Called To Fiction: A Review of Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim"

I object to "objective" reviews. Not only do I object, but I try and make my reviews as subjective as humanly possible. Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" came to me at an interesting time in my life and the very emotional and philosophical environment that I was in while reading it highly affected what I think about it, as much as it does any other "objective" reviewer, no matter how much they refuse to believe it. I've therefore decided to spend more time self-publishing my reviews on my website, rather than spending months head-to-head with a variety of publishers on what is ethical in the review process of a book. I write fast, I say my piece, I do minimal editing and move on, SO: I have put every ounce of my personal, emotional, biased opinion into this review:

NOW! Give me a few paragraphs and I'll get to Jacob Wren's book, but bear with me for now to set the scene. On September 28th, I bought a new notebook to start a new poetry project based on the relevance of art in our society. I, like anyone else at that time, was spending most of my days consuming a variety of media on the violence inflicted on the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. I was watching the genocide from what I, myself, considered to be a "radical left" standpoint, yet found myself lost in imagery and depiction that became slowly normalized, and sometimes even aestheticized to inspire more rage at the face of genocide. In a matter of a month I had been witness to more dismembered limbs and torn-up cadavers than I had been the rest of my life. I began to consider how writing, even at the moment of documentation, creates "Fictions" of the world around just as pictures and videos may . I embossed my new notebook with the title: Called to Fiction. I began a new project that, in my mind, was investigating how in writing, words, are "Called to Fiction" to perform the imagery they represent, still unsure of what may come; in my work and my world alike.

a month and 11 days later, I read Jacob Wren's "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" in a downtown Toronto cafe where the West-Asian diaspora gathers for monthly and weekly discussions of geopolitics and share space in grief. I sat with my coffee and finished the book in a matter of 4 to 5 hours.

When reading Wren's new book, many questions arise about the book's intentionally ambiguous setting. None of these questions are ones I'd like an answer to. I'm just spending the better half of a maddeningly hot November afternoon thinking about the book and by complete co-incidence, the only other book I have in my bag to read is Jacques Ranciere's "The Politics of Aesthetics", where a few dozen pages in, Ranciere speaks about Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter", and a majority of other American movies on Vietnam: 

"It can be said that the message is the derisory nature of the war. It can just as well be said that the message is the derisory nature of the struggle against war."

I come home to see Jacob Wren posted on his Facebook page a review of his book by Carl Wilson that asks: "So is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. "

This very passage of Wilson's review is what fuels my review, Since I think the inherent struggle of Jacob Wren's book is the many many such impossible riddles of post-colonial activism in our contemporary society.

Before I say anything informed and interesting, I'd like to start with something simple: that in my opinion, in a world drowning in Capitalist oppression, Colonial violence, Ecoterrorism, Fascism and Patriarchy, for me, calling political writing "Naive Activism" (or "Bourgeois Humanism" as Althusser would've put it!) isn’t as derogatory as people make it seem. for me, its very simple: Naive Activism is still activism, and Informed oppression is still oppression.

I'm not calling out anyone. Text is too often a difficult space for controlling tone. Putting Quotation marks around simple words can make them accusatory. I'm arguing back and not in any anger. I am sitting with a resting heartbeat of (let me check... 65) and writing this. THAT put aside I'm not reviewing this book as if the allegations of "Naive Activism" are true. I'm exploring Wren's book as a book "Called to Fiction", since that has been the grounding exercise of my entire October.

"Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a book of imagery, that is aware of the history of imagery, itself aware of centuries of depiction. I don't know enough theory or philosophy and I'm not here to put "Post-Modern"/ "Self-Referencing" claims on this book. These are labels for selling books and not for reading them. I'm interested mostly in how Wren explores the paradoxical progression of News and information throughout the ages. The Protagonist's very journey to an unknown, besieged land is because of a simple paradox: They have seen the land, the war and the struggle in depiction, but have they really SEEN it until they have set foot where bombs drop? We have reached a time where we have endless "Footage", inflating its value in the face of "Experience". We can watch a journalist film the war, we can hear the bomb crack the cement, we can even see the breath of the journalist inflate and deflate in the small handheld movements of the video. but what have we seen? has it been real? has it been our “experience”? If so why does it feel so fake? Why do real guns sound like fake guns? Why do bombs sound so flat and “Unreal”? Which side of the screen have we occupied all this time? Why are films and TV Shows “More real” in their violence that the blood on the real battlefield that we cannot recognize as blood?

the protagonist says "I'm here to observe and understand what I'm observing". It is misguided here to say "The protagonist is self-aware of being in the story". The Protagonist isn't aware of the text, it is afraid of it. What the book fears is not the horror of being consciously useless; the book fears fiction itself. The narrator is not afraid of being useless. The narrator is afraid that no matter how transformative the text will be, it may still remain "just art".

 "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is therefore a book of questions for artists who devote themselves to their art. One of the central questions of the book therefore becomes a question for Marxism itself: "What happens when artistic practice (here writing), has no exterior (work)? What if there is no dichotomy between Art (developing the self) and Work (developing the other (through community))"

I refer back to my Ranciere where he argues one of the most important aspects of Modernist visual art was to once again "Flatten" art, since artists began to realize that what the canvas was missing wasn't the third dimension, but life. "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a book coming to terms with the fact that it may be dead, and that its possible for the text to move on as the story moves on from the protagonist. "Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim" is a swan song to fiction where the "Utopia" it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a "Utopia" where "fiction" is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos.

Conyer Clayton's "But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves."

it has to be said right in the beginning: This is a review of one of my close friend’s books. to begin introspecting the works of a dear friend is a hard task, not only because of the bias, but also because of the strange scope imposed upon the reader. I’m writing this review, unpaid on a personal blog to make sure it doesn’t break any hard rules of conduct, but Conyer Clayton’s “But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.” was a book I simply could not keep quiet about.

I’d say, I personally think there’s a writing of disaster developed as a coping mechanism, and then there’s a writing of disaster developed as divination. However for writing to become a coping mechanism, there needs to first be “Trauma” and for there to be “trauma” there needs to be an end to a violation. but how to write when the violence is ongoing? how to write from within disaster?

there’s an unsaid code of conduct within the world of violence, that the true writing of atrocity considers any explicit description of violence obscene, both as a gesture of respect to the survivors and to those who did not survive. true writing of disaster therefore is proclaimed to be not pivoting around incidents, but as a divination to pierce through the membrane, and perhaps reach for something greater than it could ever grasp with empathy. When Celan began to write in neologisms, there were two years before he’d see the true scope of the genocide.

in a way, empathy can often be stronger than sympathy; which creates the hardest hurdle discussing Clayton’s book: reading the book as a person who is not a Woman, and has never experienced the alienation of womanhood this world. I need to tread carefully here, since the very description and categorization of any literature as emphatically female is too often used as a means to segregate (and worse, sometimes to demean, like two ehm certain ehm famous crticis of Canadian literature who fall victim to this misogyny far too often). I’ll just continue here refraining from any definition of womanhood, with the only self-proclamation that “I am not a woman” and nothing else, since any frame enforced onto such works is an oppressive one, yet the contemporary woman still experiences much violence and hatred in the contemporary world.

here's where Conyer Clayton’s book shines the brightest. I won’t claim to know anything about surrealism, but Clayton’s book is a surrealist exploration of gender violence if I ever saw one, and the use of surrealism as a format serves so perfectly the content of this book. Surrealism, being fiercely avoidant of any exposition, jumps into incidents, and fiercely avoidant of chronology and reason, climbs that the neuron-web of that incident deep into the psyche, where there are truths larger than any chronological language can reach.

the surrealization of such violence creates a veil through which the violence is an imagistic fiction, instead of a chokehold of oppression that can grip as firmly as the “exposition” most survivors will deem “Obscene” in the face of atrocity. the survivor’s mind is in pursuit of power, and whereas a descriptive narrative of assault can chain one back into the incident, the dreamscape, with its vaults of absurdity, doors to other temporalities and its aesthetic gesture towards disaster, creates a structure where the reader can once again regain power.

