ARE YOU THINKING

WHAT IM THINKING
DANICA EVERING

copyleft

Danica Evering, 2015

first edition

of 30

All text may be freely pirated and quoted, and the author would like to be
informed if so at the email address below.
Inspired by and made as part of COMS 646 - Alternative Media
Under the instruction of Monika Kin Gagnon
Printed and bound by Danica Evering
Published by Minor Press (Danica Evering and Kosta Gligorijevic)

M
1

Minor Press
Montral, Qubec
minorpresses@gmail.com

Have you seen this?

Have you heard about this?
Am I right?
Whats the deal with the patriarchy?
Can you back me up on this?
These are thirteen one-page ambivalent forays.
Arranged alphabetically from Alternative to Truth
so you can pick your own way through it:
one by one, back to front, centrefold and out.
Its a collection of thoughts that Ive had
and thoughts other people have had
that Ive needed to read or needed to hear.
Maybe you need to too?
A weird toolkit of sorts (or so I suppose)
to challenge hierarchies
and form tiny fissures.
Are you thinking what Im thinking?

ARE YOU THINKING

WHAT IM THINKING
Alternative _______________________________________ 6
Collaboration _____________________________________ 8
Emotion _______________________________________ 10
Erection ________________________________________ 12
Food __________________________________________ 14
Hope __________________________________________ 16
Hysteria ________________________________________ 18
Labour _________________________________________ 20
Nag ___________________________________________ 22
Power _________________________________________ 24
Repair _________________________________________ 26
Slow ___________________________________________ 28
Truth __________________________________________ 30

Alternative
Sous les paves, le plage!1
It is down there, underneath. Sandy, brighteyesearing, laughing people of all shapes
and sizes roasting. So let me ask you though: is it strange that I feel ambivalent2
about the cobblestones and the beach? You can tell me if it is, I wont be sad. But I
see the oppressive damage as the regimented capitalist city covers the freedom of joy
sun sand sweat. (Stone crushes beach.) But the stones also make it easier for me to
walk. It is hard to run on sand. Is it okay to feel complexly about this? To recognize
the problem and recognize the solution beyond just resistance? Roxane Gay writes
about being a bad feminist.3 Maybe I am a bad anarchist. But do I ever want things
to be different.
This is how Rafael Roncagliolo sees change, he heard in Brazil: It is the alterative
that gives meaning to the alternative.4 What alternative really means is, one or the other.
Alter means, to make other. It is an action, not a binary.
I am tired of one or the other, I am tired of sticking it to The Man, I am tired of
ripping off his bed sheets and finding straw: a decoy for the dominator who snuck
off to glint in our eyes. Like the Critical Art Ensemble notes of architectural
monuments, These places can be occupied, but to do so will not disrupt the
nomadic flow.5 I want to find other ways of being, ways to make other.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes, There is no global social justice without global
cognitive justice. This means that the critical task ahead cannot be limited to
generating alternatives. Indeed, it requires an alternative thinking of alternatives. A
new post-abyssal thinking is thus called for.6 I am weary of the abyss, of paranoid
reading,7 of dreaming only in opposition. Can we try something different? Can we
find different ways of thinking of resistance?
Sous le paves, le plage! Sous le plage, leau! Sous leau, le fond!
Sous le fond, les paves: the molten core of the earth.
1

This means under the cobblestones, the beach! and was a slogan of the May 1968 protests in France.
The original meaning of this word is delicious. What ambivalent means is, to feel equally strongly
on both sides about two different things.
3
Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).
4
Rafael Roncagliolo, Notes On The Alternative, in Video: The Changing World, ed. Nancy Thede
and Alain Ambrosi (Montreal: Videoazimut and Video Tiers-monde, 1991), 207.
5
Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbances (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), 23.
6
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of
knowledges, Eurozine, (2007), 10.
7
See also: Repair.
2

