Month: January 2025

January readings

crisp packet poetry: Tangerine Dream

The Glad Cafe, Glasgow | Wed, Jan 22, 2025 7:30 PM

Tonight I’ll be reading a nauseated sestina dedicated to the old Glasgow subway for the launch of TANGERINE DREAM – an anthology collecting work from 24 glasgow-based poets and artists, responding to the 2024 retirement of the old glasgow subway carriages. You know how I love infrastructure.

more info

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Shore Poets January 2025

The Waverley Bar, Edinburgh | Thursday, Jan 30, 2025 7:00 PM

I’ll be reading with the luminous Vik Shirley alongside open mic performances and music from The Self-Righteous Brothers. I’m told there is a raffle. Will bring some books to sell (have a few copies of Midsummer Song and a new batch of Cherry Nightshade).

more info

Ordinary Water

Curious in the cartoon litany of lying underneath the song is Sylvester the main antagonist out of touch with the show girls who nourish ducklings with a fractal hush that something connects and is like done, the texture of communication bristles against the cat’s tuxedo and beautifully undiminished and slow I go into the lair of the wholesome embodiment, holding up glove puppets of my favourite characters — Melancholy, Sanguine, Cholic and Phlegm — asking will you be west on the day of this shimmering announcement, new protections and crystals, slamming on the bed of our lungs it was gorgeous; I was sick for a month in the cold, moist aporia of not getting it done, my fingers in the cleft of the being held sideways and what is called dyscrasia was thought to be the underpinning of all disease including the disorderly eating with which I bring to you my body, its folds and anthropomorphic sinews, the double blush of my hipbones — and even if Sylvester comes bounding along with impossible feline precision, smacking his chops, and even if temperament is a psychologically damaging aspiration, I aspire to a joy that would swallow, susceptible, the violation — and if that be spirit, Sophia, spiritedness, the cellar door opens on its own to reveal a vital wine whose bold adoration unmerited is only a thrifted, fruity red that is lightly tattooed on your ankle and if you dance with your dear antagonist there’s no stopping, my dear one, stopped, I do not try to bend down the pain tree my spine’s impression remembers the dance of the dream in which I was willowy, carefree without keys and spiralling through the gardens of the queerest princes their sensuous lips are peonies the cognitive vacillation of anyone’s truth claim a clause unlocks and is perilous, like a thirst 

Neoliberal hubris and Dionysius on the news escapes immunity, the wilder instinct of the puppet in me and the me in the glove is like holding a hand but who’s anyway, we are going into the structure of witnessing where to hand a soft hypocrisy to the beach is only placating the burning palms, or how it feels to hold you; every little habit or thing in continuum to compulsively repeat the lossy compression of origins every time simple, night time, the song of the puppetshow of the vegetables and a drone in humour — looping whose function — in play’s decentred exigency we are unthinking the shadowplay of having said CHILD YOU ARE IN HOT WATER to a crumbling earth in our green plaster-cast sandpit at the art school tending towards minerals and diacritics, to blush soot from your lashes and the cartoon voice of the angelheaded baristas where the faucet is switched off from redacted 

Prometheas all you could want buffet of fire, deep in life’s interior is the dream or the drama — if I am a conduit for being punched in meatspace to say every person is already in the poem saying ‘I’ for ‘aw’ say hello online in a burst of tiny energies, swift changes, inserts an otherworldliness within the world banality of movement; can a person really be a spider or a cyclone, like jouissance to speak of the symbiotic ana-cartharsis, triangulates how honey I shrunk the president is wanting to move in with you / how it is too much to meet this lyric transfer, taut love’s blank dream to be twisting and safe, people in the street have been multiplied lately like kissing, we are here, a sad reprisal

(2019)

Submissions open: Digital Dreamland

So excited to co-edit this new series with Maisie Florence Post!

SPAM Plaza is reopening submissions for Digital Dreamland. 

Ever had déjà vu, not knowing if something happened IRL, online or in your dreams? As screentime and sleep time increasingly clock similar hours of the day, we’re turning our attention to the acute relationship between dreams and the internet. 

