I spent the weekend in Zoomland with a group of really brilliant practitioners musing on the affordances of sleep and dreaming in our writing. We took the opportunity to discuss chronotypes, insomnia, hypnagogic poetics, oceanic feeling, nocturnes, dwelling and dreamwork among other things. Everyone has a relationship to sleep and what I love about these workshop spaces is the way so much is unlocked by paying attention to the liminal moments in the day. I really enjoyed hearing about how modifications to one’s writing environment (turning the lights off, going outside, changing the light temperature on your writing device) an affect what we write. We thought about darkness as discovery. We considered the lullaby. Sleep as a transformative force, sleep as anti-capitalist, sleep as a process of (un)becoming, sleep as trip and trance. Sleep and caregiving, sleep and safety, sleep and homemaking, sleep and the more-than-human.
Thanks to everyone who attended ❤
More events and work on sleep & somnolence will be announced in the new year!
‘…Then it’s ‘Fairy Tale’ (not of New York). We’re going to do a song for each archetype of text e.g. poem, prayer, screenplay, fairy tale etc…’
I’m sitting here opposite EILEEN CAKE (whose work we love) and outside Kimchi Cult dead hungry, in conversation with the new disco-drone outfit (one half Ian Macartney one half Santiago Taberna), TEXTURE TEXTURE. If you have two libras in a band together does their balance balance each other out? What would that look like? Balance balance is like dance dance is like boom boom is like vroom vroom is like horror horror is like well well is like never never is like dark dark is like bah bah is like la la is like ____ ____ is like Xiu Xiu is like EXTRA EXTRA. Read all about it! It is astrological excess equivalent to semantic satiation of the stars and their generalised synthesisers. Red velvet epizeuxis.
When I think of EILEEN CAKE I think of Eileen Myles eating a cake. And someone narrating the whole process like Come on Eileen!!!!! What kind of cake would Eileen Myles enjoy? In researching this topic I found an interview Kristin Grogan did with Myles in a cafe in Oxford, remarking on the excellence of its pear crumble cake. No guarantee that’s what Myles ordered or what’s on offer at EILEEN CAKE, here in Partick. The main thing is it’s not EILEEN’S CAKES, it’s EILEEN CAKE. The cake of Eileen. The name Eileen denotes, says thebump.com, an ‘old world charmer’, its derivatives meaning ‘little bird’, ‘strength’ and ‘desired’. Oh yeah baby. It also ‘derives from the french word “Aveline,” meaning “hazelnut”’. Okay there’s the segue. Ian Macartney has a pretty scary nut allergy. That’s why we’re at outside waiting for our bibimbap and not eating EILEEN CAKE (though certainly I would like to try it). We’ve just been to a poetry reading.
Every time I say ‘texture texture’ I sound like I am coaxing some cyborgian bambi out of the quantum realm for long enough to try a little pumpkin seed, some disco biscuits. Sometimes it sounds like a question, a comfort, compulsive loop. Last night TEXTURE TEXTURE played at the Bank Street Media Lab’s Episode 005: ZONE night at Ushi’s Coffee Corner. Don’t let cosiness fool you into thinking this isn’t a swag wee music venue home to many feline demons and the best soft drink selection this side of Eden. Anyway it really is snug and there are bare stone walls, an LED indigo glow and coils of wiring fit for a sculptural impression of e-waste baroque, say, five years from now in the trend cycle. The boys are knelt on the floor, one in white and one in black. When the white-outfiteer stands up, a little shaky, nearly knocking his head, the black-outfiteer tenderly holds his head to protect it. Bass hums. This reminds me of the Hilma af Klint painting The Swan, No. 1 (1915).
By which I mean the neck of the guitar is the neck of the black swan and the adam’s apple of clicky duplicity, swerve swerve. A transcript from the Guggenheim concerning this painting reads: ‘In alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of what is known as the philosopher’s stone, a substance believed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Here, af Klint’s black-and-white palette underscores the dualities of light and dark, male and female, life and death’.
People in the audience keep telling each other to coorie in which is fucking adorable, finally we are in a crowd of intentional nesting and care. Santiago is wearing waterproof trousers, perhaps as a gesture to the storm that is sweeping the country (though not Glasgow, which got a bonnie blue day in its favour). If Ian is summer bummer, Santi is winter rain and the mix of solarity and rush rush is the sznal dialectic of fuck us all back to the early 2000s (before the weather was really bad?!).