Collaboration
Collaboration is a dream of togetherness that is sometimes a reality of frustration.8
When I ask artist and actor milie Monnet what she thinks about it, she tells me, I
think it starts first with a collaboration with yourself.9 Of course it does.
Collaboration isnt just a struggle to navigate the interests and needs of a group. She
says, Its also a negotiation of your own ego. Your interests and feelings.
(A doctor tells me to take care of myself, and I divide. A part of me is myself, a part
of me is taking care of myself. I do not run: I exercise my body. I do not shower: I
scrub myself gently behind soapy ears. I do not eat: I make and feed myself the
choicest morsels. I do not sleep: I give my head a well-deserved rest. Each act is not
an act of necessity: it is an act of tenderness.)
Socially-engaged artist Pablo Helguera talks about collaboration on the radio. He
never starts a collaboration with a specific goal in mindif he has a clear idea for a
project, he wont seek out a collaboration. Collaboration is entering with a blank
slate, you know, and really letting yourself go through a process in which decisions
will be made collectively. 10
Im like, histories of rampant individualism, and hes like yes, you need to acknowledge the
difficulty of the process, hes like, acknowledge your role, privilege, and position. Hes says, it is
about a difference of experience. Successful collaborations are able to bring the best in
each one of the participants and that this best aspect of each participant is exhibited
later in the resulting project.11 Same respect, different skill.
Collaboration has a dark side though.
It is saccharine dust
between the sheets of slickly-printed magazines
smacks of social innovation
has a tangy military aftertaste.
8

Jacob Wren, A Short Text on Certain Aspects of Collaboration, A Radical Cut in the Texture of
Reality, August 22, 2014, accessed 18 November 2015, http://radicalcut.blogspot.ca/2014/08/ashort-text-on-certain-aspects-of.html.
9
Emilie Monnet, interview by Danica Evering, Caf La Rue, November 19, 2015.
10
Pablo Helguera, interview by Danica Evering and Alissa Firth-Eagland, The Secret Ingredient,
CFRU 93.3 FM, June 24, 2015.
11
Ibid.
8

Emotion
I cry a lot. Maybe you do, too. (You dont need to though. Crying is not a necessity
to feel. (Obviously. (This should be apparent but it isnt always.12)))
For me, it starts in my throat. Wells up, honey-sweet, when I hear something that I
really needed to hear. Wells up when my chest rumbles, oh hell yes. When theory
resonates it makes me cry (and here Im talking about theory in the broadest sense:
writing, stray phrases, audio essays). There is an in-sync feeling, a feeling without an
ego, a feeling a little bit like love. I am taught to be critical of everything but when
you are in love you find the theorys quirks endearing.
When theory makes you cry it becomes an act of comprehension and
companionship. When I sat, struggling through an at-the-time-seemingly-hopeless
essay about discourse, I reached out to Judith Halberstam. Is there a way for individuals
to have agency within large structures and conversations, I ask woefully? Halberstam answers,
low theory. Low theory? I confirm, and she says she found it through the writing of Hall
and Gramsci. She reads it as a theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is
assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to confirm the
hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory.13
Yes, yes! I answer, and Judith nods. Low theory is intellectual activity everyone
participates in just as they cook meals and mend clothes without necessarily being
chefs or tailors.14 The low theorist rejects participation in the hegemonic and
instead works with others to sort through the contradictions of capitalism and to
illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life.15
My eyes shining, I tell Halberstam, Fuck, Judith. I love you so much. I dont know what Id
do without you.
Reading evokes joy, too. Laughter burbles out of my throat in delight at De
Certeaus prose about railways: They are a lovers phantasm, a way out for the ill,
an escapade for children (Wee-wee!).16 Michel, I have whispered into his pages,
I love you, I love you, I love you.

