1. that everyone has the capacity to be an artist.

2. that to be an artist you have to continually do art.

But I didn’t know anything about Cameron’s project when I picked up The Artist’s Way. What I did know was that many of my more artistically inclined friends found the book transformative and, after going through Cameron’s 12-week program, began to look at their art differently. My friend did the artist’s way, and it totally changed their life, I would hear. I’m in an artist’s way group and now I’m writing like I’ve never written before.

Obviously, I had to try it. So, I joined two close friends in an Artist’s Way group and took up the 12-week program hoping to further my creativity and with the expectation that I would come out of the book transformed, overflowing with artistic enthusiasm. What I got instead were 200 pages of batshit ramblings, promotional material for the Julia Cameron brand, and inane therapy-speak. The Artist’s Way has caused many people I love and respect to ask questions of themselves that advanced their artistry. The only question I came out of the book asking was: how is this not snake oil? How could this book possibly work for anyone?

While a terrible self-help book, I wouldn’t call The Artist’s Way a bad book. When read all at once, The Artist’s Way takes on the feeling of an avant garde novel in the way that Cameron’s insanity is revealed to the reader over the course of twelve chapters. Take, for example, Cameron’s claim that if you are an artist, you are in direct conversation with God. Even atheists, she claims, are in conversation with G.O.D.—Good Order and Direction:

The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity. Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as the creator but seldom see creator as the literal term for artist. I am suggesting you take the term for creator quite literally.

Being a creator like me brings you closer to God, Cameron says, and she spends much of her book trying to convince us of her godliness—The Artist’s Way is bogged down with low impact anecdotes of strangers approaching Cameron to tell her how amazing she is. The entire introduction of the 25^th anniversary edition is a conversation between Cameron and a stranger at a café. “‘Oh my god,’ [the stranger] exclaims, ‘your book changed my life. It made me a novelist…I bet you hear stories like mine all the time.’” After the woman goes on to laud Cameron’s work for a page, Cameron happily agrees to sign a copy of The Artist’s Way for her boyfriend: “I ask his name and write a simple phrase, ‘May our words be friends.’” The Artist’s Way is filled with inanities like this, including continual invocations of God and comparisons between artists and prophets, which make Julia Cameron’s outsized ego a centerpiece of the book.

In Cameron’s claim that artists are conduits to God, she also implies that if you are not a creator, you are further away from divinity. Working two jobs and you’re too exhausted to spend your off-hours writing a novel? You’re a godless heathen. Living in poverty? Don’t have computer? These are just excuses. Simply have no desire to write a book, movie, or play? FALSE. You are a “shadow artist”, a coward, a plague on all of your friends. Don’t take it from me, take it from Julia. When comparing couples therapy to artist dates—a homework assignment in which readers are asked to spend a few hours each week experiencing art alone—Cameron writes:

“Do you spend quality time with each other?” troubled couples are often asked by their therapist…Do you go on dates? Just to talk? Just to listen to each other?”

“Dates?...But we’re married, too busy, too broke, too—”

“Too scared,” the therapist may interrupt. (Hey, don’t sugarcoat it.)

It seems doubtful that a couple’s therapist would compare a couple’s monetary problems to cowardice, but it’s completely believable that Julia Cameron would. Cameron talks constantly about money, although she seems to have no practical awareness of it:

There are as many ways to avoid [going on an artist’s date] as there are days of your life. “I’m too broke” is the favored one, although no one said the date need involve elaborate expenses…a visit to a great junk store, a solo trip to the beach, an old movie seen alone together, a visit to an aquarium or an art gallery—these cost time not money.

We cling to our financial concerns as a way to avoid not only our art but our spiritual growth. Our faith is in the dollar. “I have to keep a roof over my head,” we say. “Nobody’s going to pay me to be more creative.”

All too often we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money. This is never an authentic block.

One of my friends is a world-famous artist…Nonetheless this is an artist suffering in the throes of artistic anorexia…Because he has denied himself luxury. Let me be clear the luxury I am talking about here has nothing to do with penthouse views, designer clothes, zippy foreign sports cars, or first-class travel. This man enjoys all of these privileges, but what he doesn’t enjoy is his life…Recently, I bought myself a horse for the first time in a decade.

Famously, one can buy a horse with time, and a ticket to the museum, the aquarium, the theater, these are matters of self-care and have nothing to do with money.

Cameron’s inability to see two feet beyond her own nose is clear throughout The Artist’s Way—and it doesn’t only have to do with money. Julia Cameron hates your friends. She constantly calls them blocked artists, says that they are trying to tear you down, asks you to make lists of people you should abandon. Nobody can be genuinely selfless, Cameron thinks:

Bent on being good husbands, fathers, mothers, wives, teachers, whatevers, they have constructed a false self that looks good to the world and meets with a lot of worldly approval. This false self is always patient, always willing to defer its needs to meet the needs or demands of another. (What a great guy! That Fred gave up his concert tickets to help me move on a Friday night…”)

The best thing for one’s artistry, Cameron claims, is to always follow your own wants and whims. Sacrifice is fraudulent, helping your friends is never artistically fulfilling. In this way, she tells on herself and rationalizes all her psychotic actions: whether this is issuing “death threats” to her children when they interrupt her art1 or going no-contact with her friends for being boring. If this book is good, it’s because of these elements of Cameron’s psyche—and her psyche is Jackson Pollocked across the pages of The Artist’s Way. Cameron never ceases to surprise you, whether it’s with her complexes around criticism (Cameron says a teacher insulting your art is a betrayal on the level of a parent’s sexual abuse and calls it “emotional incest”); her feelings about food and the body (she is constantly calling food an anti-artistic numbing agent or comparing artist’s block to anorexia); or her thoughts about addiction.

Julia Cameron is a recovering alcoholic who spent a good amount of time in AA and then decided to make a sort of AA of her own: The Artist’s Way’s 12 weeks are clearly meant to mirror the 12-step program. But in case you didn’t pick up on this, Cameron is always ready to remind you that artistic discontent is an addiction—though the comparison is clunky and nonsensical. Cameron writes:

Ordinarily when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. We give up alcohol, drugs, sugar, fats, caffeine, nicotine—and we suffer a withdrawal. It’s useful to use a creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energies back into our own core.

Clearly Cameron has not thought through the central metaphor of her book. If it is only useful to think about creativity as a withdrawal if we reinvent the English language, then what is the point of thinking about creativity as withdrawal at all—aside from Cameron’s seeming obsession with viewing artistic lack as addiction. This obsession serves a particular function in Cameron’s book, as Cameron views anyone thinking her stupid book is stupid as a sort of artistic relapse, a thing to be discounted. She speaks on this numerous times:

This choppy growth phase [brought about by The Artist’s Way] is followed by a strong urge to abandon the process and return to life as we know it. In other words, a bargaining period.

If you think this sounds stupid or that you will never be able to afford the time, identify that reaction as resistance. You cannot afford not to find time for artist dates.

You are likely to find yourself avoiding your artist dates. Recognize this resistance as a fear of intimacy—self-intimacy.

If this still sounds airy fairy to you, ask yourself bluntly what next step you are evading. What dream are you discounting as impossible given your resources? What payoffs are you getting for remaining struck at this point in your expansion?

The dynamic between Cameron and her readers is a tense one. Throughout The Artist’s Way it is implied that an artist can do no wrong, that critics are bitter and jealous and are to be discounted completely.2 But, while Cameron views her readers as artists, she also seems to view us as potential critics of her art, which leads to a volatile push and pull. You can do no wrong unless you insult Cameron’s transformative book and then you’re just a cynic, a blocked artist refusing to take the next step in their artistic journey.

AA’s effect on The Artist’s Way is patently obvious, as AA encourages participants to be God-fearing, dogmatic, and, most importantly, to subscribe to an ethic of personal responsibility—a common critique of AA, as the program encourages participants to feel guilty for the program’s failings. In a 2015 NPR interview, journalist Gabrielle Glaser says of AA,

It causes people to blame themselves for failing and, consequently, spending more time in the program feeling worse about themselves. Families also blame their loved ones if they don’t do well or if they drop out rather than realizing that AA might not be the best approach.

Much like Cameron, it seems that AA enthusiasts are unable to conceive of a reality where their program doesn’t work for somebody. Instead, it’s easier to blame the participant, to preemptively say that if you relapse it’s an issue of character, an issue of spirituality.

Cameron doesn’t only believe in a Western God (or Good Order and Direction). Throughout the book, she invokes Eastern practices, whose popularity in America emerges from 20^th century rejections of Western materialism, though she does her best to combine the two. In The Artist’s Way, Cameron compares doing morning pages to Hatha Yoga and physical exercise to Zen Buddhism, although she draws the line at condoning meditation as this is something Westerners use to “bliss out and render ourselves high but dysfunctional. We lose our grounding, and with it our capacity to act in the world.” While The Artist’s Way claims that meditation makes us lose our grounding, there are things which leave you far more divorced from reality—namely, being Julia Cameron.

Despite everything, though, The Artist’s Way continues to gain popularity. Maybe, this is because in some ways Cameron’s thoughts are prescient, particularly in her deployment of therapy speak, a very 2020s, TikTok phenomenon. Therapy speak takes something legitimate—in this case, the recognition of declining American mental health—and turns it into an identity marker and a way to fuel one’s self-obsession, so of course Cameron uses it constantly to encourage selfishness:

Your artist child needs to be taken out, pampered, and listened to.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artistic abuse.

The process of identifying a self inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change.

As our artist’s protective parent, we must learn to place our artist with safe companions. Toxic playmates can capsize our artist’s growth.

This language serves to stroke our egos, to set us apart from and above other people. This is not uncommon in therapy speak, as the misuse of concepts like boundaries, toxicity, and gentle parenting can encourage us to pamper and focus on ourselves and leave our friends and family by the wayside. Julia Cameron is the perfect avatar for ignoring the wants and needs of others. She urges us to be selfish and encourages readers to think of non-artists as NPCs—another phenomenon that she seems to have been ahead of the curve on.

In The Artist’s Way, art is not something you do, it’s something you are. Cameron can’t see any value in a person who doesn’t want to be an artist—to her these people have a spiritual deficit, are lying to themselves, and are conniving to destroy your confidence, to bring you with them into their pit of godless despair:

If [your friends] are having trouble with your recovery, they are still getting a payoff from remaining blocked. Perhaps they still get an anorectic high from the martyrdom of being blocked or they still collect sympathy and wallow in self-pity. Perhaps they still feel smug thinking about how much more creative they could be than those who are out there doing it. These are toxic behaviors for you now.

As a reminder, Cameron’s idea of “recovery” involves cutting off all friends who you find boring, who you think are below you, who critique your art. It involves locking yourself away from your family, spending most of your time alone, refusing to help those close to you because this doesn’t aid your artistry. In an activity later on in the book, Cameron asks her readers to cut seven strips from a piece of paper and write down what she calls The Deadlies, addictions which artists use to avoid their craft: alcohol, drugs, sex, work, money, food, and family/friends. It’s no surprise that Cameron sees family and friends as an addiction; she seems to isolate herself more and more throughout the pages of The Artist’s Way, digging herself further and further into artistry as an identity as the book goes on.

There’s no discounting that this book does work for people—I have no doubt that some of the self-aggrandizing stories Cameron tells are true. However, it seems that the most helpful part of The Artist’s Way is not only trite but could be reduced to a sentence: write three-pages every day and never look at them again. Everyone I’ve talked to about Cameron’s book mentions the morning pages as the essential component of their journey. But Julia Cameron doesn’t own journaling, you are welcome to do that without reading 200 pages of insanity. My advice to those considering reading The Artist’s Way: read it all in one go, you’ll get a kick out of it. But, if you’re going to follow Cameron’s 12-week program for artistic recovery just try to remember that the people around you (yes, even the non-artists) are not a part of some cabal trying to undermine you and destroy your art. Despite Julia Cameron’s claims to the contrary, by cutting off your friends and family you are not setting a boundary or pampering your artist child. You’re just being selfish.

The Artist’s Way
Nonfiction by Julia Cameron
TarcherPerigee, 1992 (Publisher’s Site)

DJ Sandler is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is currently working on his first novel. Follow him on Substack.

MORE FROM DJ SANDLER

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from an artist who has earned our respect and affection. Today we offer three poems from Finnish poet Teemu Helle, translated by .

THE FAIR

The coffee-pouring angel
has ragged, sooty wings.
The sudden storm
dropped the angel from the sky
straight into the factory smokestack. Then
it swore to never again
agree to night flights.

“In the name of the father, the son, and nepotism,”
sang the cardinal from the Wall Street Journal’s
holy texts. After that we voted
for a new pope, for winter dividends,
for the indulgences that would get us to heaven.

On break the angel noted, to its horror,
that not even holy water removed the soot.
It was as if someone in the darkness
had written on its back with a finger.

DOMESTICATION

A man sat on the cafe terrace
face turned to the sun.
At his feet a shiny-coated dog
gnawed with concentration on a shinbone.

The waiter’s tray held
a different kind of life,
round and brightly distinct.
The dog abandoned his bone and began to beg.

“Could I get you anything else?”
asked the wind along the boulevard.
The man took the sunglasses from his eyes
without saying anything

handed them to the dog, closed his eyes
and began to pant.

AWARENESS

I sit in my work room
reading a book on the scholastics
when something stings my neck—

I smack it; death
for this crime
is the right punishment.

The whining laughter just
will not stop.
Is it you?

The words echo off the walls
like something grand about
to take flight.

TEEMU HELLE is the author of eight collections of poetry in Finland; work in translation has appeared in or is forthcoming from *Plume*, *The Massachusetts Review*, *RHINO*, *Cordite Poetry Review*, *The Los Angeles Review*, *Modern Poetry in Translation*, *Solstice Literary Magazine*, *Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine*, and elsewhere.

NIINA POLLARI translated Tytti Heikkinen's poetry collection *The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal* (Action Books). She is also the author of two poetry volumes, *Dead Horse* (2015) and *Path of Totality* (2022). Her new collection, *Risk Tolerance*, will be out with Autofocus Books in early 2027.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

So we thought: hey, why not run a bunch of the Discordites through a gauntlet of sex letters by famous writers and artists and see what everybody thinks? Let’s begin!

Charles Bukowski

I love you, your pussy hairs I felt with my fingers, the inside of your pussy, wet, hot, I felt with my fingers; you, up against the refrigerator, you have such a wonderful refrigerator, your hair dangling down, wild, you there, the wild bird of you the wild thing of you, hot, lewd, miraculous.

Gwen Aube: Oh the Bukowski one is cute!

: I think the sudden focus on the fridge is a nice touch, a coy little tease. The repetitiveness has this throbbing, driving quality to it that I think makes it kinda sexy. No thesaurus in sight, it’s simple crude Saxony. I think that in English the shorter, simpler words of Germanic origin tend to outscore the ostentatious, flowery Latinate words every time when it comes to sex talk. “Fuck me harder, daddy” is always going to be hotter than “fornicate me rigorously, father.”

: The fridge line is good in a poem. In a fuck letter, you’re kinda tipping your hand that what you’re doing is at least a bit of a put-on / performance. Though if you’re Bukowski and you’re getting laid, probably it is because she is turned on by your Great Writerness, so she’s probably gonna roll with it even if she rolls her eyes first.

Andrea Finlay: It does read as a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there’s also something to being so horny you start having thoughts like that, the fridge thing. I can relate to that. The other reading is that in the heat of the moment your thoughts are racing and your attention is temporarily diverted to the refrigerator, and yeah, at the peak of ecstasy the fridge really does look like the most wonderful fridge you've ever seen.

Sire: While that’s a great exegesis of the text, I don’t really buy it as true spontaneity—that’s the type shit I do writing horny because I can’t help showing off, and I don’t think Bukowski can shut that impulse off either. It’s an overall great sex letter though, the type a woman keeps even if she decides not to fuck you again and has to explain to her grandkids when they find it folded in her jewellery box.

: I like that he gets a little cutie patootie pilled near the end. I think that really good sex writing is always about the melding of “you are an eminently fuckable meat-object that gives me an erection” and “the way you laugh makes me understand why I haven’t killed myself yet.” The hairy pussy / wild bird of it all.

Gwen: Yeah the balance between erotic wild charge and sweet vulnerability is good writin’.

Sire: No one who sexts this good is gonna be there in the morning, unfortunately.

Gustav Flaubert

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports… When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

Eris: [Roger Ebert impression] I think that bit about gorging you until you faint and die is commanding, direct, not really all that wordy by 19th-century standards. Flaubert wasn’t one to waste a word, and here he lines it all up and delivers. I think this does the job.

Gwen: [referring to Eris] Bataille-ass motherfucker, that’s crazy.

Sire: [flexing his recent French course] In French it’s more like Je souhaite te garder dans une cage pour t’empêcher de te lécher l’arrière-train, à la manière d’un jeune taureau. Ensuite, je te nourrirai de protéines jusqu’à ce que tu sois gorgé de sperme grâce à mon pénis qui t’impressionne.

Tara: “Gorge” not a hot application of that word here imo, “all joys of the flesh” also too vague. Pass!

Sire: If there’s a flaw in it, it’s in that midsection about Flaubert’s fantasy of being the world’s best lay, which somewhat distracts from the force of his ardour—he wants to prove his skill like an athlete. I absolutely love the dry bones quivering line, but this is another one where it tells you more about how the guy sees himself than what he feels for his lover.

Eris: The midsection is certainly its weakest part, although I’m not against aggrandizing in sexting. Sometimes you’re trying to sell a fantasy of yourself during sexting or sex—I think part of being a dom, for instance, is playing the part of someone commanding and powerful who isn’t necessarily who you actually are in your day-to-day life.

Sire: Sure, but “I want you to be amazed by me” actually reveals the wimpiness of the guy. A dom would say, “You will be amazed by me,” or just say what he’s going to do and trust that the sub will pick up on how hot and impressive it is without him being like, “Oh just you wait till you see what I’ve got in store! I’m pretty sure you’ll like it!”

Eris: Focusing on the second order of things, of the desire to rather than just being, is definitely a weakness here.

Andrea: Okay, me though. “No worries if not though!”

Sire: In fairness, the construction might have a different connotation in French.

Gwen: But of course a moment must be paid to Joyce—

James Joyce

I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

Tara: Joyce is so GOATed for that I swear to God. I think that this is a level of down bad we should all aspire to. Especially because sex is gross due to bodies also being gross. And that’s a beautiful thing! I found this on the internet when I was like fourteen and it broke my brain. There is a bit of “little naughty farties” in everything I write.

Gwen: Don’t worry, it shows.

Tara: I feel like the apex of erotic wisdom and capacity is “I am going to prickfuck you arseways until I know the exact tenor and register of your farts.” That is peak male performance.

Sire: It’s obviously spectacular in its attention to detail and specificity. It kinda grosses me out in that it feels like the kind of horny I associate with people who would today spend a lot of their time wearing fursuits and saying things like “yay for cummies!” when someone nuts. I’m also not a quote “fart guy.” But good for them!

Eris: I feel bad that Joyce wrote one fart letter and became “the fart guy.”

Tara: If you’re not willing to potentially be “the fart guy” you’re not taking big enough risks in art or love.

Frida Kahlo

Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Sire: You get these kinda texts from a girl and you’re either heading over directly or getting a new ID and leaving the country.

Eris: You know what, I complained that Updike’s shit was too wordy, but this overcomes that hurdle. I think part of it is I just believe it so much more, it doesn’t have the unbearable self-impressed smugness that infects every single sentence Updike pens. I believe she wants to fuck him and not just herself.

Sire: Her rage letters also have incredible shit:

I am not afraid of pain and you know it. It is almost inherent to my being, although I confess that I suffered, and a great deal, when you cheated on me, every time you did it, not just with my sister but with so many other women. How did they let themselves be fooled by you? You believe I was furious about Cristina, but today I confess that it wasn’t because of her. It was because of me and you. First of all because of me, since I’ve never been able to understand what you looked and look for, what they give you that I couldn’t. Let’s not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you manage to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch? […]

That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace.

Good bye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you,

Your Frida

This is a god damn wrestling promo.

Eris: If a woman texted me this I would simply show my friends, say “this bitch is crazy,” and never respond out of fear for my life.

Macho Man Frida Kahlo:

Eris: Hahahaha.

Tara: Frida fucked so hard, man.

Sire: May I also submit—

???????

Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. Drink from me Love. I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I'll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. 'Dont spill a drop'. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.

Tara: Bitch, who is this? …and is he single?

Sire: RFK Jr.

Tara: Please tell me you’re joking.

Eris: With special thanks to .

Andrea: They’re calling him America’s most eligible disabled—worm in brain—bachelor.

Tara: I don’t want to live on this planet any more.

Andrea: Look, Tara you could definitely hit that, he obviously has a thing for much younger writers. The texts are one thing but imagine him struggling to whisper them to you?

Tara: I hate you. I don’t like knowing how much I would like sexting with RFK Jr.

Sire: In all fairness, I think he’s a good sexter. Every sext sounds awful if you don’t want to receive it, but if you are Down you want The Weird Stuff.

Andrea: I've definitely had sext conversations where like if they were leaked I would have no choice but to immediately lock myself in a Cybertruck and set off 800 fireworks.

Tara: Yeah, that’s also why the fart one is so great. I heard a ProDomme talk about how like half of domming is just finding out what someone is insecure about and then approving of it. I believe there is a parallel with the move of: identify something specific/mundane/kind of yucky about lover and then put it in mouth.

