storage. When I move out of the shoebox I call my apartment, I’ll probably hang it up. Because of Ali, my father charted a path that led him to my mother, to his eventual line of work, and to me. If Ali had not told him to quit boxing, I would not be here. My father might not be either. But also, without Reagan—Ali’s 1984 candidate of choice—several of my family members would perhaps still be alive. Ali supported Reagan amidst a reelection campaign: he had seen Reagan’s first term, and its destruction of Black communities across the country, and he didn’t care.

I will put up the poster despite these things. I want to be regularly reminded to have courage, and to remember what he did for my father. But I don’t need to shape my world around an idea of Ali. I do not need to make him someone he was not.

And when I listen to Nicki Minaj, I’ll do the same.

Head to Hilde’s Visions and subscribe now.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Now look, literature is very trendy at the moment (as Comrade Eris has recently written about), but that is just… what the hell, man. Every period in that block of text should toll like a mournful church bell.

For our readers outside Montreal, some context may be helpful.2 While the 4.6 million souls residing in the vicinity of Montreal rank it as the 20th most populous metropolitan area in North America (the city proper is 1.9 million, good for 8th overall), only about 700,000 speak English as their first language.3 This population is strongly concentrated in the traditionally anglophone communities of the West Island and in more recent émigré groups from former British colonies, neither of which have a lot of truck with the Plateau/Mile End/Milton Park crowd of migratory university students, aspirant artists, and kibbutzing queers that make up the bulk of the English lit “scene.” While Montreal as a whole is extremely bilingual (nearly 60% are fluent in both tongues), on balance the francophones tend to pay more attention to the domestic French-language ecosystem, which enjoys a considerably larger readership and offers more opportunity to actually make money. The local population these, again, thirty-goddamn-four magazines are theoretically serving is therefore, very generously, about 100,000—which you can then further reduce to the number of people within that who both care about reading and care about reading local writing. That’s an awful small pie to be slicing into so many wedges.

Of course, the sad secret of the literary magazine is that few of them are for readers. They are rather places for writers to aspire to be published in. Many years ago, I worked at one of Canada’s more respectable small lit journals. We had a circulation of a few thousand—most of them acquired thanks to our annual poetry contest, which included a year’s subscription to the magazine with its entrance fee.4 I wish I could claim this was a novel scheme, but it’s pretty much standard operating procedure in the industry. It has always been the strangled purple hard-on of writers to see their own names in print that keeps the printers printing. Even so, as I chatted on the couch with my friend, scoffing about the local glut, I couldn’t help wondering:

• Where did all of these magazines come from? It wasn’t always like this.

• Who are they even publishing? Is it just the same hundred or so people drifting in and out of the community furpile? Are there more magazines than artists?

• Is there any difference between these outlets? Couldn’t we like, consolidate a few of these?

So I did what any sane and curious person would do: I made a spreadsheet listing every single contributor to every single active English lit journal in Montreal.

Now look, obviously I didn’t read each of the hundred or so issues included in my analysis (a bunch of them shits are like 75 pages!). But I feel pretty confident saying most of what I saw wasn’t very good. There were some things I very much enjoyed. To name three: a transcript of a thoroughly entertaining shit-talking session between Pip Morrison and Icari Tjitunga in brand new journal Navel; a crackling, eerie poem by Toronto veteran Stan Rogal tucked in the back of Vallum’s Summer 2025 edition (PDF download free here); Paige Cooper’s Naomi Klein-meets-dragon-porn short fic piece in Maisonneuve. But generally it was not a great showing for “The City of 100 Steeples and Also 34 English Literary Magazines.” I have some thoughts about this.

First though, while I expect there will be at least a few True Montreal Sickos who will be very curious about the 700-person-long spreadsheet and (way better) searchable Airtable database that Discordia pal Rebecca Lawrence Lynch helped me create, I’ll save the rest of you some time by putting all of that stuff (hyper-local roasts included) in an appendix at the bottom of this post. (If that’s you, you can jump there now if so inclined and then come back.)

Okay, now that those people have temporarily left us, let’s survey their mess (after a word from our sponsor).

Montreal Publishing: A “No Loads Refused” Orgy (And Is Your Town Any Different?)

Today’s general crisis in literature has many mothers, but a major culprit is the diminishing focus on the formal, political, and aesthetic qualities of art as a unifying principle for movements and collectives. Of the magazines in the chart above, I would say exactly two have a narrow, defined stylistic mandate: Stimulant, which has a very alt. lit revival sensibility and an instantly identifiable look, and Navel, an outgrowth of the same social/artistic circle. When you read Stimulant you know exactly what they’re going for and, as a result, even when their contributors fall short in their aims there is a direction to the writing. The same cannot be said of basically any of the other new magazines.5 There are, at best, some affinities of identity: LBRNTH (est. 2021) brings the vibe of a glossy gay culture mag like BUTT to local queer poetry; a variety of mags have a feminist mandate. But as there is no such thing as a “gay poem” or a “woman poem,” except in the very broadest sense, how can these provide a genuine structure within which an artist can develop their personal aesthetic principles? And how fertile can these sorts of grounds be when all the other mags are dominated by women and queers anyway? Montreal literally has a guy called The Last Male Poet and his whole schtick is that he sucks and is a joke. That basically makes him one of the more successful conceptual artists in town.

