the coldest months

Winter Semester 2013: The Books I Read

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:55:28 -0400

Here’s a list of all the books I read from January to April 2013, organized by author/editor’s surname.

César Aira: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Algernon Blackwood: Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
Robert Bloch: Dragons and Nightmares
Gilles Boulenger: John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness
Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Judith Butler: Gender Trouble
James M. Cain: The Root of His Evil
Ramsey Campbell: The Doll Who Ate His Mother
Truman Capote: The Grass Harp
Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red
Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night
John Clute: The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror
Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves
Jacques Derrida: The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret
Jacques Derrida: The Animal That Therefore I Am
Jacques Derrida: Genres, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Gambler
Jack Ketchum: Off Season
Stephen King: Skeleton Crew
Stephen King: Insomnia
Stephen King: Under the Dome
Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan
Richard Matheson: A Stir of Echoes
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer
Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor
Frank Norris: McTeague
Sylvia Plath: Ariel
Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Eden Robinson: Blood Sports
Marcel Schwob: The Book of Monelle
Tim Underwood & Chuck Miller (eds.): Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King
Tim Underwood & Chuck Miller (eds.): Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King
Matthew Vollmer: Inscriptions for Headstones
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto

Transverse Engine

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:23:00 -0400

This is magic realism in a Honda civic and the driver’s eyes are segmented like an insect’s. He quotes pop literature, perceives new colours, chain smokes cigarillos. He cruises rising crenellations of concrete hell, puffs grape smoke through the holes in his cheeks. We forget the goons in the back, ageless deadbeats who pass the test with designer clothes. They’re passing joints, they’re smoking hash, they’re packing the bong, they’re silent like a nuclear bomb. We navigate the voids of unseen avenues, we scoff at the abject and we ponder substance dualism. Someone says Daddy choked me with a skip rope when I was a kid and that’s why I’m lonely, that’s why I’m angry, that’s why I smoke, but nobody hears him. The station changes on its own accord, jumping from static to static, spectres of glitch pop and audio snow. We throw sizzling butts at a sick-faced vampire thumbing for a ride, we shower him in sparks, we laugh, we smoke avarice, we burn endless fuel. We’ve got five years left and ain’t it a shame, five years left and the gauge keeps dipping from “F” to “E.”

REPENTINO PRE-ORDER FORM.

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:08:38 -0400

REPENTINO PRE-ORDER FORM. :

infraread:

repentinomagazine:

Order your copy of Repentino now! If you have any accepted work being featured in the magazine (check your emails) you receive one for free!

I have been published in this edition of Repentino. Order one. Support Mexico City’s vibrant writing scene.

-T

My Top 10 Horror Films

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:05:00 -0400

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987)

Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932)

William Castle’s The Tingler (1959)

Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981)

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

George A. Romero’s Martin (1977)

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965)

Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963)

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)

Honorable Mentions: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Frank Darabont’s The Mist, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

Check out my complete, chronologically organized list of favourite horror films here

My 10 Favorite Horror Novels/Novellas

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:12:29 -0400

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894)

It by Stephen King (1986)

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso (1970)

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Honorable Mentions: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Phantasm

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:03:00 -0400

Fuck, I say, fuck, the chainsaw is out of oil and the chain seizes and the saw won’t work without the chain, and the thing, the threat, is on the other side of the room, or maybe outside the house, or maybe closer than I think, hovering over the desk that’s become my bunker and the thing is an archetype, the savagery of collective unconscious, all aberration and bad intent, and the fucking chainsaw is out of oil, and a door opens, or maybe it’s my mind playing tricks on me, maybe, just maybe it’s someone coming to help, or maybe it’s the thing exhaling air that smells like a morgue, dragging impossibly long limbs along the floorboards, scraping fingernails along the door, and I drop the chainsaw because the fucking thing is out of oil and I dash across the room like a squirrel dodging BB shots, because there’s something in the room with me, and I wish I had asked someone to join me, I wish this sabbatical was a populated place, I wish there was somewhere to go, because I can hear it dragging, I can see the shadow, I can hear the breathing, I’ve been here before, I’ve yelled at the screen, I’ve closed the book…

Open Call For Submissions

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:49:56 -0400

infraread:

Submit poetry, prose, and everything in between to us. We will publish it on our blog.

We look forward to hearing from you.

-The Inframantics

Discount Shrine

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:18:00 -0400

A song reserved for
headache sifting
in thrift store dust.
Political stage dress,
the sneezing smell of
drum machine overdose.
The floundering slurs
of semantic oppression,
a half-priced candidate
splatters the aisle to
leave a lasting mark.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #7: The Work of Mourning (Sarah Kofman)

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:08:00 -0400

“At first I did not know—and I in fact still do not know—what title to give to these words.