Sire: What you want is for your lover correspondent to be so next level horny for you that they make activities that are pretty normal sound like they should be recriminalized. RFK also does some good stuff with his diction there that really sells what people tend to fantasize about with older men specifically, which is basically this sense that they are Of Another Time and have some sort of access to a richer vein of horn than the men of your own cohort. I love that construction “I mean to flow through you”; it sounds like how a samurai expresses his intentions or some shit.1 You’re about to get railed in a manner that was last seen depicted on an ancient vase.

Gwen: Okay [ABOUT TO BE CANCELLED POET’S NAME REDACTED], chill out.

Eris: I want to turn our attention to one of the Updike letters I didn’t get to in my review—

John Updike

I’ve fucked you twice out of four opportunities, which is a poor average but something to build on. It makes my cock un-scarey, at least. Not that a cock would frighten you. […] I think a mayonnaise jar might be inhibiting. I went to bed at eight last night, woke up at 3:15, after some deliberation (who am I saving myself for? I asked myself) jerked off a fully-developed hard-on day’s worth of sperm, all of it spilled into you, travelling at the rate of 14,000 miles per second. Fell asleep until 7. If you had been here wouldn’t have slept nearly so well.

Eris: Having read through this book of letters, I’ve gotta say, Updike really needs to stop apologizing for his erectile dysfunction. It comes up in more than half of his sex letters. Wolcott in his review takes time to boast on Updike’s behalf about how he had had a threesome with “a pair of Australian roommates” but at this rate I can’t imagine he did anything with them other than mope and pull rope. Like, man, if it’s that bad there’s other things you can—of course, this is a guy who also admitted he couldn’t find the clit, so...

Sire: If he’d have shut up for half a second maybe it would’ve finally found him.

We’re actually pretty interested in reader input here—what’s hot dirty talk look like? What do you think of these excerpts? Got any other writer sex letters that come to mind? Let us know in the comments.

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF BUKOWSKI:

My fixation faded with age and eventually collapsed beneath my discovery of the pedophile allegations. Wacko Jacko? I often thought to myself. That’s the old me. But then Michael happened.

As one would expect, the Michael “alleged pedophile” Jackson biopic has been fraught with controversy. The film is less a celebration of his music and more an attempt to increase the waning Jackson family fortunes, and the Jackson estate has been accordingly accused of attempting to sanitize their loved one’s image. And I had to watch it. Sorry. I wanted to see Michael Jackson keke with Quincy Jones. But instead of sanitization, I discovered something much stranger. Jackson is depicted as a toy- and zoo animal-obsessed, socially stunted Peter Pan acolyte whose talents and riches completely insulate him from criticism from his personal and professional circles. Michael somehow makes the pedophile allegations even easier to believe.

How did they let this get made? I yelled at my loved ones. As they did not know, I descended again down the Michael Jackson rabbit hole. And thus, I discovered Living with Michael Jackson.

Living with Michael Jackson is a documentary produced by British journalist Martin Bashir. Though it was released in 2003—nine years after Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family over molestation allegations—Living with Michael Jackson devastated Jackson’s career. But I was long unaware of Living with Michael Jackson because upon its release, I wasn’t at an age where I could make memories, much less witness a pedophile try to salvage his good name. Thus, I watched it on a Saturday night while I ate mixed greens out of a bag.

Living with Michael Jackson begins with Jackson explaining to Bashir that his songs are delivered to him by God.1 Bashir asks Jackson to do a little dance. Jackson says “I’m shy” and then breaks out moves that would make the average person slip a disc. We then move to Neverland Ranch’s enormous grounds, wherein Jackson further proves his fitness via climbing his “Giving Tree.” He describes “water balloon fights and climbing trees” as his favorite activities, prompting Bashir to ask whether he prefers making love instead. Shortly after, we are entreated to Jackson breaking down in tears as he remembers being beaten by his father’s electric cords.

Act II. Bashir follows Jackson to Las Vegas, wherein Jackson has rented out seven hotel suites and filled them with mannequins, arcade games, and a mobility scooter which Jackson rides up and down the halls late at night. Jackson tells Bashir that while on the road as a child, he would feign sleep while his brothers had sex with groupies in the same room. They go to the casino, where Bashir watches Jackson spend five million dollars in forty-five seconds. Jackson recounts his childhood self’s humiliation over his appearance. He reminisces about the birth of his children: Prince had a big head like Joe Jackson, who the child is clearly not biologically related to; immediately after Paris entered the world, Jackson dragged her home covered in blood. As to when Paris next saw her mother? Jackson can’t remember.

Act III: Berlin. Bashir visits Jackson just after he has dangled Blanket from a hotel balcony. Jackson is in a manic state, speaking of “poor Princess Diana” and hugging sobbing fans who scream “fuck the press.” He wants to see the gorillas, so he subjects his children to perilous crowds at the zoo. In response to public backlash to the Blanket balcony incident, Jackson argues he was just giving the fans what they wanted: a look at his son. When Bashir points out that the fans could not see Blanket’s face, Jackson says “they got to feel his spirit.” Then, whilst ranting about how he would never harm a child, Jackson shakes and forces a bottle into Blanket’s mouth.

Act IV: Neverland Ranch Revisited. Jackson gives a hand-in-hand interview with Gavin Arvizo, a twelve-year-old boy whom he insinuates he cured of cancer. He defends their regular sleepovers with this infamous quote:

Why can’t you share your bed? That’s the most loving thing…to share your bed with someone.

I don’t remember what happened next, because after this scene I momentarily lost my mind. But the film ends with Act V: Miami, where Bashir lights a fire under Jackson’s ass. To no avail: Jackson will not be shaken. When Bashir questions Jackson about why he has white children, Jackson states that “Black people were called colored people because we come in all colors.”

Jackson states that Debbie Rowe, Prince and Paris’s mother, gave him children “as a gift.” He offers conflicting answers about his relationship to Blanket’s mother. He says he has sleepovers with children to heal them. He says that “if somebody announced all kids are dead, I’d jump off the balcony. I’m done.” And he pulls the ol’ Bella Hadid: he only touched his nose! That cleft in his chin? Puberty. God’s will. He has one word for those who think differently: “ignorant.”

Living with Michael Jackson initially reminded me of Kanye West, another musical genius made insane by the white world from which he both sought approval and wished to dominate. At times, Jackson found solace in his blackness, particularly at NAACP awards ceremonies where he could make allusions to getting lynched and insinuate his legal struggles were equivalent to Brown v. Board of Education. Simultaneously, Jackson sought to escape his race via modeling his physicality after a Peter Pan-esque innocence and a Superman-esque masculinity: an interpretation of the self derived from whiteness and cartoons.

But as I listened to Jackson speak about his upbringing, I realized he sounded like my paternal aunt Susan. My father’s family grew up on Chicago’s South Side, just across the state border from Jackson’s hometown of Gary, Indiana. Like the Jacksons, they were forced into adulthood from the womb by their impoverished circumstances—and by my grandfather, from whom abuse was rife. I could easily imagine the sacrifices required of the Jackson siblings to ascend from this environment and the sheer talent—particularly on Jackson’s behalf—that made this escape possible. And thus, I understood why Jackson’s monstrous turn was enabled by everyone in his vicinity. Nobody wanted to touch the golden goose.

In college, I dated many golden geese: football players. Preternaturally gifted, these men carried their entire families’ hopes on their shoulders. Their physical blessings rendered moot the expectation that they learn how to read, write, socialize, or take care of themselves. All that mattered was reaching the NFL. And thus, like Jackson, they reached adulthood completely stunted.

My peak was the NFL player whose team recruited him whilst knowing he had a severe substance abuse problem. Thus, they’d drug test him weekly, and he’d fulfill his cravings by driving around the city blackout drunk. Once, after he passed his probation period, he locked me in his house. It had no food, but it was filled with video games, Jesus Juice and weed. Neverland Ranch? More like Neverland Condominium. This man was his parents’ meal ticket. He is still in the NFL and gets passed to a new team every season.2 When Mr. NFL wasn’t cutting it, I deigned to date a few Division 1 players. One of them assaulted me with a body scarred by bullet grazes: scars he acquired at fourteen years old. Another assaulter, who as a child frequently attended his father’s dog fighting ring, stalked me for years and was suspended from his university team for beating his girlfriend. His current NFL base pay is one million dollars per year.

Jackson was no flash-in-the-pan football player nor rapper-turned-slavery apologist, and unlike my family, he aimed to ascend far beyond the middle class. But Jackson’s story is a particularly grotesque mutation of a thoroughly common dynamic. Jackson’s childhood was shaped by racism, economic precarity and violence: all factors that engender current and future abuse. As his talent presented a potential escape route, his family curated his professional skillset to the detriment of his personal growth; his arrested development was both worsened and further enabled by the lecherous industry to which Jackson’s success granted him increasing access.

Jobs that fall within the remit of celebrity and athletic stardom are but cogs in massive, exploitative, and largely white-helmed enterprises. But to many, these careers present the only obvious ladder out of circumstances that will kill them young anyways. And when one successfully and maladaptively climbs up that ladder—bringing family and professional associates along for the ride—who around them will ever rein them in?

Throughout Living with Michael Jackson, Jackson sports busted wigs, Shane Dawson makeup, and fingernails that reveal a severe drug problem, though his alternating mania and drowsiness do more than enough heavy lifting. Flat on his ass off benzos, Jackson can barely explain to Bashir the charitable intricacies of sleeping with children without falling asleep himself. Jackson should not have been allowed within ten thousand feet of the world-renowned British asshole. But he was enamored by Bashir’s Princess Diana interview, likely saw himself a similar victim, and wanted his redemption moment. He didn’t have the self-awareness to realize being serially cheated on by the world’s most famous inbred was not comparable to his settling a child molestation case out of court that he likely would’ve otherwise lost. And at that point in his career and wealth, I doubt anyone in his orbit could have realistically changed his mind.

This culture of delusion and enablement is how Living with Michael Jackson and Michael got made. Jackson acted a pedophile before Bashir because for years, nobody in his circle truly addressed how his behavior looked to outsiders, much less held him accountable for what he was allegedly doing to children—and they were likely also deluding themselves. But though Jackson himself starred in the clown show that was Living with Michael Jackson, he is not calling shots from the grave. His family is responsible for Michael. They willingly injected the hagiography with montages of him lurking around the children’s ward of the ICU. They willingly made him look like a pedophile. And I doubt they even realized it. Michael is the manifestation of his circle’s collective delusion. It is a work produced by sycophants whose grasp of reality has deteriorated after decades of turning a blind eye to their meal ticket’s misdeeds.

Jermaine Jackson, one of five of Michael Jackson’s less gifted brothers, said the following in 1984:

Even though Michael is very talented, a lot of his success has been due to timing and a little bit of luck. It could have been him, or it could as easily have been me.

Sure, Jermaine. But in a way, this statement was prophetic. Because though Michael Jackson was one of a kind, his arc would be that of any other court jester. He was plucked from obscurity and made monstrous by a system whose lights he kept on. And in repayment, the system and his beneficiaries did their best to relegate his sins to the dark. The delusion engendered by such a state of affairs allowed for disasters such as Living with Michael Jackson, in which Jackson acted a pedophile out of his own free will. But Michael is not dissimilar, and it has not been a disaster. Rather, it is sending the Jackson estate to new heights.

There is clearly still a reward for choosing not to see. As always, victims pay the heaviest price.

This piece originally ran May 21, 2026 on Hilde’s Visions. Subscribe now.

MORE HILDE ON DISCORDIA

Wolcott, an obviously slobbering fanboy, cannot see Updike for the absolute dunce that he was, describing him as someone “on whom nothing was lost.” Is that so? Because I can’t easily think of writers on whom more was lost. Hellen Keller, maybe? There are few topics that Updike has ever opined on in his work where he hasn’t gotten so completely lost in self-love that it prevented him from competently observing it. I mean, Christ, even women’s anatomy—I hate to harp on this now-infamous stretch from Witches of Eastwick, but c’mon:

…the bathroom door didn’t altogether close, due to the old frame of the house settling over the centuries, and she had to sit on the toilet some minutes waiting for the pee to come. Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through.

And keep in mind that women’s anatomy is a topic Updike literally could not stop thinking about, and his letters continue to prove it, as well as how continuously said anatomy’s “mysteries” thwarted him. Updike, someone “on whom nothing is lost,” expresses as much to Philip Roth:

…the changing shape of pussies [may be seen as] the single most quietly pivotal event of our times. What do women think about, while they studiously bend over their crotches, razor in hand, consulting the template of the newest high-thigh swimsuit cut?1

Hey John, since this question seems to be driving you absolutely crazy, have you tried just asking one? I walk into the room next to me. “Hey honey, what do you think about when you shave your pussy?” She looks at me perplexed. “Don’t slip.” There you go! Maybe if I’d told her that shaving her pussy is “the single most quietly pivotal event of our times” it would have given her more pause to think about how much more profound her thoughts ought to be as she participates in this moon-landing-level event. Wolcott seems to share the fascination, or at least scrambles to inherit it like a little brother receiving a sought-after potential hand-me-down. “If these two geniuses couldn’t figure it out, what hope for the rest of us?” …What? James! John! Just ask your fucking wives! Or your mistresses! Or literally any woman who will put up with you asking this inane fucking question! Are you retarded?

Updike did have a strange obsession with bush in particular. Flipping through my annotations in Witches of Eastwick, I find I’d honed in on sections like:

Alexandra, seeing their source in the thick black pubic bush which beneath the water seemed to sway back and forth almost like a penis

and

She liked to sit just as she was only on a chair and spread her legs so her bush felt all big and the curls of it glittery and let them just lap and kiss and eat. Hair pie, a boy she used to know in New York State called it.2

Looking through Updike’s letters myself, the obsession continues, with Updike literally sending letters to the Playboy editorial to thank them for sending him some magazines. And let me tell you, Updike does not “read it for the articles.”

Thanks so much for Oui. I feel better knowing that Henry Miller wanted one also. The difference (la difference?) must be the pussies; now that pubic hair has become as it were official, the average man has the chance to examine the amazing and tenderly monstrous variety of foliage hitherto known to only the most assiduous private collectors. I missed, in Oui, a redhead, with her piquant amber bush; a true blonde, I guess, is as hard to find as a four-leafed clover.

Anyway, I feel satisfied, if not sated.

Obviously, Updike was a chauvinist. It’s basically what is best known about him at this point. Dale Earnhardt drove cars, Michael Jordan balled, John Updike wrote stories about how women are tall children you have sex with. The plain open misogynists are always more readable than the chauvinists, because at least the plain open misogynists are rarely so irritatingly condescending. But even then, it’s easier to tolerate a habitual chauvinist like Vonnegut than Updike because at least, in most of Vonnegut’s best work, women (and men’s relationships with them) are not the focus, whereas in Updike they dominate the entire frame. But women’s minds are perpetually a mystery to Updike because he has simply never thought to ask them anything. And here’s the thing, I’m not even saying Updike has to like women, but he at least should have some faint understanding of them. I think even an unrepentant hater of woman like Bukowski ultimately spent a lot more time listening to what women said and thinking about how they felt than Updike did, and it’s the obvious imprecision that results in Updike’s work that makes it just so grating, to say nothing of how confidently he believes he understands his subject.

Wolcott speaks enviously (as well as endlessly) of Updike’s sex life, a banal preoccupation of both Updike’s readership and Updike himself. The updated terminology for someone like Updike, a slimy sex addict who frequented suburban wife-swapping parties and treated sex like a hobbyist treats model trains, would be “sex nerd,” a not particularly envious sort of loser. To the unhappily-married boomer jackoffs Updike attracts,3 the mere suggestion of having sex with someone other than your wife (let alone her having sex with someone other than themselves) is a prospect so erotic that it drives them mad, and they go on to write 6,000 word essays in the London Review of Books with barely-concealed erections just so they can tell us how hot it all is. This is smut for the 50+ male literary crowd. This is their “romantasy.” Updike, to his credit and in a rare moment of actually not allowing something to be “lost,” saw this fixation in his work under at least a somewhat furrowed brow: “I don’t know why I write about sex. It’s sort of a weakness.”4

Not that that stops a guy like Wolcott. Guys like him can’t get enough of it, it doesn’t register to them as “weakness” at all. Nearly half the piece (maybe more!) is dedicated to celebrating Updike’s prodigious fucking; Wolcott compiles a number of Updike’s saucier excerpts, including such lines as, “and how nicely you blow; my recalcitrant member just twitched at the memory,” and “my cock is yours—up or limp, your toy and acolyte and (sometimes timid) explorer,” and he seems impressed by what he’s reading (“what an operator”). There is almost nothing I can think of that is less sexy than Updike’s sex writing. Barring the revelations of at least some degree of incompetence (he writes to a lover of his failure to find the clitoris, a piece of anatomy that God designed as a glowing red button), Updike will write something like “the faint taste of your cunt in my mouth has become the most precious thing in the universe” when a simple “all I want to do is eat your pussy” would suffice. If you’re feeling really wordy, maybe call it a fucking pussy. As a rule of thumb, I think dirty talk is at its best when it aims for simplicity, because it demonstrates an animal precursor to rational thought, something that doesn’t have time to wax poetic too much—you can be a bit witty with it and playful, but it’s very easy to overdo it; it isn’t the time to be writing purple paeans to pussy. I suppose that’s just a personal thing. But what makes Updike such a painful over-writer to me is that he never understands when it is or isn’t appropriate to write in this register. Sometimes it feels like it’s the only register he’s got.

Anyways, I’ll leave you all with some other choice excerpts from the letters. You tell me if you think any of this is hot.

You ever menstruate? I haven’t met your period yet, but I must soon. How nice! I think I could drink your blood if you asked.

Beauty in your face, the way it opened and closed at the same time, when your cunt was entered; beauty in the wonderful bird-and-flower-expert’s way you would examine my prick; beauty in the way your naked body would slither in the guest bed

Though we’re in a hard place, between the first undressings, the first revelation (you taste good, like a labia should), and any sure shore of ease and frankness with the world.

Your fantasy of having some of my sperm to lace your tea makes me wish I was all cock—all cock, balls, and prostate gland—instead of being only a tiny fraction cock. You, in truth, are all cunt—your mouth is a cunt and your eyes invite me in and your whole being is as rosy if not as wrinkled as your very wonderful cunt.

…the day we said “Yes” to our various requests for oral contact; and your lovely blue letters arriving on the mail table in Adelaide; and the triumph of fucking you on my filthy floor through a virtually sleepless night and those prophetic physical inhibitations of mine at first…

I loved that black girl in The Tenants, with her miniskirt and tight cunt.5

A quick post-script, and maybe I’ll write more on this another time, but Updike’s best novel by far was his epistolic S., which does center a female POV character. What is most enduring about it is that his completely vapid bimbo of a protagonist just feels so colourful and natural for him as he writes out the contents of her vacuum head. Wonder why?

And, strangely, this is actually the second time a mid-twentieth century suburban male writer’s annoying letters have been something we’ve mocked (and also in which I refer a lot to an LRB article? weird):

More and more fashion brands are launching book clubs as well, and Chanel is even hosting “salons” now, and fuck, just look at this bag from Dior:

It goes further than fashion, even—Aesop now has its own “library.” What does that have to do with skincare? What is going on? It’s funny because chain bookstores like Indigo have been trying to rebrand as “cultural department stores,” trying desperately for years to pivot into being in the “lifestyle” lane, and now you have “lifestyle” brands pivoting into books. What is going on?

But I already told you what’s “going on” last time. In a world of instant exposure, very little can maintain a sense of cultural cachet. “Books” are the last bastion here because their absorption requires sustained attention, something which the public has in shorter and shorter supply, so unlike everything else books can remain “exclusionary” because they require skills that remain rare and become more and more rare all the time. Even avant garde films can be reduced to a series of images in the Meme Age, but books (helped along as well by the fact that they are not a visual medium) have a bit more resilience than that. Sure, books like Blood Meridian are being so hollowed out by memes that they’re practically jack-o-lanterns, but the process is slower, these things are less immediately digestible by the culture, like the wad of gum in your stomach according to urban legend.

But I don’t know if “literary culture” as a whole, the packaging around the books, has the same fortitude. Why the fuck is Marie Claire trying to tell me about the “Risky, Wild Fun of Launching a Literary Publication”? Why was a preview section of ’s Katabasis featured in Cosmpolitan? Why is People interviewing Ann Pratchett? Why is Vogue recommending Rachel Cusk’s Outline in their vacation fashion guide alongside a Prada bucket hat, and why is it that the only thing the editor who recommended it can say about it is “the shell on the cover of the first book makes it feel like a book made for summer”?

Did you read that interview with Zadie Smith in Harper’s? No, not Harper’s Magazine, silly, Harper’s BAZAAR. wants us to think this is cool or something, or at least has some precedent in literature. For instance:

For much of the 20th century, to be in Vogue was nearly as covetable as seeing your byline in the New York Review of Books. Joan Didion got her start at the magazine. (An essay she published as an entry-level staffer, “On Self-Respect,” is still widely circulated in writing courses and used as Instagram fodder.)

…Rachel, Didion was originally employed at Vogue to do merchandising copy. She did not seek the job out because it was a “coveted byline.” She often only got to do those editorials like “On Self-Respect” when other writers failed to submit their shit on time, and they were written specifically to fill space.

