Joanna Walsh

Captivated by the liberated glamour of Jean-Luc Godard’s young stars as a teenager, Joanna Walsh rediscovers his films as an adult and finds herself resisting the temptation to identify with or desire the women on film. Instead, echoing Jean-Luc Godard’s pronouncement that ‘cinema is truth at 24 frames per second’, Walsh’s essay turns its gaze on the dynamics of the camera itself and demands a new kind of art. This is an experimental, bold, and wide-ranging book that refuses to setltle for easy answers. An essential read for anyone interested in women on film.

Considered an ‘ugly feeling’ by society’s norm, we’re not supposed to vocalize what and who is letting us down. We’re supposed to stay positive, get organized and act, instead of lingering in negative emotions. We’re supposed to be productive. But making space for disappointment can be a strategy of dissensus. Instead of wallowing in impotence, to make explicit what is not meeting expectations for this world can be an act of renouncing and making cracks in the status quo, while not giving up allegiance that another world is possible.

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes: ‘we might think of how becoming feminist put us in touch with all that sadness, all those emotions that represent a collective failure to be accommodated to a system as the condition of possibility for living another way.’

In this issue we hope to plant the seeds of this rebellion by collecting a larger body of letters of disappointment. No matter how vague, impersonal, unimportant, futile, banal, or contingent these memories may seem; when shared and brought into a wider collective context, political desire may slip out from between the lines and build a corpus of transfeminist inheritance.

While spending some time with a tarot deck in preparation for this issue we obviously pulled the card of disappointment. In this deck, the illustration shows a beautiful drought: five crystal cups, which in the other cards overflow with fresh water, are shown here empty and dry.

‘The Five of Cups stands for an emotional crisis. It might be that unconscious fears come true, it could tell that feelings are disrupted or wasting away, the soul is empty and unfulfilled. In the sequence of the cups, the Five is the logical consequence of the Four. The grey tristesse that was lurking behind the luxury’s glamour is now exposed, the ‘truth is out’. The Five of Cups implies the loss of illusion, the realization of a deception. It hurts, but is necessary when we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives with our heads in the sand.’

We leave it up to you to imagine the possibilities or boundaries of what spending time with disappointment can make happen, for you, in your community, in the world.

Contributors: Pelumi Adejumo, Clara Balaguer, Dagmar Bosma, Staci Bu Shea, Alba Clevenger, Athena Farrokhzad, Sharona Franklin, Maike Hemmers, Calla Henkel, Sara Kaaman, Alena Kolesnikova, Maoyi (Peixuan Qiu), Katja Mater, Yelena Moskovich, Djuwa Mroivili, Sands Murray-Wassink, Raoni Muzho, Iarlaith Ni Fheorais, Ashley Nkechi Igwe, Milica Trakilović, Shola von Reinhold, Selma Selmani, Terre Thaemlitz, Yin Yin Wong, Anna Zvyagintseva, Sophie Zwertbroek, Joanna Walsh, Rosa Luxemburg, Yoyes Maria Dolores Gonzalez Katarain, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai and Audre Lorde

To live means to be exposed, to be vulnerable, and seek safety. But what if we give up control and don't try to cover the wounds any more? Could we ultimately transcend to openness? This is one of the core questions Spike asks in its autumn issue. From the imperfections of the body to automated text generators, from poor images to pop stars. Spike #73 is about art's soft underbelly, why writing in first person is a risk, why humans fear each other, and grappling with grief, paranoia, and intoxication. Let's find out what happens if we take off our shells.

With contributions by: McKenzie Wark, Marlene Dumas, Tosh Basco, James Richards, Raimundas Malašauskas, Joanna Walsh, Kandis Williams, Mire Lee, Gustav Metzger, Rob Horning, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, Constance Debré, Luca Lo Pinto, Simone Forti...

