Several issues ago we published a ‘Somnolent Writing’ newsletter, which was interested in sleep and sleepiness and its potential as a tool for writing. In this newsletter, I’ve returned to the theme from my own interest in Hypnagogia - that trance-like state between sleeping and waking. 

In this issue we have several contributions from various dream journals: Agnes Esterhuizen, Jonny Aldridge, Iola Wickham, myself, and Wystan Loope. We were looking specifically for writing that managed to preserve, in a simple, unaffected language, the rare naivety that is absent from conscious writing. Reading these entries, I found, almost emulates a sense of sleepiness in itself. It’s this really charming sensibility that these pieces capture, perhaps only achievable through a temporary deferral of complete reason. We are interested in this randomness, this child-like purity in absurdity and unusualness. A state of oddity that arises when the laws of reality are lifted.  

In the opening of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, the narrator describes how, falling asleep whilst reading, his thoughts form a continuum, so that he ‘seemed actually to have become the subject’ of his book. A similar ambiguity between reality and the imaginary are seen in the contributions below as they record the peculiar and amusing movements of our sleeping minds. In our editorial decisions, our main concern was to preserve this through as little editorial intervention as possible. 

If anyone would like to respond, submit work or simply send some thoughts we’d love to hear from you: submissions.odradek@gmail.com

As always, thank you for reading ODRADEK! - we appreciate all the support we get. If you enjoy or find our work interesting, please do share it around. 

Hannah Wickham.

At a school. Rushing through a labyrinth of corridors, late for a recital. You sit, fall asleep, wake up at 1.40pm. But you’re supposed to pick your wife up from Newcastle—too late! In a room, rowdy women are recording a song with same tune as ‘Because the Night’ by Patti Smith. Go out to the carpark. Suddenly you realise: your car’s been stolen. Call someone. But first, your father has left a three-hour voicemail explaining his identity has changed. His name is now Shanklin Masters. Wake.

                                                                                                                             Jonny Aldridge



Hanging out in a bookshop
Owner has to [be] somewhere
Say I can just run the shop

Can change your zodiac sign based on food
My star sign is mushroom

                                                                                                                        Agnes Esterhuizen



Anna. 
She had ants all over. 
It was my fault. 
I was scrubbing them off her. 
They wouldn't come off so I had to order pest control. 
They weren’t actually on her. 
They were on the wall.  

                                                                                                                              Iola Wickham 



I dreamt that Usher used to be a bin man and I was really surprised by that.

                                                                                                                             Wystan Loope



Kate. Our next door neighbour Kate. was in her car and we saw her and we came to see her horses. Mum was going to buy two old clumpy horses and a nice one. And the carriage for the two clumpy horses was dull. 

It skipped to me being dropped off at the bottom of the road with all my belongings I have ever had. Worried I have too much stuff and I couldn’t get it all in precise bags to carry.

Ann Hathaway in a white dress in a building with really cool spiral stairs

                                                                                                                      Hannah Wickham 


23 April 2024 
At laser clinic
Self service 
Go to bathroom
Gendered but can’t figure it out 
Get lost
Slide down gap in wall into next flat
Nice housemates

                                                                                                                             Agnes Esterhuizen


21 June 2024
It’s my birthday 
Gone away with friends
But everyone forgets it’s my birthday 
Don’t say anything 
I’m being cool about it 
Sitting around a table with everyone 
A man is walking his dog
Dog comes over and shits on my feet
I shout at the man
Walk off to find somewhere to clean my feet
Go outside 
Walking down a street 
Find a shop that has a bathroom 
Shop is empty

                                                                                                                       Agnes Esterhuizen


At my parents house after my birthday party. Sitting with Lucy chatting on my bed. Laughing and sharing experiences. She was a photographer but was also a very good poet and DJ/Producer. Her poems had been published and were better than mine. She talked softly and soon we were kissing. I boasted to my parents. They were more sceptical and esp. my mom who hinted that Lucy suffered from depression and stayed up wandering the garden at night by herself. 

Next day about to shower. Only in a towel. Was getting ready to meet Lucy in the park. Lucy’s partner burst into the house and demanded to see me. I hid and housemate convinced them I was not home. They insisted on seeing my room. Insulting me, my taste, etc. I was about to be discovered so I burst out of hiding. And bellowed at them for intruding on privacy – “can a man not bathe in peace!”. Towel flapping open buttocks at the back. The partner was that Afrikaans girl with the skew teeth.

                                                                                                                                    Wystan Loope


25 April 2024
In the car on the way to festival
First show in more than 10 years
I suddenly realise I can’t remember how to play any of the songs
I tell everyone
No one cares
Maybe i have time to practice 
Ask when we are playing
10pm
On a small stage right?
No, main stage
Put down my gear 
Keep telling people I can’t remember the songs
No one cares
In an outside garden area
I see a weird insect that scares me
Colourful, shiny red and blue
I’m watching it
It makes a beautiful noise
Get phone out to record noise
It doesn’t make noise again
Insect is scaring me so I give up
Someone asks if they can try record it
I give them my phone
Walk out the door
I’m outside a greenhouse
Looking in through the glass
I see someone I don’t recognise holding my phone
Wait who is that?? 
Person next to me says
That’s Daisy

                                                                                                                       Agnes Esterhuizen



Date unknown
Apocalypse situation
London has been destroyed
Because of the creatures 
In a refugee camp 
In line to shower 
Get to the front
It’s gender segregated 
Which one do I use

                                                                                                                           Agnes Esterhuizen



A huge catastrophe in the world (flood?), so you must drop off your daughter at a different school then go to London. A woman you have a crush on leans out of the front seat of a white van. Says she’ll meet you there later. Now in London, you’re on the catering staff for a rapper’s birthday party at a decadent hotel. Have an egg sandwich. You must impress the rapper—this is your one shot! Need to put on your leotard and tights, but there’s no changing room. Lost in maximalist decor. Wake.

                                                                                                                                   Jonny Aldridge

END. 

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This week we have contributions by two poets, Wystan Loope’s ‘Beetle Jar’, an obsessive sort of poem about voyeurism, and Emil Kristév’s brilliantly cryptic ‘Translucent’ and ‘Capitiliad’ - two lyrics on winter daylight, and, apparently, the Communist Manifesto. Both contributions are interested in an aesthetics of difficulty - in holding something back from the reader, or working around some kernel of unintelligibility.

I have always been interested in difficulty: difficult people, books, art, events, cities, relationships, and therefore I’ve included here some half-hearted notes on the subject, which might at least begin a discussion around such an interesting aesthetic issue.

If anyone would like to respond, improve, or simply send some thoughts we’d love to hear from you: odradek.submissions@gmail.com

Lastly, we have an a call for submissions for next week’s newsletter: we are specifically looking for dream journals or writings on dreams. Please see the end of the issue for more details.

As always, thank you for reading ODRADEK! - we appreciate all the support we get. If you enjoy or find our work interesting, please do share it around.

Lots of love,

Noah Swann

PS: We do try to preserve the text formatting of poems - I’m not sure how well this translates over email or Substack, some browsers may distort how character indent, line wraps, and fonts appear.

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

Literally ‘not easy’ - dis- ficile.

Some definitions of ‘Easy’:

‘Tranquil, lacking complexity, requiring no great labour or effort’. And, coming from Old French aisie ‘comfortable, at ease, rich, well-off’.

Quite quickly we can see that to be against these things, in other words difficult, is to make a problem for the status quo in some way. Difficulty would then be: agitating, complex, requiring labour and effort, uncomfortable, not-at ease, poor and badly-off. The Difficult is, therefore, that which irritates the economy of the usual. The Difficult disrupts, even if only momentarily, the benefactors of that economy. Whether it is language or capital, difficulty is the zone where the flows of an economy do not extend completely. Where the flow of a lake must give way to the counter-flow of a desert. Inhospitable regions of language whose inhabitants have adapted and evolved in strange amphibious ways to survive.

Generally speaking, difficulty is seen in art, as something negative and to be avoided. Especially if it cannot be accounted for by some oeuvre: Difficulty in minor literature is dismissed as juvenile, frivolous, pompous or obtuse. But even the most pretentious affectation, even the most ludicrous stylisation, the most unnatural mannerism—. It’s this naivety that hides, this unready, untimely soul that is all the more charming and endearing for, despite its failures and timidity, its dream to be seen as something grand. Early and late style are usually where difficulty is found because it’s here that mastery, craft, professionalism is thwarted: Difficulty is all about failure.

This seems to me to relate to Heidegger’s idea that Being makes itself manifest only in states of dis-equilibrium - in something as apparently frivolous and fleeting as a bad mood. So then, doesn’t distempering the usual economy of language also bring out the it-ness, the thing-ness of language, make its failures apparent and bring out a sudden new awareness of the vast ocean of inarticulation that stretches out beneath it, uncanny and dreadful.

Maybe Difficulty is not an aesthetic triumph over meaning rather than a desire for different kinds of meaning, fractions of meaning. Silence is a speech-act, not without meaning, but with infinite possible values.Difficulty tends towards this asymptote of silence. Its a kind of pebble in the mouth, circumnavigating a lack, this hard pith, die Quelle.

It's not that the language puts on an affectation of style, but that the language is sometimes sucked into a concentration for some reason. Because of some vision, or glimpse of the world, some clairvoyance or madness. Some catastrophic event has forced language into an exceptional mass, which has caused it to behave differently. Difficulty is the visible image of this gravitational collapse of meaning; a m( )ing in which—ean—outh—other—could all take place. Poetry becomes the glowing ring that signifies the black hole at its centre:

It’s not that there is no meaning, but that half-meanings are lighter, swifter. Half-meanings communicate on different frequencies. Deleuze and Guattari say that “holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light.” The light cannot reach us.

Or, Lines Written on My Being Engrossed in the Communist Manifesto

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

1666 pills’ parliament with its structure
of coddled crinkled nylon, I get about, my laddo,	
Here’s to—, here’s a Fighting of beggars, a pastiche 
	of Venetian ceruse. —and the woman,
Gogiga Gagagigo & ouer-al enker grene.
		Hoot! Hoot! Bombard -
		the applications for the Chinese cookie, the
	situation within a dry mouth and the shocked shins, 
this horde, that troupe, our monumental affairs, there goes the 
		coin, the coin What an orifice! O my 
	salami pantheon my wading father’s fleecing,
my throbbing appendage my once-removed cousin’s fobbing-
	off !! Do not, do not dare to stare the geste 
		in the fit...