Perhaps younger writers simply have a more conflicted relationship with fashion. Clothing has largely disappeared from contemporary fiction

???? Rachel, what the fuck are you talking about? Tons of contemporary literary writers of all stripes talk a lot about clothing—Sheila Heti, Sally Rooney, , the aforementioned Cusk, these are all very popular writers who write about clothes a lot. Even Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal featured lengthy discussions of a whole wardrobe that was to me one of the book’s highlights (I’d certainly take it over the dull rehashing of Debord). And besides, is Virginia Woolf’s deep interest in clothing and fashion anything like Madeline Cash doing a marketing campaign for the fucking Gap???1 Rachel Tashjian? More like Hateable Trashcan!!!

…I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m just playin’, dawg. We cool.

I saw not long ago that Meredith Graves was doing a short story reading at some lit event in New York. Am I missing something? When did Meredith Graves become a writer? She was for like five minutes the frontwoman for one of the most exciting (or possibly just most hyped up) punk acts of the 2010s, and then I guess she wasn’t, and then she was going to be the top VJ for a “renewed MTV” that I don’t think happened, or maybe she was going to be their new Kurt Loder or something, but also she worked for Kickstarter, and now she’s kind of cottage-core and knits and doesn’t have short hair anymore, but I guess also she’s a writer. Really, the truth is Graves is “an influencer” but for people who would balk at the suggestion that they follow an influencer. Much like what someone like Kylie Jenner does for normies, that sort of lifestyle envy baiting, Graves does for people who used to pretend they didn’t shop at Urban Outfitters (like me, for instance). But now she does readings, which means, by virtue of Graves’s job as an influencer, “doing readings” is something her audience identifies with and wants to project on in their ideal life that they live vicariously through Graves. When she got into knitwear it was exactly when all the trendy girls I knew were starting to get into knitwear, and she’s gotten eerily close to flirting with trad-wife-ism (ironically that’s sort of what her song “Inheritance Fits” was about), so she’s sort of a weather vane for this kind of thing—last year she was the ambassador for the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. What the fuck? On the basis of fucking what? How does that make any sense?

Celebrities are taste-signaling all over the place. Lorde is talking up Annie Erneaux, Lady Gaga is reading Rilke. Hudson Williams of viral softcore gay porn series Heated Rivalry is calling Luigi Pirandello “the best thing ever of all time”! Do we even really believe any of these people? Do we believe all of them, at least? It was honestly kind of refreshing to hear Alison Oliver go on Inklings and blithely tell everyone with pride that she likes the unbearably cloying and uncool books of John Boyne, a man who has done so many stupid and hacky things in his career but we really need to highlight the time he read a recipe for an in-game item from The Legend of Zelda and thought an “Octorok” was a real animal. Like, yeah Alison, I bet you love that shit. I rather hear some well-meaning idiot earnestly express her appreciation for that drivel than hear another California vacuum-head with bad lip injections tell us all about smelly stupid hippy Olga Tokarczuk. You’ve never read The Books of Jacob! I don’t believe you!

It all puts a bad taste in my mouth. Doesn’t it put a bad taste in yours? Maybe this isn’t “bad” for literature, maybe it’s even “good,” but I’m nothing if not a natural cultural eschatologist. My intuition is telling me to run for shelter. I see bad omens everywhere. Indie bookstores are opening at an alarming rate, with 31% more opening in 2025 than in 2024, which is crazy. But surely we shouldn’t be alarmed. As one of Discordia’s biggest ops once suggested, big number = big good… right?

There will be a pop star novelist. Soon. I feel it in my bones. Rather than previous panned vanity novels from celebrities like Sean Penn’s Bob Honey (which we reviewed here) or Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden’s The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace, these brats won’t have the gall to do it themselves, they’re going to get some down-on-her-luck former Booker-finalist to write a novel for like… I dunno, Adam Levine? Dua Lipa? J Blavin??? It’s going to come out via New Directions or something, and people are going to talk about how “surprised they are” by “how actually good it is” and then we’re all sons of bitches.

We should have known it was all over when Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, catapulted to immediate supermodel stardom, and simultaneously launched a book club called Library Science and started telling everyone to read Eve Babitz. Though an even earlier omen was supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, well ahead of the trend, talking up her love of Madame Bovary. Emily’s always ahead of the fashion trends—like that time she wore those Bermuda shorts!

P.S. I do find it very funny these people all love Babitz so much. Like that one I absolutely believe they all love dearly—Babitz can be great at times, but though she’s a good writer—great, even—she’s still ultimately a vapid ninny, and it’s funny to see people like try to pretend in the intro to Slow Days, Fast Company like Babitz isn’t a bimbo. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t someone be a dumb bimbo? Eve’s a Bimbo Savant, let her be what she is. Maybe we can find a little hope in that for our culture, honestly.

OR CHECK THIS OUT:

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from an artist who has earned our respect and affection. Today we pay tribute to the great French poet Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960), translated by returning favourite William Vallières.

Taste of the Real

He steps on one foot, not knowing where to place the other. At the bend in the road, wind kicks up dust and his mouth opens, taking up all the space. 
	He begins to run, hoping to take off at any moment, but the curb is wet, and his flapping arms can’t help him. In his fall he understands he is heavier than his dreams. Since then, he adores the weight that made him drop. 

—1915

Memory

When it goes
when I finally go
over there
where daylight may also be possible
birds will call the dusk
just as they do here.

And when the wind smears 
the calm white peak of the mountain
we will find ourselves on the beach again
behind the strip of rock
with nothing before us.

A cloud ambles
a shout lets itself in the window
cypresses mount a barrier
to the salty air
our hair is not dry yet.

When we finally go
beyond and far away
someone will remain
to wait for us 
listening for our return
a single friend

the tree’s shadow we abandoned 
to loneliness.

—19491

For the Time Being

Life is simple and light
the bells have stopped tolling
the sun shines clearly into things
to finally reach
me and my rooms.

A bright single beam is enough
to jolt the house
the melody I sing is enough 
to talk suicides down
from the ledge.

The worst is 
I’m not a very good singer
I’m careless with the notes that fly
into the ears of others.

But I’m not crazy
I tell you
I’m laughing at the bottom of the stairs
before the sun-offering stoop
by the vines that have climbed up over the wall
like outstretched arms outstretched to everything. 

Today is the day I love you all. 

—1916

PIERRE REVERDY (born 1889 in Narbonnes, France) is widely acknowledged as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. The author of dozens of collections, including *Les Epaves du ciel* (1924), Reverdy was also a peer and inspiration to writers like Louis Aragon, Guillaume Appollinaire, André Breton, Paul Éluard and many in the Surrealist Movement. In his later years he lived a spiritual and quasi-monastic life near the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, where he died in 1960.

WILLAM VALLIÈRES' work has appeared in *The Walrus*, *The Fiddlehead*, *Grain*, *EVENT*, *Plenitude*, and *Best Canadian Poetry 2019*. Translations have appeared in *Contemporary Verse 2* and *The New Quarterly*. His first book of poetry, *Versus* (Vehicule Press), was published in 2019.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

As always, if we’re missing something, or you want your event included, please message @discordia.review on Instagram to propose an inclusion. Doing so in advance if you already know what’s up next month is even better.

2 AUGUST (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic. Vol. 142 is on the theme of “Romance” and features well-regarded Ottawa minimalist Cameron Anstee and local man-about-the-scene Kalden Rangdrol Dhatsenpa.1 (Computer, play “Romance is Boring” by Los Campesinos!)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Cameron and Kalden.
How Much: Free. (Link)

4 AUGUST (TUES)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring franco-anglo-glosso-gramophone artist Dolce Saint-Arnold and conceptual artist-cum-novelist Michael Eddy.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Dolce and Michael.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

5 AUGUST (WEDS)

TILLIE WALDEN: CHARITY AND SYLVIA LAUNCH
What: Eisner-winning Vermont-based cartoonist Walden drops by D&Q to launch her latest.
Where: Librarie Drawn & Quarterly (176 rue Bernard O).
When: 7pm.
Who: Tillie Walden, in conversation with Sina Queyras.
How much: Free. (Link)

PETER DUBÉ: HOVERING WORLD & AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA DOUBLE LAUNCH
What: A reissue of two early works by the veteran Montreal author, presented by the Violet Hour queer book club.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7pm.
Who: I already said!
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

6 AUGUST (THURS)

BLACKOUT #1 LAUNCH PARTY
What: 41 mags is too many? According to the editors of this new journal, 41 mags is three many… wait, no, I’ve changed the wrong bit there, something about 42 mags. Anyway this one’s for BIPOC people.
Where: Tessri Duniya Theatre. (251 ave des Pins O.)
When: Doors 6pm, open mic 7:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus some features from the first ish.
How Much: $12.06 (Link).

7 AUGUST (FRI)

THE OPEN BOOK MIC
What: Not a lit specific open mic (music and comedy are also permitted) so I’m not going to repeat this listing four times here, but know that it repeats every Friday till every angel gets its wings.
Where: Café Eevee (1251 Rue St-Zotique E).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

8 AUGUST (SAT)

THE PAGE #8 LAUNCH
What: It says something about This Economy and These People (art scene anglos, such as myself) that the launch of an issue on “hedonism” is a picnic in which people are invited to bring dep snacks to an outdoor potluck. If nothing else, given that this free MTL-and-London one-sheeter is largely distributed via a cafe and a pizza joint in Little Italy, I hope they’ve gone all-in on the concept: let the kids learn about felching and Brassard pussy via a word search! Let the front page splash be a sounding how-to. L.A.Y.L.A.H.
Where: Somewhere in Parc Jarry.
When: 6pm.
Who: Whoever.
How much: Free. (Link)

ONE LONG ONE AT CARMINE’S ROOM
What: Highly irregular reading series One Long One once again stocks the wastes of Villeray. They bring a lineup full of double-barreled names to a small gallery where artist Cindy Hill is exhibiting works.
Where: Carmine’s Room (7615 rue Berri).
When: 6pm.
Who: Ruth Webber-Juggoo, Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Michael Pace, Pascha Marrow, Emily Zuberec, and Rosemary Flutur.
How much: Free. (Link)

13 AUGUST (THURS)

CHIMERA OPEN MIC
What: NDG rise up. Your open mic is here.
Where: Librairie Phoenix (5928 rue Sherbrooke O).
When: Signups open at 6, show is from 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

16 AUGUST (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—this episode’s theme is REJECTION and features Kym Dominique-Ferguson and some Jack Daniel Christie character. (Computer, play “Awful Things” by lil peep.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, and then some.
How Much: Free. (Link)

17 AUGUST (MON)

DICK’S READING ROOM & COLLECTIVE LIBRARY: OPENING EVENT
What: Dick’s, the local independent trans library, gets a little room to stretch out this month with a popup at Articule from the 17th thru the 30th of this month (check the link below for specific daily hours). They’re soliciting zine donations from trans, NB etc. authors for this opening event.
Where: Articule (6282 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 3 to 7pm.
Who: Whoever has the zines, or wants to hang.
How Much: Free. (Link)

19 AUGUST (WEDS)

HIDDEN TEXT BRAND ACTIVATION THING
What: Can’t announce it yet, but we happened to overhear something about a “happening” at De Stiil booksellers later this month. Keep an ear out—and if you do drop by, remember you can snap up copies of Fellow Travellers No. 2 and No. 3, as well as Phil Hall’s The Hobo from the shop’s august shelves.
Where: De Stiil Booksellers (351 Duluth Ave E).
When: 3pm.
Who: Wouldn’t you like to know.
How much: Free.

22 AUGUST (SAT)

ONE LONG ONE: VOLUME 7
What: Highly irregular reading series One Long One drops a second time this month with a rather star-studded lineup at Galerie Eli Kerr. The next iteration will be either the following day or in 2028.
Where: Galerie Eli Kerr (4647 boul. St-Laurent).
When: 4 to 6pm.
Who: Kalale Dalton-Lutale, Nyla Matuk, Erín Moure, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Yassine Rachidi.
How much: Free. (Link)

23 AUGUST (SUN)

LEFT-WING BOOK SALE
What: Local leftist presses and booksellers gather for one of their occasional sales, this time over in Pointe Saint-Charles.
Where: Bâtiment 7 (1900 Rue le Ber).
When: 12 to 5pm.
Who: Various presses.
How Much: Free. (Event link)

30 AUGUST (SUN)

DICK’S READING ROOM & COLLECTIVE LIBRARY: CLOSING EVENT
What: Dick’s, the local independent trans library, gets a little room to stretch out this month with a popup at Articule from the 17th thru the 30th of this month (check the link below for specific daily hours). Details TBD on this closing event, but it’ll be a reading and fundraiser for Metonymy Press.
Where: Articule (6282 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: TBD
Who: TBD
How Much: ? (Link)

And looking ahead to August…

We’ll get there when we get there.

As one of Canada’s Leading Voices™ in the war against creative writing programs, I am going to shock and disappoint my frothing readership by asserting that, rather than embracing the cathartic demand that these programs be demolished entirely, I think a viable and even preferable alternative may be the (very) radical reformation of the system.

My proposals are as follows.

1. Decouple “creative writing programs” from universities.

This one is the most fundamental and the most non-negotiable. I don’t think academics are without their use in society (though they require their own structural reforms), but literature academics and writers need to be kept as far apart as church and state ought to be. “But Eris, you’re a writer and you’re literally married to an English lit academic”—yes, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. Ideally, however, never the twain should meet, as it is bad for both disciplines; it is poor academic integrity for an academic discipline to so deeply tie itself to the object of its study, and too much academic influence malnourishes fiction.

It doesn’t help that contemporary-ish trends in English literary scholarship are a race to the bottom in terms of inane, picayune bullshit—from the resurgence of the Benjaminian “flâneur” (yo, ever think about how people walk around????), to “domesticity” (yo, ever think about how people be doing shit at home????), to “hospitality” (yo, ever think about letting somebody into your house????), to the now much-parodied “bodies” in “spaces” (yo, ever think about uhhhhhhh), these yawn-inducing clichés of analysis should especially be kept as far away from the process of actual literary creation as possible. The fact that many universities with a creative writing department treat it as a sidecar to their literature departments only compounds the problem.

This is to say nothing of the problem of housing an art institution under the auspices of an often corrupt corporate institution tied to the bourgeois state, or that most of these programs were created by the CIA and its equivalent allies across the bourgeois West.

2. De-professionalize.

The MFA system has turned creative writing degrees into a professional degree for a professional “career”—this is especially true in countries like Canada (where your intrepid reporter resides), as the broad institutional support in this country for homegrown art has been turned into a self-legitimating system of petty arts bureaucrats, and more and more of the arts scene seems to be infested with apple-polishing ladder-climbers more interested in advancing said “careers” via compulsive elbow-rubbing nepotism rather than by, you know… “getting better at writing.” Writing should not be seen as a “career” and you should not be looking to “get somewhere” with it, it’s a pursuit for its own sake. Certain magazines here in Canada (Yolk being the most obvious example where I am in Montreal in particular) were effectively forged in the fires of this career-forward attitude by students from these programs who had digested this ideology, and you can tell because they have SquareSpace websites that look very “professional” but also look like they’re a start-up trying to sell you some new kind of menstrual cup or something. When you hear these people talk about “creative writing” like some kind of white-collar career path, does it excite you? Is that why you got into writing? Is that what you want your creative life to look like? Being some neutered professional “Creative”? Some Yuccie? Fuck. That.

Real creative writing “schools” should emerge out of collectives and movements, with the aim of advancing art and not “careers.” Again, proximity to formal institutions like universities can only pollute this goal more and more over time with their bourgeois and increasingly neoliberal sensibilities. Creative writing “schools” should be largely informal, community-driven projects.

3. Kill the focus groups.

Workshops in creative writing programs are extremely destructive. The principal problem here is that a creative writing workshop is just a random selection of people who happened to be admitted to a university program—these are not peers chosen out of respect for their work or shared principles, these are a random cross-section of society who will judge your work like a focus group. Even “strong-willed” writers will be affected by this after three to four years, whether they’re aware of it or not, and it will work to sand the edges off of your work because the workshop rewards appealing to the workshop “as a whole.” But more rewarding writing is work which is divisive, and springs forth from a place of obsessive need from the artist in question—what one of Discordia’s members refers to essentially as the “Poetics of Retardation.”

In 2005, Rick Moody penned the essay “Writers and Mentors” in The Atlantic, in which he complained about this very “focus group”-oriented approach, and compared it unfavourably to the Socratic-style mentorship model (like Moody, the most important thing I got from my own sojourn in a cw program was a good mentor).1 This is how a “creative writing program” ought to be structured: with mentorship as its prime goal. “Mentors” so-defined should be able to both encourage and challenge their students to come to not only refine their work but refine what they believe and what they wish to express through said work—to find their “Retardation” to return to my colleague’s terminology.

This mentorship should be the primary “selling point” of such “schools,” and students should choose organizations based on the “faculty” they would like to mentor them. Besides, why enter a “program” just so you can spend most of your time being critiqued by other young writers with no more experience than you have? You might as well post your writing on fucking Reddit, and I wouldn’t suggest that either. Your “peers” with whom you share your unfinished work and whose opinions you seek should be those you choose yourself because you respect them and their work, not people who just happen to occupy a seat next to you in class.

4. Embrace an aesthetic.

Each creative writing “school” should be organized around shared artistic principles and choose its mentors accordingly. They should have defined sets of goals, and students should choose the “schools” whose goals speak to them.

A lack of ideologues is one of the greatest existential problems facing the arts today, and is tied to what I have previously termed “aesthetic nihilism,” something I plan to explore in greater depth on its own at a later point. Organizations should emerge not out of some nebulous desire to “teach writing” in the abstract—something writers have never needed and have managed without for millennia—but, instead, they should emerge to advance aesthetic agendas, ones which may arise to challenge others or be challenged themselves. Western art must escape from nihilism and pastiche and become wilfully dialectical once more, and you can read more about Discordia’s stance on this here:

So there you go. These systems should emerge out of writing collectives and movements, and not

By this definition of “creative writing” program perhaps Discordia should establish its own amateur “school.”

Scribbling this out very quickly as I’ve been very busy. Hope this has been at all coherent, as it was something I was literally thinking about in the shower. But I’m trying to go back to embracing “quick work” on this blog anyhow—not necessarily work I consider “low effort” but work I think meets the expectations of a “traditional blog,” i.e. “charmingly” less polished.

Toodles.

“Stone Cold” Steve Austin was a wifebeater. Bret “Hitman” Hart was a serial philanderer. “Big Poppa Pump” Scott Steiner tried to gouge out the eyes of a widely-beloved coworker, Diamond Dallas Page, during a backstage altercation. Jerome “New Jack” Young severed two arteries in the forehead of an untrained 17-year-old kid with a surgical scalpel during a match, nearly killing him. Cash Wheeler of All Elite Wrestling allegedly pulled a gun on a guy during a highway altercation. According to her mother, “Sweet” Stan Lane of the Midnight Express might be Republican congresswoman and gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert’s long lost father.

All of that stuff is real (except, probably, the Boebert thing), yet wrestling fans still love those guys. Meanwhile, the death of 71-year-old Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, arguably the biggest professional wrestling star of all time, in 2025 was marked by relatively muted tributes. These wan celebrations are reflective of Hogan’s dwindling stature within an industry he once defined. The last time the former 12-time world champion appeared on live WWE television, in January 2025, it was to celebrate a $5 billion broadcast deal between the company he’d helped build into a global behemoth and streaming giant Netflix: he was viciously booed throughout the segment by the 18,000-strong crowd at Inglewood, California’s Intuit Dome. In the wake of his death six months later, some publications openly wondered if any on-air remembrances by his former employer would be met with a similarly hostile reception.

There is always a sort of moral relativism at play in the way a fandom judges the sins of its idols. Wrestling fans are certainly well-accustomed to looking the other way when their favourites behave badly outside of the ring. Depending upon one’s own personal hierarchy of harmful behaviours, it would be easy to argue that Bollea’s various offences were of lesser severity than those of Austin or New Jack. And yet his transgressions clearly have a uniquely galling quality for how precisely they seem to poke at our collective resentments of the wealthy, the undeserving, the shameless grifters. The most instructive aspect of Hogan’s downfall is what it tells us about the changing values of contemporary fans—and of our endless broader culture war.

Hingeing an essay on the assertion that “[insert person/idea/thing] is America” is the sort of wobbly trope that would result in an instant D- on an undergraduate essay, but in the 1980s, that’s how Hogan was sold to the world by the WWE (then the WWF) and its architect Vince McMahon. Strutting to the ring to the tune of Rick Derringer’s “Real American” at a billed (and real-ish) 6’7, 300 pounds, the Hulkster was physically larger and stronger than most of the monstrous, often colourfully foreign heels he battled. But he was also greater of soul. By their nature, wrestling matches tell simple stories, and Hogan’s formula was simpler than most: first, Hulk dominates with basic punches, kicks, and slams; inevitably, his opponent cheats to gain an advantage and beats on the champion, subjecting him to a litany of painful holds and rule-bending blows. Hulk eventually draws on the passion of the crowd to fire up, shrug off the heel’s offence, and win with his signature big boot and leg drop combo. Despite Hogan’s agonized pantomime as he endured the villains’ underhanded tactics, the outcome of his matches was seldom in real doubt. He was better because he was stronger, and stronger because he was in the right. To root for the Hulkster was to root for the inevitable victory of a morally superior juggernaut, to be reassured of American supremacy in what would turn out to be the Cold War’s last gleaming.