In this issue, Worms explores New Narrative alongside writers working today that incorporate some of it’s themes. The cover star Saidiya Hartman talks with Rhea Dillon about the limits and processes of creating stories from the archive, while Camille Roy and Dodie Bellamy give insight into New Narrative from their experiences involved in the movement. Savannah Knoop tells about their life playing the character of J.T Leroy, while Calla Henkel delves into ideas of using other people’s narratives as our own. There’s lots of gleaning, lots of stealing and lots of hard truths coming from the human body. There is poetry and fiction and all of the usual bits, as well as an experimental cut up piece demonstrating the appropriation method that Kathy Acker (via William Burroughs) used in so much of her work. Many more worms to be found in these pages.

Featuring:
Saidiya Hartman, Camille Roy, Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Estelle Hoy, Rhea Dillon, Savannah Knoop, Lauren Fournier, Madelyne Beckles, Joanna Walsh, Anne Turyn, Cristina Morales, Calla Henkel, Jenny Zhang

Contributors:
ZARA JOAN MILLER, HAYDEE TOUITOU, NICOLE DELLA COSTA, CECILIA PAVON, VALENTINA VON KLENCKE, FEYI ADEGBITE, ALICE PLATTI, VICTORIA CAMPA, ALICE BUTLER, CLEMMIE BACHE, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, JACK STUART MILLS, HONOR WEATHERALL, ARCADIA MOLINAS, AIMEE BALLINGER, WES KNOWLER, ELEANOR WANG, KATY DADACZ, OLIVE COURI, RACHEL CATTLE, ISABELLE BUCKLOW, SARAH BODRI, HOPE ROAFL, MAURA SAPPILO, JODIE HILL, JACQUELINE ENNIS COLE, MARY WATT, DELIA RAINEY.

Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.

Contributors are Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.

Isabel Waidner is a writer and cultural theorist. She is the author of three books of innovative fiction, most recently Gaudy Bauble (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), which is currently longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose". Her articles and short fictions have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including 3: AM, Berfrois, Configurations, The Happy Hypocrite, The Quietus and Minor Literature[s]. She is also the editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Writing (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) which explores the relationship between identity, intersectionality and innovation in literature. As part of the indie band Klang, Waidner released records on UK labels Rough Trade (2003) and Blast First (2004). She is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Roehampton University, London, UK.

Detour/Détours imagines debt as a language game: as a broken pun; a break in a journey; a play on value and the meaning of money as it changes hands. Or in terms of Guy Debord’s détournement — as a debt reimagined through the integration of old works into something new.

The word debtor owes etymologically to the old French deteur. But — moving into English — its first appearance dates back to the early 13th century and — sounded out as dettur, dettour or detour — debt can be read as an elaboration on the mottled intimations of a detour with a little poetic license. A detour is a deviation, a digression; a play on our various senses of direction. Exploring the will, want or need to take the long way around — and seeking to bastardize and scrutinize our relationship with (and conceptualization of) a statement of debt — here we have a set of searching works that critique all our methods of repayment. Participating authors were given free rein to produce a piece of writing in response to these ideas, and the works included herein — five first English-language translations and five original texts — wind their way around the weight of the word ‘debt’ in ten attempts to reroute its meaning.

Questions of Worth by Noémi Lefebvre, translated by Natascha Lasorak and Sophie Lewis
Silent B by Lauren Elkin

A Problem of the Greek Type by Mathieu Larnaudie, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Emotional Debt/Speed of Recovery Matrix by Selma Dabbagh

Debt Night by Preti Taneja

The Pastoral Calculation by Sandra Lucbert, translated by Jessica Spivey

The Debt Collector by Jen Calleja

Unknown Soldier by Nicolas Bouyssi, translated by Amanda DeMarco

Good Relations by Joanna Walsh

Out of Debt by Thomas Clerc, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Edited by Emmanuel Bouju, Dominic Jaeckle & Cécile Menon
Limited Edition of 300 copies
180 x 120, paperback, 78 pages