We invite critical work inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following topics: 

☁︎ sleep procrastination and social media

☁︎ cloud hoarding 

☁︎ the return of the (digital) repressed

☁︎ the memetic unconscious

☁︎ distraction as dream economy 

☁︎ ghosting (and the metaphysics of digital presence)  

☁︎ sleep texting 

☁︎ hyperreal environments & nonspaces as dreamscapes 

☁︎ online dream journaling communities 

☁︎ targeted ads as unconscious desires 

☁︎ chaos edits as dream realism

☁︎ artificial intelligence and dreaming

☁︎ interactive & lucid dreaming

☁︎ digitally-induced parasomnias 

☁︎ dream imaginaries and political im/possibility

☁︎ neural net neurosis

☁︎ image spam and cyber garbage as psychic discharge 

☁︎ oceanic feeling online 

☁︎ dreams in augmented and virtual realities

☁︎ video game realities and dream framing

☁︎ online shopping and astral projection

☁︎ cognitive timelapse and digital intimacies

☁︎ corecore and collaging the cultural unconscious

☁︎ dream scanning as the next cyber frontier

☁︎ avatars, dreams and shadow selves 

☁︎ (rip) twitter dream sharing

☁︎ movie and/or fictional representations of dreams and the internet 

☁︎ typographic parapraxis (poetics of the typo as freudian slip)

☁︎ affective ecologies of the comment section

☁︎ recalibrating platforms/digital detournement

☁︎ dead internet theory as dreamscape

☁︎ online dream interpretation communities 

☁︎ folk hauntology and web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 

☁︎ somnambulist clickholes 

☁︎ liminal spaces and spaciality of dreams

☁︎ surrealist aesthetics

☁︎ online collective memories 

☁︎ posting as automatic writing 

☁︎ psychosomatics of the meta-nightmare 

☁︎ dreaming in digital interfaces 

☁︎ dream prophecies and crypto 

☁︎ virality as bottleneck alter-consciousness

☁︎ glitch feminism

☁︎ screen-induced hallucinations (shared hallucinations)

☁︎ I lost a piece of my psyche in geocities

☁︎ hyperconnectivity and dream symbolism

☁︎ we are (always already) living in a simulation

☁︎ rest vs attention online

☁︎ internet temporalities/(a)synchronicities

☁︎ social dreams as cyber commoning 

For more inspiration, read the inaugural editorial for this series written by Maisie Florence Post. We always love to see work which engages these themes specifically in relation to poetry, but are open to work that touches on any aspect of texts, media and internet culture. 

Submission guidelines:

We will be open for submissions between 15th January and 12th March 2025. 

All submissions should be sent to spamzine.editors@gmail.com with subject line SUBMISSION: DIGITAL DREAMLAND.

Please add a brief note to your email explaining how your work fits into our theme.

We aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks and some people will hear back before the submission window closes as we will be publishing pieces on a rolling basis throughout 2025. 

This is an open call for critical work. While we appreciate the line between creative and critical can be fluid, we are looking for work that fits overall a more critical angle. 

Unfortunately neither the editors or contributors of this series will receive remuneration. Copyright remains with the author. 

We don’t have capacity to give feedback on unsuccessful submissions and the editors’ decision remains final. 

Please send submissions that are previously unpublished.

You can submit up to TWO pieces in any of the following categories:

  • Flash essays – 400-1000 words
  • Full essays – 1000-2500 words
  • Theory fictions – up to 2000 words
  • Verse essays – up to 100 lines (we have very limited formatting options however, so please get in touch if you’re not sure your work will be suitable)
  • Visual essays (photography, memes, illustrations etc – max limit of 15 images)
  • Audio or video essays (with text transcript provided – you must already have the link hosted elsewhere rather than send it as a file – we need to be able to embed it via a link)

ʚɞ

You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.  