In the 35 years that followed Hogan’s heroic apogee (he also had a short late-‘90s renaissance as the villainous “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan in World Championship Wrestling), he made plenty of money on the nostalgia circuit in both wrestling and pop culture. But as large swaths of the public have begun to look on the pages of recent American history as a record of capitalistic rot, Hogan’s own reputation has suffered in turn. The first real chink in his armour came with 1994’s United States v. McMahon (better known as “the steroid trial”), in which the federal government prosecuted Vince McMahon on trafficking and embezzlement charges. Hogan, who’d always insisted his gargantuan physique was the result of milk, vitamins, and prayer, admitted in the course of testifying (in his by-then former boss’s defence) that he’d been on the juice since 1976 but had recently gone off the stuff. And indeed, between 1994 and 1997, when the industry quietly agreed it was safe to let the boys start using again, Hogan’s body literally shrunk—and with it some of his aura. While Hogan’s biceps would recover, this first very public lie formed a crack in his façade that would only spread in the years to come.

In an industry of liars, Bollea was one of its most inveterate and absurd fabulists. From claiming that he’d been invited to become Metallica’s permanent bass player in 1986 to saying André the Giant died after Hogan bodyslammed him in the main event of 1987’s Wrestlemania III, he could scarcely get through an interview without dropping a bizarre new bushel of fibs. What might’ve been indulged as an endearing carny quirk from a thoroughly dotty legend was cast in a less flattering light by persistent accounts of his backstage politicking. He shrewdly negotiated contracts which allowed him creative control over how his character was depicted onscreen, and was notorious for using these provisions to avoid “putting over” (losing to) talents who threatened to rival his popularity, even when the occasional loss might have been good for the wrestling business as a whole. He tended to enhance his influence by forming close relations with the bosses: his friendship with WCW Executive Producer Eric Bischoff was widely blamed for unpopular creative decisions that hobbled the once-hot company in the late-1990s,1 and fellow wrestler (and future Minnesota governor) Jesse “The Body” Ventura never forgave Bollea for stooling on him to McMahon when Ventura attempted to form a WWF wrestler’s union back in 1986.

Given the mafia-like temperament of promoters and the degree of well-founded distrust between wrestlers of the era—a by-and-large fiercely libertarian bunch—it’s unlikely Ventura’s union would’ve taken root even had Hogan stayed out of the matter. But that it was Hogan, the wealthiest and most nakedly self-interested of the lot, who betrayed the effort rankled newer generations of fans. Smartened up by the plethora of backstage dirt available online, fans have increasingly come to see wrestlers not as boneheaded brawlers but as exploited artists. Since the steroid trials, American wrestling had increasingly begun to spotlight more athletic, less obviously-juiced performers like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels whose work borrowed from the up-tempo styles practiced in Mexico (lucha libre) and Japan (puroresu). Wrestling became simultaneously more high-impact and more balletic, with younger purists favouring elaborately choreographed epics over the simple pugilism of the form’s golden age. Hogan’s safe, plodding style became synonymous with laziness, his politicking seen as holding down hungrier, more talented workers. In these new fans’ minds, Hogan was about cynically making money, not art.

It didn’t really matter to them that most of Hogan’s peers shared his mentality. Wrestling is an appallingly taxing way to make a living, especially given the brutal touring schedule and concrete-stiff rings of the 1980s-era WWF.2 In the old days it had a tendency to beat the auteurism out of its practitioners. It was a mark of Hogan’s once-in-a-generation charisma that he was able to get the reactions he did while taking so few risks, and nearly all of his co-workers would’ve happily done his act if it came with a fraction of his stardom. Working a program with Hogan meant drawing the biggest paycheques most of them would ever make while taking the fewest bumps—receiving Hogan’s offence has been described by several opponents as like being gently buffeted by pillows. While the work of some of his peers has better survived the test of time aesthetically, too many of them wound up debilitated or in early graves long before the Hulkster did, carried there by drug addictions begun in hopes of deferring the pain that came from top-rope dives, high-impact slams, and tens of thousands of miles on the road.

Despite the qualms of pro wrestling aesthetes, Hogan was too great a star to be entirely rejected by the sports entertainment world, and he could usually be counted on to deliver a big crowd pop during his sporadic later appearances. But, by the end, the “Controversies” section of his Wikipedia page had begun to bulge alarmingly. There were the appallingly racist and homophobic comments captured on a sex tape leaked by his supposed friend, the shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge; his Satanic bargain with financier Peter Thiel to sue gossip blog Gawker out of existence for publishing said tape; a series of affairs and an ugly divorce; and, latterly, a full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump. It was this last offence that earned him the lusty opprobrium of that Inglewood crowd in 2025, a scene that underscored what a man out of time Bollea truly was, especially by the end.

If in 1986 the US president had been a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, a close personal friend of Vince McMahon, and had Hulk Hogan stumping for him on the campaign trail, it would’ve been the greatest public relations win anyone in the wrestling business could have possibly imagined. In 2025 it was simply awkward, with the company quietly distancing itself from the Hulkster just as it had the now-disgraced McMahon, whose name hung about the company’s neck like a millstone after a storm of nightmarish sexual abuse allegations finally forced his retirement the previous year.3 Thus did the Immortal Hulk Hogan, the Real American, die effectively in exile, a man without a country in a country that has never resembled him more than it does today.

It is difficult to see any popular figure of the past half-century outside the lens of the culture war. But, having now laid Terry Bollea’s life out on the dissection table, we must return to the question we began with: what made “the people” turn on him? Or, rather, what did the people get out of hating Hulk Hogan? It will hopefully be taken by the reader as a given that being a racist, even a private one, is a bad thing. Trumpism, while by no means the only poisonous strain of American political culture, is a blight on our time and a black mark on those who support it. And yes, those who betray their fellow workers to curry favour with management are without honour. Ultimately though, Hogan’s crimes are more those of a mascot than of a citizen. If any fusion of the public/private Hogan/Bollea chimera did real damage to American life, it was in the same sense that an overinflated parade float bulbously setting off a few car alarms and getting stuck on a traffic light is damaging to a city that is simultaneously being flooded, firebombed, and swarmed by killer bees.

What the fans in Inglewood and online really got when they jeered Hogan was the satisfaction and catharsis of watching a despicable onscreen heel get his comeuppance—and, in a respect that has always been the privilege of an audience turning on a performance, to be the instrument of that comeuppance. For many, it must have felt like an exercise of collective morality, some small way of rejecting the current state of affairs. But it was fighting back as a form of self-entertainment, taking place in a venue designed to convert outrage into spectacle. After Hogan’s segment, the audience didn’t turn on the event or WWE as a whole. Nearly all stayed to cheer their favourites and boo the heels. For the viewer just tuning in, it would’ve been hard to tell the difference between the “real” bad guy and all the other guys successfully playing the role of villain. What difference was there then? At the end of the night Hogan and his bosses got paid, just like they always did.

Originally published in slightly altered form on August 14, 2025 on Canadian Dimension as “A Real Man Without a Country.”

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from an artist who has earned our respect and affection. Today our old compatriot William Vallières (author of Discordia zine K no. 10, Februar, in 2024) shares excerpts from a series of epistles with the working title “The Lucia Poems.”

from The Lucia Poems

1 

Distance compels me to write what I couldn’t say in the moonlight, Lucia; mainly, that your very best handwritten letter’s closing sentiment was right: I failed to paint a single bird for the dormant rain in the sky.
	I shatter at the slightest impermanence. Just yesterday, I could call you up, and with your coach-leather bag you’d turn the corner and be standing there beside me, in an infinity of moments.
	Perhaps I think too much like a phenomenologist. 
	Today, the rain disturbed picnics and other reasonable events, sending the sherbert vendors to tasteful canopies.
	The days pass like tides pulled by the moon over the beach; in cinematic contemplation, contemplation, contemplation.
	Lucia, my grip.


2

You have no idea what I delete in a day. That’s why I’ll never have a book called The Florentine Nun.
	When was the last time you audited your failings, apposing questions to every listed event? I’m just asking for a friend. I’ve come to accept that things are unresolvable, like an oft-visited grave.
	It’s the unanswered questions that weigh, Lucia. The unasked are as blissful as the slightest rain of April.
	Soon it will be spring and everything will be next. The birds will choose their branches.
	Given time, excuses for not doing this and not doing that harden into fate.


3

I enter the bath like I enter scenery: with concomitant chamber-music.
	I remember you entering the river when it was morning and cold, your prized white scrunchy pulled by the current, freed to the sweep of future occasions. How you reached for it in vain.
	One day I turned and nobody was there, as if I had been tapped on the shoulder by a celestial preschooler. All the ideas of the world became wind, and people started losing their hats, sometimes even their heads, which rolled down the street like empty Coke cans, talking.
	When they came to recruit Odysseus, he played at madness, sowing his fields with salt.
	When you come for me, Lucia, look for me in the tub; I will be penning my most frothèd excuse.
	Always, your harried Diogenes. 


4

A world bent into my image would no longer be the world, Lucia, I can always hear you say: the jackhammer is part of the day, buddy.
	But I maintain: birdsong and Byzantine chanting form the baseline of reality; the rest is just attempts at the seriousness and the beauty.
	I set my specificities on the counter by the roses, and now they have flown like a flock out of Norway. I await the tender generalities of abstraction. The curtains sway, the window cogitates, nothing stays, not even memories. 
	It is the details—the finches in the cherry tree, the unfinished cheesecake—that break my heart, Lucia. The squirrel panicking for an acorn. 
	If only to exist. 


5

There’s a picture of a landscape on my wall, grazing sheep supervised by a nonplussed shepherd playing a reed flute at the end of the day, a picture I don’t dare touch even the nail of, for fear that the whole world might be suspended from it.
	 I thought lots, Lucia, like Boethius in his cell, trying to put the world back together. So much so that I built a life outside of this one, a world of gerunds, of bright immanent happening verbs. I was a fool in thirteen time zones, over several distinct epochs.
	Why must we build a cage around every truth, Lucia? To protect it like a shy bird on a curious streak? The heaven of truths is full; the picture, the word, they are graves. I am a corpse relating echoes to eternity.
	I was alive in your arms, once, when you called me Boogie.
	I held the burden in my hands and walked out into the sun. 


6

;skdm;kdnv;unew;dvnèeijfdv^083u4^083à=r8923ç90eugç0eindvèoinweûdghç2u35ç090oajknhud7cdjnùh34rb^woeir09i94u5iondfviunune0jç938r0wocsjpiduhcxj
;nk.wesidguivlbcnkdsjècopkwecdvsegesefesfe44808evjv;verfdcvbvirjnfikeo30efp3kgèbaifdsnv;unreèpoqdjhsg;uehdg;usjvnçweinfaèrowiuhad^89gyu3û5à3ujt^891h4èoei
        gnèewijgç0eiwmfsèavkdfn—apologies, I was cleaning my keyboard.
	There was something important I wanted to say. I could have sworn it was extremely important. Then the dust settled in, at first between the letters, then between words, then sentences.
	I lived my life under the assumption that perhaps I could outwit authority and live a delightful existence in a world of beauty. Was I wrong, Lucia? Was I a fool to dream of clear water when razor clams signed the shallows?
	Some things finally happen—Marc Bolan whispers “fusilli” in my ear, and the marmotte across the street crosses it to clover. Once in a while, I get a stupid, unjuicy lemon. 
	Words come back to me in fits, to unfrenzy.

WILLAM VALLIÈRES' work has appeared in *The Walrus*, *The Fiddlehead*, *Grain*, *EVENT*, *Plenitude*, and *Best Canadian Poetry 2019*. Translations have appeared in *Contemporary Verse 2* and *The New Quarterly*. His first book of poetry, *Versus* (Vehicule Press), was published in 2019.

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

The incel’s manifesto was executed with about the same level of competency as his killing spree. The thing is not only completely ideologically incoherent—the shooter complains that capitalism is the source of “hypergamy” (the incel belief that women get to date men who have “higher partner value”—better looks, more money, etc.—than men do), believes women should be kept out of the workforce (wouldn’t this make “hypergamy” worse because most women wouldn’t have their own finances at all?), and some belief that trans women are part of some sort of a pipeline of driving men to suicide—but also simply badly written. At one point the author complains that women “[allow themselves] to become flagrantly corpulent and/or generally unclean.” This kind of laughable thesaurus-speak is how a lot of incels write, generally with the assumption that this verbosity comes off to make them sound like a sophisticated gentleman rather than revealing a mostly clumsy handle on language.

Katie Kitamura may write better than an incel shooter, but only just barely.

Kitamura’s acclaimed novel Audition was named a “Best Book of 2025” by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, NPR, Vogue, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, and Barack Obama (…why are we still paying attention to that man?), and is about a successful actress who encounters a boy who claims to be her son, an impossibility as she has never given birth. Thrills ensue, minds are bent. Riverhead Books’ press material calls it a…

…compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel […] rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

However, like the incel dope, Kitamura aims for a kind of grandiloquence that sounds like it’s trying to be “sophisticated,” only to come off as incredibly forced, even gauche. When Kitamura’s protagonist walks through a door someone held open for her, she does so “according to the imperative of mere courtesy.” When she doesn’t notice something, it’s because she “was thus discombobulated.” An affair becomes a “sexual entanglement.” Five dollar words are great and all, but you shouldn’t rack up too much of a debt if it’s not necessary. Kitamura does not have that restraint—women be shopping!!!!1!!!1!! Where a mere “approval” would do, she opts for “approbation.” Where she really ought to reach for “clear,” she grabs “delineated.” When it’s time to say “flattery,” she goes for “blandishments.” It’s not that something “lacked for complexity,” it’s that it “did not have the requisite dimensionality.” Remember when people on Reddit or 9gag or whatever used to write “fancy” versions of rap lyrics? This sounds like that.

I get the sense that this is what Kitamura thinks writing “is”: knowing a lot of big words and then using them to construct wordy sentences. As a result she produces some truly terrible prose. Take for instance:

I heard a teasing note in my voice, perhaps because I was not comfortable talking about Murata and I wanted to direct Xavier’s attention elsewhere. The flirtation was a habit, one that had quieted over the years as I grew older, but that could still at times awaken.

It was a habit, and it quieted. But then it… awoke? It would make more sense to say it had grown dormant, and then awoke. And then there’s the decision to call it “the flirtation.” “The flirtation”? Not only does that just sound bad to the ear, but “flirtation” usually refers to an instance of flirting, or a flirtatious relationship someone has with another person, it does not refer to someone’s disposition. Check Cambridge, Webster, Dictionary.com—that’s just not what that word means. It’s just Kitamura trying to make the sentence sound wordier—the correct phrase would be “the flirting was a habit.” Beyond correctness, it just sounds better. Or she could opt for “coquetry”! Or how about the line

Evidently sensing this—our desire to please, and perhaps even more, for continuance, we were only trying to maintain the equilibrium that we had attained—Xavier made his demand

“our desire to please, and perhaps even more, for continuance,” which has a lot of the same problems, right down an extremely ugly and awkward choice of form for a rather common word—“our desire for continuance”? How about “our desire for continuity” or “our desire to continue”? All of which is to say nothing of her awkward parallel between an infinitive (“to please”) and a preposition (“for continuance”). This is supposed to be a verbose, sophisticated narrator with heightened language, right? Why is she eating shit in nearly every sentence like this?

Kitamura loves to take normal words like “flirt” and “continue” and add unnecessary affixes to them to make them longer and sound smarter (I hear lawyers in court attempting this same gambit all the time, and it just makes you sound like an idiot). She’ll call something a “small act of domesticity”1 when it could just be called a “small domestic act.” But, see, the former “sounds” smarter because “domesticity” is a fancier word than “domestic,” and Kitamura is willing to sacrifice rhythm just to insert it here—“small ACT of do mes TIC i ty” vs. “small do MES tic ACT,” like with the previous example, her prose drags. The whole time I read this thin yet simultaneously bloated novel I felt the desire to reach for hedge trimmers. Trim “the similarity between us, which was more than the fact of our shared race” into “our similarity was in more than our shared race,” or “a period of extraordinary concordance in my marriage” into “a harmonious period in my marriage,” and so on. Listen, I’m not a minimalist—I love piles of adjectives and adverbs and long descriptions and digressions and meandering sentences and embedded clauses and parentheticals and I even love big fat words…2 but this is just bad writing. This is a high school student trying to sound smart in an English class essay.

How about this: “I had not been so closely attuned to Tomas in years, to the subtle weather of his moods, the cartography of his expression.” I find the comparison of his moods to “subtle” weather hackneyed on its own (and she could have used that “big vocabulary” of hers to choose a more suitable adjective like “equable”), but then she pairs it with “the cartography” of his expression. Weather is a natural phenomenon, cartography is making or studying maps. The weather analog to cartography, for instance, would be meteorology—since she is the one studying the natural phenomena in this sentence, it would make more sense to say she’s attuned to the weather of his moods and the geography or maps of his expressions, or otherwise to say that she’s a meteorologist of his moods and a cartographer of his expressions.

The book is filled with mixed metaphors like these. Kitamura describes “the apparatus of our marriage growing rickety”—when would anyone ever call an apparatus rickety? Yeah, I get that in a sense a “bridge” or something could be an “apparatus,” but then why not just say bridge? “The current of intensity running between Xavier and me. Its source was an imbalance of want.” “Currents” have sources, so I sort of get tripped up finding that the source of the current was… an imbalance? At one point the protagonist’s husband is “transformed by the breadth of his emotion, stepping outside himself and extending the boundaries of his being” and his enthusiastic wife thinks, “I wanted nothing more than for Tomas to stay inside the container of this feeling.” Wait, hold on, he’s stepping outside of himself… into a container? Man, even the second last sentence of the book includes the phrase “a chain of words, sturdy as a cable”—ARE THEY A CHAIN OR A CABLE??? And then there is perhaps my favourite:

the part [an actress plays] is only working if I lose sight of the shore. But at the same time, it’s important to be able to come out the other side, you have to be able to come up for air.

????? Lose sight of the shore, okay, but… Come out the other side?? COME UP FOR AIR???? What the fuck are you TALKING about?????? Only for this metaphor to come back a few pages later in order to get further extended and muddled:

I also thought that if ever an actor had lost sight of the shore then it was this one, he had stumbled deep into the interior, [also this is a fucking comma splice!] and I wondered if he worried that he would never find his way out, if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.

???????? If an actor loses sight of the shore, then he’s… in the interior? And the interior is like… a shield? But then it isn’t anymore if you’re lost in it? Because the shielding is… also like a… territorial border? Is he still at sea??? More importantly, will he be able to COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE or COME UP FOR AIR?????

Even when she pulls it off she still manages to hamstring herself. Kitamura’s narrator describes a scene in the middle of a play as sitting “in the center like a black hole or box.” I take it she means “black hole or black box” (which actually sounds nicer with the repetition of the word “black” in my opinion), and that’s actually not a bad parallel—a “black hole” contains “nothing,”3 and in a sense a “black box” contains “everything”—but the resulting sentence makes it sound like she’s comparing it to either a black hole or……. a box. You know, like a cardboard box. Sometimes I simply have no idea what she means: “I had been troubled by the silence that had constellated around the abortion.” The silence that did what?

There are other head-scratchers too, imprecise turns of phrase, fumbles like “the name of the restaurant was brief.” Or descriptions such as, “…different from the usual irritation and worry with which he would scroll through the news or his messages.” I have scrolled while irritated, perhaps I have even scrolled while worried, but I have never in my life scrolled with either irritation or worry, and certainly not both. What does it look like to scroll not while irritated and worried but with irritation and worry? Like, as an act, how is the scrolling meaningfully imbued with those emotions? It’s supposed to be describing a typical annoyed and concerned internet user but makes it sound like he’s regularly fucking frantic scrolling his phone like a maniac. Then consider the string of syllables that make up “…the usual irritation and worry with which he would…”—this set of words sags in the middle of the sentence like the gut of my obese cat. This is, once again, just terrible intuition for the rhythm of language. Even just off the cuff, here’s a better sentence: “unlike his normal air of irritation as he scrolled the news.” Nothing fancy! Anyways, shit like this is all over the place. “He ate with steady and controlled gusto.” Controlled gusto? “His movements were spiky and exaggerated.” Spiky? “He turned, with a wandering movement of the head.” What the fuck?

Or how about something like “a feeling of regret so pronounced it seemed to exert a gravitational pull, it seemed to pull me to the ground.” If the feeling had gravitational pull, it would pull you to itself, not to the ground, which already has a gravitational pull, Katie. Or:

absence was not the right word, it penetrated further than that, because we did not speak of it to anyone else

…huh? Is something only suitably called an “absence” if you talk about it? Or:

people always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place […] they forgot that not having children was also something that took place […] it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event

If not having children is “an event,” one which had “presence in the world,” then when did it take place? And even ignoring that, could you not say this about literally anything that didn’t or doesn’t happen? I never fucked Andre the Giant. By this logic, that was an event in my life, not fucking Andre the Giant. It has its own presence in the world, it was its own event, not fucking Andre the Giant. I don’t fuck Andre the Giant basically every day, so, if anything, this is a continuous series of events, I’m a total anti-slut for the late Andre the Giant.