None of these new mags (nor any of the older ones) are dedicated to an ethos of aesthetic minimalism, or of maximalism for that matter; none to concrete poetry or to any type of formalism; we lack Futurists and social realists, kitchen-sinkers, Decadents, Objectivists, Dadaists, Spasmodics, post-anythings, neo-anythings (not even accursed neo-Romantics), not one single self-identified magazine of capital-C Confessional poetry (even if that is broadly what the younger poets tend to produce). The only magazine in town that has to my knowledge published a statement of purpose or a manifesto is the one you’re reading right now, and it is a sign of how debased things are these days that said manifesto could (ungenerously) be boiled down to “don’t get an MFA” and “be mean to people’s whose art you don’t like.”

The trickle-down effects of this are obvious. Rejecting people who submit to your magazine feels bad—you may be surprised to learn even our loveable grump Eris hates doing it—and I suspect that a lot of this town’s editors don’t really reject much. This is a function of not having a real heuristic for deciding what to publish—taste, after all, is in part defined by what it excludes. And this in turn means that a writer who is pot-committed enough to getting published to submit to every mag will get published without encountering the productive friction essential to improvement.

What has happened in Montreal, as has been happening in many cultural centres over the past three years, is that after a long lull, publishing became trendy, and a whole whack of university students and recent graduates all decided to start magazines so they could publish their friends. Which, on its own, is a totally fine and endearing thing to do. The incestuous bonds of artistic communities can certainly be generative in a way—as fun as it is to rag on autofiction, to cite an extreme example, some excellent work did emerge from all that obsessing over social minutiae (work which was bound by a fairly strict conceptual mandate!). But to truly build something together artistically, to row down deep enough into the muck of the daily to grapple with that aspect of yourself which is transcendent, requires obsession—delusion even. But in an era where the notion of finding the new has been beaten out of us, you kind of have to be a mule on molly to look. Do these 700 people on my spreadsheet stay up after all these launches talking about poetry? And what are they willing to risk to find their art?

A protracted, not very coherent metaphor about soil conditions ensues

Hey you, non-Montreal reader, this is your problem too. It’s not like we just have shitty “kids”6 here—here, enjoy this report on a recent LA launch for some horrendous-sounding books that gave me a contact eating disorder and coke habit. The present state of affairs owes much to things that are specific to recent local history, but also to the broader cultural moment. The internet has invaded us all as thoroughly as microplastics, and it has crowded out those idiosyncrasies of place that were once the seedbeds of culture. Going insane in our own personal content bubbles actually does replicate some of these qualities (we become more alien to each other by the moment, which is great for producing entrancing, utterly bewildering artifacts), but it has largely been corrosive to, say, the state of monastic horniness that has produced much of our finest verse. There may eventually be a poetics adapted to the pace and distortions of the slop-era internet, but most of the attempts I have encountered Suck, and it may be impossible for the kind of refining process necessary to produce a mature form to occur because the conditions the form is responding to are continually shifting. The outlook is little better for prose.

The explosion of magazines can be seen as a yearning then for place. Before this latest wave of new lit mags (and reading series’, and open mics etc. etc.) Montreal’s scene was barren (a mere 18 lit mags!). Like everywhere else, the established magazine industry in Montreal was flambéed by the internet in general and then the pandemic in specific. And right before said pandemic, Concordia University’s creative writing department, one of the country’s most notable talent farms, was rocked by sexual assault and misconduct allegations. There’s no way of counting how many disillusioned people dropped out in the wake of the scandal, but there were also immediate material effects. The city’s most popular anglophone journal, Matrix Magazine,7 quietly disappeared alongside disgraced professor Jon Paul Fiorentino, who had been its editor-in-chief. Numerous figures throughout the local and Canadian small press community were toppled as the hunt for abusers (and, in some cases, garden variety assholes) spread. In the end, the scandal and the pandemic removed a layer of the “old growth” tree cover that had helped protect what remained of the soil’s local terroir from the constant deluge of Placeless Online Content.

These institutions provided a consistency to the scene that is especially important in anglophone Montreal, which has thin soil to begin with. Every year tons of people who came here for school graduate, figure out they can’t make a real living without decent French, and then move to a bigger city or go home, taking pieces of cultural memory with them. Montreal had a particularly thriving micro-publishing scene in the 2010s, of which almost nothing remains today save for its central pillar Metatron Press, which continues to carry on despite publisher Ashley Opheim’s slow-dawning realization 13 years in that there actually might not be any money in this thing. Most of the writers who made up that particular moment have skipped town, and what monuments they left behind (now 404 errors, mainly) have washed away in the flood.