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

1. The Riverman’s confession 

A mirror divided the light, distributed 
the morning in small, fractured rectangles.
Shuttered lines, a broken architecture
that lay along my pebbled thigh. 
With the slow precision of cathedrals 
(High Gothic and French)

my mind oozed across its dark lake searching
in the currents for unnamed insects I could touch and tadpole
beneath the quiet leaves of the lotus flower.
Here, I came (quite unexpectedly)
across an image of you waving in the water like river-weed:

a memory — a keyhole, through which I saw
you brushing lamp	light from your hair
riverward across the wooded lake
I wondered brittle things that morning, I admit.



2. Stringing beads

Before photography you were an actor,
then a writer, a painter, a jewelry maker
making cheap brooches in the morning.
The sunlight arriving like architecture 
through the shutters while you worked
threading beads, and semi-precious stones 
and counterfeits, your ankhs and evil eyes, 

all beetle-jarred in plastic compartments;
your Coptic crosses, copied from copies.
A long chain of diluted meaning to get here:
this simulacra, this vague spiritualism 
neatly stored in this Jewlery Making 
Kit For Adults. Well, so what?

I still string this image on image of you, don’t I?
cross-legged and dressed in your keyhole silk,
staring at your reflection (the door ajar) brushing
gold into your hair. 

                                      O 	           O 
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne.

(The door: a jar)

But why should I hide these amphibian habits?
Why not my slime?
why not my webbed hands and webbed feet?


3. Bless thee, Bottom! …  Thou art translated.

In memory’s dark strands, I imagined 
darker threads of history winding through
your Syrian hair 	while you brushed it out like a scarf 

Say something about the moon
then say something about your hair  	O, how it was like 

something of the moon 
speaking itself into            there like a fruit 
over a lake: this is the prologue 		       —
the disturbance 	of a wrist	willowed 

over beetle-black minnows 	moving 
in their hundreds 	smooth		 tiny and tightly muscled 
flash through glistened rings 	widening 

of rippled shadows—stones knock together 
and shudder in their cloaks of water 
I thought of you—chinked 
and played by one of my Mechanicals. Watched

		Permit from the Latin mittere ‘to send’

Should I have announced myself

sent you cherry greetings	 asked 
for your permission to milk
your image	may I take your photo?	

may I stumble on the intimacies of trees?
or raid the unread hieroglyphics?
Isn’t all light 		even lamplight

even MOONSHINE 
copied, like your old rings,
and sent through the iris  along a string 

of optic nerve, aren’t we all guilty then
of translation? 
The frustration	 of	
trying to see the light behind the light:

shoulder-blades through  
the wheat-fields of water.

•

Is frustration what I felt looking on
a replica of Byzantine jewels made in China, or
scarab beetle in oxidized copper? 

Everything I attach to those beads of yours 
is wrapped in complex versions of myself—
Goblin-self and tiger-self	things  I’m frightened of.

           I see my face spread out in multitudes
    Reflected in the amber carapaces of beads
—Haha!  they seem to laugh at me,  
like millions of little frogs 
they hood me with this donkey-mask.

The truth is that I have so much mythologised
this mirror moment—this speculary session—
it’s long been torn from the you;

my appointment is with another
whose Coca Cola hair is heavy
with the smell of burnt proteas. You see,
I am ashamed to say I have diluted you,

I have remade, remoulded you 
small as an insect — see how you fit inside my beetle-jar! —
then I pictured and pixeled you		your image turned
                                  . Again

                            (you
                                                           lack a spider's mouth)

Until I felt, 		I feel now,
not you, no 		, but a shadow history
that grows	 with every repetition.


4. He ripped the golden brooches

What of the world
we miss in this eclipse

what we so quickly call	sight 
we call sense call motion? 	What lies

between the frame	 to frame,
between the skin. What of comb

what of weaving water humming stone 
through fingers did I miss?

what did I miss by sending you 
this cathedral of dung-beetles. 

What is
unpermitted is 		unsent is gift		(n. poison)

but given is received and redeemed –	
bought back	and paid for	not forgiven.
You did for-

give me, and I still 	 to turn and re-
turn to that point	 and pour 

quick word-like beads over my eyes
or into the porches of my ears 	O

O, to feel blind		cold 
beetles on my face	 running
from my bird-faced hand 	
                                         feðer	 a feather; a pen,
	                                   just birdshit  	O 	or  	ink

down my neck 	 just birdhand	again		O,		

and blunt with feeling fingers 
I fumbled the cool face			
of the page           before your strange mirror-dogs could shriek.

bead-black the water swallowed me
in its architecture 		the guano covered rocks.

To Dutch Apricity

⟡ ⟡ ⟡

Phalanges contuse
petroleum promontorial
	loosens sulfuric acid acidic
Flood insofar as mud Upon 		some
		Führer-like will-o’-the-wisp
	sways aeolianising across 
Veins phosphorescent
	Anything else gray save for the charcoal hardly 
alabaster congeals 		Black onyx Globe that festers
		Pianoforte Dr. Pozzi libretto-operetta
	dirty thunders assault Gaily
		Faggots pearl. One more octave to retch, 
one more, could you clad that bloodshot moon In
Rum 	profused in mahogany 	Axed
Abbots rainbow one’s tor and reflection 	Moo!
	Had you ever any upholstery of skin
	vacuum tint of such huge pink; do let me know
by whom you have refined the sun psalm, please,
	Transmigrate, permutate,
		Crystalline virgin
	dissolving
		I — — I
			ceruleanise
		void eunuchs Cursing
dull eyes of prisms—golden
		sperm
	thymes seraphim; those are
			the ornaments of
			androgenous diphthong
		vowels.
	Might you know? Does it rattle?
	Impregnating Draughts of 
Shadows, afterwards, echoes...	 czar or lord-lieutenant,
with the kingly 	stomach
It Clatters. Shan’t thou sire Sweet myrrh?
	Man-Flesh off, 	peel off, 	off,
chiaroscuro cellophane rough, 	Hymen, indeed. When
were the Whispers 
	Plastic		 Consummation Purpling 	there
into penultimate rivers 
Turquoise may be turquoising Hermaphroditus, the half-created.
The earth winds 
spice---	Lea, lea, lea:
Wheezle do the oil-based Tinkerbells
	for to enumerate Crist’s lilies offal Goddamn Creation! -
		(cre - - ole) -
			co - - ral -
Clays. Our God may bauble. “Thalatta! Thalatta!
Azog!—Azog!—” Azure threads of thoughts, thoughts fucking 
budding Remembrances of ether:  
serene Culprit fever, 
things of Nameless vacancies—absences. 
		Pentimento-
	Anaesthetised is the Blue Flame.
		Tutankhamun,
		O! 
		catafalqueish cauldron!
	Cleopatra’s Hwatery milk
					is
				Spilt.
		40 Swans of rebosomed Enlightenment.

‘DREAM JOURNAL’ OPEN CALL:

Do you dream, in the most literal sense? Have you ever awoken from a dream and felt compelled to write it down? Maybe it was so memorable that you recorded it even beyond the state of sleep? Perhaps, even, you record your dreams in a journal?

Or maybe you have written about dreams in a more general or theoretical sense?

If you have, we want to read them! Submit your dream journal writing for publication in an upcoming ODRADEK! newsletter.

Please feel free to comment/reply to this post or email your submission to odradek.submission@gmail.com under the subject heading ‘Dream journal submission’.

End.

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This is the second week of our enquiry into the diary form. We have four contributions that consider the diary, the self and the city.

1. Noah Lee Swann, ‘Self-Dispenser’

   Swann argues in three parts that the diary is a machine for the construction of the self comparable to the city as a machine for the construction of the subject.

2. Hannah Wickham, ‘Berlin Diaries’

   Second, we have the wonderfully sparse, elliptical observations of a flâneur type, by the English writer Hannah Wickham from her diaries kept in Berlin in 2024.

3. Warrick Sony, ‘Joburg Diary’

   A diary entry that reads like a short story, documenting the collapsing infrastructure of Johannesburg.

4. Firas Ibrahim, from Syrian Diaries

   An extract from Syrian Diaries - an ongoing project by Firas Ibrahim - which treats the diary as a public journal to share stories from his home.

In other news, we are excited to announce two new members of Odradek: Nic Snyders and Hannah Wickham, who will be coming on board as editors, running newsletters and helping with The Odd Review.

Thank you for reading and please be sure to subscribe to a free or paid subscription if you enjoy what we post.

Thanks very much.

♡dette ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

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by Noah Lee Swann

diary / state / city

I write down the date: Sunday, July 19. I write down, perhaps, my maudlin state of mind.

Derrida says, “to mark a date in history’ presupposes, in any case, ‘something’ comes or happens for the first and last time, ‘something’ that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on unforgettable.”

In the diary, which marks a date in one’s own history, this ‘something’ is the event, usually, of a day: ‘January 9. Rain, on and off, all day. Sat in my office at Metro, writing letters,’ writes Christopher Isherwood in his diaries. Nothing very interesting. And yet, it’s still the form of the diary that we regard as housing some essence of self. When we read the ‘nothing’, or ‘rien’, in Louis XVI’s hunting journal on the day the Bastille fell, don’t we hear a peculiarity? - a plaintive note, perhaps? Most diary entries record little else other than this day-to-day ‘rien’ of a life, but it’s the attitude, the character, or mood of the nothingness, how it shows itself, that seems so full of meaning.

What can we make of Kafka’s entry: ‘Sunday, July 19, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life’? What is the ‘something’ that is being recorded here other than being in a state of misery. The day or date, the events are really of little interest to us at all. Where the diary becomes of interest, is when this being, through a state of disequilibrium, becomes manifest. The ‘something’ recorded in the diary is this passing event of the self. The subject’s thrownness: this wave of arrival in the world: the date, the place of its occurrence, this state-of-mind’s mind. This light through the leaves: a green light, an italicized, specific light, through those illuminated leaves. Illuminated now, and now, and now. A certain aspect, humour or misery, a slanted handwriting of life: italics of the now. slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

The subject records the symptoms of its own being-there in various modulations; it transcribes through the grammar of days its spindrift. The diary is a city for these moods or states-of-mind, these multitudes meticulously rendered and domiciled in their dates; it's a city for a soul.

by Hannah Wickham

21st April 24’

Haunted house

A genuine query or an extravagant pick-up line I will never know. I’ve chosen to remember it as the latter.

A woman, early 20s, came up to me while I was writing on a bench. She asked if I spoke German, to which I shamefully replied, no. Relieved, she told me she thought there was someone in her house. She could hear bottles rattling and voices, she said. She asked if I could guard the door while she checked. How funny that we trust a random stranger to possibly protect us from another unknown stranger.