What is the gift of a title?

I even had the fleeting suspicion that such a gift would be somewhat indecent: it would imply the violent selection of a perspective, an abusive interpretative framing or narcissistic reappropriation, a conspicuous signature there where it is Sarah Kofman …” —Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning

Here, in the introduction of his memorial piece for Sarah Kofman, Derrida already reaches an incredible aporia. He acknowledges that the existence of a title is innately laden with the (im)position of its author. In this piece, and elsewhere throughout the collection, Derrida grapples with the impossibility of mourning. How can the written word be, in fact, for the other, to the other?

Through his decision to efface the necessity of a title, Derrida aims to make the subject, Sarah Kofman, the centre of the piece. Nevertheless, he still encounters (and struggles with) the expansive distance that is established through written language. While he writes compassionately and fondly of Kofman, he cannot breach the paralyzing restrictions of personal inscription.

That is, although he makes a specific effort to sidestep “the violent selection of a perspective,” the entirety of his memorial essay is inevitably imbued with that very thing: the calculated and impossible encoding of perspective.

Tenement Echoes

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:01:00 -0400

It’s the way he smokes, you know? On these nights, more often than not, we’ll go without speaking. We’ll remember those terrible halls, and we’ll remember superstition and the backsides of mirrors. We’ll look at parking lots cluttered with the dormant body of a population ascending and we’ll wonder just how the fuck it went so far. And he’ll keep chasing the light, a verse in slow burn, and for a moment that bead of ember will just hover in space. And then it’ll drop, flick, spark, and blink out. And sometimes there’ll be a rabbit down there and for a moment, just a moment, I’ll look at it looking at me. And I’ll really see it looking at me, and I’ll wonder what it’s like down there, low on the ground between the boots of corporate dread. And we’ll know that there was a time, or maybe a moment, or maybe an imagined gap, when we could wax poetic while slogging through absent reminders of the written word. And maybe he’ll mention this image he saw in a film once, or an image from a story his father told him, where three guys sat at the back of a room under a neon sign that said “(A)basement Turned Heavenward.” And we’ll laugh because really, when it comes down to it, even the saddest meditations are bullshit. And he’ll take a final drag, always the deepest, and we’ll trap ambition in a dark room with sleeping gas.

My reading of “Medusa” by Tomas Boudreau

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:10:40 -0400

My reading of “Medusa” by Tomas Boudreau

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #6: Derrida - "I don't know why we are doing this"

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:57:00 -0400

“What is ‘living with the animal’? What is ‘cohabiting’ with the animal? That is the question of mitgehen and mitexistieren. The animal can mitgehen with is in the house; a cat, for example, which is often said to be a narcissistic animal, can inhabit the same place as us, it can ‘go with us,’ ‘walk with us,’ it can be ‘with us’ in the house, live ‘with us,’ but ‘it doesn’t exist with us’ in the house.” —Jacques Derrida, “I don’t know why we are doing this” from The Animal That Therefore I Am

Here, I think Derrida taps into the line of reasoning that leads to the justification of human violence and brutality against animals. Although we are aware of animals as tangible, visible, and present (to an extent), we are susceptible to an ancient and perpetuated notion of the animal as nonexistent in a “human” context.

I believe this connects with a Cartesian perception of the human as “above” her world, as transcendent, as utterly separate from his environment. While the animal is believed to be immanently connected with nature and the natural world, the human is graced with the privilege of extracting from that world. Paradoxically, however, the human can justify brutal means of extraction by virtue of Darwinian logic. In other words, we have the right to slaughter to excess because it is the “natural” way of things.

In other words, the animal cannot “be” in the same way that the human can be, because it is imprisoned by its status as an element of the natural environment. Nevertheless, the human’s self-proclaimed transcendence can be validated by Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #5: The Animal That Therefore I Am

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:55:00 -0400

“The animal, what a word!

The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other.” —Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am

This excerpt (among many others) illustrates the extreme compassion and empathy of Derrida’s Animal project. Here, he calls the auditor or reader to confront the extent of their logocentric privileges. He tackles the magnitude of linguistic imposition upon another—an other—who is wholly other, almost uniformly decreed with abjection.

Derrida defends the other through the lens of interaction with his cat. It is not only our logos-centred precedence that ultimately excuses brutality toward animals (here, animals implicitly excludes humankind); rather, he argues that we believe it is our potential for vocal response which sets us on a separate plane from “the animal.”

Throughout the course of this text, I found that my lifelong perception of animals was unsettled. Previously, I subconsciously or unconsciously ascribed my attitudes toward animals with innate truth. After finishing this book, I found that I could no longer perceive the animal as so utterly separate from myself.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #4: Force of Law (Second Response)

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:53:00 -0400

Derrida writes that “law is essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, that is to say constructed, upon interpretable and transformable textual strata (and that is the history of law, its possible and necessary transformation, sometimes its amelioration), or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded.”