And then there’s the repetitiveness. Not only is the prose incompetent, it’s also trapped in a cycle of infinite vocabular recurrence. In spite of every attempt on Kitamura’s part to slot in as many GRE words as possible, she still winds up using the same smaller-budget words over and over and over again. People are constantly “nodding.” I did a search for the word “nod” in all its variations and it is used forty-five times in one-hundred-and-forty-five pages. That’s like one “nod” for every three pages. People “stare” forty-seven times! This is also, as you might imagine, not merely lexically repetitive but situationally repetitive. Yes, the word “stare” and its derivative forms repeat forty-seven times, but this does not count circumstances in which people “stare” without using the word “stare”—characters “gaze” (twenty-three times) and “watch” (thirty-nine times) and whatever else. And hey, maybe this plays into the theme of, you know, acting and being looked at and all, but then what does nodding represent? And is whatever that theme is even more present in her novel Intimacies, where characters are described as nodding EIGHT-SEVEN TIMES? Kitamura has hardly any idea how to describe a character action that isn’t either bobble-heading or being locked in a staring contest. Or maybe they’re “turning,” which recurs eighty-nine times.

And yet the few times she’s not resorting to these stock descriptions of character actions, her choices are utterly bewildering, such as this part where the narrator details what can only be described as “being terrified of her husband aggressively eating nuts with sadness”:

He continued to cram nuts into his mouth and I thought that he must really have been hungry, he ate with a gusto that was not in and of itself off-putting, it was simply a man eating, and yet I recoiled, something in the crunching movement of his jaw was alien, it was briefly the face of someone who thought he was alone.

…which tried to sell me on as a moment of shock at seeing the emotional nakedness of her husband, but it’s just described so incompetently that it, like much of the book’s prose, requires you to stop a second to figure out just what it is that Kitamura expects you to get out of what she’s just written. The words feel as crammed together as the nuts in her husband’s mouth.

And then there’s the states! Everything is a state! Someone might be in a “state of heightened attention” or a “state of almost preternatural concentration” or a “state of unease” or a “state of agitation” or a “state of frenzied conviction” or, perhaps most hilariously, a “state of being a child.” For fuck’s sake, at one point she uses it twice in a row.

Perhaps for that reason I had been lulled into a state of unthinking complacency. As I continued walking down the street, through that soft rain, I began to wonder how long I had been in this state of excessive inurement.

And don’t fucking start with me with the “oh, well, you see, it’s because it’s about acting, and—” it recurs just as much in the aforementioned Intimacies. In fact, here it is twice in a row again in that book:

whether he would be in a state of shock or rage, whether he would be utterly silent or whether questions and accusations and counteraccusations would pour out of him, whether he would simply be tired from his journey, like a businessman disembarking a longhaul flight, or whether he would be in a state of physical collapse.

…and that book further contains the incredible sentence “a state of I know but I do not know.”4

Like with a lot of Kitamura’s choices, it usually isn’t the right one. Back to Audition, when her protagonist says “I left the restaurant in a state of considerable relief,” for instance, I think… is relief really a “state”? Isn’t it more of a reaction to the alleviation of stress that transitions into being relaxed? The sentence would make more sense as “I left the restaurant considerably relieved”—and, once again, it even just sounds better!—but then of course Kitamura doesn’t get to use those precious extra words she loves so much.

Words, words, words. Kitamura loves words. I thought I loved words, and I think I do love words, but I don’t think I love each and every one of them as unconditionally as she does. For her, there are never enough words and they are never in the wrong place. Sometimes she’ll basically just repeat the same ideas using near-synonyms—often, in fact! Howsabout “it was an emerald necklace, beautiful and extravagant” or “I had regarded his face with such scrutiny and attention” or “it was an echo or mirroring” or “she gave a small smile, vain and self-satisfied” or “I winced in pain and alarm” or “it was only a feeling, an intuition” or “I had given in to his story, his narrative” or “my hauteur, my arrogance”5 or “it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack” or “one person who wants into an absence, a void” or “she used language that was confusing to say the least, that seemed designed to obfuscate” or “they wore expressions of approval and general goodwill” or “he sounded thoroughly rational, not at all like the kind of person who could have believed so fervently in a fantasy.”

Her idea of adding nuance to a description is to describe two things seemingly at odds at once. Sometimes even preceded by the phrase “at once”: “at once present and neutral,” “at once there but also not there,” “at once startled and blank,” “at once wholly plausible and completely vague,” “at once absolute and condescending,” “at once sullen but also prideful and excited,” “at once abject and defensive,” “at once too obvious and too painful to address.” “Here, it is possible to be two things at once,” says Kitamura’s narrator. Yeah, no shit! STOP. You. Yeah you. Stop typing, I see you—no, yet again, this repetition is present in her other books too, I checked.

The words, words, words just wear me down. Instead of saying they “circled each other like prizefighters,” she says they “circled around each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and in a posture of constant assessment”—like, yeah man, this is a pretty cliché comparison, we all know what you’re trying to get at, you don’t need to belabour it. “The mind […] reaches for the most obvious explanation, and in the way of Occam’s razor, the most obvious explanation is often also the correct one”—yeah, got it, thanks Katie, we know what Occam’s razor is. “It mattered, the vocabulary, the way a word circulated through society, the context and atmosphere that was created around it”—holy shit!

Sometimes it’s just like…

I have a feeling that there are some… personal limits on display here. I checked the book’s Wikipedia page and read this:

Kitamura came upon the idea for the novel in the 2010s, when she read the following headline: "A stranger told me he was my son." She was careful not to read the article that accompanied it, because she was "interested in the illogical nature of the headline. The two terms, 'a stranger' and 'my son', seemed diametrically opposed, even mutually exclusive. I didn't want the mystery of that opposition to be resolved."

…what? How is that illogical? What mystery? Surely we can imagine pretty easily what the headline is probably alluding to. A woman gave up her son, and the son found her. Yet the headline shook Kitamura to her core. The words to her “seemed diametrically opposed, even mutually exclusive”—wow, she just talks like that in real life, huh?

I assumed while reading the thing that Kitamura must be, like… twenty-five, or something, young enough that she hasn’t been writing very long and has maybe not spent enough time going to, idk, talk to bank tellers or something to pull off this kind of register. But no. Kitamura is nearly fifty-years-old. And she’s been publishing books since at least 2006. That is fucking crazy. Does this writing sound to you like someone who has been doing this for twenty years??? The book is, to put it mildly after ALL of that, amateurish. The only thing “literary” about it is the way that it performs “seriousness” by being wordy and boring and severe and repetitive. But I get why people like it! I didn’t even get into this in this review because I was… preoccupied, but the story at the heart of Audition is extremely disturbed and twisted in a way that legitimately got under my skin in a distinctly different way than the prose did. But the prose battled me the whole fucking way. It’s presently being adapted for film, a medium where I suspect the material could succeed far better than it did on the page.

Something that only really settled in as I was finishing the thing was how much my reception of the book was coloured by its marketing, because the book is so boldly marketed as what it’s not, which has simply been regurgitated by the outlets covering it. NPR called the book “a tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller.” But that’s not true. The book’s just a psychological thriller with familial themes that “reads like” pretentious literary fiction. This is part and parcel a result of the whole “literature trend” thing that I keep harping on about.

There’s a premium now on capital-L Literature, and so now work is being shoehorned in that doesn’t really belong in there if there’s a sense it can be sold to the trend-mongering dipshit. This isn’t… really lit, is it? Maybe I should treat this as the thriller it is?

But I’m a “lit” guy, and this is being sold as “lit,” and this is a bad “lit.” The prose is overwrought and brutally stupid, and it would have done far better to drop the act and stop trying to be “respectable,” a charade worse than any of the performances in the book, which makes it nearly unreadable to me. The fact that it was selected by the Booker and Pulitzer judges would concern me about people’s ability to distinguish good writing if it weren’t for the fact that I already think those two in particular are just galleries for the hand-selected best-sellers that the publishers who submit them are seeking to advertise, and are likely far from competitions of merit. I don’t even think the judges read the books anymore outside of the press releases.

Audition
Fiction by Katie Kitamura
Assembly Press, 2025 (Publisher’s Site)

KITAMURA’S BOOK SURE SEEMS COMPLETELY UNEDITED. WHY NOT READ THIS ESSAY ON THE JOY OF BEING AN EDITOR?

And I am asking you once again:

GIVE ME GOSSIP

If you submit me juicy enough gossip that I haven’t heard, you’ll get free access to the Gossip Club for a month (email discordia.sucks@gmail.com and they’ll forward it to me). You just have to abide by the two gossip rules:

GOSSIP RULES:

1. Subjects must have at least one published chapbook or book, have a major award or achievement, or be published with decent frequency in Journals Of Repute. I’m not trying to clown on small-time amateurs here. And believe me, there’s a few of those I could give you an earful about. That said, I’ll absolutely love to hear about it anyways, I just won’t run it in the column.

2. No sex crimes. We’re doing Fun Gossip, No Downers—if you have a credible report of a sex crime then contact the police, the CBC, or a lawyer. A lawyer aside from Eris, anyways.

So with that out of the way, let’s begin. Let’s raise some money for the Discordia coffers.

Read more

The Rausing family were, for quite a while, the richest family in the UK.

Sigrid Rausing herself is your classic sort of liberal-minded, pretentious capitalist buffoon, a higher order of pathetic loser for whom it isn’t enough that she owns all our asses: she expects us all to validate her “culturedness,” “intelligence,” and “morality” too.1 Sigrid has a rich person vanity PhD in the humanities, patronizes the arts, and engages in all manner of “altruism” (more on whether that “altruism” is truly “altruistic” later). Much like one of her Canadian counterparts, the loathsome arms profiteer and patron of letters Scott Griffin, who we’ve clowned on before, Sigrid’s vanity also led her to pen a shitty memoir. Rich people with literary pretensions love publishing shitty memoirs because it is ultimately not much of a challenge to matter-of-factly write the story of Things That Happened To You. Of course there are absolutely brilliant memoirs out there, sure, but most are awful and boring, because the bar for completing a memoir manuscript is so low, and because it is a process in which most of the more difficult literary skills are, while not necessarily absent, inessential. Autoslop is the refuge of the rich pseudo-artist because it is just so easy. Wealthy industrialists hate work—it’s why they exploit other people to do it for them—and so this is just about the best we can expect from them most of the time.

The epigraphs for rich people’s memoirs are often some of the most telling parts. Consider Spare by Prince Harry, which begins with a Faulkner quote, and then immediately undercuts that decision when Harry proudly announces that he has never heard of William Faulkner and found the quote while lazily searching BrainyQuote. Harry doesn’t even consider how vacuous this confession is. I need to take a minor detour here, because you do need to read this.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?

Is it comforting to know that the British royal family has the mental life of a caricature of an English peasant from a movie about the 14th century?

Anyways—the epigraph for Sigrid’s memoir comes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, because of course it does, there’s no book more emblematic of her lower-end-of-middle-brow rich person tastes, a title most people experience as assigned reading in high school. (For what it’s worth, Sigrid’s book has better prose than Scott Griffin’s. But, for what it’s worth, that’s not worth much.)

And of course she had to buy Granta. Not just finance it, but outright buy it, and by the sounds of it she goes to editors meetings and helps make decisions on editorial matters, because…… well, I dunno, she was already a fake anthropologist, why not let her be a fake lit mag editor too? Buy Discordia, Sigrid! Buy me! I’ll let you pretend to be my wife (my real wife, unlike Sigrid, has a real PhD)! Sigrid even got to be a real fake editor after she tried to budget cut Granta to hell and a ton of her staff quit on her, forcing her to take on the top position herself. Her first order of business? An issue about big international issues.2 Stories about wars and humanitarian concerns, and about Iran, and China, and the “shadow” of the long-gone Soviet Union. Because Sigrid has a lot of important things to say. She’s not just Sigrid the chin-stroking “intellectual” and Sigrid the “literary figure,” heavens no, she’s also…

Sigrid the “Saint.”

As I mentioned above, Rausing likes to bill herself as an altruist, committing vast sums of money to philanthropic efforts. She’s all about that liberal human rights type stuff—you know, women’s rights, open democracies, press freedoms and all that jazz. Or, as we call it in my neck of the politics, “humanitarian imperialism.”

A lot of my readers, having brain worms like I do, will know what the National Endowment for Democracy is. In case you’re not a ‘noided nutcase like me, let me fill you in as succinctly as I can: in the 1970s the Church Committee wound up exposing a ton of extremely shady CIA and FBI dealings and brought the CIA under increased scrutiny. There were a lot of consequences of this, but one was the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a semi-autonomous NGO set up by the United States government, with the principal goal of taking a lot of the old underground foreign influence operations and laundering them through the façade of “respectable” “charitable” ventures. That’s to say that a lot of what they do today was done covertly over twenty-five years ago by the CIA. And in case you don’t believe me, here’s NED cofounder Allen Weinstein:

A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.

It has long been established that the NED’s goal is to help put a smiling face on regime change and influence peddling, existing somewhere between the US empire’s carrot (World Bank, IMF,3 USAID, etc.) and its stick (the CIA outright and the DoD).

The NED and Sigrid Rausing overlap a ton. Just how much is at least a little opaque (the NED will be the first to tell you that its actions and funding are not transparent), but basically wherever the Western bloc reaches an obstacle, there’s Sigrid Rausing to lend her weight (and the weight of her big, fat pockets) right alongside the NED. Whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, China, Russia, and so on, Sigrid will be there to tell you about how horrible the situation is and how the people are suffering and about how we really have to do something about it, how they lack all those precious “freedoms” we take for granted, and she’ll funnel as much money as she can into “helping” them. Does she take her marching orders from the US State Department like the NED clearly does? Perhaps not directly, but the funding overlap does reveal quite a bit of ideological overlap.

One thing that both Sigrid and the NED love is the journalist collective Bellingcat, an outlet that I (and others) believe is just a press arm of the CIA and western intelligence. As Foreign Policy put it, “Bellingcat Can Say What U.S. Intelligence Can’t.” The CIA just loves Belingcat. Former CIA chiefs have gone on the record describing how helpful Bellingcat was to them, saying such things as “whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work” (don’t worry though, even though Bellingcat is explicitly funded by the CIA’s ostensible cover funding apparatus, the NED, and just so happens to do a lot of work the CIA relies on, when the same former official was pressed on whether the CIA controls Bellingcat, he said “we have no ties to them” lol). Sigrid and the NED also both fund “freedom of expression” organizations like Article 19, which also collects funds from the US State Department, USAID, and the Ford Foundation (itself an infamous CIA front), as well as organizations representing other Western national interests such as Global Affairs Canada, UK FCDO, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and so on. There are also “freedom of the press” organizations such as Reporters sans frontières (Reporters without Borders), which not only receives funding directly from Western powers but also receives funding from specific regime change outfits such as the completely psychotic Center for a Free Cuba,4 as well as financial institutions like Société Générale, which profits off of loans to Western arms manufacturers. Both Sigrid and the NED and a lot of the aforementioned interests fund “feminist” initiatives such as the Women’s Learning Partnership, a foundation which was created by Mahnaz Afkhami, who used to serve in the Shah’s government and goes on TV to tell lies about how the 1979 Iranian Revolution was “to a significant extent” a reaction to advancing women’s rights.5 Both Sigrid and the NED also fund the International Commission of Jurists, an organization that was literally proven to be created by the CIA for the purposes of international propaganda, and so on, and so forth. You get the picture. These are all groups that seek to promote “liberal freedoms” like “rule of law,” “freedom of the press,” and “freedom of expression,” but in effect are mostly just tools of the West to chip away at the foundations of their geopolitical rivals by either disproportionately focusing on their enemy’s “illiberal” qualities, deliberately misrepresenting or skewing understanding of those qualities, or, failing that, making some qualities up.

Rausing is a Western liberal internationalist—she supports world “cooperation” and “peace,” but on Western terms: specifically, terms that either don’t impact her own bottom line or terms that conveniently make her richer. The social and economic models of the West (including Western ownership) must be exported everywhere, whether the people there want it or not. In fact, we’ll pay some of the people over there to tell us publicly how much they do really want it, and then we’ll blow them the fuck up with our bombs. Libs like Sigrid, in spite of having done invaluable work in creating the moral foundations to allow us to drop bombs on these people, will then solemnly shake their heads. Sigrid decries violence. She’ll accept the boost to her stock portfolio, sure, but it’s icky. But wait, what’s that sound??? Sounds like yet another enemy of the West who lives under constant siege is doing something untoward in order to desperately hold together the nation as the US forcibly starves it with sanctions! My God—these people don’t even have McDonald’s! Sigrid Rausing to the rescue! And we’ll do it all over again.

In her writing and interviews, Sigrid is constantly dry-humping concepts of international rights and their related statutes, often while lambasting those damn illiberal Saracens and shifty Orientals. Like here, for instance:

The notion that human rights is a western concern is an argument often used in China and in authoritarian Muslim states. […] Human rights for all, as expressed in the Universal Declaration and its successive additions, is a progressive ideal which all countries active in the UN ought to strive for.

But does Sigrid actually love human rights statutes that much? Or is she a dreaded fake fan? If you want to see how much “human rights” actually mean to Sigrid, you can hear all about how quickly she pulled the plug on just about every organization her trust supported that voiced even an inkling of support for Palestine in a piece she wrote in The Times titled:

An article so Zionist that Bari Weiss re-published it in The Free Press two days later.

In it, she complains about such organizations as “a group in Canada” that

almost immediately termed Israel’s actions “genocidal”, and described the country as a “settler colonialist white-supremacist state.” The statement ended with an echo of a United Nations resolution; an affirmation of “the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance.” It is a phrase which, given the context of the piece, we felt condoned the Hamas atrocities.

I would actually go further than the organization Sigrid is critiquing did and point out that the preamble of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Sigrid Rausing’s most favourite document evarrrrrrr ^ _ ^ (remember how she said the document is illustrative of “a progressive ideal which all countries active in the UN ought to strive for”????) says the following in its preamble:

it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law

Well, the rights of the Palestinians are not being protected by rule of law, which means, by the logic of the preamble to the Declaration—the preamble being the foundation of the foundation of international human rights law—the Palestinians have recourse to rebellion. I’m not going to pretend that international human rights law is perfect, but Sigrid certainly seems to think it is. So what does she make about the international courts finding Israel guilty of violating human rights? In her aforementioned essay, publishing in 2025—that’s right, 2025—Sigrid just dodges reckoning with that almost entirely. Instead she says, “The words settler/colonial/white supremacist don’t reflect reality, exactly—they are a slur.” Sure thing, Sigrid.6 Then she quotes Orwell yet again. Which is especially funny this time around, because, while I’m a noted Orwell Hater, the man was an anti-Zionist.

Then, out of nowhere she starts ranting and raving about the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and its anti-Zionism, and about how she knows all about this because of her aforementioned work for her vanity PhD in Estonia.

Yeah, anyways, about all that.

Sigrid the Scion.

I mentioned how Sigrid is an “anthropologist,” right?

Her PhD thesis, which was later published by Oxford University Press (geez, every PhD student’s dream, right? Shall we mention that the Rausings have donated hundreds of millions of pounds over the years to Oxford?), was on post-Soviet anthropology, drawing from her own field work while living in Estonia. Said work, and her later memoir documenting same (Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia) largely concern the “evils” of collectivization. Rather than debate that subject with you, reader, which would make this blog post a lot longer, I would at least like to point out something that Sigrid doesn’t seem to mention in either work, which is her family’s “interesting” history with the Soviet Union and what it stood to gain from collectivization’s end.

Some of Tetra Pak’s first great successes lay in exports to the USSR, after Hans Rausing, Sigrid’s father, negotiated a deal with the Soviet government. “The early foothold in the Soviet market proved valuable as the company continued to ramp up its capabilities.” Tetra Pak’s early pyramid-shaped milk cartons are now as iconic a symbol of the Soviet era in Russian society as the Young Pioneers necktie and Sputnik.

The “emerging markets” in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union were a huge business opportunity, especially as Tetra Pak already had their foot in the door. This expansion eventually made Tetra Pak “the largest foreign employer” in post-Soviet Russia as Tetra Pak partnered with the emergent class of Russian robber barons, such as the oligarch David Yakobashvili’s Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods, which slowly took over Soviet dairy plants and once-collectivized farms. Of course Sigrid sees collectivization as a great “tragedy” and propagandizes to those ends—the end of such a system was a prerequisite for the privatization frenzy her family partook in to the extraordinary benefit of themselves and all the other vultures, stripping the nation for parts, and contributing to millions of deaths in the process.

The aforementioned Yakobashvili, an organized criminal with connections to the murderous Bauman syndicate, profited from a massive corrupt dilution of workers’ and pensioners’ shares in farms and scammed countless farmers out of their land, beating or killing those who resisted or protested. The Peasants’ Front took to the streets in opposition, with banners bearing slogans such as “to the peasants—to the people!” But never mind all that. Sigrid, living in POST-SOVIET Estonia just a year after her family’s deal with Yakobashvili, a place which was at the time facing the very same rapidly rising poverty and mortality rates as a direct result of these explored processes, can only focus on Soviet collectivization for some reason! Why’s that, Sigrid???

