What upcoming [media] are you looking forward to?
We don’t usually keep up with what’s upcoming - at least not deliberately - so it’s hard to say. Moreover, we’re very much in the “once burned, twice shy” camp in regards to whatever hyped or under-hyped thing is on the horizon. That said, there are a handful of names that we pay particular attention to and are excited to see these names do things in the future regardless of whether we end up liking the things or not.
Books: Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams.
Music: Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Laurel Halo’s Atlas, and Lorraine James’ Gentle Confrontation. Also, sort of interested in new albums from The Armed and Olivia Rodrigo (you don’t need a link to this). MILDLY curious about 1989 (Taylor’s Version) [settle down and you def don’t need a link to this].
Movies: Club Zero (dir. Jessica Hausner), Saltburn (dir. Emerald Fennell), La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher), Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismaki), and The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer). Oh, and the remake of The Exorcist? Someone told us the trailer was scary/good, so maybe that’ll be cool?
Television: Is this still a thing?
More than new things, we’re pretty excited about eventually and finally getting around to some old stuff like:
Books: Iris Mudoch’s The Black Prince.
Music: whatever was happening in the club scene right before ‘80s Detroit techno, unpopular Twin/Tone proto-alt/indie records released before 1990.
Movies: Everything directed by Ivan Dixon, Jules Dassin, Ying Liang, and Claudia Weill.
Television: They remade Dead Ringers?? As a show? Big if true. Oh, also, Swarm.
Are you going to write about [current thing]?
Obviously, [current thing] is very urgent and important, so we’ve been working really hard on a lengthy, insightful piece about how people presently think that [current thing] is like [other current thing] when (IN FACT) it’s actually much more like [slightly less current thing] and also, more importantly, [old thing]. By shifting our frame of reference and thinking about [current thing] alongside [things we personally selected], we believe that we can get a better picture of [broader socio-cultural issue] and ultimately see why [neutered, vague, and non-threatening political position] is so important right now.
It would be - in our humble opinion - grossly irresponsible to only let several hundred diverse media outlets discuss [current thing] from every possible angle without offering our own two cents. We’re fairly sure that if we reach a certain discursive density around [current thing] then all all of our erroneous attitudes will be corrected and our collective behavior improved. Imagine what life would look like without fevered and manic discussion of [current thing]? It’s clear, when you look back a couple of weeks or months or years, that all the time spent on [formerly current things] was critical to our individual and collective well-being.
We hope to publish this piece on [current thing] more or less exactly after interest in [current thing] has died entirely and shifted, understandably, onto [soon to be current thing].
Are there any topics you want to write about, but haven’t yet? Like what?
Plenty! Too many, probably.
Would love to write about parts of Montreal we’ve never been to (e.g. the Pointe-aux-Prairies park), events we don’t personally care much about (e.g. amateur sports), the Montreal advertorial industry, and the mystery that is LAVAL.
Would love to write something about sites like GoodReads, Letterboxd, etc. and the peculiar ways that people critique/review things on those platforms, about how publishing and the literary scene more broadly now mimics Hollywood logic and is swiftly dying as a result, about the resurgence of interest in melodrama that pretends not be melodrama, and about our love of Autechre and other music that many people would say doesn’t count as music.
There’re endless things we’d love to write about. That we haven’t yet (and might never) usually has to do with time more than anything else. There’s also the perennial concern that our interest in something will not translate into your interest in something, but - truthfully - we’re gradually less and less concerned about that (for better or worse).
Why is it so hard to get someone to review my [anything]?
Reviews, at present, are parasitical. Their popularity is derived from the popularity of the object they address (or, in very very rare cases, from the popularity of the reviewer doing the reviewing) and - right now - popularity is all that counts. Publications are unlikely to risk spending money or screen real-estate on reviews that don’t (promise to) generate traffic. While staff writers will (sometimes) be given some editorial latitude to select an object for review, an editor is rarely likely to OK a review of some unheard of thing without a compelling argument for why droves will flock to learn about its successes or failings.
So, from a publication’s perspective, reviews of things anywhere to the left of VERY MAINSTREAM aren’t very attractive. This is also true from a (freelance) writer’s perspective. Reviews pay almost nothing. You would be inordinately fortunate if you could get paid the equivalent of minimum wage to write a review of any kind. Reviews, moreover, rarely make good clips for your CV given that most reviews are 2/3rds summary/fluff and 1/3rd overblown, vague praise and pussyfooting derision.
If you want a review because you want someone to engage with your work critically, then it’s probably better to just ask a local critic to attend your thing and promise them a meal or something in exchange for a conversation about your thing. This is more likely to happen than getting a review published and it’ll also likely be more beneficial to you to be able to converse with the critic about what worked, what didn’t, etc.
If you want a review because press (hopefully) translates into sales, then you should just pay for advertising. It’s not necessarily more effective, but it’s way easier to pay for a handful of ads or influencer placement than it is to solicit reviewers or publications to attend to your thing.
Will you review my [anything]?
Maybe? We have very mixed feelings about writing reviews. We’re not very good at it and, also, don’t much enjoy doing it. BUT we’d almost certainly be willing to write about [anything] in some form or another. We might not summarize it or give it a star rating, but we’d likely engage with it as fully as we can to ends of some particular kind. If that’s appealing, reach out and we can likely sort something out.