12

Like: how you are supposed to feel when someone dies. See also: The Stranger by Albert Camus
(New York: Vintage, 1989).
13
Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke, 2011) 16.
14
Ibid, 17.
15
Ibid, 17.
16
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. (Berkeley: University of California, 1974), 111.
10

11

Erection
Tampere, Finland, 2001. Dr. Hank Hardy Unruh, WTO. Pulls a rip cord near his
crotch. It inflates, wobbling stiffly out in front of him. It is gigantic, golden,
shimmering: textiles of the future. On a screen near the head of its twanging mass
he can view all of the actions of his employees.17 Dr. Hank Hardy Unruh is Ray
Thomas is Andy Bichlbaum is Jacques Servin. Bro Power. Bros jam the patriarchy.18
Thanks, bros.
Lefebvre has written about spaces. Lefebvre has written about the phallus. Lefebvre
has written about phallic spaces. The arrogant verticality of skyscrapers, and
especially of public and state buildings, introduces a phallic or more precisely a
phallocratic element into the visual realm.19
The treachery of architecture: Ceci nest pas un grate-ciel.
Jenna Lee Forde and Mary Tremonte have turned the erection on its throbbing head
with Theory Boner, a zine exploring feminist, queer, and anti-racist theory and creative
practice, the stiffening of the academic loins.20 I too have sailed full-mast, dont get
me wrong. Reading Ann Cvetkovich21 makes my pulse quicken.
Let us remove the permanence of the erection. (Nor does the conjunction or viagra
cialis erection better of anemia leukopenia theJudith Butler and cats erection
actinic of your mcu to the development of)22 We erect a statue to make a battle
permanent. It becomes stuck, fixed in time (dead, like Barthes photograph).23
Marble priapism.
You dont erect a pond.
You dont erect a baby.
You dont erect a good dinner.
All time is the current time: let us be ephemeral.
17

The Yes Men, Beyond The Golden Parachute, conference intervention (Tampere: Textiles of the
Future, 2001). http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/tampere.
18
See also: Because its 2015 (Justin Trudeaus response to a question about gender parity in his
cabinet) http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/full-list-of-justin-trudeau-s-cabinet-1.3300699.
19
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1991), 98.
20
Jenna Lee Forde and Mary Tremonte, Theory Boner, accessed 30 November 2015.
http://theoryboner.tumblr.com.
21
Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke 2012).
22
Spambot text on PNV Akademie GmbH http://www.oepnv-akademie.de.
23
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
12

13

Food
Night is when you look into other peoples kitchens. Down in a first floor apartment
lightly set into the frozen ground someone holds a crescent clove of garlic to the
fluorescent light. Wielding a knife, they slice its papery skin, away from them. It is a
soundless gesture that I cant hear but that looks to me like *snikt.*24 Is this the best
way to cut a garlic? I dont know, Im no a garlic expert. But they learned this from
someone: mama papa grandparent boo friend housemate. Garlic lineage.
Here is how my dad taught me to cut a carrot: slice the top off slice the bottom off
slice it in half (carefully carefully wiggle the knife so it doesnt veer off to one side
like a bowling ball into a gutter) slice the halves into halves, chop down the middle.
Here is how my parents taught me to treat the patriarchy: with extreme suspicion.
In 2013 artist Maggie Groat made a table out of fences. It is called Fences Will Turn
Into Tables. Here is how curator cheyanne turions reflects on this: What if we
approached our relationship to the land from the position of stewardship rather
than ownership?25 This is potent metaphor, tables as places for negotiation. The
sharing of food, of ideas, of ways of being. Maggie Groats table remakes the
marking of borders and private property into a sense of responsibility to others.26
We learn to navigate relationships: Leanne Simpson writes that breastfeeding is the
very first treaty negotiation.27
Publication Studio, a print-on-demand publisher that started in Portland makes
handmade food and books side by side. Eating food, making sense of thoughts
together. Barthes has a lovely bit about this parenthetically, he reminds: (the French
words for flavor and knowledge have the same Latin root).28 Saveur and savoir: from
our first kicking start, we come to understanding through the mouth.
Gut sense: I know things in my stomach.
I recognize that even my intestinal flora
are companion species.29
24

This is the official noise Wolverines claws make.

