markers of such

[thatual]

There seems to be a general feeling, that one must pretend to enjoy performing oral sex or risk a life of loneliness, listening to Taylor Swift while getting into Twitter fights with people about Jennifer Aniston’s romantic future.

Rosie Waterland, The Anti-Cool Girl

[thatual]

But the most important theoretical contribution to shape this text was my collaborator Leon Kahane’s attempt to shoplift a bottle of wine for a brainstorming session.

Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”

[thatual]

She was passionately trying to make what I considered to be a relatively outdated and unimaginative statement, and I mistakenly heard refreshing and enlightening poetry.

Ana Finel Honigman, “Message Understood?”

[thatual]

You learn how things are working from what happens to those who challenge how things are working. You learn how power reconstitutes and conceals itself as it is being revealed.

Safia Adid, “After #CadaanStudies”

[thatual]

I write this on the bus, passing by the refuse heaps of Pave-All, by Volvo and Strong Co., and the Walmart trucks. I want to write a sentence that is not only these things, then put another sentence beside it to see what happens, what might be released. In the formal movement of language, an experience of freedom might find a shelter. I want to activate capacious mental sensation towards both historicity and newness. I want to assume that a woman could be believed.

Lisa Robertson, “Notes on Form and Belief”

[thatual]

In 'The Silkworm', after Strike has bought her surveillance lessons as a Christmas present, he quips that most women would have expected flowers. She responds, with heartbreaking pride, that she’s not like ‘most women’. All around the world, ‘most women’ – reminded as we often are that it is terrible to be too much like a woman, whatever that means – heave a resigned sigh.

EH Pipher, “Sexism, crime and JK Rowling’s ‘Career of Evil’”

[thatual]

I’ve spent a lot of time being jealous of artists who work with something other than words. I know language is a material, that it can be thingly, that the book is a specific medium, and so on, but when I see an artist who gets to work with paint or foam or metal or whatever, I often wish I practiced a more tactile art. My jealousy has various sources, but one is the unsophisticated yet unshakable sense that a work of visual art – even a photograph or film installation – is more real, more actual, than a machine made out of words.

Ben Lerner, “The Actual World”

[thatual]

For me, at least at the moment, the novel, not the poem, is the privileged form for the kind of virtuality I’m describing. I think of the novel as a fundamentally curatorial form, as a genre that assimilates and arranges and dramatizes encounters with other genres: poetry, criticism and so on.

Ben Lerner, “The Actual World”

[thatual]

There is illness and injury which has produced a great deal of not writing. There is cynicism, disappointment, political outrage, heartbreak, resentment, and realistic thinking which has produced a great deal of not writing. There is reproduction which has been like illness and injury and taken up many hours with not writing. There is being anxious or depressed which takes up many hours though not very much once there is no belief in mental health. There is trauma which is fantastic in the way it is brief and clear and also the way it lingers around and emerges unpredictably as if it will forever. Trauma is always the indirect direct producer of so much not writing. It is like a mind which has a shadow and then is the shadow and then isn’t a mind or its shadow but isn’t at all.

Anne Boyer, “What is ‘Not Writing’?”, Garments Against Women (2015)

[thatual]

She did not stop thinking about it thinking about life so that is what she was thinking about. She was thinking about how she was feeling and what the people all over everywhere in the earth were doing. How could she. It think about it when every day she knew what she was feeling at least she thought she did and every day she knew what everybody everywhere was doing, anyway they told her she did and she did.

Gertrude Stein, “Ida” (1937)