Project Hail Mary
Fiction by Andy Weir
Ballantine Books, 2021

Reviewed by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Cade Jameson

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

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

Yeah man! You think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RELATED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RELATED

Thank you.

TOTALLY UNRELATED

ALSO UNRELATED

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

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

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

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

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

Unsung heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romancing the looky-loos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grant bait, ooh ha ha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “Reveals” an already obvious structural inequality

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

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

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

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

• Concerns someone’s immigrant grandma and her cooking

• Meditates on the horrors of climate change

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

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

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

The terror of not being perceived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE ON THE MONTREAL MAGAZINE GLUT

Orbital
Fiction by Samantha Harvey
Jonathan Cape, 2023

Reviewed by DJ Sandler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t say what I’d do on the rug.

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

What would you do? Nell asks.

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

Lie there, Pietro says. And dream of space.

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

• He loves space

• He has a daughter

• He went to the Philippines for his honeymoon

• He is a nice man1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—DJ Sandler

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

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

1 JUNE (MON)

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

2 JUNE (TUES)

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

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

4 JUNE (THURS)

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

5 JUNE (FRI)

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

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

6 JUNE (SAT)

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

7 JUNE (SUN)

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

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

9 JUNE (TUES)

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

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

10 JUNE (WEDS)

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

11 JUNE (THURS)

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

12 JUNE (FRI)

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

13 JUNE (SAT)

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

15 JUNE (MON)

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

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

17 JUNE (WEDS)

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

19 JUNE (FRI)

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

20 JUNE (SAT)

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

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

21 JUNE (SUN)

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

And looking ahead to July…

We’ll get there when we get there.

So what the fuck is going on here? Was the field packed with AI entries, or did the AI entries just somehow pull ahead of all the human entrants, and if it’s the latter, what does it say about the future of written expression? Well, here’s the thing: the story that won is fucking dogshit. It’s plainly bad writing. How did it make it this far and how did it win? I opted to track down Jamir Nazir, this “genius” of the written word, and read his other work. I wound up on his Facebook page. This is the last thing he wrote on his wall:

It goes on for a few more stanzas of total dogshit, but of course anyone even remotely familiar with AI writing will clock this immediately. For those of you not familiar:

Even Nazir’s prompts clearly suck. Regular readers will remember the time I wrote at length making fun of how often Instagram poets will all write exactly the same poem between them, over and over and over again, and I specifically zeroed in on how they handled the cliché of “fire”:

Nazir’s imagination is just as shallow, and he imbibes the same Romantic corpse water runoff as the rest of them.

He has poems with titles like “The Flame That Walks with Me” and “When the Ember Remembers Its Name” and “The Habit of Your Fire” (?) and his poems without fire in the title contain lines like “I remain yours—a flame unquenched” and “fire laid across my chest” and “your arms gather the embers and I am reborn—a flame without end.” This basically accounts for his entire output, although I suppose I can’t say for certain—according to one comment, Nazir has “thousands of poems all ready for publication.” To his credit, he does have something his Instagram competitors don’t, which is a poem about how he suffers from neuropathy. Of course, that still won’t stop him from invoking fire again.

Nazir is so committed to his creative dullness that when it came time to write something about how the “chains” of colonialism were broken with Trinidad’s independence, he stuck with the fire conceit and called it “When the Chains Turned to Ashes.” To ASHES, Jamir??? CHAINS?????? What the fuck were they made of, WOOD?????

Even this idiot’s photo for the contest was clearly yassified by AI.1

The only words on Nazir’s page I think can be said to be confirmedly Nazir’s own writing are the descriptions in which he desperately begs for engagement from his absence of followers. “Different style today any advice and no comments will be greatly appreciated. Thanks,” says Nazir to nobody. The man they reveal can barely write a sentence.

How exactly did the judges find someone as incompetent and borderline illiterate as Nazir worthy of an international prize for writing? The first source to seek out here would be the words of the judges themselves; perhaps they can provide a sufficient explanation as to what they saw in the man’s work. Sharma Taylor, judge for the Caribbean region, had this to say about Nazir’s story:

Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.

…Hang on. Guys, does this… does this blurb sound funny to you?

YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME!!! I THINK I’M GOING TO GO FUCKING INSANE!!! I get that there can be false positives,2 but that text wasn’t even fucking trying, Taylor’s judgment was even more obviously AI than Nazir’s own fucking story—Sharma Taylor, j’accuse.

In addition to posting AI poems on Facebook, Nazir posts AI mini-essays on LinkedIn, often about how important AI is. In this one, the result of his ChatGPT prompt makes at least one valid point: the rise of AI will accelerate incompetence, and it will, as it did here, help to “amplify bad judgment.” An ironic choice of words.

I checked the other judges, and while they didn’t set off the AI alarm when run through the checker, their explanations don’t fare much better. Rifat Munim Dip said of Sharon Aruparayil’s “Mehendi Nights” (a story also accused of using AI) that it was “an exquisite reminder that fiction is not only about portraying people’s lives but also about pushing the boundaries of storytelling.” Bro, what? Are you for real? That’s the best pull quote you could get from him? “We forget sometimes that fiction isn’t just about depicting things but also depicting things interestingly.” Oh, okay. Well hey, Dip might eat lead paint chips, it’s true, but at least he wrote that himself!

So these judges aren’t the literary world’s best and brightest, fine. One is still left to wonder how it was they fell for an AI story over one of the innumerable human ones they must have received. What happened? I’ve got two theories.

Theory #1: The Ocean Vuong Effect

Recently we got a comment from 3 on our old (and controversial) Ocean Vuong piece:

That thing where a sentence looks like it’s doing things but you step back and it’s word salad… the Achilles’ heel of literary novelisers. Like a box of yearning, bright, in a world of dead dreams and pollen. Oh, my great heavy cornflake heart.

What Chavasse is here describing isn’t “new” per se, but it is becoming a lot more prevalent. There has been a rise in the last fifteen years of what I often disparagingly call “dissassociative literature” (it has absolutely dominated the realm of “marginalized identity” fiction in this period especially). The effect of reading this shit is like taking a Xanax or, perhaps more accurately, a Zopiclone. Meaning blurs. Materiality softens. At its worst excesses, which have come to be its most dominant forces (most notoriously, people like Ocean Vuong, Kaveh Akbar, etc), it produces a “literary fiction” marked by extremely imprecise and haphazard language, self-evidently lazy writing which attempts to cover for its laziness with obdurate vagueness.4

Putting a premium on writing like this inevitably means putting a premium on AI writing, because the hallmarks of both are fundamentally the same. Check out the extremely bizarre and imprecise figurative language from Nazir’s story. I want to remind you that “Sharma Taylor” (or, at least, an AI extension of her) called this language “precise.” Ah, yes. Precise. Such “precision” as:

the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink

she looked once at Sita’s leg—already writing itself in purple

the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare

white rum hot as apology

she had the kind of walking that made benches become men

and then consider that that third line is actually from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. If the Vibe Shift doesn’t kill off Ocean Vuong, then the LLMs will. I could generate you a million books that are completely interchangeable with Vuong’s before breakfast, you’d miss fucking nothing. Hey Grok, write me a story about Ocean Vuong’s career being killed by the Vibe Shift and LLMs!

Ocean Vuong wakes inside the algorithm like a bruise learning to bloom backwards. The boys who once underlined his sentences in coffee shops with cracked windows now ask chatbots to ache for them faster, cleaner, without the inconvenience of a human body trembling behind the page. Somewhere, a venture capitalist calls this democratization. Somewhere else, Ocean watches language flatten into the soft gray light of prediction — every metaphor pre-chewed, every wound optimized for engagement. The Vibe Shift arrives not as a riot but as a ringtone: irony replacing confession, sincerity wearing sunglasses indoors. Even grief now comes captioned, monetized, rendered into shareable fragments before it can finish becoming grief. And Ocean, standing at the edge of this humming machine, feels himself turning obsolete in real time, like a candle carried into a server farm, his beautiful sentences flickering briefly against the endless appetite of generated speech.