Looking at my spreadsheet here, I’m struck once again by how few of the notable names from that era, many of whom continue to publish with varying degrees of success, have appeared in any of the magazines I looked at. Paige Cooper, Tara McGowan-Ross, Fawn Parker, Jessica Bebenek, Viola Chen (each with only a single publication to boot)… aaand that might be it actually. Hell, if you filter out Maisonneuve, carte blanche, yolk, Vallum, and Fellow Travellers, I’m not sure there are 20 people on there who even have (non-self-published) books to their names. This tells me that there is no real communication between the generations—that not only does our current clutch of writers and publishers want for potential idols and teachers within their own milieu (and outside the academy), they also want for figures to rebel against. It’s a loss for that greying millennial generation too—being a cherished “local writer” sounds like a backhanded compliment, but there is honour in being part of nourishing the earth you sprung from (even as a corpse!).

Conclusion: Notes Towards a “Some Loads Refused” Publishing Orgy

Look, literature’s various “scenes” are ultimately a very minor part of many writers’ lives, and some never engage with them at all. But even if this publishing surge is a fad, more people directly engaging with literature right now means our chances are better at diverting the real talents amongst them away from more useful or profitable artforms. We need that! But we’ve seen enough of the, “if you build It they will come” mentality at work to know that mentality’s limits when “It” is just a hole words crawl into to die. So I do have a few suggestions to those in the DIY publishing world before we wrap up here and move on to the Appendices.

1. Write a manifesto, not a “vision statement” or an About page: What kind of literature do you believe in? What should it do? What arbitrary aesthetic hills are you willing to die on? Write those down, then take all of the parts that pertain exclusively to identity and put those aside (don’t worry, they aren’t going anywhere). What remains? If the answer is “nothing,” you have work to do. Your politics and your subject position will inevitably inform what you publish, as they should, but they are not a substitute for an Aesthetics. You don’t need to publish the document you produce, but having it will help you define who you are right now.

2. Read people you like who aren’t former classmates and ask them to send you shit: Some people will say no, but so what. It isn’t personal. Artists tend to be flattered by thoughtful solicitations, and adding even a few more accomplished writers to your pool elevates your project (and your expectations).

3. Say “no” to shit: No one put a gun to your head and said you needed to publish a 75-page magazine. Try making something that’s 20 pages that you think truly sings first.

4. Consider making chapbooks (or at least weirder compilations) instead: You know what English Montreal (like most cities) doesn’t have? 33 fucking chapbook presses. Are there even five? Chapbooks are an essential step for writers between magazine and book publishing, and the shortage of presses makes it gratingly difficult for even accomplished writers to place a short collection these days. You’ll become a better editor working on chapbooks, and a better designer too. And if you truly take to it, you can do it all your life, at a pace that suits you.
   
   There has never been a better time to look to the achievements of the Canadian micro-press scene of the ‘60s to ‘90s for inspiration. jwcurry, a crucial artist and publisher of the period who remains active today, has documented thousands of items from his own collection that could serve as inspiration for just how far out of the box you can get with this stuff: printing on found materials, doing analog typesetting and stamp-cutting, formats that seem to thwart the reader, books intended to be burned after reading and on and on and on. Start with curry’s own projects as an editor, or the astonishing bpNichol catalogue, or the list of publications where Peggy Leffler’s work appeared.
   

   

   

   

It can be a lovely, humane gesture to start a magazine and give others a chance to flourish. It’s a brave thing to submit your most personal work to the judgement of an editor. But for those with experience, ambition, and taste, remember: there’s more to publishing than the next launch party and there are some loads you really should refuse.

Cue the Lord of the Rings music, nerds: it’s time for the appendices!

Appendix A: The spreadsheet, which was an insanely bad idea

The spreadsheet, which was an insanely bad idea, took me like 12 hours over the course of two days and eventually comprised more than 700 people.

[Edit, 03/09: The spreadsheet was subsequently vandalized because I guess my grandpa ass must’ve shared out a link with edit permissions at some point. On the plus side, I think their edits make for a better reading experience. The Airtable linked a bit further below is, thus far, unaffected!]

While crawling through the mags’ various busted-ass Wixsites8 and IG accounts9 in a data-entry flow state did give me a strong vibes-based assessment of the scene today, I don’t have the kind of pivot table mastery it takes to quickly ID clusters and overlaps. (Nor the chutzpah to also log demographic info like local vs. non-local status for each contrib10 etc.) News of my little project spread quickly though, and before long the angelic Rebecca Lawrence Lynch (a poet not lacking in chutzpah with a master’s in library sciences, it turns out) slid into my DMs to offer her assistance. The result, which she put together alarmingly rapidly, is this beautiful, immaculately stupid Airtable.

