Hi friends,
Today’s transmission (which you can listen to above) is all about fragmented writing, and the practice of collecting, accumulating, and assembling. And also resembling — mimicry, imitation — and the formation or presentation of self; it’s kind of meandering, it will make more sense when you listen to it.
One thing I don’t get into so much in the voice memo but I think is an interesting aspect to this whole idea of connecting sources, texts, quotes, and people through writing (and becoming, I guess) is the practice of citation. I think credit and citation are important, and I think discussions of originality and copying at this moment in time are interesting, and I’m thinking about it in parallel to the thoughts in this email. I feel lucky to have this piece of writing “Multidimensional Citation” by Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst, and Mindy Seu to point you to. They cite “Feminist Approaches to Citation” by Maiko Tanaka, which is also great. And I really like Valeria Luiselli’s “Notes on Sources” in the back of her book The Lost Children Archive, which you’ll have to acquire the book to read but I highly recommend doing that anyways. And, relatedly, Legacy Russell on footnotes (!).
In that spirit (and as usual) below my signature is a list of the things I quote and reference in the recording:
yours in the salvage,
meg
Dodie Bellamy, Bee Reaved
Susan Sontag, introduction to Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Other Writings
“…pious work of salvage” quote also by Sontag and C.C.’s Mail Blog on the subject
Mimesis Wikipedia entry
Anne Truitt’s Daybook
Are.na channel “Fragment as Form”
Eve L. Ewing, “what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife”
Sarah Davidson, “A Visit with Joan Didion”
Rebecca Wolff, “And when I say a poem”
Charles Broskoski, “On Motivation”
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Anne Carson, “Stillness” lecture