Terrific. What the fuck is the significance of bringing a candle into a server farm? How does one wake “like a bruise”? How about one that is “blooming”? “Backwards”? And why does a bruise “learn” to do that? What does any of this mean? I don’t fucking know. Nobody does. Ocean, is that you???

So this is the simpler explanation. LLM writing was immediately presaged by a style of writing which it is quickly making obsolete. LLMs have helped expose this writing for the vacant garbage it is, and the literary institutions will continue to take the L’s until they are forced to change their values.

Theory #2: Something more sinister

But I have another, more terrifying, perhaps more “far-fetched” theory, one which we’ll get into in a follow-up blog. In it, I will ask one vital question: what does all of this Commonwealth Short Story Prize stuff have to do with the development of AI factory software, food packing, mass surveillance, and the assassination of a foreign head of state?

UNTIL THEN, HERE’S A PIECE ABOUT THE CULTURE WRITER WE’RE DEEMING MOST LIKELY TO DEVELOP AI PSYCHOSIS IN 2026: RICHARD BRODY!

1

My theory on the profile photo is that his prompt included the phrase “make me look like an older James Bond” and it decided to fuse him with an older Sean Connery.

EDIT: WE’VE GOT A LIVE ONE HERE! One of the other two nominees accused of using AI, Sharon Aruparayil, absolutely also used AI to yassify her photo. In fact I think the yassification input specifically used the original image on the left. Take a look:

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.

Joshua Chris Bouchard will be very familiar to long time Discordia readers as our resident haruspex/astrologer, but he is better known as one of the fiercest and most elemental poets of his generation, as seen in his essential collection BURN DIARY (2023, Wolsak and Wynn). We couldn’t be more pleased to share some new work from the old bear.

HAVE A GOOD ONE

It’s one idea, I guess. Give up, 
fuck it, resign, throw in the towel.
An entire generation built on 
What if I never existed? And nobody 
is listening. We all have suffered 
the blows of the last exit, a place 
we once knew each other. We have 
cut our palms just to bleed. One day, 
if we’re lucky, we won’t need anything 
worthwhile anymore. Nature will take
its course. It will hump this or birth that, 
kill this or sacrifice that. That’s how it works. 
You’re in it, not of it. And the underground 
keeps on laughing. Tectonic plates crush 
under each other like a slow-motion 
mosh pit. Animals sleep soundly in 
a primordial lack of fear. Just wait. 
You’ll get yours and wear it like a flag.
Occasionally, there’s that one moment, 
but it takes a lifetime.

RETAIL THERAPY

When I pummel myself
through a small group
of blind children, it's not
for a lack of humanity.
How else can I satisfy
my longing for wool socks,
small spoons, dish sets
to carry strips of my flesh
for guests that never come?
In any case, we're all alive
for one reason, and one 
reason alone. Everything 
we do is worth it now.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO ME

The dentist says the X-ray is blank
but my teeth have many fine points.

She asks if I’m any good with words.
Once, a long time ago, I’d sit in this chair 

with dignity. If I’m lying, she’ll know,
so I better smarten up. Doctor, I think 

I’m getting tired and it’s getting late.
Sugar? Yes. Coffee? Ok. Need advice?

Only if it’ll destroy me. There’s time for only us. 
Put that metal buzz deep inside my skull

and don't stop asking if I feel any pain.
You tell me. I’ll see you again next week

but I already forgot your name.

SHAVING MY HEAD

There's no other choice. The cat wails
on the hardwood, begs for pets, licks
clumps clinging to her ass. The coffee is cold,
turns bitter in the plastic kettle. I shave
my head at noon with a double-edged
razor. No water or cream and the sound
of the blade on hair on skin on endless 
bone breaks the heart. Every action
has a consequence: all this life, water-
white writs knotted up in stranded light.
I wash away the blood and try again 
to be a simple man. 

JOSHUA CHRIS BOUCHARD is the author of *BURN DIARY* (2023, Wolsak and Wynn). His chapbook, *Let This Be the End of Me* (2018, Bad Books), was shortlisted for a bpNichol Chapbook Award. He wrote and co-wrote four other chapbooks, and his poetry appears in *The Ampersand Review*, *Event*, *CV2*, *Poetry Is Dead*, *PRISM international*, and more.

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

By (Subscribe to Dead Bear now)

I get the strangest ads on streaming these days. As a format, streaming service advertising is uncomfortably stuck between the hyper-targeted pitches of social media and the old broad market buys of traditional cable.

Take this viewing experience I had a few weeks ago for example

I’m watching the classic detective series Riptide on Tubi. Just as I finish a glossy montage of pro-SECURITY pro-GROWTH ads for BAE systems and JP Morgan Chase, the widescreen and cinema sound is interrupted by a cropped vertical video of an actor-playing-influencer talking through a peaking mic about the virtues of “full body deodorant.” I barely have time to sniff my armpits before I see a particularly unsettling A.I.-generated ad.

A group of A.I. adults are watching a football game with rapt attention, awaiting the “big touchdown”. Bug-eyed and clay-faced in the harsh blue glow of the TV, they mindlessly consume their snacks and beer, chewing and chugging but never swallowing. Our protagonist, a photogenic golden retriever, is uninterested in the game, looking instead with begging eyes at its owner. The text “Can we watch DOGTV now?” flashes across the bottom of the screen. The big touchdown is scored.

What follows is a surreal series of images. A woman screams, pulling back her hair like a damsel in a Sam Raimi film.

Half-full beer bottles suddenly erupt like Coke-Mentos fountains in celebration and popcorn is scattered across the room like snowflakes.

One friend, presumably a fan of the losing team, lies in stunned silence on the floor while a couple screams in each other’s arms, their faces morphed somewhere between laughter and intense mourning. Another fan dives off the couch.

As this unfolds (in a now completely different room) our canine hero gives a quizzical wine, and stiffly does the dog equivalent of a facepalm. The bacchanalia dies down; the humans look at each other baffled at their animalistic outburst. “Happy dog, happy Life: DOGTV,” says the unseen narrator. The audience is left to fill in the pitch: perhaps we’re not so different after all. Perhaps my dog deserves TV time like I do.

“Oh, its A.I.... OH man, it’s TV for Dogs,” I say to my half-distracted partner. A Google search confirms it. DOGTV is the veterinarian-endorsed TV channel by humans for dogs. The “perfect babysitter for dogs who have to stay home alone.” Owners can put it on to keep their canine companions calm and entertained with content specially calibrated to their senses and sensibilities.

The times being what they are, I’d forgive anyone for simply shrugging their shoulders and accepting the fact that millions of dollars have been moved to make and market TV for dogs. For one thing, it’s by no means a new concept. Since the advent of recording technology, “what would happen if I played this for a dog” has been on people’s minds. DOGTV itself is over ten years old, a product of 2010s “peak cable” spruced up for the era of freemium streaming. But still my mind turns to what and why. With ten dollars in hand, provided in advance by this fine publication,1 I bought a one-month subscription to DOGTV to try and answer those questions.

A quick disclaimer, I am not a dog owner. Beginning in 2009 my family did have a white wiry haired terrier mutt by the name of Arkey. The long march of time and the fangs of a Fullerton coyote finally took the life of our amiable and steadfast pet in 2023. As a result, I cannot speak personally to DOGTV’s effect on dogs. While I’m not entirely opposed to animal testing, I see this technical limitation as a moral opportunity. That’s why I decided to ethically test DOGTV on myself. I would recreate the dog experience by isolating myself at home and watching six hours of DOGTV content, allowing myself no other forms of entertainment or distraction. This would then be followed by two hours of owner-focused content on the “Unleashed by DOGTV” side of the platform. A few days later I blocked out my Saturday, made a cup of coffee and settled on the couch for DOGTV.