Here’s another episode in world history that perhaps is owed a closer look with particular scrutiny toward the Rausing clan: the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. The potential of Sigrid’s father’s involvement in the killing was once put forward by Hans’s daughter-in-law, Eva Rausing, shortly before her sudden and untimely death in 2012, just before a planned meeting with Swedish prosecutors to give them more details. Eva was crazy, of course—and don’t take my word for it, take Sigrid’s! She wrote a whole memoir about the affair—as she so often does when her family might be implicated of wrong-doing!—titled Mayhem, though it should be titled Guys, My Dad Definitely Did Not Have A Hand in Killing the Prime Minister (and I Did Not Kill My Sister-in-Law).

Eva might not have known or remembered that by 1986—the year of Palme’s murder—the headquarters of Tetra Pak had already left Sweden. The reason for the move was the radical political plan to change the ownership of Swedish industry via union-controlled foundations. These trusts would hold shares that industries of a certain size would be compelled to issue on an annual basis, financed by up to 20 percent of revenue, until the union foundations would own 52 percent of the companies, giving them ownership control.

…

Eva’s idea, therefore, that Olof Palme had constituted a threat against the company may have been true in the 1970s, but by 1986 it certainly wasn’t true anymore. And every newspaper editor in Sweden knew that.

This is a massive lie by omission and Sigrid knows it. Firstly, Sigrid for some reason ignores the primary reason Tetra Pak left Sweden, which is repeated in the first, like, twenty sources I found on the subject, which is that the move was principally motivated by tax reasons. But also, as a family of Swedish billionaires, large chunks of the Rausings’ personal wealth were obviously still within Sweden, as well as non-insignificant portions of the company. Tetra Pak’s technological core remains in Sweden, as its R&D is still based out of Lund.

Ruben Rausing had emigrated to Lausanne in 1969, and in 1981, Tetra Pak followed, both relocations prompted by tax reasons [see there’s that tax thing again —Ed]. The R&D operations stayed behind, with Lund and Sweden remaining the intellectual heartland of the business.

Tetra Pak’s R&D is tied to industrial infrastructure based in Sweden. The embedded productive capacity maintained there, including all of the valuable intellectual labour they had cultivated which would have been more familiar with the entrenched system, and it would have been a lot harder to relocate all that than it would be to move some factories (and you’d still risk having a lot of your established R&D brainpower move to other companies). And, again, if you think the richest man in Sweden didn’t have substantial domestic investments beyond this, then I know some Hot MILFs in Your Area That Just Want To Fuck if you’ll just give me your credit card info.

Obviously the Rausings are innocent, otherwise why would Sigrid decide to misrepresent the facts so brazenly?

Yes, Eva was literally a crackhead, and on one hand this may lead one to think it’s possible Eva dreamed the whole thing up as a drug-addled delusion, but on the other hand we should consider that, if these allegations against the Rausings are true, it would take a particularly unhinged person, a particularly weak link in the chain holding in the Rausing secret, to crack and let the secret out—a mentally-unstable drug addict, for instance. Anyone who would put herself in such jeopardy by threatening to expose the secrets of a family she believes has already killed someone—someone far more important than her—to protect their interests would have to be at least a little bit crazy, if not a lot crazy. And ultimately what are the odds that a woman who had been abusing these drugs since 1983 would suddenly administer herself a fatal dose within a year of trying to make this information public? And why did her husband, Sigrid’s brother Hans Kristian, then hide her body from being discovered for two months? Because of Kristian’s deceit, the report that the death was “drug-related” would likely be largely inferential—there’s no way toxicology conducted on a body that has been sitting that long could provide results conclusive enough to suggest those ends.7

When Sigrid writes such things about the fate of Eva as

I see my complicity, my guilt. I see my tiredness, my hopelessness; my false moral superiority, my finger wagging, wagging. I regret everything.

…is it a Freudian slip? What is she really talking about here, hmm? Because so much of this bloated, pointless, repetitive memoir starts to make a lot more sense through a… certain lens. There’s a narrative that starts to emerge, one that Sigrid really wants to hammer home, which is that Eva, poor Eva, she was… suffering, you know? She had it really bad, this poor, suffering girl, so when you think about it, maybe she’s… better off now? Put that way, let’s say that there was someone complicit in or at least aware of Eva’s death as more than just an accident—could that person maybe find comfort in these thoughts? Maybe not so unlike someone who personally gained a lot from a process involving organized crime, asset stripping, mass privatization, and millions of deaths in the former Soviet Union finding comfort by retreating into a mind palace to imagine how much worse everything was before?

Anyways—obviously the Rausings had a lot to lose because of the Palme administration. Not to mention, after he died, they had a lot to gain! Sigrid neglects to mention that, since Palme’s death, Tetra Pak’s investments in Sweden have greatly been expanded, aided by the more moderate and neoliberal-friendly policies of Palme’s successors.

Sigrid the Synthetic.

Sigrid’s father sold his shares in Tetra Pak (at that point having vertically-integrated with Swedish food processing company Alfa Laval to become Tetra Laval) in the mid 1990s. He made a new food packaging company after the move, and to be honest I think the whole thing was a farce motivated by some European anti-monopoly shit Tetra Pak was facing and that this was a fake breakup, but that’s beside the point.

Hans’s kids now share his fortune as consolidated in investment companies such as Alta Advisers. Unlike their cousins, whose investments mostly remain in food supply chains, Sigrid’s side of the family favours more abstract and technological investments. You can see from Alta’s Form 13F that Sigrid Rausing and her siblings have significant investments in several companies developing AI, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and fucking Palantir—all of these investments having either been established or significantly grown since the AI boom and take up many of the largest investment slices in the portfolio—as well as investment companies such as Vanguard Scottsdale, which is itself heavily-invested in AI.8

Hey. Wait a second. AI. Sigrid Rausing. Sigrid Rausing whose magazine, Granta, as mentioned in our previous piece, is at the center of an AI scandal.

Sigrid wrote a now widely-circulated (and widely-mocked) open letter about how “we’ll simply never know for sure :)” whether the winning story used AI or not. As I explored in the previous piece, while false positives are certainly possible, we actually have a pretty reasonable basis to make the claim because there is a ton of evidence outside of the story itself, derived from my research into the alleged author himself. But to list them in brief:

• The author’s LinkedIn page in which he posts about his use of AI and opines on AI’s utility.

• The author’s submitted author photo, which is obviously heavily-modified from his actual appearance, likely using AI to do so.

• The fact that his Facebook page features literally thousands of poems allegedly written by him, which all feature the same AI hallmarks and all trigger AI detectors.

• His countless aforementioned LinkedIn essays trigger the same AI detectors.

What is Sigrid’s evidence? Why, she asked AI, of course! And AI told her there were no issues.

You know who else is heavily-invested in AI? The Commonwealth Secretariat, the economic sister organization to the Commonwealth Foundation which gave the prize in question.9

In fact, the Secretariat partnered with Intel not long ago to create an “AI-driven policy toolkit” called StrategusAI.

The cost of developing one government policy or strategy can range from US$250,000 to US$1.5 million in consulting fees, and development can take from six months up to a year, not including implementation phases. This investment will be more cost-effective and efficient with StrategusAI.

Intel already partners with the Secretariat on a joint digital learning programme to demystify AI among senior officials across the Commonwealth and raise awareness of its potential applications in various sectors

Having AI formulate policy decisions raises concerns on its own, but consider also that an AI developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat and Intel could be given “subtle” biases which lead it to recommend policy solutions that are in the interests of a neoliberal organization like the former and corporate interests like the latter. What is embedded and unseen, whether intentionally or not, can make certain lines of inquiry basically fruitless.

But who would ever trust an AI to make such policy decisions? Many would be cautious to implement such toolkits, especially as, in spite of the cold market rationale of the neoliberalism embraced by so many of the states this stuff is peddled to, these ultimate conclusions are still considered to be broadly “human.” But what if you could demystify that “human” quality? What if you could convince people that distinctly “human” features are just a bunch of idealistic nonsense? What if you could “prove” that the most fundamental expressions of the “human” soul could be entirely accomplished without the “human” part at all? For instance… writing an award-winning short story?

I’m not here to debate the merits or lack thereof of AI-assisted art, but this is a preoccupation of most AI companies, and why people like Sam Altman (barely human themselves) are constantly trying to “prove” that AI can write short stories. Undermine people’s preciousness about these creative acts, and you can break the humanistic will and subordinate it to a Silicon-Valley-driven AI technocracy:

Whether AI will ever be able to do all this isn’t really the point. Perhaps it will! But the point is how we perceive it. If people continue to broadly see value in the “human” in the “humanities,” then this process of AI technocratic normalization is a lot more difficult.

An AI-invested organization gave an obviously AI-generated short story a prize—I even made the claim in my previous piece, which I think is pretty clear, that one of the judges who judged the competition used AI to do so—and an AI-invested billionaire hosted the AI winner in her vanity magazine. There is an obvious benefit for those invested in AI to have people become cynical about whether or not “human” outputs are really at all more valuable than machine ones. You understand the question I am posing. Was this result the entire point? Consider these words from D.W. Wilson’s post about the scandal in :

in light of this crisis, I don’t know if I believe myself anymore. My students lost out to AI-generated text; they see those texts under Granta’s venerable masthead. And nobody with any clout seems willing to call this out as bullshit. Can I look these young writers in the eye with confidence and tell them they’ll get there if they keep on keeping on? Writing is hard. AI promises to make it easier. That allure is strong. And here before them: evidence that it works too.

What if creeping fatalism like this is the intended effect?

A major hitch in all this theorizing is that Rausing doesn’t just like to support initiatives that are good for the imperialist bourgeoisie such as herself; she also likes to support initiatives that flatter her. Rausing would certainly like to feel like an inspiring humanist, and “AI” seems contrary to that goal—ultimately, if something was too difficult to reconcile with Rausing’s pride, she would probably make it secondary. However, as I have also demonstrated, Rausing is a master of fabricating an elaborate tapestry of the self, and it isn’t beyond reason to consider that she could find a place in this tableau for Sigrid the Synthetic, Sigrid the Futurist, Sigrid the forward-thinking maverick who saw what humanity needed before they did. The rest of us, cautious as we are about AI’s development, don’t see the big picture—we don’t understand what’s best for us. Ultimately, that’s the underlying principle of being a “philanthropist” in the first place, right? Believing that you have a better sense of which causes are important than anyone else in the world. You have the money by accident, yet you deserve to shape the world with it to what you think is right. Olof Palme’s plan to democratize the corporations of Sweden could have changed the world, but “someone” had him killed. “Someone” thought they knew better. Freaks like Sigrid Rausing and her family think of themselves as “humanists” but they’re nothing of the sort. Her incomprehensible mountains of money keep her from ever knowing one pebble of what real “humanity” is. She “cares” about the rest of us the way she “cares” for her lawn with the blades of her servants’ lawnmowers.

Sigrid is having a massive temper tantrum because not only did the result of the Granta controversy not go the way she’d expected: a lot less “well I’ll be! guess we all ought to rethink this whole ‘being human’ thing, huh?” and a lot more “HAHA! FUCKING MORONS!” Then she wrote her smug little yesmen-approved open letter and was evidently shocked when everyone savagely mocked her instead of seriously considering the “deep wisdom” she thinks she’s in possession of because she throws money at “benevolent” regime change fronts. Now, wiping the egg from her face, she is storming out of the ruckus in the hen house entirely. She has thrown the Commonwealth Foundation under the bus, and has had Granta announce that THEY ARE NEVER PARTNERING WITH THE COMMONWEALTH FOUNDATION AGAIN, OR ANY OTHER THIRD PARTY!!!!

The 2026 selection of the regional winners of the Commonwealth prize caused a great deal of controversy, based on the speculation that one or more of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated, accusations that were strongly rejected by the authors.

For the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships. We will keep the Commonwealth prize shortlisted stories on our website in the public interest, and wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work.

It’s very possible imo that this tantrum may end with Sigrid deciding FUCK ALL OF YOU!!!!! and pull support for Granta entirely. Only time will tell!

So ends this chapter in the AI Lit Wars saga.

WHAT CAN CHALLENGE THIS AI FATALISM? IS IT… A NEW ROMANTICISM????

On our Fellow Travellers posts we always start by saying that “Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything.” But the title of ’s new collection, For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything, might be closer to the nut of it. These three microfictions from the book explain more…

Casting Couch

Kiefer put the fleshlight down upon his prong. “What is this supposed to be, anyway? I don’t even feel anything.” The director told him to look in the mirror and feign excitement. “I don’t think I belong in this country,” said Kiefer. “Yes,” replied the director. “That’s exactly what I’m going for.”

Keanu put the fleshlight down upon his prong. He knew he was rich and suddenly felt as though he would never be let into heaven. “Am I a good person?” he implored the director. But the director wasn’t inclined to give him any kind of answer. Any answer at all.

Kanye put the fleshlight down upon his prong. “Gosh, I can’t wait for life to start, you guys!” But life just wouldn’t get started. It had evaded him for so long, and now he had a fleshlight upon his prong. He was playing the lead role in a Shakespearean tragedy he didn’t even know the name of. The leading lady was played by a beetle. The senators were all on their way to slay him. And here’s the director, asking him to do it all over again.

Help! I’m Gay and I Accidentally Got into Heaven!

I just ran into the sky’s sidewalk. A big fat person sitting up there. It’s odd, how the world once moved me. Then I found out I’m allergic to stars. How will I ever manage this transition?

The Acid Police

So that afternoon we all said fuck it in unison and took to the streets. We weren’t sure what we were protesting exactly, only that it felt necessary at the time. It wasn’t long before we were surrounded by a crew of baton-wielding ballerinas wearing wingtipped slippers. The batons crunched down upon our skulls. Weirdly no one lost consciousness. We all knew it was the police in disguise.

We eventually managed to escape the ballerinas and found a nice cozy dumpster to hide in. Suddenly life felt so wholesome. Tony suggested rat poison.

—Don’t listen to this defector, Blair erupted. If we cease inventing visions to chase after, what’s left? Utter randomness? How fulfilling is that? I elect we make Tony himself ingest the rat poison—then if he lives, he has to carry all this garbage with us into the next vestibule. A new stratum. There has to be something we haven’t experienced yet. Let’s go out there and find out what it is – or at the very least invent it before it finds us!

—I second that emotion, shouted the one with the beard.

And so it was decided. A life on the run, with all the curls that come with it. As a collective, we would have to learn how to invisibilize ourselves.

We climbed into the van, sped off or rather moved slowly through all the requisite checkpoints, past the dancing bear and into the mini-mart parking lot.

—I’ll take a bottle of suicide water, I ordered. No gas.

I had an ominous feeling about the forthcoming roadblock, and since it was now me behind the wheel, I had to decide what to do about it and fast. Before I had a chance to make up what was left of my mind, an angel descended. He wore a transparent satin dress that showed off his tufted genitalia and a halo made out of firecrackers that wouldn’t stop exploding. Thankfully, God had also thought to adorn him with one of those headset microphones so we could hear his words through the crackling explosions hovering above him.

—I’m just here to answer any questions you might have about the afterlife.

We looked amongst ourselves, but couldn’t find any discarded question marks. The angel must have sensed this accretion through our silence, because he soon proffered a desultory moan, as though that would provide some recompense for our perpetually stalled insights.

A sheet of lightning was hurled from the skies to make the cops up ahead disappear. I knew I’d soon be dead, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. So much stimulation fatigues me, until I feel I can go no further. An imaginary line is drawn. It becomes a unit for measuring the despairing of my trust in others; particularly the ones I willingly surround myself with. At the end of the line lies our mutual goal, a picture that becomes more blurred each time one of us, as an individual, looks in that direction. At the end of the day, it is best to ignore it altogether. We’ve managed that. If only what we were left with, the question of our collective self, could be so simple.

I really wish that angel had had more to do. But it is not God’s role to give out presents. That is the role of someone else—someone who, like God, is no longer here.

TRAVIS JEPPESEN is an American writer based in Berlin, Germany. His recent books include *Settlers Landing*, a novel, and *For Those Who Hate a Little Bit of Everything*, stories.  

Buy Settlers Landing

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Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

IN OTHER NEWS

Not a living, but maybe a life

I’ve done a loose series of “how to” articles over the past 18 months on the rudiments of handling live literary spaces—how to run a reading, how to read publicly in a way that puts your stuff forward in its best light. This being Discordia, they’ve been sort of performatively grouchy in terms of their tone, and I’d planned on doing another in the same style on editing a journal. But I dunno, at the moment I feel a bit fragile due to personal life stress, and disheartened by a lot of the new books I’ve been reading lately. I do pick up stuff I know I won’t like for the purpose of giving it a productive drubbing, but I also feel it in my gut when something I have hopes for disappoints me—a hollowness into which the rest of my ambitions for the day inevitably slide, leaving me lying in the dark like a sickly Victorian woman whose only prescription has been leeches and more leeches, wishing I had even a modest gift for the guitar. Today, at least, I can’t stomach the notion of spitting bile over it all—I fear I’d only cough up my heart’s blood instead. So I suppose what I want to do is write here about editing and publishing in a way that reminds myself why I’m so drawn to working on other people’s stuff, to connecting art that makes me feel something with an audience that I believe will appreciate that work. Unlike the other articles, there isn’t a lot of proscriptive advice here. It may yet be of use to others exploring what working in publishing might mean for them, or of understanding why someone would want to do such a thing at all, but more than usual, I’m speaking to myself. And for that reason, I’ll have to start by reminding myself how I got here.

First part: On being “an editor” as an identity

Like most people who get into publishing, my first ambition was to be known as a writer. However, like nearly every example of this type of person, being known as a writer superseded writing as a practice. I needed something to be other than a burnout who worked at a grocery store by day and invented elaborate drinking games with his friends by night, and “writer” seemed a plausible enough option. Going to poetry readings (even bad ones), without exaggeration, changed my life. I met lifelong friends; blossomed intellectually; discovered ways of being in the world that I hadn’t previously dared to hope existed; really committed to a smoking habit; fell in love (or something like it) a few times; learned to nurture; experienced shattering disappointments; failed key responsibilities; made gross errors in judgement that I will regret the rest of my days; became, I hope, a kinder, more intriguingly wrinkled, and less destructively self-loathing person. Living as a “writer” was in short a ticket to a comprehensive, albeit belated, sentimental education I’d been too shy to embark upon. It is a process I describe in past-tense but experience in the present.

It has not, however, resulted in a great quantity of poetry.

I rate myself as an adequate talent; the sort of guy who could theoretically produce a handful of affable poetry collections that would not embarrass me and would be cherished by my friends,1 but would not be much read outside those circles or beyond a few months of their publication. Maybe I will eventually produce something anyway—as Derek Beaulieu has noted, what I’ve described would constitute a modest success by the standards of modern poetry publishing. The greater issue is that, while I like my poems well enough to write them on the infrequent occasions an idea occurs to me, I don’t actually produce enough of them for being “a writer of poems” to make sense as my primary thing in life. This is because, in my experience, what makes a writer (in the sense that writer constitutes an identity) is not the desire to be a writer, or even a talent for writing, but rather the helpless compulsion to write.2 (The same logic can obviously be extended to other callings, like painting or arson.) The most consistent writers I know are people whose claws leave deep gouges in the floorboards whenever they are dragged away from their desks3 by banal obligations like paying the rent or attending their own funeral. I by contrast will usually happily leave my writing chair and bike across town to be present at the gala opening of a beer can.

What I have discovered, and this is very much the sort of “old head wisdom” that is both blitheringly obvious and surprisingly difficult to internalize until you discover it for yourself, is that your real calling tends to be something you don’t need to whip yourself into doing consistently. Instead, it’s something that feels instinctively satisfying to perform on its own terms. For me, the work I do here at Discordia mostly meets this criteria, even when it is basically drudgery (e.g. formatting the fucking Jay’s List every month). I love the pursuit of and flirtation with potential Fellow Travellers; the feeling of spotting the simple structural change that makes a guest contributor’s essay truly sing; the look of four-to-six finalized articles in the scheduler and a good crop in progress in the drafts folder; the box of fresh zines from the printer’s; hell, whenever I use a burner account to post links to our stuff on various annoying subreddits I even experience the same sense of manful self-sacrifice I feel helping a hoarder friend move house or volunteering to empty camp toilets. We’re still a very disorganized shop, and I am guilty of assuming my collaborators can read my mind and mood to a degree I’m told is unreasonable, but this role fits me such that the hard work of it requires little coaxing to undertake.

None of this precludes my continuing to write creatively (I’m a frequent contributor to this very blog, for example), but I have found a degree of freedom from the imposter syndrome that once haunted me by defining myself in a role more suited to my nature—though the simple yearning to be read and heard in my own right will never go away. Whenever the subject of being something other than a writer comes up, I often find myself recounting an incident from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, in which a fierce young man named Espinoza who has pinned his entire identity on being a writer has an extended dark night of the soul after beginning to suspect that 1) he actually has little in common with the other members of the Madrid writing community and 2) that his own creative writing kind of sucks:

And it was the beginning of his loneliness and a steady stream (or deluge) of resolutions, often contradictory or impossible to keep. These weren’t comfortable nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal. Instead he concentrated on his realization that he would never be a writer and on making everything he possibly could out of his newly unearthed bravery.

As a result of these realizations, he is able to re-focus his formidable will and ambition on academia and quickly becomes an eminent critic (albeit in a very narrow field).