To be honest, at the outset I assumed that I would find much more obvious clustering than Rebecca and I ultimately did—which is to say, way fewer names to deal with. I had narrowed my criteria to only look at the period from January 1, 2024 to the present (or the most recent three issues for those that had been super active within that period), and I figured I could skip cataloguing at least a few publications for a variety of reasons (see the methodology section in the next appendix). I figured I’d end up with a few hundred names, tops, and an obvious core of avid local writers racking up publishing credits in semi-identical periodicals.

I pretty much knew that that thesis was fucked as soon as I started logging the contributors from Ahoy magazine, first in the alphabet and soon to be furthest from my heart. Besides publishing like 25 people per issue, the journal also seems to be on a quest to brute-force a spontaneous recreation of Esperanto by including not only English and French pieces, but also poetry in Portuguese. There are local people in each issue, but Ahoy’s size and linguistic diversity meant a lot of logging names I knew would not be appearing in any other magazine. (But what incredible names! Word to Vittoria Spaghetti and Cornelius von Haugwitz: y’all lit up my day.)

Meanwhile another chunky magazine I’d never read before, Crab Apple Literary, highlighted another fact of literary publishing life: local magazines often aren’t very local in terms of content. This isn’t usually a bad thing—about 30% of what we’ve fished for Fellow Travellers comes from domestic waters, and we consider being able to put Montreal guys who deserve a bigger audience alongside the Eileen Myleses and Phil Halls of the world part of our whole deal. But one look at all the flyover state locations and references to Pushcart Prize nominations11 among Crab Apple’s contributors (14% Montrealers) and I could tell it’d been Duotroped hard. Aggregators like Duotrope, ChillSubs etc. are beloved by aspiring writers (and veteran hacks) who like to take a carpetbombing approach to making submissions. While the sudden rush of emails can be thrilling to a new editor looking to stand up their journal,12 if you don’t already have firmly established identity these slushpile bugs have a tendency to crawl into all your orifices and start laying their eggs. Before you know it you’re an utterly deracinated slop journal with little relationship to any community beyond the Vanpintern.13

Broadly though, as I milled along a picture of the magazine publishing world did begin to develop. The scene skews extremely young: the two major anglophone universities, Concordia and McGill, each have two or three current lit-adjacent magazines, Dawson College’s The Plant publishes creative writing, and the Quebec Writers Federation’s Quist covers the high school/CEGEP beat. Many of the more traditionally magazine-shaped indie publications have editors who served on one of the above mags, and the data suggests the affiliations they made at their alma maters seem to be holding a bit post-graduation.14 Surrounding these are an odds and sods flotilla of true zines, NYC-brained online journals, blogs, and the crumbling remains of the pre-pandemic grownup writing establishment. While each mag seems to have a small clique attached to it, only a very small set of writers publish widely within it.

Appendix B: Some notes on methodology

• Generally, I looked at each magazine’s last three issues (as long as they were published after January 1, 2024). If the magazine also published online features, I included these as well (though here usually only as far back as January 1, 2025).

• Since our focus here is on literary contributors, for the most part I included fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics; I did not include interviews, reviews, critical essays, visual arts, or photography. With that said, I was moving quickly and it wasn’t always obvious who was doing what, so some slipped in.

• It was immediately obvious that there were some mags I could fully or partially skip in my accounting.

  • Montreal Review of Books is dedicated to book reviews.

  • Feminist arts mag Yiara has been around for like ten years, but hasn’t published a print edition since 2021. While its guidelines say it is open for literary submissions (including poetry), all of its online pubs to date have been critical pieces. [Edit: I’ve been informed that Yiara actually has continued to put out an issue each year. The past four years are not housed on the archive section of the magazine’s website, however, so the magazine is still omitted from the Airtable count.]

  • Rodaisun has been in print since 2021, and has put out over 50 lovingly designed issues in that span. However, it has only ever had three contributors: Iva Čelebić, Catherine Machado, and Emma Cosgrove. I’ve never met “the Triad,” but I assume it would be like if this Beetle Moses comic was about girls who dress like Haim.

  • Canto Press (Canto Press?) was on the original list, but I think it’s actually a micropress. Brand new and dedicated to publishing long poems (the dumbest-named genre), they haven’t actually put anything out yet. If it does turn out to be a mag, we may have to find-and-replace this piece so that I’m screaming “thirty-five fucking magazines!” throughout.

  • The Pit didn’t say who is actually in its three issues to date anywhere on its website or on its socials. As a friend quipped, “if you want to see their list of contributors, you’ll have to pay $20 and buy a cocktail.”

  • yolk, despite being one of the more prominent local Asian American arts and culture magazines lit journals in town, has no record on its website of who was in any issue prior to its most recent edition. So I just used that one plus its 2025 online features.