The DOGTV Experience

This exercise was more difficult than I’d care to admit. Watching hours of content that is generally tailored to be relaxing, i.e. boring, really illustrated how short my attention span has become these past few years. I was initially confused when, before my playlist of relaxing dog content got rolling, I was treated to an ad espousing the service I had just subscribed to. I already know DOGTV is scientifically designed for dogs, I don’t need Lance Bass or Billy Bob Thornton to tell me that.

When I finally settled on a video playlist, I was greeted by a serene scene of a border collie sitting placid in a meadow. This first proper video was more pleasant than I initially expected. It had been a few weeks since I’d been around a dog. Seeing an animal just do its thing brought up some personal nostalgia. It was a cold and rainy spring day outside, so I was also drawn to the sunny and unnaturally green landscape. Part of DOGTV’s sales pitch is countering the notion that dogs don’t have eyesight capable of taking in TV. Dogs essentially see at a faster framerate than humans and are partially colorblind to red and green, making them see typical TV as a series of dull brownish still images. Back in 2013, DOGTV co-founder Ron Levi assured customers that new advancements in LCD technology with frame rates above human perception had made modern TVs dog friendly. Learning about these dog friendly edits brought on pangs of guilt. How many hours did I spend with Arkey in my family TV room, with me lying on the couch while he perched himself on the crumpled top cushion of a red upholstered chair? Did I bore and confuse him as I spent hours transfixed by what he saw as mud colored still images? Would he have liked some DOGTV every now and then? Looking past the marketing fluff, DOGTV applies what is essentially an Instagram filter to most of their content, creating a high-contrast high-saturation image where green grass and red tongues glow in unnaturally vivid tones. This standard isn’t consistently applied, leaving some videos naturalistic and others surreal violet and cyan color negatives.

The somewhat harsh visuals aside, I was still enjoying my first video. The sound of birds chirping and wind rusting the grass built a pleasant ambiance in my small apartment. That was until I began to hear added sound effects. It was reasonable enough at first: the canned laugh of a child I’ve heard across a million cheap programs. The inclusion of the sound made some sense, having something to pull the dogs’ attention and make them think there’s people around. But soon the situation traipsed into the absurd, as stereotypical cartoon sound effects began to blurt out seemingly at random. Every minute or so my pleasant time with this dog in the field was ruined by a bicycle horn or some other noisemaker. While this video’s soundtrack turned out to be something of an anomaly (most videos just pipe in birdsong or low-key music) I soon discovered one of DOGTV’s editors’ favorite touches is editing crude animated butterflies. This combined to make an experience akin to watching someone else play Kid Pix. Whatever dignity existed in me experiencing DOGTV was stripped away. I was in for a long day.

The channel’s steady diet of dog stock footage wore thin quickly. After my fifth video, I began to construct mental games to keep myself steady, like trying to play Geoguesser with traffic signs and foliage. I managed to place one series of videos as being in Malta thanks to a manhole cover. Based on my location scouting talents, I now believe most of DOGTVs content is produced in middle income states in eastern and southern Europe. This is certainly to save on cost but could also relate to the channel’s national origins (more on that shortly). As I worked my way down its roster of video content, I found increasingly surreal options: Footage of foreign capitals running forward and then reversed in slow motion. Silent fireworks set to elevator music. Vertically mirrored shots of highway traffic where down was up and up was down. A long shot of two golden retrievers playing near a stone wall as audio of an unseen woman says, “Who’s a good boy?” Was it me? After about three hours, one solitary thought kept repeating in my head: “This is what they put on before you’re euthanized.” I tried to retreat into the small section “DOGTV for Cats.” It was composed of cheap animations of mice or and bugs scattered in with footage of birds. It was the sort of content cat owners put on iPads to contrive viral videos of the animals batting at the targets, NOT A HIGH-END TV! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!!?! THERE’S NO WAY THIS WORKS! DOGTV FOR CATS!!!!? As I clenched my fists in rage, fully prepared to tear down my screen with the raw power of a Tibetan Mastiff, I knew I couldn’t continue.

Before we continue I want to answer two basic questions. First, DOGTV was founded as an Israeli company, and is now currently headquartered in Arizona where it is helmed by executives from Jasmine TV, a subsidiary of the joint Israeli-Chinese Jasmine Group. Since its founding it has been funded as a start up by a prominent Denver-Tel Aviv based investment firm and David Zaslav’s Discovery Inc, now Warner Discovery. Clearly some prominent people, mostly Israelis, thought this was a good idea. Second, to I hope no one’s surprise, there’s virtually zero scientific evidence that DOGTV has any substantial effect on dogs. Wading through the decade of verbatim press releases for DOGTV I found one brave dissenting article by Slate’s Ryan Vogt from 2013, the channel’s first year of national distribution. In it he systematically interrogates the scientific claims that dogs would take an interest in DOGTV over other programs. Absent the invention of a commercially viable smell-o-vision, it turns out the best thing an owner can do is spend quality time with their pets. Barring that, they can dim the lights, put on soft music, and give an enrichment toy or snack.

DOGTV is certainly aware of this fact. Recently posted short form content on their YouTube page tells prospective subscribers that the program is meant to be “in the background” of a dog’s day rather than the center of its attention. I imagine proving efficacy was less of an issue in DOGTV’s early days when the channel existed in the sea of hundreds of other cable TV offerings. However, in the desert of the contemporary streaming economy an individual subscription to DOGTV is a harder sales pitch. To make matters worse, DOGTV is no longer the only game in town. YouTube offers hours-long free playlists boasting similar dog relaxing claims. On my own streaming device, I found two other dog content apps: Dog TV (not to be confused with DOGTV), which required a subscription, and Happy Dog TV, a program that played generic animal footage and massage parlor music while claiming that “tested high frequency and healing music” was benefiting theoretical pets. I enjoyed the raw weirdness of this one for about five minutes before a pop-up paused the video and asked for my birthday and email to create an account.

These alternatives lack the professional sheen of DOGTV, replacing the dog equivalent of Disney Channel with essentially dog Cocomelon. Still, I wonder what’s stopping a discerning pet parent from making their own curated YouTube playlist for their dog, including DOGTV’s own hours of free YouTube content? DOGTV needs a broader sales pitch for owners. Since the 2022 launch of Unleashed by DOGTV, its clear they have sought their answer in providing more owner-centric content.

Unleashed by DOGTV

Compared to the lackadaisical dog content, Unleashed by DOGTV is a different animal, PUN INTENDED. Its main offerings of dog cooking advice, dog care tips, and general discussion about pet ownership place a much higher emphasis on the personality of the presenters. It is reminiscent of HGTV or the peak era of Bon Appetit YouTube content. Instead of Chip and Johanna Gaines or Brad Leone, I get dog therapy practitioners Sean, Christina, and their Golden Retriever Nash in the road trip show Paws for Love, plus the Dog Moms Chrissy and Amber. Introduced by the baffling theme song, “Dog Moms, Dog Moms whatcha gonna do,” they spend four minutes doing “doggy roulette,” answering questions at random about their experiences as lifelong dog owners and professional trainers.

Despite paying for a subscription, all Unleashed content is preceded by one to two ads, typically for dog athletic equipment, the myPurina app, or DOGTV’s partnership with the Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI) and its website The Real Reason for Pets. By all indications HABRI is essentially a public relations group propped up by the pet products and pet insurance industry. Beyond providing DOGTV with more official sounding credibility, the ad promoting this collaboration illustrates the modern sales pitch for DOGTV. Accompanied by fusty classical music, a professorial British announcer lists the many health benefits of pet ownership only to be interrupted by a, let’s say millennial toned, woman: “Love that for us, but we know the real reason [for pet ownership]… you might not get a pet because of the science but because they love you, in the simplest purest way.” DOGTV knows their core product is essentially a scam, so they preemptively keep science limited to discussions of specific products, nutrition, equipment, and fitness programs. It makes the act of responsible pet ownership about making the right consumer choices based on exclusive information and superstition about the immutable love of pets. It’s all very Make America Healthy Again. MDHA?

