these are sorted roughly from least to most academic. they're all pretty academic, lol.
a couple drunk nights in september, 2023: a man and a mushroom forest, met with the violence of a blade and scrapped back together.
march 18th-23rd, i.e. spring break, 2024: 40 some-odd hours back home with myself and my pens. what a nice thing it is to have *time.*
december, i.e. finals season, 2023: a piece that is, in its own way, dear to me. mid poetry on some acrylic. what i made to round off the semester for sukhdev sandhu's class on the histories and literatures of the south asian diaspora. i feel like the class sensitized me to appreciating the poetics of certain *sorts of life* (in this case, diasporic ones) in art.
if i had to pick 3 things to recommend you take a look at from sukhdev's syllabus (and imma shy away from the classics so that the recs are interesting), i'd go with david dabydeen's The Counting House: i think what i fucked with about this book is what a lot of readers find jarring about it, which is some combination of the rawness of the language (it's largely written in guyanese creole) and the vulgarity of the characters. as dabydeen himself puts it, "out of this matrix of spirit and earth is born a language that is both lyrical and barbaric" (check out "On Not Being Milton: N-- Talk In England Today"). looking back at / reading / reconstructing india through this language -- one born out of turbulent relocations and the violence of plantation life -- opened up the world of possibilities of what it can mean to think diasporically for me.
for the expensive pick (no sailing the high seas, as they say, for this one), i'd check out himali singh son's we are opposite like that. i don't have anything deep to say about this one, the project speaks for itself. imagine finding an old notebook-almanac-atlas full of poems. but desi. but polar? no way you're not enjoying leafing through that.
hari kunzru's Transmission i also fuck with. accidental yoda syntax there for some reason. it's attuned the poetics of the digital in a way i haven't seen before.
well i know i said 3 but i guess it's gonna be like 4 3/4 with the dabydeen essay sidebar and this..... check out philip scheffner's The Halfmoon Files! or if that's too much and you speak punjabi then listen to this. how many ghosts do humanity's modern endeavors create?
anyway, this is supposed to be a blurb about "these diasporic feet." tbh i wasn't gonna put this on the website because the time constraint just meant that i didn't get to sit with the project for as long as i might have liked. plus i didn't have a proper adhesive to attach the paper to the painting so it just looks janky and i am by no means a poet (or anything at all really, but especially a not a poet). but anyway, this site is good bc it settles for mediocrity! and i think the project represents an important moment in my art, in that -- although it was rushed and done in a time that turns you into the academic analogue of the "automatic motor in a fractional operation" -- it was important in that it's one of my first "artistic" (if it qualifies) reflections on diasporic life. that's kind of what i wanna be doing -- making art that feels it way through life lived in the diaspora, life lived in a globalized capitalist world, life lived in urban/suburban spaces. my confidence about posting this was also increased by someone telling me "i tried sniffing this to get high" -- it didn't work though :(
so, i created these mid poems where i imagine my feet to have their own consciousness and feel their way through diasporic life, then write from their perspective. shoutout to sukhdev sandhu for taking me there, he's a cool guy.
april 6th-9th: a piece that is dear to me. letting the contour lines of my trusted map melt and trusting in another life -- represented, then framed. or, a very academic processing of an artistic meditation of one of the most beautiful moments of my life, for ben(jamin) lewis robinson's german lit & signs of life class. you'll see some little pieces of the (non)language i discovered in mamaroneck in there. this piece showed me the emotional power of academic thinking in framing my life and my work.
huge shoutout to ben for having an assignment like this, allowing us to use the formulations and ways of thinking his course provided for creative ends was powerful thing. great prof. here's an exposé on the project -- it kind of bites into some pretty dense academic meat straight off the bat because it was written for a class that had been using the ideas in those materials for a sec, so keep that in mind: LINK. good memories with jay and spencer!
april and a bit of may, 2024: this was a fun one, especially consdering rory ferreira is someone i respect a lot as an artist -- i actually met him at his show @ elsewhere - zone one this may and talked about guitar pedals or something. awesome seeing him play his beats and spit over them live. this essay is a very "guys i am taking comp lit right now" portrait of his work in the album/digital space, bob's son (bandcamp.) i dig the essay though, i feel like there's a little piece of myself in there and it gave my relationship with rory's music a new color. for victoria anderson's writing class (more on that below). LINK.
february, 2024: thinking of my place as a creator in the diaspora, this time in a more explicit format (and one i'm a little more familiar with -- not necessarily sure about how to feel about that). i wrote this for victoria anderson's writing the essay class. it's a short one, a nice microcosm of the world offered by her class: the possibilities offered by recursive motion in writing; the possibilties offered by an attempt to let the voices of other creators sing. LINK
march and a bit of april, 2024: this is where it starts to get academic. my child! began as an attempt to critically and academically break down the paradigms of systems of power and their relationship with the (drag, punk, anarchist, squatting, gardening, etc) scene at tompkins in the '80s and '90s. the project was given its direction by approaches i learned in ben(jamin) lewis robinson's class on signs of life and some internalized althusser (which victoria anderson thinks i should make explicit and i kind of agree so i might do that before i post it here) *edit, i did not do that before i posted it here*.