  • The Page is basically a trendy homage to the iconic Coffee Times (super fun concept!) and is probably a stretch for inclusion anyway; they don’t list which of their contributors did what anywhere online, so I just skipped them as it’d be a pretty short list anyway.

  • Metatron Press officially wrapped up their online Glyphoria project last year, which meant their only qualifying “magazine” style publication for our purposes is the long-running occasional micro-poetry series Micro-Meta.

  • The Encore Poetry Project was, at one time, an annual print publication, I wasn’t able to find any evidence of when it last actually put something out though. At the moment its main “project” is providing a regular window display at Encore Books & Records down in NDG. While people keep telling me they still consider themselves active and are printing magazines as we speak, the only person listed as published for EPP is Gwen Aube because she told me she was in it once.

  • Likewise the only person counted from Quist, a mag dedicated to writing by artists aged 14 to 21, is Jessica Bakar, who is young enough to have appeared in two issues before going to publish in more grown-up mags. As far as the other fine contributors go… Look, if you’re over 25 and you know most of the names in an undergraduate lit magazine, you should probably be on some sort of a list. If you know most of the names in a youth lit mag you should probably have your face on a poster near a playground. Skipped!

Appendix C: Primitive accumulation; or, what magazines will be consolidated

Let’s wrap up by looking at the last questions I posed up top: Is there any difference between these outlets? Couldn’t we like, consolidate a few of these?

The answers, respectively, are, “Not as much as you’d hope” and “For sure.”

[Breaking: On March 6, 2026 at 2:05pm Eastern Standard Time I discovered The Imagist, yet ANOTHER magazine and have to, once again, update all my counts throughout this post. It is not, you will no doubt be shocked to learn, a journal of Imagist poetry.]

When reached for comment, Maybe co-editor Gwen Aube had this to say:

Discordia Review’s consolidation recommendations do, of course, have the force of law, but they take into account more than simple contributor overlaps. For example, Headlight Anthology and Soliloquies are both Concordia student mags, but the former is traditionally for grad students and the latter for undergrads—that seems reasonable given the size of the school. On the other hand, Pixie, the undergrad Concordia feminist lit mag, could probably be safely absorbed into Soliloquies, a mag not exactly overburdened with straight cis male editors, without much issue.

With eight shared contributors over the past 18 months or so alone, Chouette and Limacine appear to be basically the same magazine (though Limacine has crossword puzzles). I propose they fuse. I feel like the editors would get along famously! They can also absorb Crab Apple’s small local bureau while they’re at it. Ahoy crosses over with all of these guys pretty much—and nine times with our new Limapplette collective, which will bring an internationalist flair to the mag. Since I don’t really know what The Pit does, they can tag on to help plan the launches.

SQUID isn’t wildly different from any of those journals, albeit with a bit more edge and angst to it. Let’s cultivate that difference by instead merging that one into Ivy, which seems pretty similar except for the sort of dark fantasy genre edge you get when one of your editors professes in their bio to being into “inter-species romance”. Fuse ‘em! (And also call me?)

Pastiche is fine in its current format (two short stories per issue, one French, one English) but if you were to combine it and The Imagist (a poetry-only journal) into a single text file and tell me it was one magazine, I’d probably believe it. So sure, why not.

As for me and Fellow Travellers, you can consolidate us into Rodaisun for all I care at this exact moment, I am so tired and this blog is so over!

The editors wish to sincerely thank Rebecca Lawrence Lynch once again for her indispensable assistance with the preparation of this post.

