Cory Tamler

brooklyn-based writer, translator, teaching artist & performance-maker. offbrand.

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"If I'm inspired by something, how do I create that into my own type of agency? Not just as a consumer but as a creator?" – Cheryl Donegan, New Museum R&D Season artist

Part 1 of a 4-part interview series produced by R&D Season Fellow Cory Tamler

Cheryl Donegan: "EXTRA LAYER" Fashion Show, produced in cooperation with Print All Over Me Thursday, April 7, 7PM More info—http://bit.ly/1LRkVQN

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I Break the Loop | The Offing

An Essay by Cory Tamler

"The smell of Las Vegas: sugary and floral and chemical, like a giant Glade plugin. Flowers on a corpse. Jews don’t fuck with that. We bury our dead right away."

Wrote this essay about a city I can't seem to escape, it's up now on The Offing.

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Read a Book: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s #negrophobia as a lesson in sitting in pain

I’m drawn to the body, repelled by the face. I think of Stop and Frisk Watch apps. I think of fear.

“I’m drawn to the body, repelled by the face. I think of Stop and Frisk Watch apps. I think of fear.”

Wrote about Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s evocative #negrophobia (part of American Realness this year) for Culturebot

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Past Versions of the Present Future in niv Acosta’s DISCOTROPIC

One of the great gifts science fiction can give us is the memory of how many times we’ve been spectacularly, beautifully mistaken.

“One of the great gifts science fiction can give us is the memory of how many times we’ve been spectacularly, beautifully mistaken.”

Wrote about niv Acosta’s Afrofuturistic DISCOTROPIC (part of the 2016 COIL Festival) for Culturebot

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Together in Sadness: Ligia Lewis’ “Sorrow Swag”

I spit on your happiness! You are all dogs! D-A-W-G-Z dogs!

“I spit on your happiness! You are all dogs! D-A-W-G-Z dogs!”

Wrote about Ligia Lewis’ blue-on-blue-on-blue Sorrow Swag (part of this year’s American Realness festival) for Culturebot.

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“There is a pattern and rhythm to our communication, to our existence in any group, whether you’re in Grand Central Station, or on a subway, or walking on the street—there’s a physical relationship to other people, to yourself, in the world. To frame it and capture it for an event such as Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. is to frame it and to bring a focus to it, but it’s really something that’s around us all the time.”

Excerpt from interview with Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of Martha Graham Dance Company, conducted by New Museum R&D Season Fellow Cory Tamler.

[voyageofseasoar]

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happy 2016 from the SeaSoar crew

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12.28.2015: The Navigator

it has been so long since we docked

I know by the marigolds

how they are past wilting and I have set them to dry in a corner of the lab in which the air is recycled and cooled to kill the humidity and they are dry unto dust almost so brittle if you breathe they’ll crumble

put your laptop on an anti-slip pad put your coffee mug on an anti-slip pad

none of the chairs have wheels

the tables are bolted to the floor

every door has a hook to hold it open unless it’s one of those serious ship doors that leads to the deck and then it’s got a series of metal latches operated by a handle you pull up to open and down to close

it’s very medieval-looking

a lot of hands and fingers must have been mangled by these latches

I used to be able to tell time by clocks and numbers and I used to know the names of the months

time’s measures are now decay

lines and shadows on a face light and darkness on the ship’s hull

or a different scatter of stars

we approach the gorge and I am afraid that I am not up to this

the Captain says he knows I can guide us

SeaSoar’s whisper says here turn here turn turn

and these fears I cannot give voice to cannot even write down because my words my words are lost

but what will you do

I would ask if I could

if once again I am just a receptacle for misplaced trust

I need a shore a market a garden I need more marigolds I need fresh marigolds I am still poison I I I

there are stories of star navigators asleep in a ship’s belly starting up from a deep sleep and running for the bridge crying out tell the captain he’s steering us off course

there are stories of sea-born children who can follow currents through the ocean as if they were roads

if I can’t speak to other humans I’d like to at least be able to speak to the waves

but even in that

I am incomplete

I still have the

gift of seeing into

a stranger’s soul through her

eyes at first

sight but the

street goes just

one way now and it

is only the diver who has

patience for my empty

mouth because

the diver is not

entirely human

we will make the turn

we are now making the turn

we are sharply quickly turning and

the bolted tables do not budge

even the surface of my coffee betrays no ripple

as we slide into the 4th River Gorge

—Poppy McTighe

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follow the voyage of SeaSoar at http://voyageofseasoar.tumblr.com/

docking in Pittsburgh on 12.31.2015

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12.26.2015: The Cryptographer