This emphasis on vibes over science really comes across most clearly during the Mindful Moments and REAL Talks series. Mindful Moments, hosted by “wellness practitioner for animals” Amanda Ree, essentially teaches viewers how to do guided meditation while petting a dog. You can learn valuable information, like the fact that dogs practice mindfulness naturally and that dogs with long fingernails benefit from shoulder massages. While a bit corny, I found these videos somewhat normal, especially when compared to the deeply surreal REAL Talks. Clearly aping the format of TED Talks they feature a lone speaker addressing a plant audience in halting tech-CEO type tones about the various spices that can treat pet ailments and how to derive life lessons from cats. Even more than DOGTV’s other content, these videos feel like a practical joke on the viewer. Looking up a small logo in the corner of the videos for Blogpaws.com explains things further. Turns out the Blogpaws platform is essentially a pet blogger marketing service. I suspect all the REAL Talkers are simply pet bloggers. I’d be more unsettled by this revelation but considering the sort of people they often get for actual TED Talks, this is pretty much par for the course.

Having trawled through the bulk of the Unleashed content suite, I’m left with the unsettling feeling that there’s little daylight between the dog and human sides of the platform. Both are low effort media designed to fill the space and generally make the viewer comfortable but just stimulated enough not to turn it off. Simply put, slop (or better yet chow?).

But no, I must check myself. A glance at my phone screentime says my average right now is five hours a day, and that’s for a good week. How many of those hours were spent just filling the void, refreshing feeds, waiting for the re-edit of old clips with the right mix of cartoon butterflies and sound effects to keep me from chewing on the furniture? Has modern existence reduced me to a dog? Or would a dog-like state of mindfulness be an improvement? Unlike what the A.I.-generated ad indicated, dogs are apparently too invested in the real world to care about DOGTV–so why can’t I get away from PEOPLETV? I was drowning, I needed to find the cause, not just of DOGTV, but of the whole world of media and culture that produced it. I am a student of history after all. Perhaps there I could find my answers.

A Quick Timeline of Events

Going into my historical deep dive I had three goals in mind. First, to make an excavation of the corporate history behind DOGTV. Second, to track the political history between the major states backing DOGTV’s existence (namely Israel, the US, and China). And third, to monitor the changes in the relationship between dogs, humans, entertainment, and even war. To organize these threads I produced a Kojima style timeline of events. At the wise recommendation of my editor, this initial tangled mess of concepts has been woven into a (hopefully) more coherent conspiracy cork board thread concerning dogs, TV, DOGTV, and recent geopolitics.

1897: Russian Scientist Ivan Pavlov publishes “The Work of the Digestive Glands” the pioneering study of classical conditioning in dogs. These findings produce the early influential psychological field of Behaviorism.

1925: Chinese Warlord Zhang Zongchang, known by some as the “Dog Meat General” for his gambling habits, is appointed military governor of Shandong. Commanding a large force supplemented by White Russian exile soldiers he gains a reputation for brutality. One-time White Russian Army doctor and celebrated Soviet author, Mikhail Bulgakov writes his satire Heart of a Dog. Featuring a dog made human representing the “new Soviet man,” it is censored and kept from official publication until 1987.

1938: Viennese canine scientist Rudolphina Mendel flees Nazi extermination with her husband and two hundred of their boxers to British Mandate Palestine. Mendel had built her career training dogs for the Austrian and German police and military. The trainer continues her practice with feral “Cannan dogs” supplying trained dogs to the militant Zionist cause. By the early ‘50s Mendel establishes Israel’s first guide-dog institute.

1945: Proponent of animal rights and genocidal fascist Adolf Hitler, hiding in his command bunker under Berlin, tests a cyanide suicide capsule on his celebrated German Shepard Blondi. Hitler kills himself and his wife the next day.

1962: American psychologist Boris M. Levinson publishes “The Dog as ‘Co-therapist.’” The text argues for the efficacy of dogs as a psychotherapeutic aid for children.

1963: Photos of Civil rights protestors getting attacked by police dogs in Birmingham Alabama scandalize the American public. Police brutality by way of K-9 units remains highly racialized to this day.

1968: The educational children’s TV program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is broadcast across the United States for the first time. It becomes a model of enriching entertainment for increasingly television-bound American children.

1973: Chilean General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte launches a military coup against the democratically elected Socialist government of President Salvador Allende. The violent takeover is backed by the Chilean right wing, the American CIA, and recently dispossessed foreign corporations, including U.S. mining firms, Ford, International Telephone and Telegraph, and pet food producer Ralston Purina.

1974: Israeli special forces Canine unit-7142 Oketz is established. It is formed primarily to counter the threat of kidnappers but quickly diversifies to multiple roles including search and rescue, bomb sniffing, and combat. In a departure from its prior focus on domestic civil rights and combating anti-semitism, Anti Defamation League (ADL) leaders publish The New Anti-Semitism. Notably, it equates criticism of Zionism and Israel with antisemitism, targeting American dissenters on the left and right wing.

1981: Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment launches MTV.

1987: Israel and China, having newly aligned in foreign policy during both the Soviet-Afghan War and Angolan Civil War, deepen their diplomatic bond with the establishment of COPECO. Based in Hong Kong, the Israeli government-owned commercial corporation establishes the state’s first formal economic ties with the PRC.

1988: Cable Educational Network CEO John Hendricks founds “the Discovery Channel.” Over a series of mergers it becomes the leading cable add-on for documentaries and factual content, including the exclusive airing of Soviet-produced television programs. The IDF conducts a failed assault on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command’s headquarters in Operation Blue and Brown. The Oketz unit deploys bomb laden attack dogs to little effect.

1989: ABC airs the 1988 Soviet film adaptation of Heart of a Dog as a two part miniseries. The Berlin Wall is dismantled.

1993: A San Francisco Police investigation reveals the ADL maintained a decades-long illegal intelligence operation, managed by eccentric private investigator Roy Bullock. The operation monitored and obtained compromising materials across countless groups, particularly anti-Apartheid activists and Arab Americans, and shared confidential information with South Africa and Israel.

1994: Through ASHRA, the Israel Foreign Trade Risks Insurance Corporation, China and Israel create a framework agreement for financial protocols to insure international credit transactions. This same year Israel is accused by the United States of sharing military technology with China, most notably plans for its advanced Lavi fighter jet. Israel also sells China its popular Harpy UAV.

1997: College students Andrew Feinstein and Justin Borus create the comic strip Girls and Sports. Centered around the romantic escapades of two barhopping friends, despite its apparent low quality, the comic is nationally syndicated until 2011. Advertising executive Dan Fitzsimmons launches The Puppy Channel. Conceived for humans as a form of refuge from the increasingly unsettling content on cable, the channel was a 24/7 broadcast of videos of puppies set to calming music.

2000: Jasmine Group Founded. The joint Israeli-Chinese firm focuses primarily on the implementation of Israeli medical, agricultural, educational, technologies and investments in China. A subsidiary, Jasmine TV, is established shortly after as a primarily Israeli TV production and distribution group.

2001: A failed October mission to kill Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar becomes the first attempted U.S. drone strike. A strike is successful against Al-Queda targets one month later. Unable to grow nationally, when American TV probably needed it most, The Puppy Channel goes off the air.

2002: Israeli think-tank the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) is founded, seeking “to ensure the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization by engaging in professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry.” It treads a Liberal Zionist political line producing works targeted at Jews outside of Israel.