Standing at her doorway, I admired floor-length deep green velvet curtains, a candle-lit chandelier hanging from a mural-covered ceiling, and large abstract black and white paintings decorating the room. I was taken aback by this elaborate beauty.

She returned and we talked for a while. Skipping any form of small talk. Maybe as a result of this strange interaction, we spoke about religion. She ‘believed in belief’ but did not necessarily align with a particular religion. Neither of us being religious, I found it strange and almost intriguing that we only spoke of this.

No Burglar was found.

Binoculars

A Mother to her 8-year-old child in a pharmacy.

‘You don’t need binoculars.

That would be three pairs of binoculars.

You don’t need three pairs of binoculars.

You are one kid.’

16th April 24’

Carrot soup

Last night we made a carrot soup. It tasted like chemical lemon juice. It boiled over, spilling on the surface. Tumeric stained the kitchen tops. Confused, we chucked it and started again. Just before adding our stock water, we realised that there was descaler in the kettle. Our second attempt still tasted sour.

30th April 24’

Manuel

A piece of lined yellow paper is on the pavement floor. Hoping for a love letter, I picked it up.

‘Hello

I wanted to ask if you would like to sell your car.

If yes, please contact me. Or send Mariane a message.

Thanks! Manuel.’

19th May 24’

Change

I’m looking at the perfect scene for a high school art class on perspective. Trees fading into a messy point of green. I can see the moon. Not all of it, but enough. When I started writing there was a pink lining to the clouds. But now that colour has almost completely faded. The sky is muted blue and purple.

12th May 24’

It’s a Sunday. 7,47 pm. I’m walking and I notice a bright green drink on the side of the pavement. It’s separated. Clear electric green liquid sits at the bottom. Muted green froth rises to the top. Next to it lies a perfectly placed receipt. 24,10€ at CityChicken.

by Noah Lee Swann

diary / map / camera

A sense of self, we say, like there is something vague about it. As though there were no certainty or knowledge of this object. Only a mere sense, a glimpse, something without totality. Always dropping out of view, receding, shrinking from the spotlight of the ego.

The diary locates the pronoun “I” in a quantifiable frame of time and space, a plotted graph on the x and y axes. What the diary plots with each entry is this ephemeral, erratic, fluctuating surface of the self. As the mode of the diary is the written word, this self must be translated, moved from the indecipherable fringes of thought, from mood, feeling, full-throated experience, into the well-mannered, circumspection of words. Dates, time, weather, place etc. all the identifications of the diary, are crude attempts at mapping this territory. Like some impressive telescope snapping photos randomly at an unfathomable moon. A way of exposing an image, but only the most rudimentary image - ‘a sense of self’ - a blurred abstraction of absence, a rough hewn Jugannath of the self.

The diary is a machine for self manufacture, a selfing device to counter this insecurity. Each entry is an attempt then at freezing one’s being in order to see, or say, me-me-me. It is a small me-machine, a self-dispenser spitting out small proliferating selves. It is a process of selfing and the little selfings that appear under every date are not completely benevolent creatures: each one affirms the last and precludes a diversion from the mean and discourages outliers.

The work of such selfings is to preserve themselves, to resolve any breaks and maintain the chain of selfings, in order to secure its continued production: maintenant, now; from Latin manu tenere, ‘to hold in the hand’. In this way, they take on an appearance that is not only at odds, but entirely opposed to us: they hold us up, compare us to this aggregated image: this Image-Repertoire, this selfie. We feel them tugging at our shirt sleeves, telling us what we do and don’t like, attempting to set us in this mould.

by Warrick Sony

Thursday 23rd Jan

Mostly an uneventful day. Spent the morning preparing a class for tomorrow. An old friend Dr D⸺ came to drop off some papers and asked to see the property. It belonged to P⸺ and her ex-husband. They had separated many years ago but now wanted to sell. P⸺ wanted to go back to Europe and her ex was living in the Cape. They offered me their spare room while I settle into the city and find some more permanent accommodation.

Dr D⸺ lives only 15-minutes away. In the ‘90s, I’d lived here too with my wife and our two young kids. We all lived close by back then. But in November 1996 coming home one evening were hijacked in front of our gate. They lined us up and shot me in the leg before stealing the car. We moved to Cape Town soon after the incident.

Dr D⸺ and I talked casually as we made our way around the garden. I pointed to the tremendous swimming pool, the jungle of trees and dense, almost tropical plants. The house was built on the hillside of Langermans Kop and had a steep tiered aspect with an incredible view.

“And they only got an offer of R1.2 mil,” I said. “I just can’t believe it. “

“It’s the area and the crime” said Dr D⸺ “people are leaving in droves. I had guys break into my place a few months ago. It’s a city of fuck ups compounded by other fuck-ups.”

We circumvented the house and came around to where we had started, at the front gate. I tried to let my friend out but, to my surprise, the gate was locked. I went to the house to get the electric opener and found I had been locked out. P⸺’s car was gone, too.

“shit,” I said looking at some texts on my phone. “She thought we’d left the house.”

I disconnected the gate from its motor and, pushing, managed to roll the gate open enough to let Dr D⸺ out.

“You’ll be OK.” said Dr D⸺ before leaving. “Don’t worry. It’s actually pretty safe around here.”

When he had gone I texted P⸺ to find out what had happened. A text popped up on my screen a few minutes later.

“decided to take the dog for a walk in Rhodes park. Back in an hour”.

The sun started going down and I was getting cold so I sat in the old Toyota I was borrowing and listened to an audiobook on my phone. A few hours later my phone died. Another hour or so passed. Finally, I saw head lights and the gate began opening. It was P⸺ but another car was behind her. This one, a white BMW, had a flashing blue light on its roof. Seeing me, P⸺ got out of her vehicle. I could tell she was agitated.

“These fuckers followed me here,” she said, pointing back at the BMW, as she came over.

I could smell strong alcohol on her breath. Two men and a woman climbed out of the white BMW. They told me they were police and that P⸺ had jumped their roadblock and was driving recklessly.

One guy had an AK47 pointed at the ground and the other had a pistol in his belt. The woman seemed unarmed. She had long braids. They looked like ordinary civilians. It suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps we were being hijacked. Criminals often masqueraded as cops using a blue light. Without letting the anxiety enter my voice I asked the guy with the AK if he had police ID. He showed me his card. They were legit and, in a way, I felt enormous relief. As it turned out, P⸺ had had a few drinks with some buddies in the park and had driven home. She’d shot past the cops ignoring the blue light and their gestures to pull over.

With drunken bravado P⸺ was becoming belligerent. Winding the cops up, saying she wanted proof they were cops and that this wasn’t constitutional, refusing to comply with the police’s demands, one of which was to close the hatchback of her car.

“Don't worry,” she slurred, “I just have to let the dog out.”

“Don’t let that dog out,” the AK guy shouted.

“Don’t be ridiculous, she’s old and completely blind” said P⸺ stupidly. “She won’t harm you at all.”

The guy with the AK freaked. Raising his weapon, he shouted:

“If you let that dog out I’ll shoot it.”

Like she was in a dream, P⸺ persisted in opening the hatchback and the out jumped the scraggly, ancient dog. At this, I took the keys from her hand, grabbed the dog by the collar and said with as much assertion as I could:

“Hang on guys, I’ll get him to the house.” I quickly frog-marched the bewildered animal down the driveway. I ran indoors, quickly grabbed a jacket (it was freezing outside) and ran back to the situation.

The police had put cables-ties on P⸺ 's wrists and told me they were taking her to the station to do a breathalyser test. I said I would follow but could they drive slowly as I had an old car and wasn’t sure of the area. They were polite and said that it was a good idea that I accompany them.

I had to really work hard to calm everyone, first P⸺, then the cops, especially the woman with the braids who had taken a great dislike to her. I realised that they were actually being quite restrained and that they were pretty cool. I didn’t envy them for their job.

I followed them through the dark city to the depot at the bottom of Eloff St. – almost under the motorway.

They breathalysed P⸺ and sent her to Hillbrow hospital for blood tests and then Jeppe Police Station holding cells for the night. It was, they told me later during the long wait, to teach her a lesson. She was back home knocking on the window at 4am. She told me that she had spent most of the night in a cell with two Congolese women and an old Zimbabwean “gogo” (grandmother). She had a court date set for the following Monday.

The worst of it all, for me, was driving back in the pitch dark that night, to Kensington, through the broken roads, burned out shops, and toppled traffic lights. Steering the old Toyota through the lower end of the city, between silhouetted buildings and fires and people with no features moving spectrally in the shadows. Dystopia is not a fiction here. Entropy. The end of entropy.

by Noah Lee Swann

diary / desire / other

The contradiction of the diary is therefore that these attempts, these mechanics of its form bring us in direct confrontation with the failure of the diary’s own enterprise. Who hasn’t read back on old diaries and been astonished at the inconsistency of a cohesive sense of self? Or, who has not sat down to write a diary entry and felt the shame at confessing the self, of writing “I” over and over again. As though it were something improper, something embarrassing. What is this sense of shame and why do we feel that there is some inauthentic theatrics to the diary?

It is ironic then that what I am brought up against in the diary, what I am made aware of is not myself, but the hesitancy I feel in assuming one of these selves. (These little selfings who I see breaking like waves on the page.) I feel as though this stepping-in, this climbing inside of a self is as ridiculous as wearing a leotard and running onto stage declaring: ‘it is I, Hamlet.’

Not that I feel ‘empty inside’, but rather that my ‘I’ is just not in these words. My ‘I’ if I must have one, is some other place. —Where? —Deferred?

This would be one way of putting it, but maybe the feeling I find more accurate (and perhaps I am wrong) is that the self is buried underneath, or between these words, this language, these dates and locations, these events I record. Somehow this elusive, gelatinous ‘i’ - who bears no gender, race, age, who has no organs. Has no name! No family or nation, this ‘I’ (if it is an I, or an id) is constantly evading these attempts of capture by the self-dispenser (my diary, my phone, my language, my friends, family, nation all of it). And yet, it is this amphibious, allusive sense-of-self, who is a stranger to all selves, the desiring-I, that binds and directs, frustrates, destroys, cultivates, punctuates and irrigates these selfings, these straightbacked letters, these ruined corinthian columns, all over my page: I, I, I.

