Dear friends:
Back on Substack for a sense of what people are talking about (auto-f*-fiction?), I couldn’t explain my deja vu till I figured out that, with Notes, the platform has become to the English-speaking literary sphere exactly what Facebook was to its Arabic-speaking counterpart when last I checked:
Envy, ambition, hyperbole (aka “big words”), and the complete inability to see beyond a particular square inch between your own two feet. With little to no interest in the beautifully meaningful thing that writing is capable of being. The main difference is other-disdain instead of self-hatred, and a lot more money going around.
What does that say about contemporary literary practice between two languages?
In its first month Postmuslim has prompted some responses (see All Coverage at the bottom of the page) and a few deeply satisfying conversations (audio and text features coming up!) But I wanted to share this “Behind the Essay” rant along with my pan of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, both of which appeared on the big day. I also wanted to share my unrelated Adroit essay, “Parable of the Uroboros and the Camera,” together with one of my earliest photographic pieces (an Ilford Delta 3200 negative I developed and printed myself, back in the day):
As part of the issue’s promotion, Adroit asked contributors, among other things, “What questions are you circling in your work these days?” Notwithstanding Anne Carson’s brilliance, I can feel the pain of my response in my body as I write this:
Once you’ve lost faith in the institutions that control value, where do you go from there? How do you stay motivated when you know there is no integrity in the world? You don’t want to cut yourself off, but how can you continue to engage without being cynical? I’m not just talking about the rules-based international order. I also think about arms, drugs, and debt; FIFA, the Nobel Prize, the World Food Organization, the Venice Biennale… I think about how to be in the world alongside rather than through these things, how to imagine value outside of them.
Alongside rather than through, and also with the courage of one’s convictions regardless of sales figures in every sense of the term sales figures. Right?
But it hurts.
Sincerely,
Y
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