When my watch ends today, the sun is rising. I walk on the deck to clear my head and my ears are ringing. No: bells are ringing. Right away, I think it’s a clue for me. Excitement fills me. Until now my clues have been letters, faceless sketches of female forms. Pieces of her. In the last few days I’ve felt myself growing desperate. Instead of piecing her together, I sense that I am disintegrating, becoming as fragmented as she is for me. I am hungry for something different, something that will lead to a breakthrough, and these bells—

Careful of wishful thinking, I caution myself.

Wishful thinking: thoughts full of wishes. Remember that. To wish something means to be able to articulate it. To articulate something is to be a step closer to the thing. A thing that can’t be wished is impossible.

I give into my wish. These high-pitched, singing bells, what new piece of her might they be? Her voice? I try to mold them to my own vocal chords. Too high. All of the other boys in my class were happy when our voices started to change. I felt sadness. I never spoke of it; I would have found no allies. But with every pubescent crack, I battled tears. It seemed to me that I was losing myself. The moment my boy-voice vanished is the moment I started searching for her. Now, on the deck, I scan the water and sky, eager, heart motion-sick with excitement.

Bodies brush past me. My shipmates, always there, just when I’m trying to concentrate, when I’m near a breakthrough—

“Francis?” It’s the cook. Smell of stale coffee grounds and fresh potato peels. Eyes that pierce me. I run my hand over my face as if it would wipe my thoughts clean. The bells are still ringing.

“What?”

The bells are still ringing. “Where’s your vest?” I hear a voice, too, among the bells. This is a drill, this is a drill. Fire on the 02 deck. It must have been there all along. The mind hears what it wants to. Wishful thinking. Man your stations. This is a drill.

“Captain’s going to be waiting for you.”

I’m off at a run for my stateroom, have to grab my life vest, have to try to remember my station, yes, of course, it’s Friday, it’s drill day, every Friday for the last year, what’s wrong with me, am I losing my grip, where do I go for fire drills, am I really falling to pieces?

We were all warned. We were warned about impatience. We were warned about wishing. About the pitfalls of hasty interpretation. SeaSoar warned us. Don’t start spending the season’s profits before you’ve begun to harvest, my father would have said.

And I have always been so careful not to jump to conclusions. This line with a gentle bend, what is it, is it the curve of a cheek? I try to fit the curve to photographs and sketches. Start over. I turn the curve. Stretch it, shrink it, start over. Enlarge it. Grow it to the size of the ship. Now I see: it’s the gentle hump of a whale’s back. Grow it again. Now I see: it’s a planetary dent pressed into the fabric of space. Start over. Shrink it. Shrink. Shrink. It’s an ant’s antenna. The curvature of a dustbunny. Understanding leaves me. I let it go. I am careful. Start again.

Now this. Fooled by a ship’s alarm I’ve heard countless times before.

How is it possible that I can feel so much for someone I can’t even picture?

—Francis Quinn

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follow the voyage of SeaSoar at http://voyageofseasoar.tumblr.com/

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time-lapse of deploying SeaSoar

SeaSoar. Yellow-and-chrome, the size of a rocking horse, with ellipsoid wings that rotate to control upward or downward movement. Deploying SeaSoar makes for striking imagery, increased by the instrument’s anthropomorphic design. Raised above the stern by cable run over a pulley with most of its 700 meters of length wrapped around a massive winch, steadied by two lengths of rope called taglines, she looks to me like a sacrificial offering to the sea. The cable goes through her muzzle; the ropes bind her wings. Swinging gently against a backdrop of sky bordered by the ship’s movable A-frame, she is lowered steadily, reverently, the resident technician safeguarding her descent, giving hand signals to the winch operator and shouting “A-frame out!” “A-frame in!” to the graduate student gripping its joystick.

“She’s pretty dialed. We didn’t have to touch a thing all watch.”