2003: Former principal at Bear Stearns and Girls and Sports co-creator Justin Borus founds Ibex Investors LLC in Denver Colorado. Meanwhile, the practices of torture and abuse by U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are revealed to the public. Among the tactics of “enhanced interrogation” is the use of attack dogs against restrained detainees.

2005: Discovery subsidiary channel Animal Planet hosts the first annual Puppy Bowl, airing concurrent with NFL Super Bowl 39. Iraqi insurgents detonate a bomb-laden dog near a military convoy in Dakuk.

2006: Media Executive David Zaslav becomes CEO of Discovery Inc. He pivots the company’s focus to that of a “content company,” massively expanding the channel’s footprint by acquiring a substantial portion of the reality TV cable market during his tenure.

2008: The Israel China Chamber of Commerce is established. Jasmine Group is a key participant and sponsor.

2009: Three Jasmine TV executives, Ron Levi, Yossi Uzrad, and Gilad Neumann help found DOGTV alongside interim CEO Guy Martinovszky. Allegedly inspired by Ron Levi’s practice of leaving jazz albums on for his pet cat, the channel is initially a premium cable option for the Israeli market. The BlogPaws pet blogger marketing service is established. The Israeli tech sector boosting book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle is published.

2011: Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI) is established in Washington D.C. A public relations group focused on the positive health benefits of pet ownership, it is funded by the American Pet Products Association, Zoetis, and Petco. HABRI studies are routinely cited by DOGTV.

2012: DOGTV makes landfall in a San Diego CA test market. Following his reading of Startup Nation and a business delegation trip to Israel, Justin Borus’s Ibex Investors makes its first round of startup investments in Israel. Going forward the fund will open an office in Tel Aviv and specialize as a foreign investment firm for Israeli startups and public companies.

2013: El Segundo CA based DIRECTV picks up DOGTV for national distribution. DOGTV is mentioned by a total of five prominent talk show comedians, the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel), Ellen DeGeneres, Jay Leno, and David Letterman. DOGTV names (then-recently deceased) cartoon dog Brian Griffin of the popular program Family Guy as the “World’s Most Powerful Dog” of 2013. Justin Borus and other board members of The Mountain States ADL host a centennial dinner.

2014: Discovery Inc. acquires a stake in DOGTV for an undisclosed sum, seeking to integrate its content with Animal Planet. Justin Borus’s Ibex Investors makes a first round investment in DOGTV.

2017: The DOGTV hour on Animal Planet is announced.

2022: Discovery Inc. and Warner Brothers announce a merger into Warner Discovery. DOGTV announces pet marketing strategist Beke Lubeach as their new CEO, replacing Gilead Neuman who retires to attend Harvard University for a Master of Public Administration. He later takes a role at the JPPI’s “social accelerator.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is questioned for his personal intervention to expedite the transport of pets belonging to the animal charity group Nowzad during the NATO evacuation of Afghanistan. Critics claim Boris, and by extension the U.K. government, prioritized the rescue of dogs over at-risk Afghan civilians.

2024: Ibex Investors announce $106 million dollars for a new round of VC funding in Israeli startups. This follows a $100 million dollar investment in 2020. According to founder Justin Borus, “Most of the world’s greatest innovations come as a direct result of war and conflict and we believe this time will be no different.” An article in the Guardian reveals ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt directed the surveillance of civil rights activists in 2020 critical of longstanding Israeli training exchange programs for American Police. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor claims the Israeli Army uses police dogs to brutally attack Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Often equipped with live video cameras, IDF dogs mauled at least two civilians, a disabled man and an elderly woman. Palestinian detainees also allege Israeli jailers use attack dogs trained to rape and maul as a component in their torture program.

2025: The U.S. pet industry is valued at $158 Billion. DOGTV launches a streaming service, including the new owner focused Unleashed by DOGTV.

2026: Chinese multinational tech conglomerate Tencent launches PetTV. Offering content for cats and dogs, the channel uses third party content from DOGTV. Florida Congressman and National Security Advisor Randy Fine states in a Twitter post, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Following public criticism he introduces the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act.” New York Times journalist Nicholas D Kristof publishes an opinion piece covering reports of systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners, including by dogs, in Israeli detention. Israel threatens a defamation suit against the NYT.

What Was That All About?

It should be no surprise that the existence of an expensive bad product can be tied in some respect to the U.S., Israel, and (to a lesser degree) China. It’s certainly easy for me to show when I’m the one making the timeline. Justin Borus and Ibex Investors’ involvement in particular, reveals the strange world of Israeli tech industry boosterism. Borus’s effusive promotion of the field, and the general A.I./B2B-SAS composition of his preferred startups, reminds me of Reagan Republican schemes to sell gold-backed Krugerrands and Soldier of Fortune articles promoting mercenary service in Rhodesia.

If any of Ibex’s companies see large-scale success it will either be by integrating themselves into the Israeli defence industry or exiting the country. In the first case, there’s plenty of opportunity for self-driving cars to become autonomous gun platforms, sales tracking to pivot to assassination targeting, and rare earth mineral development schemes to serve strategic resource autarky. That makes DOGTV, as one of the few entertainment investments by Ibex, all the stranger. Given the sloppy quality of its product, one can only assume their continued inclusion in the startup club is the promise of AI produced DOGTV. Their recent ads have certainly indicated an interest. Whether I’d call them an Israeli startup is another question. Once they had the requisite capital they chose the second corporate option and moved their headquarters to Arizona and explicitly focused on making a channel “Aimed at America.”

Beyond depicting the strange globalized corporate world that gave us DOGTV, this chronology was also an effort to explore how dogs became a tool to define and circumscribe modern morality, and by extension, humanity. It is a common academic argument that the European Enlightenment’s more pluralistic egalitarian principles emerged from Europeans’ increased interaction with Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This was less so in the direct translation of governing principles or ideas of rights, and more in providing European intellectuals a malleable point of contrast to their feudal system. Another interesting layer to this argument is the influence of the transatlantic slave trade. As the emergent world economic system grew to rely on millions of people reduced to the legal status of chattel, ostensibly free people like the American founding fathers used the rhetoric of throwing off the shackles of “enslavement” to characterize their arguments in service of less lofty goals like tax evasion and settlement of treaty restricted territory (Now what does that sound like?)

Dogs and other pets are not enslaved, although we probably should treat them better. Despite this, I believe the social position of dogs relative to people and how a person or group of people treat dogs carries a similar philosophical weight on our modern ideals of civilization and humanity. This dynamic certainly shines through the bigotries attached to often inaccurate western stereotypes regarding dogmeat consumption or a general dislike and maltreatment of dogs by the peoples of East Asia, Africa, and the Muslim world. This is to say nothing of how the dog itself is a common tool in the policing and terrorizing of dehumanized populations, as my timeline illustrates.

For political reactionaries the treatment of animals and the treatment of children have similar histories and contradictions. Policy debates around the humane treatment of children and of animals, outside of a religious context, really began when both were being forced into the maw of the Industrial Revolution. Positive perceptions of both groups center around ideas of inherent innocence and good. Both place a high value on the protection of said innocence, but only to the degree that it sets a specific exacting standard for the rights and duties of the caretaker. Culture wars around the content of children’s media diets, in a sense KIDTV, overlook the more tangible issue that a substantial portion of the political population dehumanize children by viewing them more as property than as vulnerable developing people. Look to the countless conservative parents and pundits that decry the corruption of our youth while overlooking real cases of abuse.

While they certainly require fewer rights than children, our relationship with pets touches on similar problems. People desire the love of certain animals to the degree that whole species face extinction in the wild, and shelters fill with now unwanted “pandemic puppies.” With these sorts of issues in mind, to say nothing of how we treat animals in agriculture, I question if our property relationship to other animals is moral to begin with. But that’s a problem no one essay writer can solve. The issue today is that by equating this morally complicated relationship between humans and animals to interhuman relationships, by saying that your dog needs TV like you do, we de-value humans as a whole.

