Permanent Revolution: Essays

First published in 1999 in an edition of 300 perfectbound copies and 26 spiralbound copies lettered A-Z and signed, Pillage Laud is a lost cult item that now returns to print. As the 1999 edition announced, Pillage Laud selects from pages of computer-generated sentences to produce lesbian sex poems (cauterizations, vocabularies, cantigas, topiary and prose) by pulling through certain found vocabularies, relying on context: boy plug vagina library fate tool doctrine bath discipline belt beds pioneer book ambition finger fist flow. 

It used MacProse, a freeware designed by American poet and jazz musician Charles O. Hartman as a generator of random sentences based on syntax and lexicon instructions internal to the program; the program worked on Apple systems prior to OSX and is now in the dustbins of computer history. In 1999, the news was shocking: Moure’s poems are written by a computer. In 2011, now that everyone is a computer, the book can be read anew.

The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in The Men.

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it. 

Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres Hera

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

An essay on art, bodies and fascism.

In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.

A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.

‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’
— Eileen Myles

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’
— Juliet Jacques

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Any future film director planning to make a movie of Myles's iconic novel Chelsea Girls (it's always just about to happen) would be wise to read Bird Watching first. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, the central character of the book is a twenty-something that is already filled with memories. Living in New York City, resplendent, full of both grandeur and awkwardness, they are about to embark on a life fully invested in art. Bliss happens, as does uncertainty. Everything is here and now.

The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho's Boat, the other collections contained in the volume, comprise the first three books that Myles published, when their promise as one of the most important writers of their generation was just coming into view. Immensely readable, raw, and slightly unhinged, the poetry that comprises these three texts is post young. Slight creaky but fully functional, all of these poems are beautiful and funky.Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry contains a critical foreword by poet and scholar Rosa Campbell, along with a preface by Eileen Myles contextualizing the book within our contemporary moment.

Eileen Myles (them/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers around town (globally). They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Québec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. 

Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. 

The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works-Lovhers, Ultra Sounds, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of Roses and Civilization-along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

With an introduction by Jennifer Moxley.

A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature. 

The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon's 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine's coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine's story.

Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon's allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of "illegal writing" where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.

Introduction by Chad W. Post

Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) started out as a house painter but went on to become the author of a large and rich oeuvre spanning several genres: from the compelling historical epics he composed later in life to his sharp, witty work as a newspaper columnist and his tongue-in-cheek, scabrous novels. Boon is one of the most important writers of Flemish literature in the twentieth century, a keen observer of society, the individual and the interplay between them.

Adrienne Dixon is a translator of Dutch and Flemish literature.

Chad W. Post is the founder and publisher of Open Letter Books. He is also the editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press, where he was formerly the associate director. Over the course of his career, he founded the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, multiple literary podcasts (Two Month Review, Three Percent), the Three Percent website, and currently writes two newsletters: The Three Percent Problem, and Mining the Dalkey Archive. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications. In 2018 he received the Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. 

A new collection from one of Latin America's most dynamic radical thinkers—in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Eduardo Galeano.

Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and rural towns—Zibechi introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle in Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, including that of the revolutionaries in Rojava and Abdullah Öcalan, ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, for a rich and dynamic survey of movements of nonstate power. Constructing Worlds Otherwise comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in an era of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.