cheyanne turions, A Table for Negotiation, Mediation, Discussion, Difference, March 2014.
https://cheyanneturions.wordpress.com/tag/maggie-groat/.
26
Ibid.
27
Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtles Back (Winnipeg: ARP, 2011), 106.
28
Roland Barthes, (1979) Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collge de
France, January 7, 1977. Trans. Richard Howard, October, 8 (Spring): 7.
29
Donna Harraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 15.
25

14

15

Hope
Once upon a time it was a tender ember. And yet it doesnt glow from the inside
anymore. And yet it has been made plastic. And yet it has been made shiny. And yet
it has been made glittering. A bright future for everyone, regardless of situation, and
the good word of [fill in the blank] can take us there. And yet another instrument of
capitalism: fake-smiles, boot-straps, carrot-pursuit.
On November 23, 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, hope for hopes sake, hope as
tautology, hope because hope, hope because I said so, is the enemy of
intelligence.30 Would you rather? Would you rather hope for hopes sake or think
carefully? I would rather: sit in the analyzing darkness with well-adjusted eyes than
be lured by hot coals. I would rather not: suffer from an absence of doubt.31
Cristbal Martinez32 told me its good to be equal parts cynicism and optimism.
Artists Jacob Wren and Pieter De Buysser nodded at us across the metaphorical
table (toast, eggs, coffee, thin napkins). It is about the next small experimental step
instead of the big utopian dream, they agree. Critical optimism looks at the
current situation with open eyes and rigorous analysis but is never willing to let this
analysis fall into cynicism or be used as a pre-text to give up trying.33 What hope
actually means is, hope. It is a word of unknown origin.
Sara Ahmed writes of her character feminist killoy34 four years after naming her: It
might sound as if for me her arrival is always a moment of political hope. Thats not
always how it feels, even if, for me, her failure to disappear is hopeful.35
Hope is darkness. Glow faded, our eyes shift and we see it now in relationship to
other things (stones grass beetles condoms twigs). And yet we hold it gently.
And black ash rubs off on our palms.
30

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hope and the Artist: The virtues of enlightenment over feel-goodism, The
Atlantic, 23 November 2015, accessed 25 November 2015,
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/hope-and-the-artist/417348/
31
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 39.
32
Artist and one of the four members of the art collective Postcommodity.
http://cristobalmartinez.net/Bio.html.
33
Pieter De Buysser and Jacob Wren, In Performance: An Anthology of Optimism, Contemporary
Performance, 26 February 2011, accessed 26 November 2015,
http://contemporaryperformance.com/2011/02/26/in-performance-an-anthology-of-optimismjacob-wren-canada-pieter-de-buysser-belgium/
34
See: Nag.
35
Sara Ahmed, A killjoy in crisis, feministkilljoys, August 28, 2014, accessed 26 November 2015,
http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/28/a-killjoy-in-crisis/
16

17

Hysteria
Hysteria is a furious vine.
For me (and for who else may I speak, truly?) it starts in my throat. It is trembling
green. It is feral ululating excitement. Its tendrils reach, finding cracks in walls.
Finding cracks in walls, it pushes into the concrete the way I used to cuddle up to
my dad as a baby: tender skull head first and pushing. (His ribs bent under the force
of my closeness.) Finding cracks in concrete walls.
We use the word concrete to mean, to make permanent. Good work, we say, your idea
is becoming more concrete, we say. As if we are setting clarified abstracts in stone. What
concrete actually means is, to coalesce, to grow together. The patriarchy! Frowning
and tutting and wagging, it hardens even our most organic metaphors.
Hysteria is a wildness, a spinning dime that could fall with anxiety or exhilaration
face-up: heads or tails. But the dime never falls, a perpetual emotion device. It is in
our bright eyes, in our crackling fingertips, our connecting ideas, our making of
metaphors.
The root word of this vine (way way down, near sticky grey clay, almost at the water
line) is husterikos. What it means is, of the womb. A man named Gary36 wrote about
this in an article about the feminization of madness for The Guardian on
international womens day in 2012.37 (He has blue eyes and a tan and white white
shiny teeth *ting* and this matters.) Why does a man named Gary have to weigh in?
Gary, you didnt get it quite right. Gary, it is not just about the feminization of
madness.
It is about the scything dismissal of madness and excitement and emotion and
women in one swooping word.