The ‘desiring-I’ on the contrary is this unstable, unreasonable, urgency to be. It is always trying to make a break with these ghosts, these small, hungry, multitudes of selves, which try to enforce a cohesive bond with the past. As I write, it is, in other words, my difference to these past-versions of myself, these cartoons, that the diary machine reveals me to myself, not as my similarities to the selves of the past: the diary reveals my subjectivity as a lack.

What I feel then, so forcibly at this moment - and this, and this - is that my self is a potentiality to break with it all. An offensive, disruptive potential for complete revolt with myself. A desire and, yes! - a possibility to stream out into the night. To break into a cold wet field of nasturtiums. To see the round green wheels of their leaves with a single silver bead of dew at the centre of each just like I did as a child, and to feel that they are hiding something from me, as you felt that time you walked into a whispering classroom and everyone fell silent and then laughed.

And you wished then, as you do now, that you could suck the globe of dew from the hilt of a nasturtium leaf, turn purple, swell up big as a balloon and float away. Or even just to lie down among them; arrange your head under the liquorice scented leaves so their round, green wheels are above you like cocktail umbrellas, and you are the cocktail.

by Firas Ibrahim

15 of Jan 2025

“Send me an earthquake… or hand me a grenade”

My mother used to say she never missed having a sister because she had Fatima. So, we always called her Aunt Fatima. In turn, she treated us like her own children. When I was unwell, she turned up at our door with a plate of my favourite freshly baked spinach pies. She was mostly known for two things: her kind and generous heart, and her sharp tongue, which always got her into trouble, but she never cared.

I hadn’t spoken to Aunt Fatima for a while. She never owned a mobile phone, so we could only talk on WhatsApp using her daughter’s. The calls became few and far between when her daughter’s family moved to the city of Homs a couple of years ago. So, when a friend from our neighbourhood mentioned that he saw Fatima’s grandchildren on her balcony, I decided to ring her daughter, Samia, straight away.

Fatima told me about the events of the past two days. Her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren arrived at her flat in the middle of the night. Each parent was carrying a sleepy child. They came in, laid the kids on a prepared mattress in the bedroom.

Samia and her husband had just put the children to bed and were sitting listening to the news in their living room when their next-door neighbour who was part of the Sunni sect, rapped on their door and alerted them. An extremist Sunni group was in the neighbourhood attacking Alawites. The family had just enough time to get in the car and drive to her mother’s flat in Lattakia.

When they arrived, everyone was exhausted and went straight to bed. But a couple hours later, Samia woke her mother. Something was wrong with Samia’s husband. Since the fall of the government and the loss of his job, the poor man had already been under immense pressure to ensure his family had enough food. Fleeing in the middle of the night seemed to be the last straw. He woke up struggling to breathe, and he thought he was having a heart attack.

“Usually, you could call the ambulance; failing that, all you’d have needed was to knock on your neighbours and all would be looked after” Fatima said.

“So, what did you do” I asked.

Fatima gave a long sigh before she responded:

“Nothing”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Son, in daylight, everyone talks of unity, and when darkness falls, everyone is out for themselves. We hear gunshots, thugs in balaclavas knock on doors, and armed groups walk through our streets and stop people. So, after sunset, we just lock our doors and stay in.”

“Couldn’t you ask the neighbours to help?”

“I couldn’t ask them when I know they are as terrified to get out as we are.”

“How is he now?”

“He is fine. We sat with him until dawn when he seemed to calm down.”

“Sorry.”

I heard the word come out of my mouth; I felt how hollow it was. I asked Aunt Fatima if there was anything I could do.

“Send me an earthquake, that would kill us all instantly," she said with cold finality in her voice, “or hand me a grenade.”

END.

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This week, a little later than intended, we are sharing with you ‘Diary Machine’.

Several weeks ago, we put out an open call for diary entries: to “be as objective and spare as possible.” Frequently, we receive writing submissions that are strangled by notions of ‘writerliness’, of the idea that literature must be some heightened form of language, different to our everyday speech. The diary machine was our attempt at encouraging a more immediate, less self-conscious writing that finds enjoyment in what T S Eliot, I think, called ‘the music of the street’.

Because of the amount of fantastic submissions we received we will be splitting our consideration of the diary into a two newsletters, with a second instalment on the theme to appear next week, with slightly different, more considered takes on the diary form, including a critical engagement with the diary entry as a genre.

Thank you to this issue’s contributors for trusting us with their work. In order of their appearing:

Odette Fangstrem-Ward, Éadbhard C. Ó Duinn, Sheree Shatsky, L. Haiman, A. P. Murphy, Navina Donata Baur, Jordan Novak, Warrick Sony, A.J.

Thanks so much for reading this week!

Noah Lee Swann

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by Noah Lee Swann

The idea of a diary machine, or diary dispenser, was to generate, snap shots of lives without the intervention of any preconceptions of ‘good writing’ or (heaven forbid) ‘serious literature’. We received these entries from around the world: New Zealand, Germany, South Africa, London, Florida. And the result was more successful than we had intended.

What unites the diary entries are their similarities in temperament, their shared, unpretentious attention and interest in being in the world. I found myself interested in reading the entries chronologically. That is, seeing them in temporal relation to each other, and so have arranged them in this way. There are entries written within an hour of each other on the same exact day but thousands of kilometres apart. There are other entires written on the same date but several years apart. Or, written at the same time but a single day apart, so that the diary machine becomes a kind of relay of consciousness of a living world, trading places, times, subjectivities. A.J, for example, submitted an entry from Queensland, New Zealand on the 8 July 2024, and so, with this in mind, I found the same “8 July” in my own diary from four years earlier (my first day in London).

At this point in time, Trump on his throne, it feels especially poignant to read such, small, unassuming and tentative signatures of human idiosyncrasies. They are like new, green shoots rising from an inhospitable asphalt.

As Odradek we are always interested in writing that is created in a single gesture, so to speak, with all its errata laid out, still in the trance of experience, before editing, refinement, and most especially, before taste. We love reading grocery lists, to-do lists, Whatsapp conversations, voicenotes, casual texts, captions, ephemera that evidence of life and character. Writing that lies still, almost absent of the performance of being a person with a name and certain likes and dislikes. We enjoy this kind of fluidity because it feels honest to life rather than to nations, ideas, categories or meanings. With its specific typos or grammatical errors, presumptions, anxieties and fantasies, the diary machine is simply a device to record or translate snippets of experience. Like a camera or barometer it does very little; it just sounds back an affirmation; resounds with the ‘yes’ of everything that happens - the commotion of birds.

Odette Ward - UK, 8 January 2025

Wed 8 Jan 2025. Abraco coffee shop. 13:08. Dalston Kingsland Road. London.

Writing with ridiculous bright yellow nails. It’s bright outside. Bright and cold. The cafe is full w/people on their laptops. Outside, the cold sunlight makes long shadows. It’s a slight golden or yellowed light. Cold but not white. Weak not unoptimistic or sympathetic.

“No, I’m in Dalston", says a girl with short blonde hair. She’s on the phone, speaking softly. The man beside her is also on the phone speaking Korean.

“The cafe I wanted to go to didn’t allow laptops — which is fair.”

We are packed in here. Outside a pregnant woman w/glasses, who I will doubtless forget, stands drinking a takeaway coffee.

“I really want to see Nosferatu", says the woman next to me.

I am thinking about diaries. I was re-reading some of my old ones and couldn’t believe how little I remembered. How only the entries themselves are what’s left of the experience. It’s sad. How much we lose + forget. Fills me with hopelessness sometimes thinking like this. — how can we hope to change anything of these ghastly cycles of war and despotism when I won’t even remember this. This — this now — in five years I would have forgotten it all. The light, the girl on the phone, the Korean man, the pregnant woman.

“OK; I’m going to send an invoice + go to the bank,” says the woman with the short hair, before hanging up. I will forget you too.

Éadbhard C. Ó Duinn - USA, 11 January 2025

January 10th, 9:03 EST; Home, Tolland Green, Tolland, Connecticut. Clear but very cold (-3 C)

The whir of cars rushing past, all far exceeding the residential speed limit. The furnace just rumbled to life.

The computer fans glow neon blue (my son’s choice). Coffee cup is half empty. The trees are tilting at severe angles in the unusually strong gusts.

Hannah the cat is curled up tightly on the sofa. The jet black sheen of her fur catching the precious morning light.

Sheree Shatsky - USA, 11 January 2025

Sat. 11 Jan. 9:02 am. Florida, east coast. Home, lounging with Bob, aka a cat. It’s sixty drizzling degrees outside.

My ears are ringing. Always. I hear traffic out on the street. And birds. Blue jays. The kitchen clock is ticking. A freight train. An airplane. Dishes rattle.

The outside reflects inside on the blank tv. Open blinds. Concrete driveway. A poinsettia placed on the porch table. A hint of the cleared lot across the street. The rabbits cleared as well. One lives in the front garden. In a hutch disguised as tree debris. Every day, we study nocturnal photos snapped of the rabbit on our wildlife camera.

The feral cat, too. Passersby of the night.

L. Haiman - UK, 13 January 2025

Monday, 13 Jan, 11:15, Margate, Westbrook, 5C cloudy. My one year old’s highly articulate babble directed at my parents. A black cat just walked outside my study door. On my desk: notebook still closed, hand cream tube almost empty, rings, 0.9 mm pencil, keyboard, phone, mouse, empty coffee cup, card, laptop, fingers typing. It’s 11:20 and it feels like too much day has already happened.

A. P. Murphy - Catalonia, 13 January 2025

Monday 13 January, 12.00 noon, Barcelona, Catalonia

Weather: Clear, sunny, blinding, fresh.

Out for a mandated healthful stroll with my daughter in her wheelchair. The day is fine and fresh, there's a standard press of weekday folks around, particularly outside the corner cafe where everyone's smoking up a storm.

I have to ask a man clustered in a group on the corner to make way for the wheelchair to pass. He doesn't hear, but his colleagues, all smoking up a storm, let him know, and he moves aside.

I recognize him. Until last year he was President of our little country, but he got voted out in a snap election. His party's HQ office is on my block and they often gather at this bar to chat and plan their political comeback. No bodyguards, no entourage, just a bunch of friends from the office.

Last year, running for re-election, he was all concern when he met us at an event for disabled people. Lots of questions about my daughter: how old, what are her needs, is there anything the government could do?

Today he barely glances at her as his friend passes him a cigarette. He blows smoke over us as we pass through the small space he's opened up on the pavement outside the coffee bar.

Navina Donata Baur - Germany, 13 January 2025

Monday, 13th January at 1:44 PM local time, Hilden Old Town, NRW, Germany, Overstolz Café. Alone, but surrounded by people. Sunny, blue sky, 1°C.

A murmur of voices - people at the nearby tables are deep in animated conversation, laughing together. In the background, I hear the hard-working coffee machine grinding beans—it smells heavenly. There’s no scent I love more than that of freshly ground coffee.

I open my eyes, expecting to see this picture as if I am waking up from a dream - but I’m disappointed. I hear music that is too loud for a café of this size. I hear the coffee machine, smell the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, and see people sitting at nearby tables staring into space or at their phones. I’m the only person sitting in this café by herself, and yet, everyone else seems so much lonelier.

No hum of voices, no lively conversations to eavesdrop on. Just loud music and solitude. A good-looking man, perhaps in his mid-forties, is sitting at a table with a woman. He’s gazing out the window—maybe watching the dog outside barking passionately at its owner. Another treat! Or maybe his fixed stare is directed at the computer shop across the street.

I glance over at it, too, and think to myself what a bleak, boring display it has.

The man reaches for his glass of freshly squeezed orange juice - his movements are elegant and calm. His fingers slowly wrap around the glass; he lifts it to his mouth and takes a sip. His gaze remains distant as his hand places the glass back down with the same deliberate care.

I turn my gaze away from him; I’ve been watching him so long that he might notice soon. The woman across from him says something, but I can’t hear her words. He straightens in his chair, a movement as if awakening from a trance, as though he’s just returned to reality. He looks at her gently and replies - she laughs.

A little less loneliness, I think, and I take a contented sip of my now lukewarm coffee.

Reassured, with a faint sense of hope for humanity, I glance down at my book: The Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton.

Jordan Novak - Italy, 13 January (2021?)

Wed. 13 Jan. 7:03 am. Florence, Italy. In the bedroom. Alone. Weather 51° F. Sunny.

The sound of the urban police car buzzing past our apartment. For the second day now. Wondering if there’s something going on downtown. I can hear the washer running, almost at the end of its cycle. Unlike my frigid New York dwelling, it’s warm enough for me to put my clothing on a clothesline to dry in the sunshine. I thought a lack of technology might be frustrating—but it’s been oddly soothing instead.

Outside, I hear people starting to wake up. The light starts to shine, illuminating the piazza and all the glass cafes within it. Creaking and squeaking, the candy-colored carousel starts to run (and so do the children, towards it).

Women clop along the cobblestones with their long black coats and leather boots, their bracelets chiming as they walk. There’s a work commute here, usually on foot, but there is a separate commute everyone makes for their cappuccino; the people’s fuel of choice in this beautiful country.

I leave in a few days, but I’ve only been here for a few days… Why can’t New York be more like this?

Warrick Sony - South Africa, 19 January 2025

It is 8:30 am on Sunday morning 19^th January. I am in Kensington, Johannesburg and staying at P… 's house for a few weeks. Built-in the early 1900s, with pressed metal ceilings and generous proportions, her house has an incredible view, overlooking Bez Valley and most of the city's eastern side and adjoining suburbs. I can see the Hillbrow Tower, the brutalist Ponte City skyscraper and most of the ridge of Yeoville. The red roofs and brick buildings of Bez Valley are outlined by green foliage from the thousands of trees that have benefited from the recent years of extreme summer rains.

I'm told Johannesburg is the world's largest manufactured urban forest, and bird sounds are prominent, especially in the early mornings. The valley acts as an acoustic sonic amplifier, throwing up disparate voices, dog barks and motor vehicles.

A fist-sized bird foregrounds my attention in an ancient oak tree that stretches up towards my room window, a story or so above the ground. It makes a long kaaaaaar sound and has a noticeable red face with black and white wing stripes. It darts back and forth chasing insects or something, running up and down a withered tree branch.

A copy of Kenneth Newman's, fully-revised, Birds of Southern Africa (2002) is lying on the table which I open and locate the little bird on page 284. It looks like a ‘Black-collared Barbet’ of which the following is written:

The call is a loud duet, starting with a whirring 'kerrr-kerrr-kerrr' and then becoming a 'too-puddley- too-puddley-too-puddley-too-puddley….' about eight times, accompanied by wing-quivering and bobbing

A gunshot echoes across the valley. Nothing follows but a long reverberation and the "kweh-h-h" of a Lourie (p 226). The gunshot happens again about ten seconds later. No voices, no screams, nothing. And again, and again, and again, all with long intervals.

"It can't be a gunshot" I think. "what could it be?"

I move to the lounge area and open the large sliding window to see if I can make sense of it. Again and again, sometimes with longer intervals.

Could it be a panel beater perhaps, someone with a 10-pound hammer hitting steel? No, it felt percussive, explosive; more like a firework but at this time of the morning and for twenty minutes? It went on for ages.

"What the fuck?" I thought.

Yesterday evening, after hearing what I thought was a gunshot across the valley, P. said it was a firework and that gunshots differ from fireworks in that “they are usually close together. Gunshots go, "doef, doef, doef, doef," she said, “and fireworks have one bang and a silence.”

But again back to the question; who would be setting off fireworks at 8.40 am on a Sunday morning and why? Another Johannesburg WTF? moment, piling up against a whole lot of others, like: why were so many traffic lights lying on their sides; chopped down, felled like trees snapped in half, some even still blinking and alive. Why?

A.J - New Zealand, 6th July 2024

July 6, 2024, 11:08 AM, the bench outside the library, Arrowtown.

(I am writing this with freezing hands, and I still refuse to wear my gloves ahhh)

Been in Queenstown for a day, It was another thirty-minute bus ride from there to Arrowtown. It’s so cold here. Everyone warned me about the wild, freezing July winds, but I still wasn’t prepared enough. There’s also no noise of cars speeding by or the beeping sound of traffic lights. It's all very quiet.

I do hear the chatter of people here and there. “Bit of a cold day today,” “Just taking the kid to play outside,” “Well, at least the sun’s out,” “Yeah, that’s a nice sight this morning,” I hear two guys talking as I sit on a wooden bench outside the town library. They are parting ways now. Apparently, the kid was too impatient— he didn’t wanna wait for them to finish their conversation. He’s now speedily running away into the field. Go have fun, kid.

I love the library. There’s a stone wall and reading schedules written on a blackboard outside. There’s also an olive green metallic flap to return books. I went in there ten minutes ago and the blonde librarian, about 25, smiled and waved at me as soon as I stepped in. She was v polite, I hope she has a great day.

As I sit here now, six feet away from a bookshelf reading “Take a book, leave a book,”I realise I don’t wanna leave!! I’ll def come here again. I’ll also look around the museum and talk to strangers more. Everyone’s been so nice to me.

I don’t wanna be in a rush to catch a plane, ahhh!! but I still hope the bus gets here soon. Gonna be back in Auckland in the next five hours. At least it won’t be as cold.

P.S. THE PANCAKES HERE ARE AMAZING!!!

Noah Lee Swann - UK, 6th July 2020

6th July 2020 - 225 Highbury Quadrant 11:35am

Sitting on the back porch overlooking the garden. Just saw a fox disappear into the hedge. The sun is coming out now. Something rustling in the ivy. Malcolm, the cat, is sitting on the wooden table I am writing on. Cathy can be heard talking to a client or someone about something. Small flies or midges dart around and chase each other in the new light. A bird gurgles atonally. The clouds are sparse, white and fluffy. Far above sparrows or swallows soar and dip for invisible food. The trees whisper and wave. Silver sounds. A spade rakes along gravel somewhere out of sight. A hammer beats a wooden plank in the distance and sets the dogs off barking. A hooter of a car soft, muffled.

END

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Happy New Year! appy ew ear! ap y e ar! p y e r! e ! !

For our first post of the new year, we have a contribution from our very own editor, Noah Lee Swann, who has written an engaging piece, ‘Somnolent Writing on Fassbinder’s Landslide Shadows’, a fragment of film criticism written in a state of half-sleep on a film that never existed in the first place. Comparable in a way to the opium-induced half-conscious state described by De Quincey in his Confessions or Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’. The origins of the piece are fairly humorous, and so Swann has included a brief introduction, too.

We have also included, at the end of this newsletter, an open call for diary entries, anonymous or authored, for our ‘Diary Machine’, which will be published in our next newsletter. You can find details below.

In other news, we have nearly gone through all our submissions. Thank you to everyone who sent us work. If you haven’t heard from us in the next couple of weeks, please do send us an email.

As always, thank you for reading! please like, comment, subscribe etc. etc. ALL support goes a very long way.

Happy reading!

♡dette ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

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by Noah Lee Swann

Last year, I was working part-time as an invigilator at a gallery in Soho for an exhibition of paintings by the artist Marlene Dumas. The paintings themselves were strange and disquieting, many of them were portraits of stone-like faces, or face-like stones. Day after day I spent hours staring and contemplating them. In fact, as I was sitting in the same unmoved position each day, I felt as though I was becoming a stoney version of myself. The director of the gallery knew I was a writer and asked me if I would like to write a few words about the show that she could send to Marlene Dumas. Naturally, I agreed.

I found it impossible to write anything when I got home and went to bed very late, worrying about it. That night I had the most vivid dream about a film called Landslide Shadows by the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The dream was of intense detail, as you’ll read. On waking up at 4 am, I was convinced not only of the existence of such a film, but somehow, in my half-woken dream state, I was convinced that Landslide Shadows had solved all of the previous night’s writing problems. I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it.

In my delusional sleepiness, I grabbed a notebook and pen and frantically wrote down the dream. I explained the film in great detail and felt, once I had finished, that everything there was to be said about the paintings was explicated through this reading of Landslide Shadows. After two hours of frantic writing, I put down the notebook and fell promptly back into a deep and happy sleep. The next morning, while I set to typing out my notes, the dream-logic began to dissipate in what Yeats called, ‘the prosaic light of day’. In fact, to my now sober mind, the piece of writing had nothing in common with the paintings at all. But the dream being so vivid, I was still convinced of the film, so I googled ‘Landslide Shadows film’, ‘Fassbinder best films’, ‘use of shadows’, in various iterations, I thought maybe I had mistaken the director’s name. Eventually I had to admit there had never been a Landslide Shadows; I had imagined it, along with an entire cast. I had even dreamt up a French critic called Thierry Mirabeau (!!). Even Mirabeau, whose keen critical engagement and philosophical depth I had so heavily relied on in my own piece!

What is written here, is, humorously, with minor changes, a transcription of the somnolent analysis of the entirely imagined film, Landslide Shadows, written at 4 am.

*

Fassbinder’s Landslide Shadows

Fassbinder, or a German film-maker by another name, discovered the importance of shadows, when, one afternoon, while filming, because the sun was at a certain angle, he was unable to keep the cameraman’s lengthy shadow out of shot. Shortly after this frustrating scenario, Fassbinder began experimenting, not with lighting per se, but with shadows: removing shadows completely from scenes, replacing them suddenly, exaggerating them or even growing them like some insistent fungus. His first film experimenting with these techniques was titled simply, Landslide Shadows, a montage of rockfalls and landslides with their shadows changing so dynamically, one critic likened these dark shapes to dancers. Fassbinder went on to incorporate these dynamic shadows into more conventional narratives, achieving commercial successes with films such as Mirror, No Place and Integrity. These were considered the auteurs ‘great’ years, however in an interview with The New Yorker, Fassbinder was reported saying everything in his career after Landslide Shadows was to him an anticlimax. The French literary critic and theorist Thierry Mirabeau wrote the following:

“In the famous scene of Landslide Shadows, Fassbinder juxtaposed two otherwise identical shots of a rockslide, not the event itself but the aftermath of the destruction. The only difference between these two shots is the shadows. In the first, there are almost none, in the second they rise inquisitively, they extend, meet, conjoin, it is an entire erotics of the dark. To be almost perversely interested in shadows is to be interested in aftermath, in how events and their elements lie, how events are experienced, are witnessed, are interpreted and cognised. The effect Fassbinder pioneered is disarming for its simplicity, and seems, on one hand to engage with very little, but on the other hand, it is an enquiry into a phenomenological crisis: how things happen, how things- even inanimate things, continue to happen. As the epilogue concludes: ‘there are shadows because there are hills.’ There is, in Landslide Shadows, an understanding both of the knife-edge of the contemporary moment, but also, considering its subject matter, an understanding of slow time, of the longue durée of geographical time, of tectonic shifts.”

The Odd Review is running a ‘Diary Machine’ experiment to be published in our next newsletter.

The aim is to gather and publish a selection of single, brief diary entries, which record, each in turn, a subjective impression of place and time. Sketched, unrefined, these brief entries can be written during a commute, in a coffee shop, walking down the road, or at home.

We encourage anyone and everyone to produce and submit a diary entry to us by following these instructions (or guidelines - feel free to make the form your own):

1. Record the date, time, location (eg. London, Hackney), weather and temperature (2°, overcast).

2. What you hear in the distance (if anything), what you hear around you (eg. humming of the refrigerator).

3. Describe what you see, be as objective and spare as possible (eg. the street outside. A red London double decker bus. A loud motorbike drives past).

4. (optional) write your thoughts on one individual, creature, idea or object that grabs your attention.

You can find the original Substack post here: LINK

___________

Example:

Wed 8 Jan 2025. Abraco coffee shop. 13:08. Dalston Kingsland Road. London.

Writing with ridiculous bright yellow nails. It’s bright outside. Bright and cold. The cafe is full w/people on their laptops. Outside, the cold sunlight makes long shadows. It’s a slight golden or yellowed light. Cold but not white. Weak not unoptimistic, sympathetic, even.

“No, I’m in Dalston", says a girl with short blonde hair. She’s on the phone, speaking softly. The man beside her is also on the phone speaking Korean.

“The cafe I wanted to go to didn’t allow laptops — which is fair.”

We are packed in here. Outside a pregnant woman w/glasses, who I will doubtless forget, stands drinking a takeaway coffee .

“I really want to see Nosferatu", says the woman next to me.

I am thinking about diaries. I was re-reading some of my old ones and couldn’t believe how little I remembered. How only the entries themselves are what’s left of the experience. It’s sad. How much we lose + forget. Fills me with hopelessness sometimes thinking like this. — how can we hope to change anything of these ghastly cycles of war and despotism when I won’t even remember this. This — this now — in five years I would have forgotten it all. The light, the girl on the phone, the Korean man, the pregnant woman.

“OK; I’m going to send an invoice + go to the bank,” says the woman with the short hair, before hanging up.I will forget you too.

____________

If you’d prefer to email us your entry you can do so too: odradek.subissions@gmail.com

That is all for now.

Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed, please think about subscribing or even moving to paid subscription (help us pay our rent). You could also help by simply sharing this with a friend.

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Just last night while writing this we reached 1,000 subscribers. We have to thank all of you and especially those who have moved to a paid subscription.

In 1961 a poet by the name of Raymond Queneau wrote 10 sonnets and printed them on 10 sheets of paper. He set about to cut each line of each of the ten poems so that the strips, each with a line of poetry, could fold interchangeably back over each other. The result was 140 lines interacting with each other, creating exponential meanings. He called this book ‘One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems’ 10¹⁴ (= 100,000,000,000,000). Queneau’s poem made me think of both form and poetic lines in a slightly different sense. Isn’t it a liberating thought, for example, that if 1,000 subscribers contributed a single line of words we could amass 82,721,210,695,570,328,927,708,881 sonnets?

I have always been interested in ephemeral, so called ‘non-literary’ texts: shopping lists, timetables, texts and comment sections. And so a couple weeks ago, on the 7th of December, with this in mind, we made a post on our Substack inviting anyone to comment a single line of poetry to contribute to a ‘Sonnet Machine’. The idea was, if we got fourteen lines, we would have a sonnet. The most basic tenant of the sonnet being its 14 lines. The original note and the comment can be found here.

We received 42 lines of poetry from around 40 contributors, which means we generated three original sonnets. This week we are sharing these three ‘Comment Section Sonnets’. If you’d like to be part of future collaborative collage writing experiments subscribe and keep an eye on our Substack.

I arranged the lines and Wystan, our poetry editor, has written an insightful introduction to the ‘Comment Section Sonnets’ under the title ‘On Sonnets & Machines: a mechanical history of the sonnet and the poetics of the machine’, which has also been published today and can be found here. This is for paid subscribers only, so should you wish to read that you can subscribe below for only £5 a month:

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We would like to thank all our contributors:

Ryan Tilley, Jim Trainer, Jessica Dylan Miele, Wake Lloire, february fatigue, Sam Tripton, everyday reads and rambles, Nikos Anagnostou, Mitchell Tillison, W. B. Foley, Tilma, B.R Bechtold, Daniel Bogogolela, Philip Athans, A.P. Murphy, Sol Miranda, Monique Gadella, adv, Kill Symbols, Duende verde, Sheree Shatsky, Jeanine, Jason O’Toole, j.e. Moyer LPC, Alexandra Hill, Thomas Finan, Ashley Healy, morganmemento, Aggy, Nichole M Willden, Biancamaria Pacci, Meg Smythe, Nico Sakaki, anaika kakoty, Elanor Flowers, Sal Randolph, EJ Trask, alia and Lily Autumn West.

Please consider sharing and leaving a comment, suggestion or feedback.

Enjoy!

Noah Lee Swann

Listen to a reading of this poem.

Comment Section Sonnet #1

It was all a glassblur
And it never occurred to me to turn the lights on 
I opened the door and I let the world quietly step in
I held a spider in my palm 
If you can believe such a thing
Sitting with my cat on my lap in the sun. 
My hands are full of plums and full of water
My heart stutters inconclusively then targets you

There is grease and dirt packed under these fingernails, under these wings
She was my love in the storm.
Her whole body shakes while she is looking at him.
It does take two to make such a big mess.
If only I could fart without shame 
If only the flamingos could save us

listen to a reading of this poem.

Conceit Moments Sonnet #2

where the prince left his silver,
I keep losing my shoes
fleeting mouse weeping massively in the fire 
When I turned 50, I disappeared.
I was the woman who inhaled the fly.
Swimming over the drowned towns of Fish House and The Vly
Not a human doing, but a being
Caught up inside 10,000 Julys.
The gray dawn rises over the bare tree.
Give me a break. 14 lines of free verse does not make a sonnet.
every cigarette is a therapist…
Every sunset a saviour 
Thank you for considering my application.
How annoying good advice can be.

Listen to a reading of this poem.

Commie Contents Sonnet #3

I heard the strangest noise while i was sleeping
The stories of my skull sponge
then my bed sheets fall asleep
My line starts with a full stop.
Never talk to a pitcher who’s throwing a perfect game
What a shame to play a game without a worthy foe
Sorry, my reply’s been lost amidst the garland and tinsel and wintry tchotchkes.
that's so fun!! here's my contribution:
we fade into words on a screen
Living worldly memes, becoming mindless enemies
To spin a web without a thread
FUN! Here's mine:
The elf hath sat upon thy shelf
It’s coming for you.

Thank you for reading ODRADEK! <3

Please do subscribe or consider a paid subscription if you haven’t and share with those you think might enjoy our newsletter.

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Welcome to Issue 3 of our newsletter ODRADEK! Before we discuss this issue, we do have a brief letter from our editor Noah Lee Swann:

“Thank you for all your enthusiastic support so far. In little over two weeks we’ve amassed nearly 800 subscribers.

The Odd Review is run by a very small team battling with financial strains. We have recently made the decision, therefore, to turn on ‘paid’ subscription through our Substack. This newsletter will remain free, but we will be adding paid content in the form of longer pieces, spot-lighting a single author. And while we regret having to break through, what De Quincey calls, ‘that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities,’ we are asking you, if you enjoy or believe in the work we are doing, please do consider moving to a paid subscription.”

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This week we are sharing some great examples of ‘collage-writing’ from our workshop that took place a couple weeks ago at Abney Books. We have collage poems by several attendees: Lu Rose Cunningham, Alice Hall, Noah Lee Swann, Arna Beth and Anna Curzon-Price. A few aonymous texts (I wasn’t sure who made them) are included too.

In addition we are sharing the first Odradek manifesto, ‘What is Odradek fragments?’ which appeared in July in The Odd Review. Although a lot has changed since then, we thought this would help give some context to our project for new subscribers.

Lastly, we have included instructions to some of the collage-writing techniques used in our workshop in the hope that everyone might feel inspired to create their own odd poems.

Thanks so much for reading! We would love to hear your comments, feedback, suggestions and support.

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Collage Text #1

unknown author

       into the   walls. Then in the 

   mirrored      lake  and 

to me,         limpid    and opaque 

Collage Text #2

by Lu Rose Cunningham

Storm 
Warning 


finding		       the street was		             acrid smoke, and 
		                      god                                          thunder	


the reflection				                    waving flaming torches 
       birds                                                              red and blue flames                        dance 
						                                                      hammer-blows 


waver		    distorted 


in the plate-glass   silvery sound 
           ceiling                      murmur 


				                                        the glass collapsed 
					                                          cards


Bales of cloth flew out and piled up on the street.
               sky                                               road

Collage Text #3

by Anna Curzon-Price

Collage Text #4

by Alice Hall

                    he did not repent. 
his father’s funeral 

                                No one could dispute 
                                                                          his father’s 
                     strange genius 

                          – but in her mind there was a sense of 
                                                    offence 

Collage Text #5

by Noah Lee Swann

	his roast beef 
seizes 
			the 	house. 

		politeness 	is 
		the death of 
			love. 