They play a set that opens with a sort of beckoning call to the muse, Ian’s elastic shouting — I WANT YOU — refrained over triumphant feedback. Santi holds his guitar upside down and twangs a lotta noise out it, so far so Thurston. This I WANT YOU is the same premise of seductive intonation as is inherent in the name TEXTURE TEXTURE, which is to say here are two trochees smushed together like ‘The XX’ except no that’s a spondee, right, ‘XX’. Which is to say, kisses, and tweets made out into cigarettes like that Dana Ward poem where cigarettes are made into tweets and when I keep saying it, kisses and tweets and cigarettes and kisses and tweets I wonder about oral fixation and its relationship to noise like the aerated acne of being teenage or trying too hard all the time. My favourite song by Third Eye Blind is called ‘I Want You’. I like it because it’s super horny and super gothic and ugh fat clicky beginning it feels like the end of the world of caring for someone in your marrow.
A TEXTURE TEXTURE highlight was one song from the end, perhaps ‘Fairy Tale’, a track which sounded like the Animal Crossing village song massaged through ovulation dreams of MACINTOSH PLUS to result in plaintive mall fables of yesteryear, which is to say 2006, with all its streaming puberty and cider. This is beautiful because it sounds like bagpipe midi cross melodics of having a thought. What else do I catch, something about watching waves. Something about time travel. This must be the place! etc. Earlier this morning, Ian left me a voice note saying ‘Just had a second recollection, I guess a proustian moment, of being extorted for peaches on Animal Crossing by my cousins’. Ian’s cousins were not available for comment. But god, the peaches! I wonder what brought this on.
Everything gets darker at the end with ‘For a Stranger’. The livestream voiceover says: ‘the audience look like they’re scared, scared to dance!’. The vibe is kind of industrial nananananananaa syncopated bop-it shifting, but there’s a James Murphy in Ian yet as he riles up the dance dance and a soft drum underneath. I voxpop Ian’s flatmate who says he has heard the tappy tap of the electric drumkit for days but the rest of the set was pretty secret.
Ian makes a point of pretending he is famous enough to not know the difference between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He does this by saying “THANK YOU EDINBURGH”. This, I argue, is not about ‘getting wide with the audience’ but evidence of a general veering towards ‘post-edinburgh’ which I have spoken of before (at length, in The Dram). It does remind me a little of when Desmond Dekker played a tiny field in Dumfries & Galloway and took to the stage with “HELLO GLASGOW”. This was in my childhood and I remember being very cold and desperate for my sleeping bag oblivion, listening to bass beats thrum through the grass. When someone in the audience goes ‘WOW’ with sarcasm and I repeat ‘WOW’ I am only repeating the mono-syllabic duplicity that is being awake, alive and scared to dance. Oh wow. Lovely. I’m feeling delicate.
Following TEXTURE TEXTURE were a bunch of trippy short films and two beaut sets from Slide Cancel and nil00. The former was super hypnotic, precise and really really cool internet music for melting your face off in the smoothest way possible ++++ and the latter was utterly enchanting crush ballads for the lovers. Special shoutout to this song, ‘Beautiful Fish (Just Remember You’re Beautiful, And Two Hours Comes Pretty Easily, I Wanna Spend It W You’: a perfect shimmery thought-loop of harmony and piscean energy I could get down with. Nooo it’s not lofi bubblegum pixel trap it’s lyric etherea, sorta a la Happy Spendy, a nu candy ballad which sings from inside the moon’s teardrop many aeolian harps ago, O angel you should’ve come to my little meadow of deconstructed cuddlecore. The fact there were audio problems to begin with (how many wires in the world does it take to connect our heaven) only added to the tenderness and play of the set. I was thinking about the fish song later drunk on the bus home thinking about fish and a thing my friend Frannie once said which is ‘I wonder where the fish go to sleep’ and I wonder where they do indeed.
𓆟
(beautiful fish)
Well anyway, the interview. Ian (Irn Bru) was wearing a stylish grandpa jumper testament to the heydays of west end thrifting, and Santi (Still Water) was wearing an ochre-beige coloured rain coat, so fall. The boys did not take turns answering in ecstatic monosyllables, so much as relish the dialectic of one’s reticence and the other’s intent. Sometimes, one would echo the other, recreating the semantic satiation which is the band’s lifeblood. More, more. Text, text. No, never. That’s all I’ll say of whose answers these are.
What is the poetic unit of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
TEXT.
What inspired you to start this band?
NOISE.
What was your first encounter with noise?
BABY.
How did that feel?
BAD.
Would you define bad as a value judgement, or something else?
ELSE.
How do you think your work was received last night?
BOUNCY.
And what did you think of the visual accompaniment?
GREAT.
Is ‘great’ an ethic to you?
SERIOUS.
What’s the biggest mystery of your life?
GOD.
If you had to marry a sound, what would it be?
CLANG.
If you had to kill a sound, what would it be?
BUBBLEGUM.
If you had to fuck a sound, what would it be?
COWBELLS.
So true, same. Did anyone ever tell you that you shouldn’t start a band, it’s a risky business?
YES.
Did you agree with them?
NO.
Describe your production process.
INTUITIVE.
How did you two meet?
SPAM.
Do you think it was a meeting of minds, souls or bodies?
SOULS.
What’s your biggest influence?
PEARLING.
If you could play any ocean in the world, what ocean would it be?
ANTARCTIC.
Why?
ANTARCTIC.
Are you a communist?
YES.
What’s next for your performance?
MORE.
Tell me about your outfit choices.
OPPOSITES.
Have you ever fallen out?
NO.
If TEXTURE TEXTURE were edible, what would it be?
SHRAPNEL.
What would you say is the big idea of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
DANCE.
What’s the spice level of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
PICANTE.
What’s the sun sign of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
SCORPIO.
If you could send a cassette demo to one living politician, who would it be?
I wonder how much is a kind of alertness to being awake itself, posting as if to ward off the rain, posting as if to pop my wormy little head out of the earthsoil of silence and say “hai”.
We should leave the moon alone. I went to her once with a question. You don’t just go to the moon with a question, not anymore, but things were different then. The moon wanted an ardent debate on the topic of dust. What was it, whose was it, how can we lay blame for it. How can we monetise the dust. I lay the blame of dust in my bed and slept awhile. Like all of you, I felt super lame. There were academics emailing with the promise of a lunar economy and a cupboard slamming shut at gunpoint. Our father was desperate, who art in languor of sleepgolf in Middlesex said “where is my pill down the back of your throat”. It was a little fuzzy pink thing he popped with no water. The whole moon. The whole pill of her eaten to become annoying. Take a pill. I would pay a whole pill for the moon and back. That man wanted my oesophagus as a kind of liquid spear indicative of mental illness, or science fiction. How much would pay to go to the moon with the money you need? How much would you really swallow?
…satellite & loaf & mope & idle & waste & pine & languish & years ago & infatuate & party catharsis & killing…
do not go gently into the future that blooms abandonment update four hundred passengers with miles to go before they sleep in full view, refund & expense centuries passed in that mainline
Woundscape is a creative response to Making Imagined Objects, the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference which happened in Glasgow, June 2022, commissioned by The Alasdair Gray Archive in partnership with Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. This pamphlet has been produced with support from the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Poetry Pamphlet Fund’.
Released 4th November 2023 Edition of 100 numbered copies. * ISBN: 978-1-3999-7021-1
“An introspective set of poetics that sews together the gathering discomfort of the human soul and stretches it out across the urban decay of our crumbling cities. Sledmere is an architect of the atmospheric, the surreal, but captures with a brilliant and delicate undercurrent that singularity of emotion that we can all relate to; the absurdity of our existence. This book is inimitable, a triumph of melancholy raining down upon our weathered streets, where hearts are imprisoned, and all doors are carefully barred.” (Stuart McPherson)
“Where does poetry go when ‘tomorrow becomes sorer and sorer’? I’d follow it here, to Maria Sledmere’s writing. These brilliant poems encounter familiar woundscapes, from Alasdair Gray on the heart, to the scaffolding and sanctuaries of a city, our civic agonies, and remake the stakes of poetry again. As they meet the ache of bodily enclosures and language, something emerges, like a condition: shared, real and moving, alive. A kind of love poetry perhaps, that knows in its lightness the costs. Fake, hungry and true. ‘To eat/like to read a poem’. Nothing more urgent and fresh than this, ‘going home in the prosody of being sold nothing’. Eat now, before it’s gone.” (Carol Watts)
“A work which is at once meaningfully drawn from Gray’s own Woundscape and very much her own, this response is full of all the vividity, sparky connectivity and sensitivity you’d expect from Maria Sledmere. Never a dull phrase, never a dead word, her Woundscape – ‘disciplined/in the disappearing city/of civic agonies’ – is urgent and arresting.” (Rodge Glass)
“What Maria Sledmere deftly does is extend her prose beyond Gray and the ‘Making Imagined Objects’ event, weaving into it personal interactions, responses to other creatives work (including Louise Bourgeois), digital wanderings and liminal spaces. The result is a layered dreamscape written with a human heart but embodying otherworldly wisdom.” (Sorcha Dallas, Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive)
We are launching the pamphlet in Glasgow, at The Alasdair Gray Archive, on 4th November at 2pm. There will also be readings from Robbie White, Scott Hay and Alasdair Watson. Tickets here.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of working with two excellent poets, Jack Young and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, on bringing to life their pamphlets in the country garden /the end of england and All in Animal Time. It’s been a fair few months since SPAM published anything physical (our most recent print publication was Cocoa and Nothing back in February) and coordinating everything for season 7 reminded me why I love doing this in the first place. There is something magical and alchemical that happens in the process of getting something from email to book in a series of whirlwind zoom(ies) and frantic whatsapps and editorial ping pong and delicious in-depth reading. I love figuring out solutions to a design problem, shunting things around, letting things bleed into the edges or splash into place, phone calls about word choice and line breaks. Generous margins and snaky wee texts / embarking upon font quests.
We got to know our authors, who are based in Bristol and Iceland, variously over the pandemic through Zoom workshops and the great poetry boulevard that is gmail. You can read one of Jack’s poems in SPAM005 and one of Karó’s in SPAM004. The SPAM editors are big fans of their work and we were delighted that both authors had pamphlets that kind of grew out of the poems in the magazine. This season has a lil rainbow-shrouded eco flavour: poems of the anthropocene everyday, poems of queer pastoral, poems in animal time (as per David Berman’s advice). J&K are poets with a real interest in the scholarly work of poetry as much as the playful. These are really thoughtful works which traverse everything from decolonising botany to Commander Keen, the dietary needs of black holes and the sonnets of rats and punctuation marks. Ugh I really love them! Thinking about these pamphlets is like coming up on coffee with sunlight pouring through the morning and having adequate sleep and remembering why the little things really fucking matter. It’s like the libido of the knotweed exerting pressure to break concrete and escape the walled garden which is like beautiful open source software. I am so lucky to have worked with these poets and also to have collabed with my co-editors Mau Baiocco, Kirsty Dunlop and Ian Macartney in bringing them to fruition. Long live SPAM!
Coordinating this pamphlet series also reminded me that publishing is an act of worldbuilding, brick by paper brick, pixel by pixel. It’s like: how do we give birth constantly to the word-pearls of what you wanted by accident of so many factors to have an idea for ~ ~ it’s like……a gift, a life-changing conversation, a journal entry for the language of flowers, a frolic through girl city’s sugar cubes and the delicious lumpencoal of the poem. Stop to admire the ‘four-star review sycamore’ (KRO) while you’re at it.
We worked with two v talented artists, Maura Sappilo and Sam Williams on cover design. Thank you Jack and Maura!!!
If you’re in Glasgow, please come along to our launch on the 10th November, where we’ll also have a reading from Edinburgh poet Murid L. Keshtmand and there will be many a pamphlet on sale and a lil wine & snack to be had.
PEOPLE OF THE PRESS! If you’d like to review the book, interview one of the authors, have them on your podcast or stock copies of the pamphlets in your store, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.
You can preorder the books at inflation-resistant prices => spamzine.co.uk/shop.
You can watch two Instagram live sessions with Jack and Karó here, where we talk about the thinking behind the pamphlets, inspirations and the craft of writing.
mariaology 