De-humanization is in vogue. Tech billionaires claim introspection was invented by modern philosophers (someone’s been doing dog mindfulness), and champion the elimination of traditional artistic creation with computer automated incestuous nostalgia. While the top 1% celebrates their inhumanity openly, they ascribe subhuman characteristics to those on the bottom. This is made worse by the fact that the tools of oppression have only improved. K-9 units, dog bombs, and other, more vital, if no less inaccurate or cruel technologies, are being replaced by an A.I.-targeted, drone-enabled, social-media-propagandized system of murder.

When I think about DOGTV’s presentation of the love between the pet and owner as the “simplest, purest” form of love, I see it as an inherent devaluation of love and humanity at a time when that matters more than ever. I believe my dog Arkey and I shared a sort of simple love, and that connection had meaning. However, I suspect his reasons for sitting with me all those years in the TV room was less about a familial love for me or fascination with what I was watching than it did his view of the window. True to his terrier instincts, Arkey had chosen the one seat in the house where he could spot, and subsequently chase after, squirrels in the front and back yards. I choose to believe human love in all its complexity and shortcomings is more important than the simple but alienated love offered by dogs.

The relationship between a pet and an owner is an inherently limited one, both by simple realities of cognition and by the animal’s status as property. DOGTV is born from the same loveless system of dehumanization as most other products today, a flawed component in a machine that’s increasingly inclined to use our bond with dogs to define and enforce new inhumanities. It was never for the dogs. Like most non-essential pet products, it exists for the owners, those that feel insecure in their relationship to their pets, hoping that mutually consuming enough content will fundamentally deepen and secure their connection. To make a very long story short, money can certainly help in finding love, but it still cannot buy it, even from a dog.

Subscribe to James Brine’s Dead Bear Substack now.

IN OTHER DOG NEWS

While the cinema occasionally hosts trendy midnight movie nights for a more mainstream audience, the Sunday vintage tapes are not the sort of recognizable “classics” from porn’s 1969 to 1984 Golden Age2 that a hip crowd might be ginned into watching on aesthetic/camp grounds. These late ‘80s to 2001 flicks are instead specimens of the little-loved transition period between the “actual movie” production values of the 35mm era and the gonzo shot-on-video cheapies that subsequently dominated the industry prior to the rise of digital cameras in the mid-’00s. It’s somewhat of a “worst of both worlds” scenario in that these films lack the genuine cinematic verve of the Golden Age while also presenting sex that looks way worse than most anything you’d find on a tube site today. Sure, contemporary porn has the same relationship to real life fucking that watching, say, John Wick has to actually shooting multiple people in the face, but it is downright naturalistic compared to something like recent L’Amour screening Goth (2000), a notionally straight flick that features so much zoomed-in footage of pistoning copper dicks soundtracked by trashy Italian house music that it is spiritually indistinguishable from gay porn.3 When the actors don’t look doped up, they look like they’re experiencing withdrawal; there are more weird piledriver positions than there is missionary sex. We should not yearn for a return to the era of Buttman.

So why go see this stuff?

One reason is that I am a good friend, and want to support my pal’s interests. Another is that the whole scenario of putting on these extremely niche clunkers for a not-exactly-consenting audience is pretty funny to me, especially when it’s something like 1986’s inexplicable Videodrome parody Video Bone4 playing every two hours for an entire day. Still another is that I am undeniably a voyeur and an exhibitionist, and having a quasi-journalistic pretext to watch people jerk off in public and/or to do so myself carries a small thrill. But the main thing is Cinéma L’Amour itself.

North America’s few remaining porn theatres tend to be modest affairs, little screening rooms tucked away in basements and the upper stories of adult shops. The basement “cinema” in Montreal’s Plaza Saint-Hubert5 for example consists of an unpleasantly lit row of white semi-enclosed booths where you (and perhaps a new friend!) can watch a movie, plus two tiny twenty-seat “theatres” (one playing gay porn, the other straight stuff). The whole place reeks like dog kibble soaked in a fetid tidepool, with top-notes of soda lye. L’Amour though, is something of another order.

Originally dubbed Le Globe, the future L’Amour was opened back in 1914 as a combination movie house and live performance venue for the city’s sizable Jewish community. It is a proper theatre (pron. thee-ayy-turr) in the old style, with over a hundred floor seats and a looming balcony supported by enormous balustrades, its surfaces blessed with intricate stonework carvings and floral detailing by craftsmen who gave a shit about creating dignified public spaces. The screen hangs between two sets of curtains on the edge of what was once its stage, behind which (out of sight of the patrons) the rusting hulk of its original rigging still squats in the corner. Beneath the main floor, various disused dressing rooms and corridors contain decades of fascinating detritus—when I was given the tour some time ago, I found stacks of promo materials for vintage skin flicks, and some mouldering bankers boxes full of documents from an Argentine embassy. When it was converted into a porn theatre in the late ‘60s (first as The Pussycat and finally dubbed L’Amour in 1981) the old dame received a suitably garish makeover: columns and wall features painted a glossy shade of red that looks like it’ll leave lipstick smudges if you lean on it; row upon row of matching red plastic chairs; and huge red pleather-covered doors secured with heavy studs that do a modestly effective job of muffling the sounds of fucking for patrons standing in the charming little lobby (where you can indeed get popcorn, snacks, and some pretty cracky coffee). The balcony likewise has been fitted with a pair of spartan red boxes containing padded benches intended for premium-paying couples who want to play in the theatre without being within skeeting distance of the other patrons.

The overall effect of the (did I mention it’s red) décor is, unavoidably, pretty Lynchian,6 particularly during the dimly-lit, sparsely-attended regular screenings where shadowy figures saunter around the theatre scanning the rows for prospects and presenting themselves for inspection. Like any adult theatre in the age of internet pornography, L’Amour is primarily a gay cruising space and a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs. The sound system is not up to the challenge of the cavernous room, loud but tinny like old grey computer speakers, giving everything a sonic hollowness that adds to the otherworldliness of it all. In a strange auditory quirk, despite the noise it is often possible from the main floor to pick up the sounds of panting and sharply in-drawn breaths when a couple is up on the balcony. During one of my visits, I joined a group of men standing silently at the front of the room with our backs to the screen, necks craned up to catch a glimpse of two just barely visible partners screwing high above—bare-breasted in the red light as she rode him in reverse, the woman looked like a carved maiden on the prow of a ship. The group stood there a long twenty minutes till they had finished before dispersing. I turned around and remembered Ejacula was still playing—a tall woman with a platinum blonde, very Berlin haircut was making a creditable effort at giving a blowjob while wearing a pair of dollar store vampire teeth to a pallid, clammy looking Rocco Siffredi, who was also wearing vampire teeth.

For the price of a ticket purchased when L’Amour opens at 11 a.m. you can spend up to 12 hours in one of the few remaining “free” places in the city limits7—though, in a nod to the public health priorities of our era, while it is permissible to (politely) ask random women to piss in your Camelbak and then walk around the theatre drinking it, you will be eighty-sixed for smoking in the bathroom. Though anyone in the theatre is very much being surreptitiously sized-up by the others, there is still a common understanding that people come here to do things that are to be hidden even as they put themselves on display. It is a different feeling of being observed than the usual surveillances of modern life—a relief to be in the shadows. These sorts of spaces are generally in decline of course, as are most places that involve leaving your house to get or do something fucked up, be they bathhouses or dive bars. Habits are changing, and while it would be very Discordia Review of me to plant my flag directly through my own foot and say that this sucks and is bad for the future prospects of people being able to socialize and discover themselves, the feeling I am personally experiencing and trying to alleviate through these Sunday sessions in the red room is a generalized nostalgia for a way of being in the world that is in the process of evaporating.