Collage Text #6

unknown author

               An intimate acquaintance 	     joined
								
						  	                                                             saw nothing 

                                                  she was herself 
						                                                   at last 


        why should not I wear pink ribbons?


				                     no fortune. 	but two thousand pounds 

		       good thing 
				                 “I am monstrous 

It would be quite unkind to 	judge 	a 	horse

Collage Text #7

by Arna Beth

Hell")     of his was  striking
he could  fee   any political  little angel  for years

Automatous 14 Person Sonnet Exquis

by Odradek

Just you sit tight covered with faded green-striped wallpaper.

marching and ventured, attracted his attention

              my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never 
see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system,

be after her death (when I should still love her and she would 

               not arrive at Saint-Loup's restaurant every evening in
the same state of mind.
having me run the length of that blessed corridor.

sleep instead of protecting it. Only yesterday the incessant

                                                                  Your landlady answered
and said you were on your way. She sounded . . . scared.'

The fat man at the cash register didn't seem to mind
 
                                 Tap tap tap tap tap!

suspended by her tears. In books too, as well as in music,

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Preface

by Wystan Loope

The below text was published for the first time on an Instagram page, at the time called, odradek_fragments on the 16 April 2024. The same page is now called, the_odd_review. In other words, Odradek fragments was the precursor to our magazine.

Without many resources, the goal of what was called Odradek fragments, was to make publishing as easy and manageable as possible. The main principles were to publish a kind of before-writing, half-started, un-finished writing: notes scribbled in the margins, or something unintelligible on a sticky note. Writing that hasn’t been painstakingly honed for publication, that is liable to change, to have errors, typos, which incidentally began embody a certain attitude.

It’s this attitude that we began to associate with Odradek, a kind of shared playful sensibility. If you were to ask me what this sensibility consists of, I wouldn’t know how to answer, though a few keywords or phrases come to mind: a preference for character over craft; oddity, not for the sake of weirdness, but as a kind of compassionate engagement with the other; collage, and the idea that everything is collage, is fundamental to this; and lastly, prized perhaps above all, is an ability to tread an ambiguous line between seriousness and silliness. And though we are beginning to broaden our vision since April (we have moved into print and we have started this newsletter), nonetheless, these concepts, still, I think, apply.

What is Odradek fragments?

In a conversation, when we have not been heard or our meaning remains misunderstood, we tend to repeat ourselves. We may rephrase what we’ve been saying, striving for greater clarity or for rhetorical colour. If we are still ignored, unheard, our desire to express is still denied, eventually we find another avenue for this articulation. Violence is one way, however, the path that this project of fragments is concerned with is the way underground. Here, in the dark, the exiled, excommunicated words emerge like mycelium networks do, in small patches of insistent mushrooms. In some sense, this is what this project is concerned with, this oddity, this odradek.

Disillusioned with most contemporary publishing, the goal of fragments is to make a space for a kind of writing that can’t survive in this frigid atmosphere. In nineteen-fifty-something Kenneth Koch wrote to Frank O’Hara: ‘It does appear to me that unless we do something about ourselves, nobody will; why should they? Since if our poetry is good theirs is (mostly) out of date and shitty (which it is).’ Like the New York School we want our own ‘solitary space’ in which the usual economy of ‘good literature’ can be temporarily suspended, where we can play. Where we can do away with the gatekeeping, snobbery and preciousness of any ‘literary world’.

In this odd review, this Odradek view, by making oddities, odpilled and overdosed, making oddkin, oddments, fragments that produce more fragments, we shout out ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’ We publish like a leech or a tick or a vampire or a fungus or a virus. There is nothing moral about art. Scavenging texts, appropriating, stealing, like foxes, in our red reek of rapine, we follow a scent. You will find here a stoned Letterboxd review, poems written by a cat, snippets of whatsapp messages, poems made from comment sections and video games. Encountered here, however, these items are italicised, made strange, made other, they are made to speak in a slanted kind of dialect.

Rauschenberg said, ‘I work in the gap between life and art’. That is what we are trying here, to endorse a kind of living writing: writing that’s porous, that lets the world in rather than imposing itself on the world. Anyone can do this: write down what is around you, a conversation you overhear on the Tube, for example, or record a conversation you have with a friend and transcribe it. The writing we are interested in is already written. In a sense, it lies visible to everyone on the surface of all our lives: ‘The word hand floats above your hand/like a small cloud over a lake’, writes Margret Atwood. We need only be able to read to pluck it and lay it down on our page.

A central idea is that these are short, fluid, quickly composed pieces, open to error and development. For this reason texts may be published, edited, republished, re-edited, published again. Texts may be anonymous one day and authored the next. More than anything we encourage experimentation and oddity. Writing about a bouquet of flowers is one thing, but what kind of writing attempts to become the bouquet or likewise what kind of flowers try to become a writing? We are interested in this ‘minor literature’: sparse thoughts, unresolved, unfinished, un-started, becoming-a-writing, brief commentaries on a passage of text for example.

There is, around any published material, something that resembles a living mass of unpublishable writing, scribbling, notes, observations, that have driven this ‘final draft’ into the light. This subterranean mass, of stems, root networks, although they are almost undetectable connect any text to a network of invisible and transient influences. Ephemera, old drafts, these are all ghost texts which haunt every word into publication. The relation between the unpublished and the published, in this sense, can be understood as resembling that of the conscious with the unconscious. We are interested in this textual unconscious, the unpublished and the unpublishable.

There is no authentic, no good or original literature, “Every statement is the product of machinic assemblages.” We are indebted to the German Romantics' concept of Fragments and what they called ‘symphilosophie’ which they published hurriedly often anonymously, amalgamating discussions, thinkings, bits of this and that. A blog from 2005 writes, ‘as understood by the Romantics [symphilosophy] ideally included a group of friends in close fellowship whose work was (as it were) fused or aggregated into one work through give-and-take, dialogue, commentary, so that any precise individuation begins to be impossible.’

Fragment, frangere means ‘to break’. According to Heidegger, the obstinacy of a broken tool makes conspicuous not just the hammer but the whole world that the hammer’s project is involved in. Kafka’s Odradek is a creature made of fragments, bits of this and that, and it’s this very brokenness, this obstinacy which disturbs the narrator: ‘the idea that he [Odradek] is likely to survive me I find almost painful’. So our fragments here breaks away from a culture of ‘the new’ and offer in its place little more than obstinacy. Even on a newly tarred road a weed can sprout from some miniscule crack and by pushing its way to the light shows something of the pathetic futility of road-building.

Writing, not as shitposting necessarily, but with the same naive enthusiasm we had for posting bulk photos in sepia tints in the early days of Facebook. This endeavour, whatever it becomes, is precipitate. It comes from a need to speak despite feeling ill prepared. It is maybe hodgepodge, ill-conceived, miscalculated and mistaken but we keep in mind Derrida’s commentary on Foucault: ‘This interminable unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that he does not yet know—or is still concealing from himself:— that the master, like real life, may always be absent. The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.’

July 2024 |London

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Example 1: Tristan Tzara’s ‘ Dada technique

To make a dadaist poem

Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

Excerpt from Tristan Tzara’s 1916 poem:

Price they are yesterday agreeing afterwards paintings / Appreciate the dream epoch of the eyes / Pompously than recite the gospel mode darkens / Group the apotheosis imagine he said fatality power of colors / Cut arches flabbergasted the reality a magic spell / Spectator all to efforts from the it is no longer 10 to 12 / During digression volt right diminishes pressure / Render of madmen topsy-turvy flesh on a monstrous crushing scene […]

Example 2

Odradek Painting

This is a combination of erasure, chance procedures and collage. It uses a process of revised layering and erasing, which makes the writing process in many ways closer to that of painting.

1. Tear out a paragraph of a book.

2. Draw a cross diagonally across the page so that you have four triangles of text.

3. Next, one by one, by blacking out words, draw out meanings so that you are left with four short texts.

4. Cut these out and glue them in the centre of a larger sheet of paper in the most logical order.

5. Now take a second book. Start adding and layering words and phrases to these four fragments that bring out a holistic meaning of these texts.

6. Develop on this until you feel the text is complete.

Detail of Noah Lee Swann’s ‘Odradek Painting 1’ (2022):

Example 3

‘Thanatical Writing’

‘Thanatic’: a play on fanatic and Thanatos. This technique tries to adapt Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion into poetry in order to bring about the strange and uncanny.

It does this by exploiting homophones, words which sound the same but have different meanings, and a kind of ‘pareidolia’, which is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on otherwise meaningless things. Like seeing a face in the clouds or in a rock formation, or hearing music or voices in white-noise.

1. Copy down a poem that you like.

2. Begin with the first line of the poem: repeatedly recite the line out-loud until you begin to hear different words or different meanings in the sounds. It is important to ignore any impulse towards sense-making.

   There should be a point where, through sheer repetition of the word or phrase, the meaning comes ‘undone’, so to speak, and the words seem foreign, strange, less made up of language than of almost material sounds.

   When reciting the words, it can help to alternate between accelerating and slowing down. Also, try slurring the words, dropping syllables, or breaking up the sounds in different ways. It can also help to write the line out phonetically, first.

3. Once you have changed enough of the text into your own words for it to be considered a new line, move onto the next line until you have translated the whole text homophonically.

Here is an example, starting with lines from ‘A Mood of Quiet Beauty’ by John Ashbery

John Ashbery’s original lines:

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, 
Dreams I had, including suicide, 
Puff out the hot-air balloon now. 
It is bursting, it is about to burst.

Example of Thanatic translation:

Butter reason sodden and played with olden tones
Dreamside igloo things sewers I had 
Pop-up the shop tear blue noon owl. 
Lettuce birthing eaters have a house to purse. 

Postscript: These techniques are for experimentation and to encourage different ways of seeing and thinking about language and composition, both of prose and poetry. There might only be one line that is worth preserving, or even one word, but it’s how the arbitrary and strange can be used to push aside the cliches and stock phrases we so often employ absent mindedly, to make way for a new, concernful poetics. One more agile and resourceful. There is something political in this even, though I’m unsure what it is.