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

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

THE HOLY BIBLE VOLUME 2, VERSE 4

LIKE A ROGUE FLOOD WE RUN YOU OUT OF TOWN WITH OBNOXIOUS INSISTENCE, WIELDING OUR HUNGER LIKE RIFLES IN THE HANDS OF GOD, SPARKS ALONG THE SHORE OF OUR RAGE, WET JUNK POURING FROM THE WORRYING SLIT OF THE INGLORIOUS END OF ALL THINGS IN A SHOW OF SUPPORT FOR THE GET-DOWN STAY-DOWN, THE BOTHERING, THE YES-I-AM, THE SUDDEN RUINATION OF A VERY FINE SUIT AS WE BEAT THE JAZZ OUT OF THE BOARD OF INVESTORS IN A SUBTLE LEAD-UP TO A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED SITDOWN, IN WHICH WE CRADLE THEIR FACES ONE-BY-ONE & TEACH THEM THE MEANING OF REDUNDANCY, BECAUSE TODAY, MY GOOD BITCH, IS THE DAY WE ERADICATE THE MIDDLE DISTANCE ONCE & FOR ALL, HAVING COVETED A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP FOR FAR, FAR TOO LONG, BUT AFTER THE SOFT, LINGERING SUCK ON THE NECTAR OF OUR ESTEEMED DELIRIUM, IN THE HARSH BASTARD LIGHT OF THE GODDAMN WORKDAY MIXED WITH THE DENTED RADIANCE DRIBBLING WETLY OUT OF THE INGLORIOUS END OF ALL THINGS, WE ARE FINALLY ABLE TO SEE FOR OURSELVES THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FLAWED & WRONG, & IT’S JUST FUCKING SITTING THERE, BURIED UNDERNEATH THE BURNT-OUT HUSKS OF ALL THE VERSIONS OF OURSELVES WE LEFT BEHIND OVER YEARS & YEARS, A CURSED & NECESSARY BREADCRUMB TRAIL THAT REGULARLY WALKS ITSELF OUT OF THE LAKE & INTO OUR BEDS TO TENDERLY SLIT THE THROAT OF THE VERY CONCEPT OF OUR OWN SELF-IMAGE, & EVEN AFTER ALL OF THIS WAITING THE MOMENT DOESN’T FIT QUITE RIGHT, THE ANGLE IS OFF, THE DAY IS BENT, WE’RE ALL JUST SO DAMN TIRED FROM DRAGGING AROUND THE INGLORIOUS END OF ALL THINGS, RIDDLED WITH THE GAPING WOUNDS OF ALL OUR GOODBYES & ENDURING THE CURSE OF COLD FEET, & YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIKE IT BUT THIS IS WHAT PEAK PERFORMANCE LOOKS LIKE HONEY BUN, WE MADE IT, THIS IS THE MOTHERFUCKING FUTURE & IT SUCKS TO BE ALIVE, BUT WE ARE ALIVE, WE BELIEVERS IN THE INFINITE NOTHING OF ALL POSSIBILITIES, WE WHO ARE SWADDLED IN PITIFUL MUSCLE & BLOOD, HOPING FOR JUST ENOUGH LOVE TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE WINTER, THE REDDISH PULSATING INSISTENCE OF OUR HEARTS’ DIVINE BULLSHIT ECHOING OUT ALONG THE STRAITS IN AIRBORNE PACKAGES OF CAVERNOUS INSIGHT INTO THE SUBCUTANEOUS TRUTH ETCHED INTO THE PARCHMENT OF EACH & EVERY ONE OF US BY ALL THE MORBID SHENANIGANS SPONSORED BY THE INGLORIOUS END OF ALL THINGS, IN BETWEEN ALL OUR ATTEMPTS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM THE SIBILANT FACT THAT ONE PERSON’S VERY GOOD MORNING IS ANOTHER PERSON’S ACCIDENTAL DEATH, EVEN WHILE WE WERE JUST SAYING, HAVING HAD OUR DAILY CRISIS, HOW NICE THIS ALL IS, THIS SILENCE AFTER THE FACT, IF ONLY IN A RELATIVE SENSE, IF ONLY WHILE THE BLOOD’S STILL WARM, FAMILIAR, & SO ON, & IT REALLY IS NICE, WHICH, THINKING ABOUT IT NOW, IN THE POST-POST-CRISIS MALAISE, IS FUCKED, BUT, WELL.

ELEANOR ELI MOSS writes poetry. They’ve got a Substack and a forthcoming book. That’s it, really. You can figure the rest out as we go.

Read Eleanor’s Substack here.

The cover of the forthcoming book in question is below.

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

As always, if we’re missing something, or you want your event included, please message @discordia.review on Instagram to propose an inclusion.

1 MAR (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic at its new venue. Episode 132 is on the theme of “farce,” which is kinda rough on this month’s features, no? (Computer, play Julius Fučík’s “Entry of the Gladiators.”)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus K. Gandhar Chakravarty, Mariana Jimenez, and Michael Occhionero.
How Much: Free. (Link)

KATE CAYLEY: DALLOWAY ON THE DON LAUNCH
What: Cayley launches her new Coach House novel at Star Bar, where there is pizza and one very big bathroom upstairs and then a few small ones downstairs.
Where: Star Bar (4671 Boul. Saint-Laurent).
When: 6 to 7:30pm.
Who: Kate Cayley and Derek Webster, hosted by Eva Crocker.
How Much: Free. (Link)

3 MAR (TUES)

KASIA VAN SCHAIK: WOMEN AMONG MONUMENTS LAUNCH
What: Montreal ex-pat re-pats to launch latest.
Where: Librarie De Stiil.
When: 6pm.
When: Kasia Van Schaik, in conversation with Eliza Robertson.
How Much: Free. (Link)

MARIA MILLAND: BORN AT THE GATES OF HELL LAUNCH
What: Writer and physician Dr. Maria Milland launches a nonfiction title about delivering babies in Syria’s Al-Hol refugee camp, at the one bookstore that makes us sweat bullets trying to spell.
Where: L’Euguélionne (1426 Rue Beaudry).
When: 6 to 8pm.
Who: Maria Milland.
How Much: Free. (Link)