What I have found behind the doors unlocked by the key that was my own attempt to be a writer are what I think of as my real creative gifts: a capacity to bring people together; to identify talent; to understand what an artist is aiming for and to help them find a path towards its realization; to support them when their faith in their own abilities falters in the face of our era’s unfathomably bad taste. These are all fundamentally socially oriented qualities, and this speaks to the alignment between the nature of the role of an editor (which cannot exist in a vacuum, much though many editors may despise the talent they work with) and my own nature. A former friend once diagnosed me with cruel charity as a supremely skilled social mimic who would never be anything if I didn’t shake the tendency and learn to be myself. The critique was acutely observed but ultimately off the mark: I am always myself, but am at my most fully realized when working within and toward things greater than myself.

Second part: On Discordia

The editorial board of Discordia is an amorphous and fluctuating collective whose membership is opaque even to me. But in terms of its outlook on what we’re actually doing in publishing, it could probably be divided into three rough camps whose attitudes strike me as distinct if not exactly contradictory.4

Eris is the dominant voice both in terms of public output and behind the scenes as the project’s founder. He and those editors who most closely share his philosophy are both profoundly idealistic about art and profoundly fatalistic about its prospects in the twenty-first century. To quote him in a moment of despair that is revealing of both his doubt and his uncompromising ambition, “Everything is damned already, no one will be mustered, there is no one to assemble, no one to give themselves to the cause, to commit to a project or ideal and to believe blindly in it, to have faith in it, to give up reason and rationality and simply act.” In essence, nothing short of art as a force of occult transcendence will do: “To make your own reality through force of will that may with sufficient [belief] burst forth and overtake other people’s realities, to make truth into Truth.”

At other times he is somewhat more measured, but given such standards it can be hard to look at his own successes as a critic and what we have managed as a print press and think much has been accomplished given the state of the wider literary world, or even the local scene here in Montreal. Small wonder his preferred mode is being on the attack as a lone harrier striking public blows against the institutions in hopes that revealing their hypocrisies will loosen their hold on whatever power remains in a decaying industry. (And also because it often feels good to hit things.) This aspect of the project has become our signature—chances are if you’re reading this, your entry point was one of Eris’s takedowns.

A second perspective within the collective focuses on Discordia’s pathway to truly transforming Canadian literature via its potential to eventually become a trade publisher on the scale of, at least, a Palimpsest, a Book*hug, a Goose Lane.5 The small press establishment such as it is is rickety—everyone in it is overworked and underfunded, and that there has been in many respects a consolidation among the small presses in terms of house style has opened up a wide lane for creating a genuine alternative. Is there not room in the field for something shocking? Something antagonistic? Fiercely loyal though we are to our DIY model, there are models for scaling up. After all, it took editors and publishers with vision and distribution to give air to most of our heroes: Bob Cobbing, Kathy Acker, bpNichol, Grace Paley, Mordecai Richler, Samuel Delaney, etc.6 Should we not commit as much as we can to giving the talents we identify as Our Guys, the Jack Brides, the Meghan Harrisons, as broad a platform as possible?

It probably makes for good editorial balance that I find myself in a third position roughly equidistant from the other two, less out of any disagreement with either and more because I have a carefully cultivated tendency not to dream too much. The world around me has always felt too brittle to go far beyond what I can directly account for. I can’t say whether we have it in us to be a trade press one day, financially or in terms of personal stability; and there is always the risk an astringent critic (or group of critics) runs of becoming so defined by their astringency that most of their other qualities and potentialities are occluded in the final analysis.7 And so my own approach is to think small, one zine, a few posts at a time, but to plan meticulously on that scale. Whatever Discordia will become, I bend myself to making it the most it can be in the moment, knowing that this is the surest way to ensure that what it is is worthy of the aspirations we each have for it—that our readership expects of us.

This also lends itself to a mindset of appreciating the good stuff as it happens. Painstakingly retyping the transcript of a recording of an off-the-cuff conversation between my friends that made me feel fairly overwhelmed at my own luck to have such remarkable comrades; and seeing that sense affirmed by the responses of our readers. That Phil Hall, as close to the embodiment of what’s worth honouring in the Canadian avant-garde tradition as there is, letting us publish a full sequence of his new poems; getting to watch from the side of the stage as he sang to a rapt audience mostly discovering him for the first time; receiving even now his waves from Otty Lake in my inbox from time to time. Clearing out some of the thickets in another of Eris’s 7,000-words-in-three-hours assaults so his flame would burn bright and clean; and then printing some of the best of his poetry. Making Joshua Chris Bouchard write horoscopes, and then seeing him perform them live in Toronto next to a fortune teller’s table he’d hauled halfway across the city just because he knew the bit of extra set-dressing would complete my peculiar little vision. Publishing so many names from what had been my own personal rolodex of the Good Ones in barely over a year and a half; finding a few new Good Ones even in the dregs of the slushpile. Being told by Opal Louis Nations that my email asking for some poems and drawings, which happened to land on his 84th birthday, was the best news he’d had in some time. Still hearing the spirit of an old friend cackling in the rafters.

Discordia Review has occasionally been accused of cruelty. I don’t think that’s been the case, and I wouldn’t particularly want to be a part of a journal that bullies people for their personal foibles for the sake of a cheap thrill. But we do have a nasty streak, and so in that light it might seem incongruous to say that I what have aspired to most in my work with the press is to provide hope—hope and iron. Hope for those readers who wish to form a more discerning and opinionated audience for writing that offers the public no platitudes; iron for their conviction that what seems to them to be bland bullshit is bland bullshit and that there is no moral reward for eating it. Hope for new writers pressured to bend the knee to the expectations of grants and institutions and write from inside a box that was built to kennel them; iron to forge their own weapons to make their own way. Hope to those great talents who have been working in relative obscurity for years and who are doomed to be themselves whatever it costs their career prospects; iron to give the products of their imaginations a more tangible substance. Hope to those long-timers who have spent their decades contributing to blazing, necessary traditions that younger generations are unknowingly being denied contact with; iron to ensure the work of their lives endures. Whatever starts here multiplies with each person who joins our cause, and in however many make something of their own that shares at least the principal that there is something in art that is deeper than a hobby, more worth risk than the promise of an allowance.

It’s 6:36 AM and I’ve been writing since just before midnight, and I know if I’m doing this sort of chestbeating routine it’s time to crawl into bed before I do any further damage. So let me tie it off here: As I once said to a young person who asked me how one gets a career in literature, “You probably can’t make a living in writing. But you can make a life.” And I’m living one.

As always, if we’re missing something, or you want your event included, please message @discordia.review on Instagram to propose an inclusion. Doing so in advance if you already know what’s up next month is even better.

2 JULY (THURS)

mRb SUMMER 2026 LAUNCH
What: Do we know why the “R” in “mRb” is capitalized? Have they considered going full KoЯn with it? mЯb has kind of a look to it, is all we’re saying. Anyway, new issue, probably fulla fucken book reviews and whatnot.
Where: Teesri Duniya Theatre (Cité-des-Hospitalières 251 Avenue des Pins Ouest, #148).
When: 6pm.
Who: Natalie Doonan, Guy Rex Rodgers, and Chanel Sutherland.
How Much: Free. (Link)

3 JULY (FRI)

SHOW UP FOR METONYMY
What: Despite poster’s call for “dontations” (which I presume is when you refuse to give a specific amount to a cause), it seems the long running small gay publisher could use some quick cash. A quartet of readings, followed by “karaoke vibes,” which I presume just means “karaoke.”
Where: Articule (6282 rue St-Hubert).
When: 7 to 10pm.
Who: Nora Treatbaby, Adjani Poirier, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, and Felix Chau Bradley. Hosted by Sultana.
How Much: PWYC, $20 to $40 suggested. (Link)

THE OPEN BOOK MIC
What: Not a lit specific open mic (music and comedy are also permitted) so I’m not going to repeat this listing four times here, but know that it repeats every Friday till every angel gets its wings.
Where: Café Eevee (1251 Rue St-Zotique E).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls.
How Much: Free. (Link)

4 JULY (SAT)

PHOENIX ASCENSION PARTY
What: I dunno man, but there’s snacks. CAW!
Where: Librairie Phoenix (5928 rue Sherbrooke O).
When: 6 to 9pm.
Who: Whoever is willing to set themselves on fire and be born anew, I guess.
How Much: Free. (Link)

THROW! POETRY SLAM
What: Poetry slam, first Saturday of every month. No info online as of yet, but it’s presumably happening.
Where: Le basement. (3716 Notre Dame O.)
When: 9pm.
Who: Dunno.
How Much: $10. (Link) Summer break

5 JULY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic. Vol. 140 is on the theme “Tumultuous”—I feel like “Tumult” would be the more correct grammar, but who’s to say?1 (Computer, play “Bouquet of Barbed Wire” by The Ex.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Kat Charles and David Bateman.
How Much: Free. (Link)

7 JULY (TUES)

JRG LITERARY OPEN MIC
What: Rollicking monthly open mic with an absurdist edge, this time featuring MTL-by-NYC-by-MTLer Imogene Mahalia and Ottawan Fellow Traveller IAN MARTIN, who will be accompanied by David Currie, with whom MARTIN’s written a new above/ground chapbook.
Where: L’hémisphère gauche (221 Rue Beaubien E).
When: 8:30pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Imogene Mahalia, IAN MARTIN, and David Currie.
How Much: PWYC. (Link)

JO WALTON: EVERYBODY’S PERFECT LAUNCH
What: Did you know the only writer other than Ursula K. Le Guin to win Best Novel at the Hugos, Nebulas, and World Fantasy Awards lives in Montreal? Well she does. Anyway, she’s launching a book.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Jo Walton.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

9 JULY (THURS)

STEPHANIE BOLSTER/MISHA SOLOMON: above/ground ZINE LAUNCH
What: Speaking of above/ground, the tentacles of Ottawa chapbook impresario rob mclennan continue to creep into Montreal as his press reissues a vintage Stephanie Bolster chap alongside a new one from Misha Solomon that responds to Bolster’s original.
Where: Librairie Pulp Books & Cafe.
When: 7 to 8:30pm.
Who: Stephanie Bolster and Misha Solomon. Hosted by Sarah Burgoyne.
How much: Free. (Link)

11 JULY (SAT)

QUEER + TRANS BOOK + ZINE SWAP
What: Queer + trans book + zine swap = ? Anyway, it’s happening! Presented by Dick’s Lending Library + Sheer Spite.
Where: Parc Lafontaine, corner of Sherbrooke + Papineau.
When: 2 to 5pm. (Rain date: same time Sunday)
Who: Whoever has the books + zines.
How Much: Free. (Link)

CHERIE HART: IT HAPPENED ON HARVARD AVENUE
What: Launch of a mystery novel set in Westmount, where this launch happens to be. See what you can deduce from that.
Where: Chez Nick (1377 ave Greene).
When: 5 to 7pm.
Who: Cherie Hart. Also snacks.
How Much: Free. (Link)

13 JULY (MON)

BOOKMATCH
What: Get half-cut at LSH—your $45 gets you a glass of prosecco, two glasses of wine, a $5 LSH giftcard and some time with a staffer, who will try to “set you up” with a book you’ll like. Personally I like to imagine you get all three glasses at once and everyone is walking around the store with their hands full.
Where: Librairie St-Henri Bookstore (4622 rue Notre-Dame Ouest).
When: 7pm.
Who: Whoever has $45.
How Much: $45. (Link) SOLD OUT!

16 JULY (THURS)

STÉPHANE LEBLANC-RAINVILLE: NINE BAGS OF GOLD LAUNCH
What: Some historical nonfiction about a peculiar treasure hunt in nineteenth century Moncton.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Stéphane LeBlanc-Rainville.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

POETRY TRIVIA NIGHT
What: Encore Poetry Project (the ones what do that window display at the bookstore) are doing a lit trivia night. The answers are: Leonard Cohen, B), Ocean Vuong, Accent Open Mic, True, Oscar Wilde, C), Leonard Cohen, Nicky Taylor, 34, Billy-Ray Belcourt, False, Anne Carson, Encore Poetry Project, enjambment, A), and Leonard Cohen. Good luck!
Where: Champs (3956 Boul. St-Laurent).
When: 8pm.
Who: Whoever’s got the time on their hands. Hosted by Misha Solomon.
How much: Free, prizes to be had. (Link)

19 JULY (SUN)

ACCENT OPEN MIC
What: Popular twice monthly bilingual open mic—theme is “Luck.” (Computer, play “Opposite Day” by Andrew Bird.)
Where: Bar le Record (7622 rue Saint-Hubert).
When: 8 to 10pm.
Who: Whoever has the balls, plus Sena the Queen and David Koloszyc.
How Much: Free. (Link)

AHOY #5 LAUNCH PARTY
What: Local trilingual lit journal continues its plan to reconstruct the Tower of Babel in the low-ceilinged confines of the beloved Word bookstore.
Where: The Word. (469 rue Milton.)
When: 7pm.
Who: “Some of your favourite local writers.”
How Much: $10, or $20 with copy of the mag (link).

21 JULY (TUES)

KŌHEI SAITŌ: CAPITAL FROM ZERO LAUNCH
What: A new introduction to Marx’s Capital, goes the spiel—Saitō’s translator Brian Bergstrom will be in attendance.
Where: Argo (1841-A Rue Sainte-Catherine O).
When: 7 to 9pm.
Who: Brian Bergstrom.
How much: Free, but RSVP recommended. (Link)

maisonneuve 100 LAUNCH
What: A hundred episodes used to be enough for a sitcom to enter the Valhalla of eternal syndicated reruns. Presumably something good also happens to magazines that achieve this nice round number.
Where: Co-op Bar Milton Parc (3714 av. du Parc).
When: Doors 7, show 8pm.
Who: Aurora Stewart de Peña, Eternity Martis, Katia Grubisic, Waseem Haja, and more.
How much: Free. (Link)

26 JULY (SUN)

“EGG THE POET”: yolk 5.2 LAUNCH
What: yolk brings back its popular “egg the poet” event in which the audience is invited to throw eggs at the readers, only this time you don’t actually get to use eggs, just water balloons. What is this, wolk magazine?
Where: Outdoors in the Mile End, RSVP for location.
When: 3:30 to 7pm.
Who: Contributors and whoever likes to get wet.
How much: Free. (Link)

BIRTH SCREENINGS 8: SILAS JAMES & EM ZEV
What: “Influenced by ‘90s underground spoken word/noise performances,” expecting talking, violin stuff, quotidian samples, probly some feedback. Followed by an hour of animated short films.
Where: White Wall Studio (here-ish).
When: 7pm.
Who: Silas James & Em Zev.
How much: $19.50. (Link)

31 JULY (FRI)

SLUTTY & SOLIDAIRE / FUNDRAISER
What: A rave in support of feminist co-op L’Euguélionne featuring four DJs from T.I.T.S. Collective.
Where: Espace SAT (1201 boul. St-Laurent).
When: 10pm to 6am.
Who: venus in bed, Jasleen, San Farafina [Moonshine], and Atity.
How much: $37.61 regular, $45.86 last chance. (Link)

And looking ahead to August…

We’ll get there when we get there.

The source of the petulant whining this time around is one David… Bezmozgis? How do you even pronounce that? Lemme just take a look at…

What? No. No fucking way. You’re kidding. This is an AI summary, I don’t think we can trust—

LMAO. Well, let’s just say nominative determinism theory is about to be vindicated yet again.

Anyways, David Brainless is mad because The Ex-Puritan put out a call for submissions for a special issue concerning “Resistance and Hope.” The issue says it hopes to be, as Brainless reports, “a creative folio of political education that consolidates ‘Resistance’ as armed struggle against US-led imperialism.” Further,

Ms. [Bahar] Orang [the issue’s guest editor—Eds.] writes that she deplores “zionist (sic) demand[s] to ‘condemn’ this group or that group” and wishes “to affirm [that] revolutionary violence [...] is a historically accurate, materially grounded, and ethically sound position to hold.”

Brainless isn’t a fan of this kind of talk. He’s mad specifically because the call shouts out Palestinian resistance, which Brainless takes issue with, and has used the opportunity to publish an article in The Globe & Mail, one of the country’s biggest newspapers with six million active subscribers and which was literally founded by one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, to spotlight an indie magazine with a few thousand followers on Instagram and a total of $22k in government grants over the last ten years which probably still runs into the red after paying its contributors. This has engendered, as I’m sure Brainless expected it would, a (proportionally massive) harassment campaign—not only of The Ex-Puritan but even of the League of Canadian Poets simply for having shared the call, which is, you know, just their job.

Brainless spends most of his ink whining about how this is disrespectful to all the casualties on October 7th or something, also going so far as to mention all the alleged “gender-based violence” which took place. Sure, 300 of those casualties were explicitly soldiers, we still don’t know just how many of those casualties were the result of Israeli friendly fire (many of which were reportedly not accidental), no one can confirm anything about these alleged sex crimes because Israel forum shopped the shit out of an assessment they knew was primed to consider every single case put forward to them as a confirmed sexual assault before even investigating it1 (which certainly doesn’t make me confident about the veracity of the claims!), a lot of those killed lived in settlements and kibbutzim specifically set up to be a “living perimeter” to keep the Palestinians in place, and that, in retaliation, the Israelis have since killed dozens and dozens of times the alleged casualty count of October 7th (and frankly I think it’s probably a lot more even than that!), including ten times the proportionate killing of children (3% of Israeli casualties on October 7th were children, vs. 30% of Palestinian casualties after October 7th), which I’m sure will be “rebutted” by the claim that Hamas “uses human shields,” in spite of said claim being debunked by both Human Rights Watch and mainstream journalists like those at the BBC, and in spite of the fact that Israel itself has been accused of using human shields by Amnesty International.

In a… interview cited by Ms. Orang, Mr. Omar said that “it stands to reason that if the outright intention had been to indiscriminately kill, the number of Israeli casualties in the initial days would probably have been significantly higher.”

Well, I don’t see what’s so appalling about Orang’s statement, that’s just true—given that 30% of Israelis are under 14 years of age, the casualty statistics do not suggest Hamas targeted children in the attacks. This certainly suggests an attack that wasn’t prioritizing civilian casualties. Still, maybe don’t raise your kids as a “living perimeter” (I want to make clear that this isn’t “my opinion,” this is the language used by the settlers who live there) around an open-air concentration camp?

That a writer in Canada can pitch an editor on an issue of a magazine whose purpose, at least in part, is to lend intellectual cover for the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7

Isn’t this entire article lending intellectual cover for the atrocities committed by Israel on… always? Check out the ways that Brainless deliberately obscures the truth in order to accomplish his ideological goals:

Canadian Jews represent 1 per cent of Canada’s population but they are now the objects of nearly 70 per cent of hate crimes.

You can read these reports on “antisemitism” yourself and find that the majority of what they’re calling “hate crimes” are literally just saying “Israel is bad and I don’t like it.”

For those who feel differently and have an essay for ISIS or a haiku for Hamas, The Ex-Puritan is accepting submissions until Aug. 7.

Brainless wants readers to assume that Hamas is on par with some kind of Salafi jihadist group. Hamas and ISIS aren’t remotely the same thing, Brainless. In fact, Hamas fought an entire war against ISIS.2 But let’s focus on something Brainless does get right:

You might ask why you should care about an issue of a literary magazine most Canadians have never heard of.

Sure. The Ex-Puritan is not a famous magazine. I’ll be honest, it isn’t even a very good magazine. I might even call them pretty fucking annoying.

But anyways, famous or not, the fact that most Canadians have never heard of The Ex-Puritan doesn’t really matter. Most Canadians also haven’t heard of Malahat, Fiddlehead, PRISM, etc. The Ex-Puritan is not necessarily a “small dog” in Canadian lit magazines, they’re well-known if this is a topic you keep up with, but most Canadians (most people, really) don’t read literary magazines to begin with and couldn’t tell a James Wood from a James Woods. This obviously bitter and petty attempt at a slight on Brainless’s part is meaningless. David, if they’re such a non-entity, then why are you writing an article in The Globe and Mail about them? I have no idea who David Brainless is, but he has a Wikipedia page and an op-ed in a major Canadian magazine, he’s obviously someone, otherwise I wouldn’t be fucking writing this! If I wanted to insult David, I wouldn’t sneer and pretend he’s a nobody, because then who am I for taking shots at him? Besides, I can just post this photo of him instead.

Frankly, the mandate for the issue up for discussion felt to me like a bunch of virtue signalling. In spite of the issue’s claims to be grounded in some kind of “materialist” revolutionary politics—certainly a lot more tolerable than the magazine’s usual wussy lib bullshit (see: above)—this is still pretty obviously immaterial. It’s fucking poetry in an indie magazine. Calm the fuck down. This is LARP. The Ex-Puritan wasn’t going to accomplish anything with this issue of their magazine, but now, thanks to Brainless, they kinda will, even if they lose their funding and get harassed out of existence in the process.