This isn’t to say there aren’t more contemporary things happening at L’Amour. There are sex-themed lesbian raves and rave-themed sex parties for dykes. Haut couture-coded smut-makers like filmmaker Ariana Molly premiere their movies here, and it’s an easy erotic-coded backdrop for any local artist (or, in at least one case, academic conference panel) that wants to add a frisson of transgression to their packaging. I even did a little voiceover work for an acquaintance’s upcoming art porn project, and if I someday get to hear my own honking voice blaring in the cinema I’ll be pretty jazzed about it. But to the extent that such events constitute vibrant, living entities in themselves, they tend to do so in a way that emphasizes that L’Amour as it actually operates on a day-to-day basis is the opposite—a relic, something of interest for its vintage aesthetic not its present viability. Like myself, they are tourists—I could probably have linked this video of local singer Lydia Képinski (whose music I generally like!) earnestly gushing about the architecture and demonstrating that it is safe to sit on one of the chairs in lieu of having written like a third of this essay. If there is a difference between myself and these guys, it’s that they want a place to be seen being horny in a hot and fashionable way, whereas I, I am discovering as I write this, want a place to be horny in a melancholy way so I can tell you how it feels.

At this point, L’Amour itself is essentially a clothing brand operating out of a theatre: its iconic (and not cheap!) merch is everywhere in Montreal, generally worn by people who wouldn’t dream of shooting a load there. It’s likely the business would be far more profitable if they simply sold the building and just kept their online store.

The fact that it still plays movies at all is down to the quirks of its owner, Steve Koltai. He inherited the business from his own father, and it’s clear from how little he’s changed about the place that it is intensely meaningful to him. Perhaps he simply wants the little corner of the world he controls to hang suspended in amber, perhaps he is bound to a hateful routine yet feels psychically incapable of altering it, or perhaps he is simply pathologically resistant to change. (And if he is himself a pervert, in terms of modestly rich guy toys the thrills of owning his own one-of-a-kind play palace is basically the Fetlife User equivalent of being the landlord of the old Montreal Forum had it never been renovated.) He comes off as a bit prickly, but ultimately civic-minded in his way in Aaron Hancox’s 2006 documentary short Cinéma L’Amour, a film worth checking out for how perfectly it captures the very Quebec brand of folksiness that lies beneath the business’s filth peddling. Like a hyper-local version of Hustler’s Larry Flynt, his years of scrapping with the city over obscenity and decency laws on his own behalf have helped to preserve some of Montreal’s notorious (and essential) licentiousness. Whatever his reasoning, the community benefits.

I’ve never met Steve, and so I find myself projecting onto him an almost certainly inaccurate image as a sort of sentimental custodian. It’s the same role that I imagine I play in my own world as a literary editor: keeping the lights on a little longer for the old ways and those who observe them, jury-rigging a few more years of life out of the rusting mechanisms they don’t make parts for anymore. I believe we are on the verge of changes both psychic and material to our culture (in literature and beyond) for which me and my kind are fundamentally ill-suited, even hostile to—but I recognize that this is the fate of everyone who has lived during the past 200 years or so, if not further still. And I am not someone who believes that every last scrap humanity has ever created needs to be preserved in some great archive; in fact there is sometimes a greater freedom when certain things are lost, leaving gaps in the procedural this begat that chains of historical cultural production through which it becomes easier to imagine something new. But, even so, there is this defect in my thinking that seems to demand things be mourned a little before they go, mourned and played with one last time. This applies even to those scorned bits of junk culture (e.g. porn tapes from an undistinguished era) that do not appeal to me specifically but that I can sense were, in the days of relative media scarcity, once loci for people’s secret dreams and fantasies.

When I have occasion to visit the Internet Adult Film Database to check a film credit, as I did a few times researching this blog, I often find myself landing on its modest, very web 2.0 tribute page to founder Peter van Aarle, who died back in 2005.8 If anyone ever treasured the kind of junk my friend’s been digitizing, it is surely a guy like van Aarle, an avid adult film conventiongoer who made his life’s work keeping records of things that were never meant to persist outside of Hideki Matsui’s house. And as he was in the process over years of doing that documenting, it eventually became natural to start IAFD’s now 1,887-strong “dead pornstar list,” a record of people who by some reckonings were never meant to persist either. Most entries list no cause of death but as I amble through details leap out: “sustained a massive head injury after getting punched”; “suffocated and then charred in a vehicle”; “shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later killed another girlfriend and then killed himself”; “OD’d on Carisoprodol; suffering from AIDS”; “died after a shootout with Glendale police over a domestic dispute”; “drowned by a mini-tsunami at the end of the shooting of his last film Private Club in the Seychelles.” This note on Milton Ingley, who acted for 23 years under the name Michael Morrison, says it all: “Some say Milton grew tired of life; diabetes had left him blind. He ate too much, lived hard, fucked a lot, loved a lot, and laughed more. For a man like that to be inactive is like a death sentence, I think.”

It’s probable that if given their druthers many of the people on the list would not be remembered for performing in skin flicks, the variously tragic and absurd circumstances of their demises (“cosmetic filler poisoning”) thrown in for completion’s sake. Surely at one point in his life Peter van Aarle would’ve had mixed feelings knowing his name would survive only on a porn database; and maybe a young Steve from L’Amour would’ve figured on having had a different legacy than he ultimately will. Yet there they are, captured as they were, available for whatever pleasure you may take of them, but quietly demanding dignity for having done their years of hard and strange work.

RELATED

1

Clearly not a vore guy!

Eris: What actually makes voraphilia so uncanny to me is that the so-called “soft” voraphiles often imagine being swallowed not just by giants but in fact by regular-sized people who will unhinge their jaws and consume them anaconda-style, often distending their stomachs in the process.

Sire: What, you mean like this?

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 selection of poems from a new project tentatively named UFO Girl by Montreal’s Mona Gendron, better known as the Mayor/Mare of the local transexual community, the Doyen of alt. rockers Puberty Well, and iunno the Margravess or some shit of having had a zine published by us in 2024 (The Boys Are Homophobic Sweethearts). Enjoy these alien amuse-bouches.

I am a doctor

I am a doctor, with my stethoscope and medical rags, with my mind for science and my shoes of serious leather. I wield the pyramidic hat, and the double-ended scalpel. A foreskin hates to see me coming. I work with the supernatural non-combatants of the nondescript suburban enclave of Whitephaelia. I peel them apart through guaranteed hypnosis, revealing sunset-colored organs shifting around in liquid-metal pools of insurance. They come to me for answers of the weird kind. My goatee implies I am down. I sit them in my special chair of forced hypnotic recognizance; remove their socks; bring to them a special elixir of bee pollen, LSD and estrogen; turn the lights on and off really fast a bunch; and finally bring them to center with breathing exercises mimicking the tenor and cadence of a payphone stalker. In the dusky aether of our sessions we reach into their memories, grasping orbs of trauma from the clear slimes of their subconsciouses. This one lost his virginity to a green, nine-foot-tall alien woman. (When word got out, his father was asked for comment and replied, “My son is not weird.”) This one had the Jesus gene implanted in her mind through psychic surgery. She turned her infant’s bath into wine, causing an instant and lethal body-wide cirrhosis. It is my goal to help them come to terms with these experiences via my patented three-step process of Total Submission: bowing in perpetuity to the blinding strike of life’s mean hammer as it hammers away on your dick and balls, converting them into pulp and pith for the duck à l’orange of your Higher Power.