36

Patricia Lockwood, "The Hunt for a Newborn Gary," in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,
(New York: Penguin, 2014) 20-22.
37
Gary Nunn, The feminisation of madness is crazy, The Guardian, 8 March 2012, accessed 30
November 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/mar/08/mindyour-language-feminisation-madness.
18

19

Labour
How much labour how much time how much energy do I do, do I spend, I do not get paid for?
We dont have the right kind of rulers and so I cannot measure. I feel it though the
weight in my shoulders, the lump in my throat, the sink in my stomach. It is never
asked. If it were tangible I could say no I could give informed consent. But it is
assumed and expected and I am resentful.
Unseen workers unite! How do I find you?
Earlier this year (it is still 2015 today) Lauren Chief Elk, Yeoshin Lourdes, and
Bardot Smith started #GiveYourMoneyToWomen. We live in a white male
capitalist system. Given that, they say, of course we should give that capital and its
power to women for their emotional labour. For the affirmation, attention,
consultation, education, energy, guidance, pacification, sex, tutorial, therapy that is
not asked but assumed. Chief Elk says, this is a dream of a whole new theory of
economics, she says, Both micro and macro levels: Violence reduction,
rebalancing the positionality of income, slowing down unrelenting capitalism,
reparations for certain populations of women, and tangibly improving lives and
safety. 38 Paying for emotional labour makes the invisible material.
Labour is but is not only not the factory sweat of a capitalist economy. What labour
also means is, hard physical work. What labour also means is, childbirth. The
importance of the labour of our mothers. How strange to think that labour pains
stop after birth. It is only just beginning.
Neoliberal feminist Sheryl Sandberg says Just Lean In, Nancy Fraser shuts her down:
we need to fight for a form of life that de-centers waged work and valorizes
unwaged activities, including but not only carework.39
I feel labours weight most when it is not reciprocated.
Money stands in for exchange: gift economy, barter, tending.
Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund:40 pay up.
38

Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear, Yeoshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith, Give Your Money to
Women: The End Game of Capitalism, Model View Culture 25, 10 August 2015, accessed 30
November 2015, https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/giveyourmoneytowomen-the-end-gameof-capitalism.
39
Nancy Fraser, How feminism became capitalisms handmaiden and how to reclaim it,
Monday, The Guardian, 14 October 2013, accessed 30 November 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaidenneoliberal
40
A German phrase: the morning hour has gold in its mouth (the early bird catches the worm).
20

21

Nag
Old tired horses are called nags. Nag is a persistent act of annoying or irritating or
finding fault. What nag means is, gnaw. In this way it is onomatopoeic. Teeth (the
back ones, most like) grinding, crushing, gnashing. It is incessant, it never goes away.
(Just like the white supremacist heteropatriarchy, amirite?) But. This word has been
deflected to try and silence tenacious women:
shut up you old nag.
The Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto took back this word for their angry letter
writing campaign. NAG: challenging TIFF on their racist and misogynist list of 100
essential filmmakers of all time.41 The importance. The importance of nagging, the
killing of joy. The killjoy does not let it go. The killjoy does not laugh it off. Though
the air around the table is scintillating and chaleureux she opens her mouth: calls out
the dominator.42 Speaks her truth to power.
Dayna McLeod, queer performance artist (whose presence makes one giddy, at least
if one is me), talked about overhearing a sexist comment shared between two men at
the cabaret bar about a burlesque performer: I wonder if shes that hot up close. Then, she
wants to say something. Later she says to me, I become the PC police, I become
the killjoy. Theres no responsibility taken, you think that because its this type of
performance youre given permission? You didnt have to do that. You didnt have
to take it that far.43 But Dayna takes that scene and positions it in a performance.
Makes it hilarious, exposes how ridiculous it is. And in this alchemy the sexism is
framed out, visible, tangible, laughable. Lead into gold.
Nag is also an incense. Sweet smoke in the teen bedrooms of my parents (uh huh
over there next to the pot of tiger balm). It rises in a billowing and steadfast line:
champa flower
benzoin resinoid
henna
geranium
sandalwood
honey.