7 MAR (SAT)

ÉPIPHANIES #2
What: Someone sent me this event and whispered the words “Dimes Square” before disappearing into a mandrake-scented vape cloud, so I assume I’ll be dying March 7. A Matthew Gasda-related thing, if you have opinions on that front.
Where: WILLS (6729 Ave de l’Esplanade).
When: 7:30pm.
Who: Maurane, The Last Male Poet, Maya Chambers, Erika Comtois, Ema Pope, Sahba, Victoria Vyraeth, Cedar, Sarah Velk.
How Much: No door cost specified. (Link)

QUEER VOICES IN PRINT
What: Queer writers sit down to talk queerness, writing, sitting, directions.
Where: L’Euguélionne (1426 Rue Beaudry).
When: 5 to 7pm.
Who: Liana Cusmano, Chris DiRaddo, Erin Mouré, Faith Paré, Misha Solomon, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch.
How Much: Free. (Link)

THROW! POETRY COLLECTIVE
What: Slam poets apparently get in free, so consider stapling a post-it note to your forehead so they know. Tonight’s winner competes at Nationals.
Where: La Basement (3716 rue Notre-Dame O.
When: 8:30pm doors, 9pm show (and it recurs the first Saturday of every month).
Who: Kym Dominique-Ferguson, Mellowdramma, K.R.Y. Da Soul Spilluh, and Hilani, plus whoever has the balls.
How Much: $10 for QWF members, $15 everybody else. (Link)

8 MAR (SUN)

FAVOURITE LIBRARY x RODAISUN
What: Rodaisun, the King Ghidorah of the local writing scene, teams with the latest movers and shakers in the 10 Pins building, Favourite Library, for a music and poetry show. Performances will be followed by a short open mic.
Where: Favourite Library 10 ave Pins, #116).
When: 7pm doors, 8pm show.
Who: Rodaisun, Olivia Khoury, MUDA, and whoever has both the balls and an advance ticket (see below).
How Much: $22 (Ticket link, must buy in advance, no door tix)

INSIDE MADPOETIX STUDIO
What: Some music, some spoken word poetry, plus an interview with the feature artist, that kinda situation. This one’s for ~the ladies.~
Where: Maison France-Montreal (429 ave Viger).
When: 6:30pm doors, 7:30pm show.
Who: Brnchtr, plus whoever has the balls.
How Much: $20 (Event link)

9 MAR (MON)

LECTURES LOGOS READINGS
What: The long-running poetry series is also for ~the ladies~ this month, with a women’s-only open mic in addition to the usual parade of featured acts.
Where: U.N.I.A. (2741 rue Notre-Dame O).
When: 7-9:30pm.
Who: Caroline Dick, Emeline I, IF the Poet, Joel Des-Rosiers, Maxianne Berger, Tanya Déry-Obin and whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Event link)

12 MAR (THURS)

THYME TRAVELLERS: A MONTREAL WRITERS FOR PALESTINE FUNDRAISER
What: A number of local writers assemble for a fundraiser/raffle for Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist aid group in Gaza.
Where: Articule (6282 Rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 7pm.
Who: Belen Blizzard, H Felix Chau Bradley, Nadine Ltaif, and Yara Coussa.
How Much: $25, including raffle ticket, or PWYC. (Link)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring beloved Toronto minimalist Elio Ianni and William Vallières.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8pm.
Who: Elio Ianni and William Vallières, plus whoever has the balls.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

13 MAR (FRI)

SOLILOQUIES x PIXIE OPEN MIC
What: Solilixie? Pixiloquies? Spoilxiileoquies? (Probably not that last one.) Anyway, two undergrad mags collab on an open mic fundraiser with a novel concept: read your worst work.
Where: BedRoc Collective (RSVP for address).
When: 7pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus musical performances from BedRoc Collective.
How Much: $5 PWYC, bring extra for raffle tix. (Link)

15 MAR (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic at its new venue (we can probably call it new for another coupla months eh?). Episode 133 is on the theme of “obiter dicta” which probably means something like “cancelled fucking” in Greek or some shit (Computer, play “The Unknown Knows” by Voivod.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Clementine Morrigan, Laura Mota-Juang, and Robin Warren.
How Much: Free. (Link)

18 MAR (WEDS)

LOCH BAILLIE: RIVER RUNNING LAUNCH
What: This debut is allegedly “breathtakingly intimate,” so be prepared to look away and cough from time to time.
Where: Librarie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7pm.
Who: Loch Baillie, Simina Banu, Sally Cunningham, and Tara McGowan-Ross.
How much: Free. (Link)