Farmhouse

I was born in the mathematical center of a farmhouse in a state whose governing bodies resemble a snaketarium. Winds blew the crops in circles. Unlike many of the families portrayed in post-Reaganite media, mine had both a Maw and Paw. I had 17 siblings. They are buried in a hexagon constructed around a gallium pole wrapped in white hair. They came from the earth, like ripe fruits, ores, ancient bacteria or WiFi. Satellites come from the earth, before spending their fruitless days searching the miles-deep Antarctic ice for Mayan pyramids. We are told the earth is, astronomically speaking, under-special. Exoplanets with tragically few microplastics glitter in the firmament, tantalizing billionaires with potential utopian modes of slavality. Workaday gents see them and hound their imaginations with saucy green women. I look up and see cold death, a fool’s refuge and a spiritual red herring. Jesus came to me in a vision and told me we are alone in the universe, then wept at the spoils of the world, then called me a pathetic worm, then winked at me, then flew away.

Black Eyes

Much has been said about the blackness of their eyes. Imagine Vantablack—now double it. Imagine nighttime, but more so. Imagine a swirling pit of black cobras, twisting themselves into decorative Chinese knots. Imagine a gaped asshole, and that it’s night and the lights in the room are off, and the gaping is happening in a rural place with low population density, and with an ordinance forbidding streetlights in an effort to preserve the county’s starscape. Outside the galas, wrecks of limos throw black ash into the ether of the small town. Octogenarians complain about the influx of bad drivers before launching themselves beautifully from the town bridge into communal troughs of ivermectin. This is a place bled dry by crystal expos, med beds, sentient corn raised to have no conscience, and the mega church: a marriage of regular church, arena rock, F-15 flyovers, public executions, and every family’s propensity to keep hush-hush its record of stillbirths. And the gaping is happening here. You stare into the abyss of your lover and see the negative space God leaves behind, and the abdomen of the first black widow, before the evolution of her cunty red hourglass, and the lungs of all your friends who struggle to quit smoking, and the lips of a thousand goth women. And here, they speak to you, gaping your brain with telepathy, and command you not to move, they teeter and become slick with desire at the utter harvestability of your reproductive organs, and ask you to take them to your dealer, and to do the job of making small talk with the fucking guy while they dick around on their phones, and harvest your cum, your worthless, poisoned cum. Fear, of an immense purity, is their condition, and you will wrack yourself on it for the rest of your sobbing life.

Birth Horses

In a vacuum seal, under the harsh, omnipresent light, I give birth to a string of miniature wet crippled horses, pulled, from me, by them, with the exacting touch of a 20th century clown. They twitch weakly on the cold flooring, another success, I am told. Pirated home movies play on the monitor, they show me a picture of Jesus and observe my reaction, then a picture of Black Jesus—I am failing this test. They show me two men kissing, then two nubile boys pushing each other playfully around a steaming locker room, their mouths wet, measuring my body’s response on John Bancroft’s own phallometry transducer, consisting of an adjustable, mercury-filled silicone tube attached to my rapidly bruising cock of a girl. They show me 9/11; a strawberry; photos of Jonestown; lactating women; an adult circumcision compilation; two separate porn parodies of the Nuremberg trials; an anthropomorphic cartoon atomic bomb blowing JFK; the color “greige”; and my own future death (double coronary in the orgasmotron). I am too stunned to speak. I try a weak thumbs up, they respond by tweaking my nipples into the 5th dimension, then putting them back perfectly so no one will believe me.

BONUS: 9’ TALL ALIEN WOMEN EXCITE ME, AN ALIEN ROCK PLAYLIST CURATED BY MONA. LISTEN NOW!

MONA GENDRON (she/her) is a writer, musician, sometimes radio personality, and total softie. As a white settler in so-called “MoNtReAl,” she does her best to sit her ass down and listen. As a white girl her schedule is lined with appointments for hooting through the sunroofs of limousines. Alongside working at Canada’s last remaining porno theatre, teaching poetry to “at risk” youth, and fronting a band, she occasionally makes poems of a stupid nature, stupid like a fox! Her work has appeared in *CV2*, *Antilang*, *The Ex-Puritan*, for whom she was a Pushcart nominee, and in several magazines so sexy and young they’d give you teenage ears just to hear about them. When she’s not touring the country on her platform of equitable cruelty, you can find her frolicking through the marijuana fields of her youth. Somewhere, there’s a slice of cake with her name on it.

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

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.

The plain fact is that Western Twitter libs identify more strongly with Tolentino because Tolentino is someone who belongs to the same class of PMCs as they do—it’s simply class solidarity. Their interests and experiences line up, and so it’s easier to identify with Tolentino instead of the faceless poor Filipino, who probably doesn’t speak “perfect” English—and so then of course one projects, as they often do onto people who don’t speak the same language as them or speaks theirs imperfectly, that these people have no interiorities. Ignored also is that the poverty of the poor Filipino is itself a result of deliberate American policies which have kept the country under the boot of US interests since the turn of the twentieth century (after long suffering under the Spanish instead, and with an intermission under the Japanese). Now these Filipinos, in their enforced misery, can be put to “good use” by Filipino collaborators like the Tolentinos who can make a killing off of this miserable lot ($10,000 MINIMUM PER PERSON) in order to fill underpaid positions in austerity-gutted American institutions. But at least we’re “listening to voices,” right? Or at least the ones who, both literally and figuratively, speak our own language…

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)

PHILIPPE MINEAU: THE GUILT TRIPPERS LAUNCH
What: Music scene guy Philippe Mineau launches his first novel at Vices & Versa—theoretically a nice venue for this kind of gig you don’t see used often. Maybe Mineau will be eaten by a timberwolf that lives in the basement or felled by a suspect craft lager and we’ll understand why.
Where: Vices & Versa (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 5 to 7pm.
Who: Philippe Mineau, presumably.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (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)

THE BIRTH OF THE GODS
What: Another new one to me: Sword and Oar Productions (AKA Tom Giles) an actor who specializes in live performances of classical poetry—in this case, a verse translation by Lynn Kozak of a section of Hesiod’s Theogony.
Where: La Sala Rossa (4848 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 5pm doors, 5:30pm show.
Who: Tom Giles.
How Much: $15 (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.) the theme of “Play,” which is an excuse for me to link one of the least subtle songs ever recorded. (Computer, play “Play” by David Banner.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus features Rose Maloukis, Natalie Co, and Devon Gallant.
How Much: Free. (Link)

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)

24 MAY (SUN)

HANNAH KARPINSKI: LATERAL SWAY LEZ FEST LAUNCH
What: Ou, comme on l’appelle en français, le festival des lesbiennes. The launch for Hannah Karpinski’s debut poetry collection with Metatron brings together a number of notable young lit dykes—rent your U-Hauls now gals, demand will be high.
Where: Mes pants des queer (2025 Rue Parthenais/Ask A Queer).
When: 4pm.
Who: Hannah Karpinski, Alana Dunlop, Sadie Avery Lake, and Dimana Radoeva. Hosted by Ashley Obscura.
How much: Free. (Link)

25 MAY (MON)

LEESA DEAN: INTERSTITIAL LAUNCH
What: Some notable names at this book launch; Argo’s fairly snug, so come early if coming.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Leesa Dean, Liz Howard, Aris Keshav, Sina Queyras.
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)

30 MAY (SAT)

25 YEARS OF EXPOZINE AND POETRY
What: Montreal’s most notable zine fair celebrates a quarter century of tabling with a bilingual soiree hosted by Orane Thibault and long-time zinester (and Fellow Traveller) Sherwin Tjia. They’ll also be launching a new micro poetry zine which will be available through the city’s network of Distroboto zine vending machines.
Where: L’Escogriffe (4459 rue St-Denis).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Mirah Soleil-Ross, Juliette Langevin, Mathieu Arsenault, Laura Mota-Juang, Matante Monique Matraque, Sherwin Tjia, and Dolce St-Arnold. Music by GÉRALDINE, Alesund Vale with Sophia Perras, and CRABE. Hosted by Tjia and Orane Thibault.
How much: PWYC (Link)

And looking ahead to June…

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.

NEXT UP

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.