“Tomorrow we’ll pull her up, check her over, make sure everything’s good, and then put her back in.”

“She’s soaring. She’s happy.”

(I have been at sea for two weeks and I have yet to hear an inanimate object referred to as male.)

video courtesy of Dillon Amaya

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Stillborn | The Offing

Fiction by Tanja Šljivar translated from the Serbian by Cory Tamler and Željko Maksimović

He loved death and I loved death, and the Kaiser, his uncle, loved death and our children loved death and all the generals loved death and the kid who killed us loved death and also an organization in Serbia which took its name from its adoration of death and generally everyone in Serbia loved death and everyone in Bosnia especially, they loved death and my son was stillborn for the same reason, because he loved death, and that something inside of me died when I died, because, although it was not born yet, it loved death.

(from “Stillborn,” a monologue by Tanja Sljivar, translated by Cory Tamler and Zeljko Maksimovic)

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malakal harbor. that's my #boat

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abrupt topography

It’s September 30 and my flight leaves in 19 hours. You won’t hear from me for a little while. Nobody will, except for a handful of other people on a boat. Can you say waterlocked, like the opposite of landlocked?

Two dozen scientists, grad students, and crew trapped for a month aboard a ship whose aesthetic is part college dorm, part high school science lab, and part 1990s suburban basement.

It sounds like a pitch for a reality television show.

There is a chart room, an aft control station, a wet lab. The line on drugs and alcohol is like your basic summer camp policy (though I think they might serve a glass of wine at Sunday dinner). But the Human Resources agreement we are all signing includes a clause that amounts to “what happens at sea, stays at sea,” which I have to assume refers to the wax and wane of relations between people in a big floating box.

The chief scientist has promised me it’s going to be really, really boring.

We will be circling Palau. Our research is on FLEAT, or Flow Encountering Abrupt Topography. It’s fun to think about what makes topography abrupt. I’ll be doing what the graduate students on board are doing: four hours babysitting instrument as they collect measurements, eight hours off, four hours on, eight hours off, in a repeating cycle for 30 days.

During my eight-hours-off periods that aren’t spent sleeping or eating or maybe getting my sea legs and very hopefully not being seasick, I’ll be writing.

When I get back on November 13, I’ll share it with you.

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me in October and November

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In the Penobscot River's Open Waters, Fish Are the Performers - Extended Play

In May of 2015, Jennie Hahn of the Open Waters performance collaborative launched a multi-year investigation into Maine's Penobscot River.

“How do I make the work that I need to make while still authentically involving community?” –Jennie Hahn

I wrote this about my recent experiential research trip with Open Waters in Maine for Extended Play, a journal of investigative theatre.

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ZAIDE

It was the day before their dress rehearsal when my German friend and colleague Nora Schüssler texted me from Augsburg. She knew it was last-minute, but...could I work with her on a translation? It was her adaptation of Mozart’s unfinished opera “Zaide,” written for a production in collaboration with Syrian, Nigerian, and Afghani musicians and performers. An excerpt from my contributions to the translation is below. “Zaide” was first performed at Theater Augsburg in Germany on August 6, 2015.

Since I left, I can no longer sleep.

With three hundred other people, I pay for passage on a wooden boat.

I arrive in Algeria.

Strangers drive us to Gabès in a minivan painted black. From there we head to Zuwara, through the desert in a pickup truck.

And then—into the sea, blindly.

In the middle of the night.

My sister is still in Libya.

Alone.

My mother is in France.

My aunt is in the Netherlands. And she is waiting for me. But I can’t go to her.

My father—

My father is no longer living.

I was smuggled into Germany.

Every night I ask myself over again: Was it the right decision?

Anything would be better than staying in Dera'a.

You could also call my story an "adventure."

Every day you ask yourself these questions. Guilt. Anger. Hate. Fear. And exhaustion.

Always the exhaustion.

Sleep is a foreign word.

I want to sleep.

But sleep does not come.

The soft, tender sleep

won’t come. Only nightmares crawl all around me.

I don’t sleep.

I am lost in my own labyrinth.

Unconsciousness. Yes. Blackout. Yes.

Sleep? No.

Not anymore.

Perhaps never again.

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from my Penobscot journal