41

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, 2014 Archive, accessed 30 November 2015,

https://plugin.org/summer-institute/2014
42
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke, 2010).
43
Dayna McLeod, interview with Danica Evering, Concordia University, November 4, 2015.
22

23

Power
They were blonde and had tiny turned up pixy noses and liked the Spice Girls.
These many years later I cant even remember them as individuals: they all blend
together, speaking in one discordant voice: Like why are your clothes second hand did you
get them from a dumpster? Um what is that bread it looks weird? Oh my god youve never heard of
Britney Spears? I hated their united normality and the way their power kept me in line,
wanting. Now I dont know how to feel.
Talking about her performance Observations of Predation in Humans, where she plays
the role of Dr. Zira, animal psychologist from Planet of the Apes, artist Coco Fusco
talks about power and matriarchy. She says, she sees the irresponsibility and
unfettered power of the wealthy is not the only problem. We live in a society that
promotes self-centeredness and hyper-specialization and, as a result, few people
want to do anything for others or know how to take care of themselves.44
A matriarchy is not enough: the close guarding of power is our undoing.
Paolo Freire writes about power and education. He writes that teachers must be
students and students must be teachers. He writes about the pedagogy of the
oppressed. He writes, The pursuit of full humanitycannot be carried out in
isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot
unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed.45 He says,
no one can be authentically human while preventing others from being so.46 Although the
systems of power are vast, how do we choose to make different decisions about
oppressing? Perhaps it is in each small interaction we enact or subvert power. I grew
up with the good word of Riane Eisler: power-with, not power-over.
She is stuck permanently behind my diamond incisor.
Sometimes you raise a fist or a finger to power
Other times you find second-hand defiance: opt out, find fellowship,
make different decisions than the dominator
I wish I refused to buy in, now.
I wish I never bought tearaway pants
and Spice Girls gum
even though I never even heard a song.
44

Elia Alba, Uncaged: Coco Fusco and the Planet of the Apes, Art21, August 5, 2014, accessed
25 November 2015, http://blog.art21.org/2014/08/05/uncaged-coco-fusco-and-planet-of-theapes/#.VkgMkoSJnlL
45
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 85.
46
Ibid.
24

25

Repair
Repair is a complicated process. (Wooden egg in the toe of a sock. Taste rancid
lanolin. Feel rasp of worn wool on polished wood. Try to bite it your teeth slide off
aching.) Repair makes, but makes different. Remix, restore, refashion, rectify.
My mothers father, Henry (electrician, entrepreneur, egoist), had a smooth sleight
of hand. He could rip open someones gestalt47 in 4.5 seconds flat. Its true. She
timed him once. Would poke holes, fray someones being, lay them bare to
themselves, and then turn around. Never took responsibility for the affective or
cognitive fallout that inevitably ensued. Left them hanging shredded in his
mahogany office with the avocado green carpet.
What repair means is, to make ready again.
In her book, Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick writes about paranoid readings
and reparative readings.48 A paranoid reading is a practice of exposure: pointing out,
waking up, accusatory negative affect, a move towards truth and vindication. This
tone has been taken on by many: filmmakers, doomsayers, academics. They say, you
dont know how terrible it really is. They say, dont say I never told you so. Wake up sheeple,
they say. Rip open the veil then turn around.
Reparative reading assumes intelligence and agency and emotion, acknowledges
structure, seeks to find solutions, re-assembles tough histories through positive
affect, repairs the social fabric. It is difficult work. It is deeply troubling to power.
But it sticks around, re-weaving. Makes us ready again.
I think so much about reparative reading. But paranoid reading is so hard to pull
out, a varicose vein. A stiffening in my legs when I read blustering texts. Art school
manarchist vitriol?
A darning needle
is not a
damning needle.