I read this book 2 days after the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and if there ever was ONE book this year about the experience of living as a woman in contemporary society to learn from, it would be this eloquent, uncompromising, fiercely daring, and frankly breathtaking book.

Pixie Cram's “Pragmatopia” at Gimli Film Festival

on July 23rd I had the honor to attend the Short film showcase of the Gimli Film festival, where I came across Pixie Cram’s new project “Pragmatopia”, a different approach to the apocalypse than the average viewer is used to. Since the film shall be screened in other festivals to come, the critique here is going to omit the important plot points that unravel. 

in short Pragmatopia follows the story of a few stragglers in pursuit of survival in a mysteriously post-apocalyptic setting.

Cram’s short film has incredible sound design. Nature takes over and we hear ambient sounds more than we hear any sound made by a human. Pragmatopia situates itself at the heart of nature and simultaneously situates nature at its heart. Humanity has been pushed to the periphery once again, falling second to nature which is slowly taking over: houses swallowed by vines, communities living to natural rhythms. 

where the film makes its statement is in its ideological locus of control. While other post-apocalyptic films may portray the same overtaking of nature as destructive and even sometimes demonic, Pragmatopia portrays serenity and contentment in humanity’s return to nature and primal communes. 

the key to unlock the mysteries of Pragmatopia’s idealistic apocalypse is in the title itself. the word Pragmatopia, takes the word Utopia and trades the U for Pragma, presenting a palpable new ideal space; since the U in Utopia was historically Eu as in Eu + Topos: good place, and throughout the centuries it was dysphemized by history into U as in U + topos: no place. Pragmatopia tries to manifest the ideal society and set it to film.

here is a short film that truly takes advantage of its short runtime to build an entire world. The great advantage that short films have over longer formats is in their ability to forgo any formal exposition, throw the audience into the middle of the plot and take it away from them as soon as meaning is established. Pragmatopia is a fantastic example of a short film taking advantage of the possibilities at hand in its particular medium. 

in total, Pragmatopia is an artfully constructed vision of the poetry ubiquitous in nature and a truly hopeful vision of the future where egality rules supreme. 

Samuel Strathman's "In Flocks of Three to Five": A review

“Those who hard-knuckle with their illnesses

face plant in the mare’s nest, ignored”

By now I’ve written a dozen or so reviews, have tried my hand at the objective; but what I personally crave in reviews myself is the roaring subjective. I can’t tell you which school of thought Samuel Strathman belongs to, which techniques are used in which stanzas and whatnot; but what I can tell you is that in the throes of a mental illness episode, reading the quote above was the much-needed balm to my own mental illness.

In his debut chapbook by Anstruther press, Samuel Strathman creates a pathology of survival. The poems themselves are named by day, month, year. days numbered to pass, days where the throes of mental illness made poetry a pathos, wakening the senses. “True eloquence is birdsong” the poet says, and leads us down the thoughtladder that extends from each word downwards into our emotions.

Strathman’s poems are densely populated, if not with peoples and creatures, then with the implements created by them. 

“I don’t know when,

but I’m going to vault this mess

of modern technology and lassitude

for the intrinsic”

Strathman makes wounds blossom into remedy, and paves a path for survival through the thickets of struggle. His poems are morbidly hopeful and beautifully grotesque. I found much needed companionship in his words and hopefully many others will do so as well.

the perfect end to this “Review” is perhaps the last few words of the chapbook itself:

“Inhale the smoke

that leaks from the gun—

it’s just like medicine

but heals faster”

The Ontology of Silence: A review of Kitty Green's "The Assistant"

A few weeks before the theatres shut down, I went to Varsity theatre to watch Kitty Green’s “The Assistant”. I remember having a harsh initial reaction to the film’s first 30 minutes, to a point where I left the theatre wondering what the film was trying to achieve. 