What’s the last surprising thing you found in a bookstore?
We are always surprised by how many high schoolers seem to hang out near the fiction section at Indigo. They don’t seem to be aware that this is a bookstore, but treat it kind of like an awkwardly designed, horrifically lit, and poorly DJ-ed lounge of some kind. It’s very odd.
We’re also continuously surprised by the pre-landfill garbage that is dotted around most bookstores - the novelty books, the expensive bookmarks, the “funny” desk calendars - because we have never seen anyone buy any of it and yet it seems to be replaced with new and different pre-landfill garbage all the time.
What do you think about literary prizes?
Not much tbh. In regards to fiction prizes, we generally understand that they indicate something like “this book is mostly unobjectionable and you will never think of it again after having read it.” In regards to genre or poetry prizes, we don’t really know what to think or don’t think anything at all.
The Nobel, though, we pay attention to. Not because the authors they select are good, but rather because their selections are almost always interesting. They’re insteresting in the same way that menu items at a very fancy restaurant are interesting. Reading about who won the Nobel always seems very much like reading that “mossy sticks in a tangerine verjus topped with the longing of a pygmy radish” is orderable as an appetizer and costs $54.
Generally, the only reason we pay attention to prize-winning books (or prize-winning anything) is because people are talking about them and we’d like to understand what people are saying and why they’re saying it. This whole “talking about” cultural objects thing doesn’t seem to be happening (in any susbstantive sense) much lately (esp. re: books), so we have no idea who won the most recent anything. It’s been nice.
Having said all this, someone we know was just longlisted for [major fiction prize] and we’re very happy for them. Our lack of interest in prizes doesn’t translate into a lack of interest in people being recognized for their work and rewarded for it. We just wish that we had better and different ways of noting this recognition and alloting these rewards than corporatized, committee-based popularity contests.
How do you write so much?
Because we think as little as possible. This seems stupid or facetious, but it’s entirely true. If we thought more about what we were going to write, we’d get stuck before we started. If we thought more while we wrote, we’d abandon more pieces than we already do. If we thought more after we wrote, we would have deleted each and everything we have published. We don’t second-guess or, even, first-guess, really. We trust that whatever thinking needs to happen will happen in and through the writing itself. We (try to) treat writing like any other activity, namely, as something we merely do. It’s very simple even if it’s not at all easy.
What have you learned about yourself, your work, and/or your readers by crowdsourcing ideas and soliciting questions?
We’ve learned that writing about things suggested by others is usually both more fun and more difficult than anything else. More importantly, we’ve learned that you are (to a fault) way more interesting than we are. We’ve said it before, but it merits saying again that we’d far rather read your stuff than write our own. The comments, questions (many of which we answered privately rather than in this post), and suggestions were (bar none) such a fucking treat. We’re inordinately grateful to have somehow or another gained and retained your attention. It makes absolutely no sense to us, but we’re fine with this not making any sense.
Will you be taking a break from writing for a week or two, but return towards the end of August with exciting things to share? [This isn’t a real question anyone asked obviously, but go with it anyways]
“Yes” to the first part and almost definitely “No” to the second part. BUT we have recently been toying with the idea of doing some IRL things in Montreal? Maybe a book club? Or something? Unknown. We’d, obviously, have to adopt an elaborate disguise of some sort in order to maintain our anonymity (suggestions welcome), but we’re increasingly frustrated with the asymmetrical character of this blog. We’d love to flatten things out somehow and have a genuine group conversation about almost literally anything.
We’ll see, though, maybe over the next week or two we’ll decide that this whole endeavor isn’t ASSYMETRICAL enough and we’ll close comments, start writing in code, etc. It’s hard to say. The future’s a mystery and so on.
In any event, we’re going to be away for a bit. Our archives are free and open to everyone (subscriber or not), so if you get terminally bored and want to spend your time with a past version of us talking about who knows what you can do so over in THE ARCHIVE. There’s, like, 60 something pieces over there on everything from… we can’t really remember. We definitely wrote about something that has something to do with something. It’s probably all very edifying.
If you’ve already read all of that (we love you, dear masochists), then maybe re-read it? Or throw your phone and laptop in a river? Stop reading entirely? Go for a walk and don’t come back? Exercise the minimal freedom you can while you can and forget you ever spent even a minute on assorted internet writing? Dream of better worlds and make them real? Fall in love? Dance? Commit a crime or two? Take a deep breath and chill for like 10 days and then we’ll be probably be back and everything can go back to whatever now counts as normal? We’re not your boss. Do whatever. We’re going to and, then, probably tell you a little about all the whatever we did and WHAT IT ALL MEANSSSSS.
Autechere isn't music only because it's alchemy?
I am v into this blog, thank you, I am glad I found it through a speaker you wrote about in a way I wish I had the time to. I was a panelist for that speaker talk, but mostly there for my credentials and less for creating a meaningful conversation, something I picked up on when asked to do the talk, but optimistic enough that maybe I was reading too much into it.
"trust that whatever thinking needs to happen will happen in and through the writing itself. We (try to) treat writing like any other activity, namely, as something we merely do. It’s very simple even if it’s not at all easy."
Yess...