BLUE METROPOLIS PRESS CONFERENCE + MONTREAL REVIEW OF BOOKS LAUNCH
What: Blue Metropolis moved their press conference on account of the Freezing Rain Event, so now it’ll be at 4:30, after which (6pm) the new issue of the mRB will launch, accompanied by some readings.
Where: Hotel 10 (10 Sherbrooke W)
When: 4:30pm.
Who: Marianne Ackerman, Francine Pelletier, Karine Russo, and Anita Anand.
How much: Free. (Link)

MIRANDA SCHREIBER: IRIS AND THE DEAD LAUNCH
What: A little prose, a little poetry, some books to be bought if you’re so inclined.
Where: Centre for Expanded Poetics (LB681, 1400 Boul. de Maisonneuve Ouest)
When: 7pm.
Who: Miranda Schreiber, Nicky Taylor.
How much: Free. (Link)

SLAM LA SOMPTUEUSE
What: A bilingual slam with, at press-time anyway, open slots for readers. Sign up in advance to get your moment (though the form still says it’s for February, so idk good luck I guess).
Where: Co-Op Bar Milton Parc (3714 ave du Parc).
When: Doors 7pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Dominic Desmeules.
How Much: PWYC (Link)

22 MAR (SUN)

DISCORDIA REVIEW: FELLOW TRAVELLERS NO. 3 LAUNCH
What: Discordia Review’s Fellow Travellers quarterly releases its latest print issue, featuring new art and writing from Opal Louis Nations, Miles Forrester, Mickie Kennedy, Emilie Lafleur, Clark Allen, Nevada-Jane Arlow, Zak Jones, and Jonathan. This “anti-apartment reading” will take place in an undisclosed, entirely unfurnished apartment.
Where: RSVP for location.
When: 8pm.
Who: Sherwin Tjia, Tara McGowan-Ross, Jonathan, Joe Bagel MacNeil, Nevada-Jane Arlow, and some surprises.
How Much: $10, or $15 with the new issue. (Link)

25 MAR (WEDS)

MISHA SOLOMON: MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER DANCED BALLET LAUNCH
What: The busiest man in Montreal letters Misha Solomon launches his debut poetry collection, accompanied by an interpretive dance performance. (Mercifully the launch is not in a narrow bookstore, imagine the carnage.)
Where: Centre culturel de Georges-Vanier (2450 rue Workman).
When: 7pm.
Who: Misha Solomon, in conversation with Sarah Burgoyne, with dance from Nate Yaffe.
How Much: Free, but RSVP requested. (Link)

28 MAR (SAT)

STYGIAN: LAST RITES
What: The most chilling phrase since Ghostface growled, “Do you like scary movies?” is finally upon us: “Have you ever wanted to attend an exclusive media launch party?” Local indie horror press The Stygian Society transforms into a “horror media company”—hopefully long-time Society members’ blood-stock options have vested and they are REAPING the benefits before the inevitable shroud-pull.
Where: Studio 415 (10 Ave Des Pins O.).
When: 6:30 to 10:30pm.
Who: A lot of high concept spooky stuff, check the link below.
How Much: Free. (Link)

NAVEL VOL. 1 LAUNCH
What: Go hang out at an apartment and pick up a copy of the new mag in town. No readings, just smoking inside—finally, contemporary literature with a chance to reach the labouring classes. A public reading to follow a week later (see next month’s Jay’s List).
Where: DM via link below for address.
When: 8pm.
Who: Just you and your pals blasting cigs.
How Much: PWYC, $5 and up allowed to smoke indoors. (Link)

THE PIT #7 LAUNCH
What: $20 (and a cocktail?) buys you the company of a musician, a DJ, and some reading type people.
Where: 4710 rue Ste-Ambroise, Unit 343
When: 7pm.
Who: Music from Hanorah and Carla Oteiza, readers TBA.
How Much: Free. (Link)

29 MAR (SUN)

GWEN AUBE: MISSED CONNECTIONS WITH TALL GIRLS LAUNCH
What: Everybody’s favourite tranny punk poet and suburbanite sink pisser Gwen Aube launches her debut collection with American publisher LittlePuss Press. Maybe she’ll tell you about a time she did drugs in this very bar’s bathroom. (Definitely she will tell you about this.)
Where: Brasserie Beaubien (73 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 7:30pm doors, 8pm show.
Who: Gwen, for sure, and Rebecca Lawrence Lynch. Mona Gendron. Maybe some other people. Oh yes, Tara McGowan-Ross.
How Much: The show is free, but the book costs money. (Link)

31 MAR (TUES)

ELLIS SCOTT & MATTHEW J. TRAFFORD: NIGHT TERMINUS / RUNS IN THE BLOOD LAUNCH
What: These two writers right here? They’re launching books.
Where: Librarie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7pm.
Who: Ellis Scott and Matthew J. Trafford, in conversation with Chris DiRaddo.
How much: Free. (Link)

And looking ahead to April…

We’ll get there when we get there.