Here, I think he most explicitly demonstrates why deconstruction is constantly concerned with law, whether or not it has supposedly never been addressed in previous deconstructive writings. One of the biggest difficulties I have with this essay is pulling the terms “law” and “justice” apart from each other. If “justice” and “law” are disparate concepts, does “law” not only exist by virtue of enforcement (or the potential for enforcement)?

The word “force” is morally-laden in itself, but its innate connection with law is disconcerting even when it is qualified in unthreatening terms. I was also challenged by Derrida’s statement that “deconstruction is justice”; he distinguishes “justice” from “law” by asserting that the latter is constructible and, consequentially, deconstructible. If deconstruction is not only akin to justice but one and the same with justice, is deconstruction not constructible/deconstructible? Maybe I’m misreading him here.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #3: Force of Law

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:52:00 -0400

This is a preliminary reflection on Derrida’s “The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Near the beginning of the piece, he poses a daunting question: “Does deconstruction ensure, permit, authorize the possibility of justice?” He acknowledges the possibility of both affirmation and opposition to the question, but I think the answer is “yes.” Admittedly, this is my knee-jerk response and certainly invites further reflection.

At this point, I think deconstruction authorizes the possibility of justice, and I also think it actively encourages justice. Specifically, deconstruction encourages a distinctly thorough and unsettling approach to the reading of any and all texts. As such, it animates the potential for criticism in overlooked areas.

At the risk of an overly reductive response, I think deconstruction generates a freshly critical approach to law, authority, and the normalized divisions between “right” and “wrong.” The deconstructive process is one of exploration and excavation; just as it pulls texts apart, it also harbours the potential for new ways of thinking, writing, and being. In the context of establishing perameters for justice, deconstruction is an ethically important practice.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #2: Deconstruction & Literature

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:46:00 -0400

” … does the deconstructive effect depend on the force of a literary event? What is there of literature, and what of philosophy, here, in this fabulous staging of deconstruction? I shall not attack this enormous problem head on.” -Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other”

Derrida’s reflection here is enormously complicated. It is something I would like to dissect in more detail during the process of my facilitation tomorrow. In addition to tackling the foundation of this question, I’d like to analyze his use of the words “literature” and “philosophy” in the essay “Psyche: Inventions of the Other.”

If deconstruction functions as a written practice, it must possess the properties of its form. As such, deconstruction itself is vulnerable to the process of deconstruction. This notion initiates a moment of aporia, where deconstruction takes on the attributes of an immanent undertaking. Is deconstruction locked into the written word? I am probably simplifying the implications of Derrida’s rumination, but I think it is especially noteworthy that deconstruction must operate through a linguistic form and approach.

However, I like to believe that the deconstructive method is capable of obtaining a kind of transcendent status, of locating meaning beyond the perameters and constrictions of language.

Jacques Derrida Seminar Entry #1: Differance

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:43:00 -0400

“It is because of differance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present.” -Jacques Derrida, “Differance”

Admittedly, I find Derrida’s deconstruction of linguistic patterns immensely challenging and dizzying. However, this excerpt of “Differance” directed me toward contextualizing his ideas differently. I found myself reflecting on cultural and historical narratives (that is, narratives which aim to accurately denote events with widespread influence). Here, Derrida’s scrutiny of progression-focused narratives raises some very valid points.

For instance, it raises questions about atonement for ancestral misdemeanors. That is, if Derrida’s trace is applied in the context of cultural genocide—the Canadian First Nations residential school system: 1920-1996, for example—it effectively invalidates a stubborn emphasis on the present moment. The cultural implications can be traced back (in this case, to the origins of colonization or even earlier) and simultaneously assessed in their forward motion.

Here, Derrida challenges a culturally imbedded reinforcement of the present moment, progression toward the future moment and the future goal. He paralyzes the untangling process of events, blurring the distinction between past, present, and future.

Current Project:

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:19:23 -0400

ssemblagebooks:

A digital release of Tomas Boudreau’s and Mike Thorn’s fugues will be available soon. Print release pending.

Genetics

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:21:00 -0400

Yes, they say,
yes… the world
will end in thirty years.
And so we watch.
We watch
the embryo
raise hell,
an effort
to preserve
computer coolants
and THC.
We watch
the crossfire
of satin and
death wishes,
toy money
and electrodes.
We watch and we
are watched,
losing sight for
the ocular dream.

Gift Card Book Haul

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:10:00 -0400

I got a gift card for my birthday. These are the books I bought with it:

The Trial by Franz Kafka
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
McTeague by Frank Norris
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth