Wednesday Investigations [2:16]: End-of-year edition, part one

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to the next-to-last Wednesday of 2024 (next Wednesday will be Christmas). I last saw you in summer, and I apologize for the gap between updates, though I imagine you understand: this fall, after all, was a hard time for anyone still investing energy in the idea that electoral politics can be an avenue for, you know, making people’s lives better. I don’t intend to dwell overmuch on the Direction of the Country here; I’m sure each of you had and are having your own feelings about it. I’ll just say that I managed as best as I could: I provided what I think is meaningful care to people close to me and to vulnerable people in the broader community, I kept teaching my students with the most integrity and compassion that I could muster, and, for the first time in many years, I wrote poems. I face 2025 with something like a battered resolve and a determination to thrive. Anne Boyer writes, “There’s no getting out, so there is only getting together.” And here we are.

So. This newsletter will arrive in two parts: here in the first part, I wanted to look back on a few things my collaborators and I accomplished this year, and then the second part will contain some end-of-year lists, some distractions and diversions for you.

OK, first—achievements!

Last January, I wrote about the completion of 52 Stations on the Highway, a year-long endeavor to work with the cartoonist D.W. to produce a single long scrolling landscape (under our shared moniker, Churchdoor Lounger). We were invited to install the finished work at the Machines With Magnets space near Providence, RI, where it looped the gallery three times:

Thanks to the people who braved a wintry, icy night to come out for the opening. D.W. and I no longer collaborate, but I’m proud of the work we completed together, and this project and the gallery show felt like a satisfying note to conclude on.

This year was also marked by the accomplishment of some big projects with my other major collaborator, the collagist allison anne. The year kicked off with our release of a second deck of ADDITIONS cards:

If you haven’t heard me talk about these before, well—the ADDITIONS cards are “collage cards,” cards featuring images and textures laid out in formally elegant arrangements. All the material is sourced from the public domain, and the cards are intended for creative reuse by artists, designers, zinesters, etc. So, like, here’s a card (on the left) paired with a collage (on the right) that I made “remixing” part of it:

I’ve always loved the ADDITIONS project. It feels like a project that endeavors to “contain everything,” to be what the poet Lyn Hejinian calls a work of “capacious inclusivity.” Even a small sample should at least hint at what I mean:

If you’re interested, these are available in packs of 96, 48, or 8 from Nonmachinable (that’s the zine distro that allison and I co-run; check it out!).

Working together under the name Morphic Rooms, allison and I also enjoyed the honor of being selected to serve as the featured artists for an issue of the music-themed litmag Half Mystic Journal. Over the summer we produced “ouvrages and overdubs,” a suite of thirteen new works (plus a cover!) for them, each with a “music” theme. We produced this work in a short time, which required a titanic push, but I was happy with the finished pieces. Here’s just one:

You can see several more of these works in the top post at the Morphic Rooms Instagram page.

Our final big project for 2024 was running a Kickstarter for a book that we (as Nonmachinable) will be releasing sometime in early 2025—Ester Kärkkäinen’s Sex Works.

Ester is perhaps best known as the post-industial/noise musician Himukalt, but she is also an accomplished photographer and collagist, with a focus on the replication and (often distressed) reproduction of the body. As a former sex worker, she has a special interest in and insight into images of the commodified bodies of sex workers, which she has taken as her major topic.

This vital work is hard to find: some of it has been packaged with her albums, some has appeared on her recently-banned Instagram1, and some has appeared in zines (which are now out of print) or multimedia projects (which are difficult to archive). We reached out to Ester, with an interest in compiling some of this work, and Ester delivered us nearly 250 pages of material. Here’s two of the (less explicit) spreads:

This has been a big, long-running project, but we raised over $10,000 (thanks everyone!) and it promises to be sent to press soon.

I didn’t publish much writing this year—aside from these occasional newsletters—but my most recent novel, Relentless Melt, was longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. I didn’t win, but I got to go to a ceremony at the State House this fall, which was fun! The old line about “it’s an honor just to be nominated” is true!

I did, however, read a lot this year—but more about that in the second half, hopefully coming a little later today.

—JPB, writing from Chicago, IL, on the week ending Wednesday, December 18