— I’ve shared this quotation by Adam Zagajewski before from his book Eternal Enemies, and don’t we all have a few of those by now? “hey, friends, courage,life is beautiful”— I wrote Courage, life is beautiful, on a mirror in red lipstick, thinking I’d said something original before rummaging around in my memory banks for the AZ reference. The trouble with often quoting a line by someone else, it starts to feel like your own. I’d like to think I had his blessing for the use here. — A book I’ve been reading and loving for a while now is Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno. They also wrote Opacities which has turned into one of my most dogeared books. TBH the idea of a collaborative work almost kept me away but this thinking together thing in this case is actually magic. And tone. The subject of tone just seems to me right now to be so important in writers defending writing. I mean, those who love to use their fakewritingcheat tools, great. They won’t care. But I care, deeply, about tone. When you read all those smoothened out emails…ugh. Like, grab a personality right? Anyway. As usual, I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted here. — From Tone: “Tone is the absent presence. It’s what writing has instead of timbre: something indefinite, not clear, vague, subconscious, little, wearing down.” When we think about tone, we might also think about the vibes in a room. The other people who have been in the room, the voices, this one and that one, the feelings brought in, the scent of someone’s shampoo, various resentments, joy, a plate of cookies is passed around — that feeling. Someone leaves. A cough. Someone picks lint from their trousers, someone wrings their hands, fiddles with their ring, twirls hair. All of these conscious and unconscious things. — Quoted in Tone: Fred Moten: “And it struck us that this is what workers who are also thinkers have always been trying to understand. How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good? There are lots of people who are angry and who don’t feel good, but it seems hard for people to ask, collectively, “why doesn’t this feel good?”” — This was published in 2024 but I think all that could be applied to how we’re thinking about the very toneless AI. Why doesn’t it feel good? Why is it important to sit and consider why it feels so bad. The language we use around it is bad, is partly why. We anthropomorphize the living shit out of it for one thing. We can’t rage against the machine, as is said, if we humanize it. — I once owned a copy of Siding with Things, a now out of print translation of Francis Ponge’s thing poems. The book’s binding had disintegrated and at some point I let it go. In 2016 A new translation Partisan of Things translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau appeared and I’ve just now got to it. Corey says in the intro: “To exist in this world is to be fragile, subject to constant change; to find acceptance of that fact is an act of heroism…” He goes on, “For Ponge, the world is something that must be made, and this happens when we give le monde muet, the silent world, a voice.” And then he quotes Ponge, “We have to flourish, develop, produce the world around us — bathed and immersed in the silent world — that is our natural environment, our only true home; around us, through us, feeding us; we are part of it…” — It seems notable that it was written in the preamble to WWII, during which Ponge fought for the resistance. How can our attention to things now be a sort of resistance? — A line from Adélia Prado:“My work is important because it’s all I have.” — A conversation in White Ink with Hélène Cixous is titled “Guardian of Language.” Who will be the guardians of language, of tone, of flourishing now? Cixous: “I am angry at the spirit of betrayal that dominates individuals and society.” And in another conversation she says, “At this moment I am in a period of uneasiness because I have to rethink my existence: I have too many demands placed on me and I feel threatened. Really, next year, I am going to withdraw a bit but now I am getting into a system of contradictions which is painful for me…” — Speaking of contradictions. A note I made in my phone app, which I don’t do often. And which doesn’t mean it’s profound. But: “It’s the ethical wounds that are toughest to staunch. It’s not uncertainty that is difficult to live with so much as the contradictions.” — The word acknowledge seems to come up a lot these days. Authors are always writing their acknowledgement pages. Does AI ever write an acknowledgement page? Yah, no. Somewhere in my head, a while back now, I started writing an essay about acknowledgements pages in CanLit. Some day. Anyway, until then, a drawing: Ack! Knowledge. — Current rage: the time I waste trying to figure out if your writing is your writing. When I could actually be writing! Well, enough of that amiright? I’m all for saying at the bottom of an email, I wrote this entire goddamned thing meself. (I did). — All that said. Courage, friends! Your life is beautiful. Hey!— Also: Rage! Life is! — Raise a little hell! “If you don't like what you gotWhy don't you change it?If your world is all screwed upRearrange it”— If you don’t like the mirror lipstick smudge writing, erase it. Try again. — note on the photos. By me, as usual. Trying to find another angle for a still life practice. An experiment. October 1, 2026