47

Gestalt is a German word meaning form, shape. I understand this word to mean, the organized
whole of their habits, pattern-recognizing in instants.
48
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You're so Paranoid
You Probably Think This Essay Is About You in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
26

27

Slow
Woah
woah woah woah okay ahhhh s/shhhh shh were okay, were okay
thats it uh huh thats right
chill just shhsshh yeah yeah its okay were okay.
At the turn of this century (the 21st one since someone started counting just to be
clear) people started dreaming of Slow Media. Like Slow Food, it envisioned
mindful composition, thoughtful ingredient selection, focus on one task: eating,
cooking / creating, reading. Slow media are welcoming and hospitable. They like to
share.49 I get it, this frustration with capitalisms breakneck pace. I get it, this desire
for sharing instead of consumption. I can see it as a potential resistance to the
patriarchy. Instead of trying to keep up50 going perfectly limp:51 active resistance to
multitasking, panic, torrent. But I also can see it as a potentially privileged thing too
in this economy, not everyone can afford to slow down.
We associate bad things with slowness. Snail mail, sluggish dial-up. Brains that dont
rapid-fire. Brains that take time, ruminate slowly. Brains that turn and return to ideas
and come up with careful proposals.
Let us get at the soft core of slowness. John Law, a sociologist, writes of different
approaches to method. He writes, My hope is that we can learn to live in a way that
is less dependent on the automatic. To live more in and through slow method, or
vulnerable method, or quiet method. Multiple method. Modest method. Uncertain
method.52 Slow media can be thoughtful, reciprocal, caretaking. Instead of the next
new idea, old ones. Audre Lorde says, new ways of making them feltof
examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after
brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead.53
When I am not distracted by ringing bells/alarms/ding/woooshh
I will live with attention to new ways of making old ideas felt.
The moons eyelid slowly closes
and slowly opens again.
49

Benedikt Khler, Sabria David, and Jrg Blumtritt, The Slow Media Manifesto, Stockdorf and
Bonn, 2 January 2010, Accessed 3 December 2015, http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto.
50
Deirdre Logue/Allyson Mitchell, CANT/WONT, series of four handmade protest banners
which read: WE CAN'T COMPETE / WE WON'T COMPETE / WE CAN'T KEEP UP / WE
WON'T KEEP DOWN, Toronto: Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), 2012.
51
Nina Simone, Go Limp, Nina Simone in Concert, 1964.
52
John Law, After Method: Mess in social science research (London: Routledge, 2004), 11.
53
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 39.
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Truth
The Enlightenment has teeth.54 It sinks them deep into discourse, it wont let go.
But it is not a growling dog, it is bigger than that. We are its arms, its brains. For this
reason, some people are still believers in objectivity. They try and remove
themselves from the situation, as if they were not a part of it. They say, this is the way
things are. They say, this proves that. They say, not me, not me, not me.
Culpable bystanders.
In her thesis draft (sent to me in .docx snippets) my mother is writing about
relational validity. She is writing about finding ways of being instead of finding
truths. She is writing, I use Marsdens understanding of resonance to describe the
agreement or fit of an interpretation. As she remarks, this resonance is personal,
internal or external.55
In the car, driving to Montral (allmystuffisinthetrunktighttightsotightsotightwecant
seetheroadbehindus), we talk about truth. Shes big on agency.56 If you tell people
how youve come to know something, she says, it lets them decide if it matches with
their own experiences and dreams, with their communitys knowledge, with their
academic understandings. When she has her dialogue-they-keep-calling-a-defense,
she will call in and make a compelling argument. She will not rant, she will not make
people feel stupid. For her, she says, she wants to finish and hear them say, fucking
right.57
Truth is relational and does not necessarily lead to reconciliation.58
I will not shove my truth into anyones mouth. I will not ask them to swallow what I
think whole because it makes less of a mess. I will not hand them a Kleenex after, I
will not say, that was good for you too right babe.
I will not say babe?
Right babe?

