I find my poetics even more interested in situatedness than knowledge, and that’s why place became so important in the book as an organizing principle. Or like an active interlocutor and a site of convergence.
I feel at ease in male friendships and at ease in what some might consider male spaces. I hate men. I love men.
To me, the most sensational thing in life, the real trippy thing, is to realize that everyone you know, everyone you hang out with, everyone you’ve ever met: they’re all thinking at all times. To really know that, to really understand that is sensational.
What does it mean to have a fake novel? What does it mean to have a novel that’s thinking, aware of itself as a novel, and thinking about
While facing a totally unknown new phase of my life, I had a feeling that I should push making music. I didn’t know what would happen and I didn’t have many songs written, but I wanted to try.
In painted portraits you can see the hand of the painter, the gestures, the point of view. All portraits are in a way self-portraits too. I wanted that to happen with this book as well.
I wanted to focus on language alone and its sheer force, uncontained by formal, philosophical, and empirical systems and thought.
Instead of a few more excellent but redundant versions of Dead Souls or Crime and Punishment, why couldn’t the same people give us the first translations of Pisemsky’s Troubled Seas, Khvoshchinskaya’s In Hope of Something Better, or Leskov’s “Episcopal Justice”?
Writing to make sense of things feels both prophylactic (I will process an event, a thought in a safe space) and at times a little dangerous (Is it safe? what will happen as I bore further and further down?)
Adedayo Agarau and Isabella DeSendi
We are presenting a version of truth that perhaps no one will ever present in the same way we have. I am, we are, the scar, the proof, a testimony. How lucky we are to have language to help leave our marks on this world.