Thank you for reading ODRADEK! <3

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Welcome to Issue 2 of ODRADEK! our newsletter, in which we share all things related to The Odd Review.

Firstly, thank you everyone for the overwhelming response. We have almost 500 subscribers in less than a week, which is amazing and has really encouraged us.

• This week we are sharing a new review by Odette Fangstrem of Jack Whitten’s latest exhibition, ‘Speedchaser’ at Hauser & Wirth London. You can follow Odette’s Instagram to stay up to date with her reviews (@odette.fang).

• Last week we hosted our first ever ‘collage-writing’ workshop at Abney Books in Stoke Newington in London. Some photos from the event are included below and we will soon be sharing some of the strange and hilarious texts we produced.

If you are interested in submitting to The Odd Review, please see the most recent note we shared on Substack about submission guidelines for writers. We look forward to reading all your work.

We still have a some copies of our magazine, ‘The Odd Review: a selection of Odradek writing, No.1: July 2024’. Let us know if you’d like to buy one.

I hope you enjoy Issue 2 of the newsletter, and if so, please forward it along!

Questions and feedback is always welcome. Please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.

All the best,

Noah Lee Swann

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A Review of Jack Whitten’s 'Speedchaser’ at Hauser & Wirth London

on until 14 December 2024

By Odette Fangstrem

The ‘Speedchaser’ exhibition at Hauser & Wirth contains a selection of Whitten’s paintings, works on paper and some beautiful sculptures from the 1970s. Whitten called these the Greek Alphabet series, or the Black and White paintings. ‘The idea,” he said, “was to make a series of paintings using the Greek alphabet as titles in order to deter any specific romantic or emotional involvement[…].”

In Wim Wenders’ Alice In The Cities (1974) the young child, Alice, looks at a black and white polaroid of the clouds taken from an aeroplane window. She says: “It’s a nice picture. It’s so empty.” The photograph in the film is not dissimilar to Jack Whitten’s paintings here, they are also so empty, denuded of content. Whitten’s paintings bring to mind radio or TV static — a white noise in which we hear the flicker of an imagined voice or see an image always about to emerge but lapsing once more into formlessness.

As the poet John Ashbery writes in ‘Some Trees’: “a canvas on which emerges / a chorus of smiles / a winter morning / placed in a puzzling light and moving.”

And like a polaroid, they seem to be developed images, produced rather than one that has been painted. The paintings are procedural, made by raking a thick layer of wet acrylic paint across the surface. The result is a wooden sort of look, as if the paintings had a grain. When considered close up from the side, they remind one of the grooves of a vinyl record magnified, or of some silent, lunar landscape.

The rake-like instrument Whitten used to develop this image was invented by himself. He named it ‘the producer’, as if it were the instrument that had made the painting rather than the artist's own hand. This kind of self-abnegation, putting the self at one-remove from the creative moment by exploiting processes, has a long tradition in modern art. In the late 1800s, there was a huge rise in interest in the occult. Many avant-garde artists, such as Erik Satie, W.B Yeats and Ezra Pound were among the many artists who were interested in the occult and mysticism. One of the writing-practices that was developed at this time, was automatic writing, which was believed to make contact with spirits on the other side. Many of Yeats’ greatest poems were inspired by the automatic writings of his second wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees.

As Psychoanalytic theories began to spread in popularity through Europe, surrealism took many of these mystical practices and merged them with the avant-gardism of Dada to create an art of the subconscious: to conjure the beyond reality, the sur-reality, the unseeable dark continent of the self. In this sense here is where Whitten’s procedural practice derives from. Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 50s adopted many of these procedural methods now associated with surrealism: collage, automatism and chance encounter, but they were used in a new context to express personal belief. Robert Motherwell said, ‘without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.’

Whitten moved to New York in the 1960s from the South, where racial segregation was at its worst. What he experienced and saw deeply influenced his work and personal philosophy. He grew away from Abstract expressionism to develop a conceptual practice that revolved around these automatic processes. His earliest work in this area were his ‘Slab’ paintings which used an immense cross-bar instrument to wipe an entire canvas with paint, thus creating a painting in a single fluid gesture.

Some of Whitten's best known work belong to a series of abstract, black mosaics called ‘The Black Monolith’. Created from small irregular off-cuts of acrylic paint, that resemble rectangular shells or bricks. Each work is named after prominent black cultural figures: Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Miles Davis etc. It’s from these mosaics — though they are absent from this exhibition — that we can perhaps read Whitten's use of Black as a pigment , in the current ‘Soundchaser’ exhibition, as representing something of the African American experience.

Personally, I am not particularly interested in symbols or metaphors, and I don’t care usually for the intentions of artists. However in Whitten’s work, I think it’s his occasional aesthetic short-fallings that become a human nerve in what could otherwise be cold, dry paintings. It’s Whitten’s intentions, his hopes and beliefs that offer a small ventricle of self to irrigate the bare, alienated landscapes of these paintings. It’s these romantic, idealistic, human beliefs that try to enter the painting, and are barred by mechanical processes, but arguably exist nonetheless in a homeopathic sense, as abstracted as a memory.

Making a big expression, a huge declaration of feeling on a canvas is far easier than expressing the very light and vaporous feelings of experience and thought. How does one express the feeling of an awareness of feeling: this seems to be what Whitten is trying to communicate, a feeling that is small, passive and poignant for its ineffectiveness.

Nietzche said that all action is a moment of madness. And in this seems to have something of the pacifist’s philosophy to it. In Whitten, you have a sense of the ethical weight, the responsibility of every action, that every utterance and every intentional act and decision has a consequence or even a tremendous violence in it. In this way, the Greek Alphabet series is like John Cage’s music, hesitant to take any action, but rather trying to act as a kind of instrument of chance.

The assembled wooden sculptures in the exhibition seem to articulate something more than the paintings simply because, as objects, constructed and assembled, they are by definition, an action. One sculpture is between a creature, an object and a cabinet of curiosities. Two compartments, reveal through glass a colelction of fish bones and tackle inside the sculpture. It is assembled, austere, and strangely beautiful. The collection of otherwise useless objects that are housed inside this object represent nothing symbolic, but simply the tender act of attention that was given them. And that is in itself soulful. We imagine Whitten walking along a small beach in Greece, absentmindedly collecting these bits and pieces washed up by the tide. Attention, after all, as Walter Benjamin points out, is the natural prayer of the soul.

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ODRADEK COLLAGE-WRITING WORKSHOP

Thanks to everyone who made it out last Wednesday. We will be hosting more events in the future for anyone interested.

Thank you for reading ODRADEK! <3

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Welcome to Issue 1 of our new ODRADEK! newsletter, in which we share all things related to The Odd Review.

I have been using the name Odradek for a while now as an umbrella name for all the events and activities I’ve been involved in over the last few years. My hope is that it becomes, like the term dada, a kind of heterogenous group — in a certain sense, a collage — and similarly, a signifier of a certain sensibility.

This week, we are sharing Phoebe Eccles’ wonderful ‘Summarising Poem’, which I believe exemplifies something of that sensibility. You can read it below. Wystan Loope, our poetry editor, had the following to say about the poem:

‘It’s a piece of writing that playfully combines a witty absurdity with sparse, irreverent sentences to create a poetry of contingencies. No one sentence ‘turns’, heightens or resolves the poem, there is little interest in symbolism, metaphor, or even narrative. Eccles is more concerned with language as a material, as something real and malleable. Each sentence joins as one might plug-in a machine, each word modifying the last to build a quilted language that operates according to its own idiosyncratic system. The result is not some dry experimentation, but a poignant, strange poetics, at times prophetic and profound.’

In addition, this week Wednesday (27.11), we are hosting our very first writing workshop at Abney Books in Stoke Newington. If you are in London, see below for more details.

Lastly, we still have a dozen or so copies of our print journal, ‘The Odd Review: a selection of Odradek writing, No.1: July 2024’. Let us know if you’d like to buy one.

I hope you enjoy Issue 1 of the newsletter, and if so, please forward it along! Any questions, comments, or feedback are welcome. And, please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.

All the best,

Noah L. Swann

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by Phoebe Eccles

my hair is tall, my hair is a corinthian column. i lost my fortune in a bet with a pile of dry leaves. liars don’t interest me, pencils neither. the development of babies, though. first growing their silver scales, then their machine. my own childhood was notably brief. my machine swallowed me when i was just four. before then, i ate sequins from the pavement. reason for my sparkling eyes, say my colleagues. some people are animals, some people are meat. i fall into the latter category. that’s why i’ll never ask a baby about its machine. to get his water, my brother drinks soil. i should tell you, my brother is a liar. not like my best friend, the runner bean. not like my first born, the platypus. the walnut kernel conceals the terrible fate of dust traversing through light. in my past life i had a fruit phobia. in my present life i am sentimental, mainly about being eaten. my skin gleams with the promise of fur. not enough time now to grow a coat. barely enough to fall in love. my lover likes me to wear my column of hair down. the flooding of local canals a problem. my favourite baby is also a machine. it flattens coins into souvenirs. i wish i had trained to be a whisk, but the oils of fat don’t succumb, not to the unity of sauce. the creche worker no different to béchamel, although i speak only for myself.

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On the 27th of November Odradek is hosting a collage and procedural writing workshop at Abney Books in Stoke Newington and in preparation for the second issue of The Odd Review.

The night will involve a brief introduction introducing Odradek and some of the theory and historical context of collage and other avant-garde or process lead writing practices. Some examples will be discussed  (from Dada, Oulipo and the New York School), after which we will invite everyone to try their hand at their own experiments.  

The aim of this night is simply literary production - generating texts. We hope that those who attend might continue their own experimental practice outside of this particular workshop. Developing on the texts or ideas begun on the night. 

We provide a pile of books and texts to use as material, to cut up, erase, obscure but you are welcome to bring anything you wish. Scissors, glue and paper will be provided too, but we ask that you please bring your own if possible. 

Please get in touch, either through our Substack, email (odradek.collage@gmail.com) or our Instagram (@odradek_fragments) if you would like to come. You are welcome to bring anyone you think might be interested in such an event. You may also bring your own drinks. 

A list of optional reading resources will be provided closer to the night of the event through  a shared Google drive folder. 

Come for at 6:30 for a start at 7:00 and we will continue until 9:30 with brief discussion about the work. We should be done by 10:00. 

Copies of the first issue of The Odd Review will be available for £5 on the night. Please consider buying a copy to support us. Every purchase helps us put on more events and continue the publication. 

Thank you for reading ODRADEK! <3

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