it was a funny thing, walking and living and laughing and loving in a neighborhood while digging into its past and reading it with such academic eyes. this fact hit me eventually, and i realized that underneath all the analysis was *me, mourning.* i think this is one of my biggest takeaways from victoria anderson's class and the semester: learning what it means when i create things with eyes that are at once academic and *my own*. shoutout to victoria anderson for taking me there, of course. wonderful prof, the extent of her commitment to helping every student with their craft was something else. LINK.
may 3rd-5th, 2024: for ben's class. this thing is lowk my child! written (mostly) in the sun, over >40 hours in 3 days. on brecht's famous poems in which he wonders, "what dark times are these, in which / a conversation about trees is almost a crime". translation 1. translation 2. it was a challenge, doing the sort of the analysis we'd done on novels/plays/movies (see the michael k essay) on something so brief... compared to all the scenes, the moments, the relations, and formulations a whole narrative offers, you have to dig deep to come to the same sort of thinking from a poem.
i wrote this with an attitude towards academic approaches (& myself) i had tended to in victoria anderson's class and with our seminar work in ben's. it's close to my heart in a way that my learnings from this spring semester are. shoutout to benjamin lewis robinson for taking me there. maybe spend some time with the poems before the paper, though it's not totally necessary. LINK..
december, i.e. finals season, 2023: a paper on the cultural logic of revolutions and literature's place in that. on the more academic end, this is a vibe i like. wrote this for anne o'donnell's seminar, which was a comparative analysis of the french+russian+iranian revolutions. great fuckin class. all of the secondary sources we read were very aware of the significance of, consequences of, and ethics of the way they chose to understand what they were writing about -- i feel like that kind of meta/methodological frame of thinking leads to nice things, so i took a crack at it. i enjoyed thinking like this. LINK.
february, 2024: !WARNING! !VERY! !ACADEMIC! written for ben's (benjamin lewis robinson's) class on german literature & signs of life. brief little thing. emblematic of the sort of literary approach i learned from him: not imposing some external theoretical framework on a text, but instead coming to ways of thinking that emerge from the formulations internal to the text, all the while being sensitive to the very act of the reading you're doing. i really dig this way of thinking.
the paper assumes you've read life and times of michael k. my guilty pleasure; the white man's pleasure. fuck this book. goddamn i actually like this book. a book set in the '70s/'80s in apartheid south africa, which at portrays a man in his journey through colonial spaces, the untamed but nonetheless fenced veld, between the pores of state systems of control and into them... all re-read at the end through the scientific gaze of a doctor. interesting stuff. but wait! there is no mention of race! no mention of language! no mention of culture! this book is relations and scenes with no heritage! it is apartheid with no race! what the hell is that? that's nonsense. but there is still so much sense to made. this essay is some of that sense. LINK.
december, i.e. finals season, 2023: a paper on a philosophical approach to affirmative action. wrote this for kwame anthony appiah's class: philosophical approaches to race and racism -- never before have i been able to so palpably feel a man's intellect from the way he walked into a room. anyway, i wasn't going to put this up here initially because it's not very *me* -- it's this very analytic philosophical approach to understanding the issue; it's not really my voice, it's not a paper i have too much of a connection to.
i feel like these sorts of approaches are prone to missing something more intuitive because they're (to put this in a very nietzschean way, lol) built on very shaky edifices of rational construction. still, i learned a lot from this class and so it felt like i should archive that part of my education. for this one in particular, PLEASE forgive the me on the style. no shade but let's be real, it's a paper submitted to a class in the nyu philosophy department. hell of a contrast from the stuff i posted on here from my time in mamaroneck. LINK.
february, 2024: like a lot of philosophy papers, this one feels very [Δ]→{}→[]∴[.], if you know what i mean. these last three essays are all from sanford diehl's ethics class, which definitely taught me the modus operandi of [Δ]→{}→[]∴[.] and i think was great for my philosophical literacy / knowledge of the history of ideas. he's a good guy. the part of this essay that makes me smile is that 400 word footnote at the end, the rest i think has at least some value in the way it distills the project of nichomachean ethics (maybe). LINK.
late april, 2024:more [Δ]→{}→[]∴[.], if you know what i mean. this one doesn't really make me smile, lol, it's pretty clean though. it's about the relationship between sidgwick and peter singer's claims about actions that supposedly derive their permissibiity for the fact that others aren't doing them. LINK.
early april, 2024:the ultimate [Δ]→{}→[]∴[.], if you know what i mean. dweeb paper, honestly, kant deserves no charity. i don't know how much you have to contort your very being to shape yourself to think that the rational will is the one thing that is good and NOTHING else in life has inherent dignity because it resides in the world of empirical contingencies. kant is really out there with his homies thinking "i should do that which a good will undistracted by the heteronomous causality of the empirical world and guided only by the autonomous law of free will would self-legislate." i do appreciate kant in a way, though: there's a real clean logic to how he derives an ethics from first principles in such a short book. anyway, LINK.