Every movie I watched in 2024

Joachim Trier, Reprise (2006)

Monica Chokri, Babysitter (2022)

Joachim Trier, Oslo, August 31st (2011)

Molly Manning Walker, How to Have Sex (2023)

Yorgos Lanthimos, Nimic (2019)

Gregg Araki, Mysterious Skin (2004)

Noah Baumbach, Kicking and Screaming (1995)

Noah Baumbach, White Noise (2022)

Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest (2024)

Jonathan Glazer, Sexy Beast (2000)

Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers (2024)

Karen Moncrieff, Blue Car (2002)

Sofia Coppola, Lick the Star (1998)

Emma Seligman, Bottoms (2023)

Kristoffer Borgli, Dream Scenario (2023)

Aki Kaurismäki, The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Dennie Gordon, New York Minute (2004) 

Timm Kröger, The Universal Theory (2023)

Rachel Lambert, Sometimes I think about dying (2023)

Celine Song, Past Lives (2023)

Sean Baker, Red Rocket (2021)

Josephine Decked, Madeline’s Madeline (2018)

Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)

Susan Sandler, Crossing Delancey (1988)

Susanna Fogel, Cat Person (2023)

BBC Artworks Scotland, Martyn Bennett: Grit (2004)

Onur Tukel, Catfight (2016)

Andrew Bujalski, Results (2015)

Desiree Akhavan, Appropriate Behaviour (2014)

Allan Moyle, Empire Records (1995)

Dominique Deluze, Universal Techno (1996)

Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974)

Tommy Wiseau, The Room (2003)

Yorgos Lanthimos, Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Jeff Nichols, Bikeriders (2023)

Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972)

John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls (2024)

Les Mayfield, Encino Man (1992)

David Mirkin, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)

James Cameron, Terminator 2 (1991)

Ethan Coen, Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Jon Favreau, Chef (2014)

Richard Linklater, Hit Man (2023)

Sam Taylor-Johnson, Back to Black (2024)

Azazel Jacobs, His Three Daughters (2024)

Peter Jackson, Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Gurinder Chadha, Bend it Like Beckham (2002)

Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)

Jason Moore, Sisters (2015)

Stephen Herek, Our Little Secret (2024)

John Landis, Trading Places (1983)

Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread (2017)

Every book I read in 2024

In loose order of reading. This year I made a vow to not let work ‘get in the way’ of reading. I was talking to a colleague about how every subject/specialism has one thing they are supposed to be really good at and actually kind of suck at. We agreed English & Creative Writing staff are often pretty bad at this thing that should be their lifeblood: reading. To prioritise reading is to affirm the necessity of thinking. I felt so burned out with the circuitry of the 2010s and the zoomageddon of lockdown, all those screens. Reading in scroll-time. I still love reading in scroll-time, but on the move only. Or in the midst of something else doing. It took me three years to get back into immersive, situated, FOCUSED reading again. I mean staying up all night to finish a book, crying at sentences, holding something to the light and putting it down and stopping and starting because you want to savour something and all the world of it following you into dreams. All reading started to plug into work. Good work. Channels. If I’m honest, I haven’t written a lot this year. I needed a break from concepts. I did a lot of editing and proofing and reading. I wrote a lot of emails and did a LOT of marking. I think of marking as writing time. It eats into writing time but it’s also a practice of sentence-making, observation, editing, rewriting. Eileen Myles says somewhere that when they write people recommendation letters and do interviews etc that’s a form of writing. So really there are very few ‘fallow’ periods. You’re always writing something to someone, for something or not. I have written over a monograph’s worth of student feedback this year, maybe more. Each paragraph of feedback is a micro-essay, a snapshot of orientation, a patchwork sample which stitches multiple discourses (genre, criteria, instinct, history) in ascent to encouragement and improvement. So all that feedback, I’m trying to say, means I also read a hell of a lot of student work. Hundreds of scripts. Marking trains my eye as a reader and writer. Still learning to toggle between different kinds of reading. Refusing the active/passive binary in favour of a continuum of generative involvement. A lot of what I read below was in-between other reading, but some of it is more explicitly ‘work’ reading. Or: reading as a way of connecting with friends, colleagues — their beautiful brains. Or: preparation for something as yet unknown. Working through personal syllabi. Refreshing the palette.