54

See: Nag.
Brigitte Evering, Thinking Differently About Knowledge(s): Narratives to Inform
Environmental Collaboration, (PhD Dissertation Proposal, Trent University, 2012).
56
My brothers having a baby this winter. She wants the baby to decide what it wants to call her.
57
Brigitte Evering, Personal Conversation, Orange Honda Fit to Montral, October 4, 2015.
58
Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtles Back (Winnipeg: ARP, 2011), 21.
55

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IMAGES
Page 5 (Alternative): Mats Halldin, Jordens inre. Creative Commons, licensed under the GNU Free
Documentation License, Version 1.2. CC BY-SA 3.0.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Jordens_inre.jpg
Page 7 (Collaboration): Bonnie Clark, Photograph of chorus line, Eloha NY. Bonnie and Semoura Clark
black vaudeville photographs and ephemera, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. http://brbldl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3521675?image_id=1034154
Page 9 (Emotion): sad movies wtf Awesome vintage psychedelic 50s crying cry tears white and black wth
Abstract geek, http://rebloggy.com/post/beautiful-psychedelic-crying-cry-woman-psychedelic-artpsychedelic-collage/62416282836
Page 11 (Erection): Ujjwal Kumar, CN Tower as seen from its base, Wikimedia Commons, public
domain, uploaded 28 July 2009. Licensed under Public Domain.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CN_Tower_seen_from_its_base.jpg
Page 13 (Food): Garlic Clove, FoodPhotoSite.com.
http://www.foodphotosite.com/?level=picture&id=164
Page 15 (Hope): Jens Buurgaard Nielsen, Glowing Embers, From my last barbecue of the summer of
2006, uploaded 29 October 2006. Licensed under Public Domain.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Embers#/media/File:Embers_01.JPG
Page 17 (Hysteria): D.M. Bourneville and P. Rgnard, Women under Hysteria, montage by Damiens.rf:
Passionnelles XXIII.jpg, Attitudes Passionnelles XXVI.jpg, Debut d'une Attaque XXVIII.jpg, and Hystropilepsie Attaque XXXV.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hysteria.jpg#/media/File:Hysteria.jpg
Page 19 (Labour): (Film Still), Sean McAllister, Japan: A story of Love and Hate, BBC Four, 2009. Accessed
from The Rootless Metropolitan, February 18, 2013.
https://rootlessmetropolitan.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/japanese-hostesses-and-hosts/
Page 21 (Nag): W.J. Fenn, Monterey Shrew, in Results of a Biological Survey of Mount Shasta, by C. Hart
Merriam. Mount Shasta, California, 1899. http://www.siskiyous.edu/shasta/env/fauna/moles.htm
Page 23 (Power): Non-dropframe, power lines in field, uploaded 2 November 2008. Licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. CC BY-SA 3.0.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Power_lines.jpg#/media/File:Power_lines.jpg
Page 25 (Repair): Swiss darning, from At Swim-Two-Birds, January 9, 2013. http://at-swim-twobirds.blogspot.ca/2013/01/landscape.html
Page 27 (Slow): Holger Vaga, Waning Moon IV, uploaded 23 August 2008. Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
http://celestronimages.com/details.php?image_id=11202&sessionid=t5kf821qfnusbotf4g1k3f9iv3
Page 29 (Truth): Abbie and Mrs. Brown, Kleenex Lily Flower Craft, 6 March 2013.
http://blossomsandposies.com/blog/kleenex-lily-flower-craft/

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Danica Evering: metaphorist, imposter, and warrior queen from

Cobourg currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at Concordia
in hopes of finding out different ways to challenge power-over systems.
Tell me: danica.evering@gmail.com.
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