The general Canadian public doesn’t know about The Ex-Puritan. But most of what people are going to see here—even your standard Globe and Mail Readers—is yet another example of Zionists trying to bully people. A ton of Zios are presently harassing Ex-Puritan and the LCP, but these people are merely a very vocal (and nasally) minority. What people like Brainless don’t understand is that they are only shooting themselves in the foot. They’re so fucking butthurt about people supporting Palestine that they impulsively react by sitting down even harder on the issue to try and smoosh it, but all it does is go further up their asses. It would honestly be a much better tactic to simply ignore it, especially to something no one is paying attention to or cares about, but they just. can’t. help it. And part of that is the extreme amount of copium they’re imbibing. At least 61% of Canadians now hold “unfavourable” views of Israel. I’m sorry (not really lol) but you’re never putting the cat back in the bag, and it will only get worse. International opinion is swinging wildly against Israel. In many influential countries, Israel’s unfavourability now dwarfs South Africa’s in the 1980s. And as America’s international influence wanes, Israel will slowly find that its most stalwart supporter simply will not have the pull it used to have. Those who know my political commentaries know that I am not an optimist, but I think the truth here is, for once, quite optimistic in the long run: Israel as we know it, Israel as a “Jewish state,” will cease to exist in our lifetimes. What that means and what it will look like is anyone’s guess, but of this much I am certain.

But that’s the big picture. The little picture, the localized one we’re talking about in Canadian media, still sucks. A wanton bully like Brainless, someone “unintentionally” directing hate mobs toward a barely funded indie lit magazine from within the pages of one of the most widely-read newspapers in the country, can do whatever he wants and face basically no repercussions. The Ex-Puritan may have to take its email down because of all the harassment they’re going to continue to receive, while David’s inbox, meanwhile, will probably be full of these same pervs harassing The Ex-Puritan telling him how “brave” he is for stomping on a tiny independent bug with the power of his institutional print magazine boot. Those who think people like Brainless are assholes, a demographic which dwarfs Brainless’s supporters in sheer numbers, will likely stay out of it.

AND FOR MORE CANADIAN IMPERIALIST SHITHEADS:

1

An excerpt for those of you without institutional access; a worthwhile read:

I’m mostly just reporting on what people tell me. Maybe we’ll do more of these, maybe we won’t, maybe the fallout will be too great a pain in the ass to continue! Time will tell! But in case we do continue:

GIVE ME GOSSIP

If you submit me juicy enough gossip that I haven’t heard, you’ll get free access to the Gossip Club for a month (email discordia.sucks@gmail.com and they’ll forward it to me). You just have to abide by the two gossip rules:

GOSSIP RULES:

1. Subjects must have at least one published chapbook or book, have a major award or achievement, or be published with decent frequency in Journals Of Repute. I’m not trying to clown on small-time amateurs here. And believe me, there’s a few of those I could give you an earful about. That said, I’ll absolutely love to hear about it anyways, I just won’t run it in the column.

2. No sex crimes. We’re doing Fun Gossip, No Downers—if you have a credible report of a sex crime then contact the police, the CBC, or a lawyer. A lawyer aside from Eris, anyways.

So with that out of the way, let’s begin.

Read more

Sire on Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century by Derek Beaulieu (nonfiction)
Andrew Wu on Suicide by Édouard Levé, trans. by Jan Steyn (fiction)
Sire on ouch ouch ouch by Ev Ricky (illustrations & poetry)
Veeda Khan on It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Meltzer

Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century
Nonfiction by Derek Beaulieu
Assembly Press, 2026 (Publisher's Site)

Reviewed by Sire

The most arresting observations in Derek Beaulieu’s new self-help book for poets come early on. In the chapter “There is No There There,”1 Beaulieu does some quick cocktail napkin math on the economics of poetry publishing, and what the numbers can tell us about the genre’s presumable readership:

Five hundred copies [the average print run of a poetry collection] for 40 million people means that a good-selling book of poetry will have a readership of less than 0.0001 percent of Canada’s population. One ten-thousandth of 1 percent. […] For American authors, the situation doesn’t scale. The population is roughly ten times that of Canada, but the print runs for poetry are not ten times higher; they remain about the same at around 500–1,000 copies.

Following on from this premise, Beaulieu notes that, of the estimated $12,475 grossed from the sale of said 500 books, an author on a 10% royalty deal will make approximately $1,249 after the publishers, distributors and bookstores have taken their cuts;2 that even this paltry sum is an optimistic scenario given how few titles actually sell out even a single printing; and, looming above all this, that poetry makes up a mere 0.12% of total book sales.3

I can’t imagine there are too many non-delusional poets working towards a traditional publishing deal who are unaware of the general bleakness of the financial picture awaiting them, but it’s useful to have the ice cold water of your earnings will top out at like $5 a week tossed in your face from time to time as a reminder of how absurd it is to allow ‘careerism’ to dictate your choices as a poet. And for the audience of beginners and hobbyists that Beaulieu seems to be catering to with Do It Wrong, it’s not a bad idea to establish reasonable expectations early.

In his own practice Beaulieu is an extremely prolific experimental poet, and it’s consistent with that ethos when he concludes that, since you’re not going to sell anything anyway, you are therefore free to do whatever you want to do. (In fact, Beaulieu laudably makes available free of charge nearly everything he’s ever published.) The underlying message here is that gatekeepers have no real power once you realize there is practically nothing behind the gate that you cannot acquire on your own. Publishers don’t like your stuff? Make some zines and give them away. Depressed by your lack of readership? Burrow deeper into the community of fellow (similarly profoundly unread) writers. Prizes are a scam, winners chosen by exhausted compromise, laurels of thin air on scalps of thinning hair. There’s a lot to these basic premises that a Discordia reader can sympathize with.

In some ways, this all makes for a nice antidote to the Save the Cat!-style writing manuals that purport to instruct aspirants on techniques for producing commercially viable work while (in reality) stuffing their imaginations into boxes. But Beaulieu’s blandly optimistic tone is too similar to these For Dummies handbooks for comfort. In many respects, something like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet could also be described as a “self-help” book for “creatives,” but for all that book’s tenderness and pragmatic statements about the writer’s life, its great, defining quality is the seriousness with which it treats poetry. Upon being shown the works sent to him by the ‘young poet,’ which the reader can infer are of middling quality,4 Rilke’s remarks are tactful and generous, but he refuses to praise the poet unduly—one senses that to do so would be a betrayal of both his correspondent and of poetry. What he gives instead are his own ideas on how to see and to feel in such a way that, whether one has a genuine talent for verse or not, one can live in a condition of humble sensitivity that is conducive to poiesis.

By contrast, despite obviously being an obsessive who has moulded his life around his art, the Beaulieu of Do It Wrong mostly sounds like he’s talking about a hobby of little real consequence beyond signposting one’s own quirkiness.5 (I yearned for the prickly grievance farming of Stuart Ross’s cult classic Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer because, in addition to being funny, it was clear how much it burned his ass to see hacks have more success than the genuine talents—most notably himself.) As with most contemporary artists, Beaulieu has been forced to spend nearly as much time teaching in creative programs and hustling for grants and patronage positions6 as he has working on his own poetry. That’s why even when he tries to get serious about defending the importance of the genre, he can’t help but answer like the creature of the system that he is. Beaulieu checks off the required references to the supposed positive economic impact of Canadian artists (despite having established the puniness of poetry’s current stature); to Indigenous peoples (via a shoehorned-in two-pager on what ‘thinking like Natives’ can teach us about community); to Representing Identities, and so on and on. Witness the worst advice in the entire book:

A young queer student once asked me to read their manuscript and offer feedback. I shared with them that I was surprised, because their writing sounded like something I might write—and I’m cis-bodied, straight, male, and middle-aged. I suggested they consider how they could use a vocabulary, a structure, a POV, and a means of writing that is indelibly twenty-first century 2SLGBTQ+.

“Toss these sestinas. I want 90 new free verse poems about Sonichu on my desk by Tuesday!” he might as well have said. You can tell how proud he is to have acted so progressively in cramming this poor student right back into the ID Bucket after they’d made an effort to write outside of the framework established by their Feeld profile’s bio. One can write true poetry in an “indelibly twenty-first century 2SLGBTQ+” vein, but you’re also allowed to be a queer who locates your style in other elements of your identity and experience. If anything, by pushing this student into adopting a more recognizably queer-coded affect, Beaulieu’s advice is as likely to prevent the emergence of a unique style as it is to encourage it.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke notes that, while he’s ostensibly offering advice to his correspondent, he is really speaking to his own younger self, trying to tell himself things he wishes he could’ve known, advice he even now wishes he could take. I don’t know if Beaulieu is writing ‘to himself’ in the same way (or if he realizes that’s what he’s doing), but if he is, he has fallen somewhat short of the intimate honesty of his greater forebears in the field (a number of whom are helpfully cited in the book’s recommended reading list). He’d have had a better book if he’d rid it of some of the pro forma-sounding liberal truisms larding it down and gave it more of his own strangeness, his own philosophies of poetry beyond, ‘It’s fun to do and it’s okay if you don’t win any awards.’ The book is better when his gift for free association, the sort of unreasonable synaesthetic logic all poets must have to some degree, peeks out:

I strive to write books that move and shimmer like the landscapes in my dreams. I imagine towering letters along the horizon-line viewed for an instant through the flickering of a copse of birch trees, street signs reflected in oily puddles on the sidewalk, poems trapped in the methane bubbles of Abraham Lake.

What a beautiful way of articulating why his own muse has led him toward the concrete, iconographic visual poetry for which he is known. Surely this sort of thing is more likely to fire the imagination of a young poet than bland pablum about poetry’s great worth to the economy or the meaning of an A+ grade. There is good advice to be found within Do It Wrong, and we would all do well to heed Beaulieu’s exhortations toward greater generosity and communitarianism. But overall, it’s more likely to make you want to give a poet a wedgie than to become one yourself. — Sire

Suicide
Fiction by Édouard Levé, Trans. Jan Steyn
Dalkey Archive Essentials, 2025 (Publisher’s Website)

Reviewed by Andrew Wu

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?

Édouard Levé (1965–2007) was a French artist and author. Self-taught, he produced a handful of books and series of photographs. His writing is meanderingly, almost mockingly objective—for example, Oeuvres is simply a list of hundreds of his ideas for possible works of art (some of which he eventually realized.)

Levé’s last work, Suicide, is a novella in which an unnamed narrator conveys to the reader a description of his friend, an unnamed you who committed suicide two decades prior. In March 2008, Suicide was published (in the original French) by Éditions P.O.L. In 2011, Dalkey Archive Press released an English translation by Jan Steyn, and in 2025, it was reissued as a part of Dalkey’s Essentials series. Before the mundanities of publication, translation, and distribution, in October 2007, ten days after sending Suicide to his editor, Levé hanged himself.

Suicide begins with the narrator recounting the act itself: his friend is to play tennis; he tells his wife he forgot his racket; he returns to his house; he shoots himself in the head (specifically the mouth, we later learn); his wife finds him a few minutes later; in her grief, she accidentally knocks over (and thus closes) the comic book that had been opened to specific pages that were to serve as a suicide note of sorts. The remainder of the novella comprises a series of the narrator’s observations about his friend—some banal, some tragic, some short and salient, some long and winding and full of digressions, all inevitably, irrevocably colored by the first act and the title. We learn in one paragraph that the friend spoke both French and English, and in the next paragraph that the narrator believes his friend’s death gave his life “coherence,” and in the next that the friend had not backed down from a confrontation with two aggressive drivers, and in the next that the friend’s “quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable.” The title forces us to grapple with these details, some of them trivialities, as if they were vitally important. How relevant to his suicide is it that the friend thought it “better to listen to rock in a foreign language”? (Perhaps it is!)

We know also that there is a degree of unreality to the narrator’s observations. He cannot know some of the things he claims to. He says so explicitly, when describing the act: “I have never gone into this house […] I’ve replayed the scene hundreds of times, always in the same settings, those I imagined.” Other times we may infer he is guessing, though confidently so. “You would no doubt have needed to see these people for some time in order for the present to replace the past.” (No doubt, surely.) In life, the narrator and his friend were not so close, so how could he know so much? “I was more attached to other boys … [you] used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious.”

Mysterious indeed: one of Suicide’s themes is the way in which the unknown is more attractive than the known:

Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

The friend dreams up imaginary holidays; likes the idea of new destinations until he arrives; thinks the lives described in books more real than his own; believes his parents wanted him due to “what they imagined [he] would be” rather than who he was. This theme is mirrored at every level of the novella’s construction. The narrator’s friend, after all, “died because [he] searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.” Life is known, predictable; death is not. It is the unknown, too, that compels the narrator to revisit all these facts and stories of his friend—no one really knew why he shot himself. It is all patchwork guesswork. It is, indeed, in part, what compels us to read the novella, that unknown, that Levé hung himself and can never, in interviews or writing or future art, recontextualize or explain or elaborate upon Suicide.

Given the circumstances, one might come, as the narrator does, to associate the unknown with the future and the known with the past:

Religious and mythological painting would take you back to a past that was known and without surprises.

You wanted to know your future […] You would be able to consult the future like you could remember the past[.]

But it’s all muddled, isn’t it? Because, to the narrator, the past seems also mutable. “The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form,” he says, in one of the novella’s most unforgettable passages. You think you know someone; in a flash, a heartbeat, they prove to you that you really knew nothing at all, and you are forced to reconsider, through a glass darkly, their entire being.

Such contradictions are the heart of Suicide. The past is fixed yet mutable. It cannot be changed except by the act of interpretation, yet the act of interpretation can change nothing at all. The narrator cannot know what his friend thought and believed, but speaks as though he were intimately familiar with him. They were not close in life; they are close in death. There was a suicide note of sorts, in the form of a specific set of pages in a comic book; it is addressed only once, briefly, after the initial description of the suicide, when the narrator describes how the deceased's father engaged with the book: “[he] bought dozens of copies, which he gave to everyone […] he is looking for the page, and on the page for the sentence, that you had chosen.” In the same way, too, we are given far more information than is necessary to understand the narrator’s friend’s suicide—“better to listen to rock in a foreign language”—and as such we are given nothing at all.

To attempt to make sense of these contradictions, this overflow of information, is futile, and simultaneously, the only thing we can do and the only thing worth doing. Such is the labor of literature and of life. For to those who grow old, sense-making is a slow, arduous, yet rewarding process—a few meaningless encounters here bloom, decades later, into a romance; a paragraph from a book read as a teenager resurfaces as one enters their fifties; the seemingly contradictory wisdom of one’s father and mother unify themselves in adulthood; the tendrils of life, long as they are, have the chance to organize themselves neatly, to weave themselves into tapestries that proclaim to the world, this is who I am.

A premature self-inflicted death, then, forces a sudden reckoning. Those meaningless encounters will never bloom. That paragraph will never resurface. One’s parents will be locked in eternal conflict. The tendrils of life, cut short, are interpreted not as curving here and there, seemingly at random, so that they might eventually come together in some beautiful form, but rather as pointing—all of them, in some way or another, forever and ever—toward suicide. — Andrew Wu

ouch ouch ouch
Illustrations and Poetry by Ev Ricky
Self-Published, 2025 (Artist’s Website)

Reviewed by Sire

looking
at all
the specimens
going,

OUCH
OUCH
OUCH

This slim self-published volume of full-colour self-portraits and minimalist poetic narration by Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Ev Ricky7 was produced as part of a residency at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine, a fascinating (and gnarly) collection of books and anatomical ephemera from the past few centuries of experimentation.

Ricky’s compositions are modelled on images from the master anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri.8 In addition to breaking new ground in the medical understanding of the human form, the art in Vesalius’s book also frequently depicts his hideously mangled subjects in allegorical poses that perhaps served as memento mori, reminding clinicians that these dead remains were once (and may yet be) vessels of spirit just like themselves, that they should be treated with care.

Ricky’s updated takes are in a sense making this same argument on behalf of the modern patient, rendering that invisible experience of pain with vivid cartoon logic: a pair of disembodied hands inside throat and pelvis wrenching the esophagus; bloody hooks lodged in the musculature of the upper back to keep the figure's ass from collapsing around their feet like fallen drapery; the discrete organs of the bowels and womb fused into a thorny mass. The drawings vary somewhat in style (some more draftsmanlike, others crude) but most are marked by bold washes of colour, as though to represent the way intense sensations pulse and throb beyond what it seems possible for the physical body to contain.

Despite the painful subject matter, and because of it, ouch ouch ouch is marked by a great sense of tenderness and compassion. The human figure’s solitary suffering is interrupted by a little yellow dog, whose simple needs and affections demand attention—though the visual signifiers of pain remain (a head full of shattering glass etc.), there is also a mingling of auras (and even swapping of features) with the other creature that resituates that pain within the greater experience of living. Ricky’s conclusions are oblique, and the artist doesn’t try to force a happy ending onto their account of ongoing chronic pain (even romantic companionship is introduced as “the gift / of a productive cough, / the woman who gave it / to me dying laughing / to a song in the kitchen”), but the final images seem to evoke both transcendence and endurance.

Ev Ricky has long been at work on their debut graphic novel I Wouldn’t Lie to You (working title), a book I expect to significantly raise their profile both regionally and abroad. But in the meantime, ouch ouch ouch offers further proof that they are among Montreal’s most intriguing comics-adjacent artists. The book is now in its second printing9—contact Ricky for purchasing details through their website. — Sire

It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin
Nonfiction by Marisa Meltzer
Simon & Schuster, 2025 (Publisher’s Website)

Reviewed by Veeda Khan

Despite her stardom as a singer, actress, and socialite, Jane Birkin is perhaps better remembered for the objects associated with her than any particular artistic success. In the Anglosphere at least, one tends to think of fashion: the bag, the bangs, the jeans and white t-shirt. If enough curiosity strikes, or if one crosses the Pinterest recommended photo threshold to the point of actual interest, maybe there is a desire to find out more about the woman. And maybe that desire prompts one to pick up a book and not just do a cursory Google search. And maybe that book is It Girl, by New York Times columnist Marisa Meltzer. And maybe, once one reads it, one realizes the English Wikipedia article would’ve probably sufficed.

Concise and unaffected, and drawn exclusively from public sources, It Girl dutifully tracks Birkin’s rise from English debutante to household name. Born to a Royal Navy spy and an actress, Birkin has been a socialite since she was a teen. She dated three male artists, with whom she had three artiste daughters, who all splintered out into high-profile careers: Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg are both actress-musicians, while Kate Barry was a photographer-turned-philanthropist. Such a diversity in artistic endeavors should come as no surprise. Birkin herself filmed seventy movies, directed one, recorded thirteen albums, and modelled many, many clothes.

Despite its rich subject matter, It Girl is a slim book, covering cradle to grave in just over 200 pages. Being concise is not a bad thing, but it’s clear that It Girl is more interested in interpersonal drama than exploring Jane Birkin as an artist. The emphasis is not on her endeavors, but rather the lovers behind them. I’m sure this is the easier narrative, if somewhat cliché, but even these relationships are presented as though they exist in a vacuum. Meltzer fails to meaningfully engage with Birkin’s cultural moment. Contemporaries Birkin herself envied are often namedropped—Fanny Ardant, Charlotte Rampling, and Brigitte Bardot to name a few—but their allure, much like Birkin’s, is relegated to physical attributes. It is difficult to parse Birkin’s cultural contributions at large when the culture itself is so ill-defined. These social considerations are not just a question of aesthetic evolution (although ye-ye, French chanson, and French New Wave are integral to the construction of Birkin’s image), but provide necessary context on the patriarchal society in which Birkin rose to prominence.

Among the many ideas that remain underdeveloped in It Girl, the most glaring is Birkin’s perpetual juvenility. Meltzer considers this a mostly personal aesthetic choice, spurred by early career coquetry in service of Serge Gainsbourg, the 40-year-old songwriting giant Birkin met at 22 and dated for the next 12 years. But how does Meltzer’s benign explanation of Birkin’s image square with the fact that Gainsbourg would, later in life, take his fascination with the “Lolita” trope to ever greater extremes? And how do we account for the fact that Jacques Doillon, her partner between the years 1980 and 1993, has been accused of sexual battery by three women? There’s obviously more to consider here than daughters and movies, especially considering the way her image persists. Sure, she may no longer bear the brunt of the criticism (the burden seems to have been most recently offloaded to Olivia Rodrigo) but her coquettish legacy endures in both pop music and high fashion. Since her ideals, both the ones she represented and the ones that she herself held, do not exist independent of their circumstances, they deserve a little more prying than the cursory Google Meltzer appears to have given them. The author seems generally uninterested in a deeper exploration, writing that “Birkin will be remembered for her proximity to volatile men.” If that’s the case, is it even worth remembering the woman at all?

Well, yeah. She’s cool as fuck. But you don’t need an NYT columnist to give you the details. Unlike other actresses of her era, and despite her deep shame and insecurity, Birkin was an open book. If you want to know more about her, your best bet is hearing it straight from her own mouth. Watch Jane B. par Agnès V. on the Criterion Channel. Read both volumes of her published diaries. Watch her bad sex comedies and her good Rivette films and her okay Doillon ones. Listen to her fragile soprano on Ex-fan des sixties with the English translations of the lyrics by her former lover Serge pulled up. Even Charlotte Gainsbourg’s fairly mediocre documentary gives you more insight into her life than this superficial biography. Jane Birkin’s influence is everywhere, there’s no denying that. If you decide to develop a sudden interest in the woman behind it, then go look for her. She’s not hard to find, and she deserves the effort.

CONTRIBUTORS

Veeda Khan reads and writes in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Zone 3, and Dreginald. She is a 2026 NBCC Emerging Critic Fellow.

Sire is a real piece of work.

Andrew Wu is a writer, pianist, and biostatistics graduate student based out of Boston. He is the co-recipient (with composer Holden Mui) of an Emergent Ventures grant, which supports his life’s ambition—to learn, perform, and record all of Holden’s piano music. His favorite song is “Moon River.”

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