~

Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (2006)

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, Sebastian Truskolaski, Antonia Grousdanidou (2023)

Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, trans. by Penny Hueston (2021/2023)

Joey Frances, Takeaway Night (2024)

Teju Cole, Black Paper (2021)

George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)

Megan Ridgeway, The Magpie (2024)

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. by John E. Woods (1924)

Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies (2021)

Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)

Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (1986)

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992) 

Oli Hazzard, Sleepers Awake (2024)

Courtney Bush, Every Book is About the Same Thing (2021)

Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahic (2016)

McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)

Rachael Allen, God Complex (2024)

Elle Nash, Deliver Me (2024)

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2021)

Andrew Meehan, Instant Fires (2022)

Michael Eigen, Ecstasy (2001)

Noah Ross, The Dogs (2024)

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death (2024)

Barbara Browning, The Gift (2017)

Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class (2021)

Courtney Bush, I Love Information (2023)

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)

Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist (2011)

Hilary White, Holes (2024)

Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances (2024)

Deborah Meadows, Representing Absence (2004)

Holly Pester, The Lodger (2024)

Terese Marie Mailhot, Heartberries (2018)

Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015)

Lauren Levin, Nightwork (2021)

Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins, trans. by Philip Roughton (2016)

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024)

Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019)

Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia (2024)

Joanne Kyger, On Time (2015) 

Jean Day, Late Human (2021)

Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (2003)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)

Ben Smith, Doggerland (2019)

Ricky Monaghan Brown, Terminal (2024)

Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (2023)

Joseph Mosconi, Fright Catalog (2013)

Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)

Haytham El Wardany, The Book of Sleep, trans. by Robin Moger (2020)  

Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere (2022)

Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (2024)

Brian Whitener, The 90s (2022)

Jamie Bunyor, A stone worn smooth (2022)

Lucy Ives, The Hermit (2016)

Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (2001) 

Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)

Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (1973)

Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth (2020)

Lindsey Boldt, Weirding (2022)

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970)

Hannah Levine, Greasepaint (2024)

Joe Luna, Old News (2024)

Maggie O’Sullivan, earth (2024)

Ian Macartney, sun-drunk (2024)

Sébastien Bovie, Longing for Lo-fi: Glimpsing back through technology (2023)

Steven Zultanski, Relief (2021)

Lionel Ruffel, I Can’t Sleep. trans. by Claire Finch (2021)

Noémi Lefebvre, The Poetics of Work, trans. by Sophie Lewis (2021)

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (2019)

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker, Spoilers (2024)

Ed Steck, David Horvitz Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2021)

Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, Joanne Kyger: Letters to & From (2012)

Lyn Hejinian, Fall Creek (2024)

Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, trans. by Ethan Mitchell (2024)

Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)

Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)

Miye Lee, Dallergut Dream Department Store, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee (2023)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 1 (2006/2010)

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Ian Macartney, Darksong (2024)

Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl (2000)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 2 (2007/2017)

Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes (2014)

Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega, trans. by Saskia Vogel (2022) 

Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (1985)

Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006)

Daniel Feinberg, Some Sun (2024)

Maria Hardin, Sick Story (2022)

Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, trans. by Sophie Collins (2022)

Nadia de Vries, Thistle, trans. by Sarah Timmer Harvey (2024)

Rodge Glass, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024)

Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (2024)

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica (2024)

Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists (2024)

Andrew Meehan, Best Friends (2025)

Courtney Bush, Isn’t this Nice? (2019)

Meghann Boltz, Cautionary Tale (2021)

Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood (2024) 

Dalia Neis, The Swarm (2022)

Ian Macartney, Secret Agent Orca Twelve (2024)

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night (2010)

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1982)

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

Molly Brodak, Bandit (2016)

Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986)

Anna Gurton-Wachter, My Midwinter Poem (2020)