CCRU writings 1997-2003

A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy. Both attack the decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when colonialist rationality meets its limits in the "magnificent disorder" of the Amazon jungle. 

Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's foreword as "no longer an interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil," Jean-Christophe Goddard's strange theory-fiction plunges Western philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered categories are devored by uncontainable contaminations—first and foremost the rainforest itself, a "monstrosity unapproachable by the cogito." 

In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying hallucination of "a scabby black Brazilian." But rather than a vision of "the Other," the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento's own duplicity. Upon adopting the "clean white nickname" of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial misadventures, repudiating this specter that flees along the lines of migration: "Spinoza is American ... the journey is intensive." And in his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into Goddard's Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias... 

The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel's classic 1904 work of Brazilian literature. In Rangel's astonishing tales, this "poet-engineer" sent into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary limit experience.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

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

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

In the first issue of Sore, observations of everyday life intertwined with memories and cultural references to denote the significance of a certain soreness we each carry within us as we negotiate the various challenges of social existence. In this second ensemble, seven new authors widen our understanding of the term ‘sore’ by underlining a need to orient one’s gaze towards what’s hidden underneath, to enter the anatomy of all these necessary contortions and u-turns one performs in order to escape the grip of expected compliance.

With contributions from: Mathilde Heuliez, Lisa Lagova, Muyeong Kim, Nour Ben Saïd, Masha Ryabova, Adrienne Chung, Richard Dmitri Hees, Oscar Le Merle, Morra Kozlitina, Tindra Eliason, Helmer Stuyt, Ilya Stasevich, Kristina Stallvik.

Published by cover crop, Mathilde Heuliez & Lisa Lagova.