Before going to the Cinema, I had started the day with a little peak into Chantal Akerman’s feminist masterpiece “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, and when I came back home, I picked up where I had left off to explore the philosophy of “Boredom” in Cinema. about 4 hours later when I finished the film in awe, the first reaction I had was to rethink my experience with the first 30 minutes of “The Assistant”.

I will not make excuses for myself; I misjudged “The Assistant” and did not allow it to tell the story that it needed to tell, and after finishing it; I realized how my very reaction affirmed the socio-political issues that the film aimed to address.

I went into “The Assistant” blind, not knowing what it had in store for me, and evidently I left the first viewing before it had time to tell its story of sexual abuse in the workplace and the systematic silencing of sexually assaulted women on both a micro and a macro level. 

“The Assistant” begins with emphasis on the tedium of the titular assistant’s job. Julie Garner fits perfectly as the lowest rung in the corporate ladder. She is constantly diminished and dismissed, guilt-tripped by her superiors into subservience. Kitty Green makes us see the assistant as a reverse performer, the one who needs to suppress her character in order to allow her male counterparts to perform superiority. There is a poetic ambience to her monotonous work life, a complete solution of the self into industry. But unlike “Jeanne Dielman”, the tedium that gnaws at her character does not implode into a spectacle.

Where “The Assistant” says the most, is with the inconsequentialism of the assistant’s voice. The Assistant is invisible, her voice is drowned in the loud ambience of her male counterparts. Unlike films of its ilk, the Assistant is not constantly striving to stand out, but failing. The Assistant is not the heroic story of a woman who rises to equity through spectacle. The Assistant is enveloped in a subdued haze of telephone calls, trapped in a neo-Sadist highly systematic hell where sexual abuse is planned and executed by an entire corporate ladder. The Assistant is trapped without a way up..

The film reaches its peak at the one hour mark when The Assistant goes to human resources to report the sexual meritocracy of her boss, where her complaint is dismissed as “Jealousy”. The counseling scene is impeccable, depicting the elusive nature of sexual condemnation when faced with a fundamentally flawed system. She is dismissed with the sentence “You don’t have anything to worry about, you’re not his type.” In “The King Kog Theorie” Virginie Despentes describes a woman’s sudden shift from an object to subject as a hammer who suddenly grows eyes and stares back at its holder. We watch The Assistant struggle to rise to subject status, but fail due to emotional manipulation and endless mind games that make her tear up to a status of emotional object. 

After coming back from human resources, she is further apprehended by her coworkers and her boss. We see The Assistant fully broken, as her two male coworkers literally spell out her apology email to her boss. This is where most films would have created a spectacle, but The assistant does not aim to “Resolve” the deep seeded inequity in corporate power politics. The film leaves us with an uneventful dinner, a slow walk into the night and back into the same hellish system.

If “The Assistant” is boring, it’s because there is no “Excitement” to be sought after in the silencing of the abused. Trauma is a single spectacle surrounded by a endless silence and infinite boredom. Certain cases of Tedium produce spectacular events, but “The Assistant” is about all the broken people who are trapped under abusive systems, unable to ever rise above. The Assistant is above all the abuse that is buried and remains hidden.

It still breaks my heart that I left the theatre upon my first viewing. By not finding the film “interesting” I was feeding a system that avoids the deep discomfort of discussing sexual abuse by dismissing it. what one finds “interesting” can be quite telling. 

Films are not “meant” to be escapism. Films are escapist to sell, but tedious tales of sexual abuse never sell. We need more uncomfortable films .What’s uncomfortable can linger, what lingers can induce long lasting thought, long lasting thought can create ideology, and ideology can inspire change. The Assistant is perhaps the most powerful film I have ever watched about the power-politics of the corporate world and the suppression of abused voices.