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)
Okay music this year was weird for me. I liked things where the lyrics were meltwater into guitars and my ~spotify wrapped was all obsessively listened same songs split geode feelings. Exclusively masculine guitar bands with the exception of Brat (top 5). I too am the virus. Maybe because it rained nonstop all year in Glasgow, even with my heart split with California it made so much sense to listen to The Natural Bridge on loop and felt that bridge would cross the ocean. It was the bridge in the song and the bridge of the ocean. I kept thinking about high-singing shoegaze sirens and lay in the mud during a Mogwai gig. Songs about blues and magic mountains and lucifer and love and sympathy and blood and fluoresce and dallas and golden days and dreams and strawberries and tiredness and june and miracles. Seriously I know 2024 was music gossip and humming cancellations and virality blown up to chromatic ontology but (here I want a line break) I just wanted to be stoned at the claire rousay gig forever. And that was my music.
<cue sparkly tambourine>
“Come talk to me about it outside”
Thought about taking a searing breath onstage and how long til it heals?
“Then there was this weird music video that popped up in my complaining featuring jelly sparkle heels and the message was about destroy your cloud with new CD-R storage capacities! and there was this song from the early 2000s and in the music video you could walk around with big yeti slippers
and this really horny barbie song set in a swimming pool which honestly just sounded like goats but was visually orgiastic & gauche
guess I blame the pseudoephedrine!”
Approximate seasonal index:
Winter – shoegaze, e-girl Spring – folk, emo, concrète Summer – jam bands, indie rock, hyperpop Autumn – alt, slowcore
~ NEW RELEASES ~
Jazmin Bean — Traumatic Livelihood
Kim Gordon — The Collective
DIIV — Frog in Boiling Water
Waxahatchee — Tigers Blood
Julia Holter — Something in the Room She Moves
The Lemon Twigs — A Dream Is All We Know
Bladee — Pyskos
Four Tet — Three +
Grace Cummings — Ramona
Vampire Weekend — Only God Was Above Us
Pearling — Lovelocket
claire rousay — sentiment
Billie Eilish — HIT ME HARD AND SOFT
Charli xcx — Brat
Dr. Dog — Dr. Dog
Clairo — Charm
Bella White — Five for Silver
Chanel Beads – Your Day Will Come
Loukeman — Baby You’re a Star
Phish — Evolve
Kelly Lee Owens — Dreamstate
SOPHIE — SOPHIE
LI YILEI — NONAGE
claire rousay — The Bloody Lady
Asher White — Home Constellation Study
Porridge Radio — Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me
mariaology 