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Friends, Continuing on with my series about work, I wanted to consider not just writing but being a writer. In other words, what it takes and take from you to write; the work of being a writer. I wanted to do it with another working writer who writes in genre-defying and genre-defining modes, so I asked SARAH MARIA GRIFFINback onto the show. Sarah – who was last on the show back on AEWCH 93 – is the author of poetry, zines, memoir, and dark fantasy, including her masterful weird novel, Other Words for Smoke. She’s also a teacher and tarot reader. Now she had two upcoming horror novels (keep an eye out!) and understands the life of not just writing but being a writer and all that that requires: the mediating of forces dark and difficult, the frightening endurance, the tedious quotidian tasks, the managing of the expectations of readers. It’s not easy work, but it’s also the work that she – and I – love most. Why? Why do we want more of life in isolation on the ecotone of symbol and reality? This is a personal and weird episode, and I hope you love it. CH
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Wanttobuy the booksmentionedonthisep? For Blindboy’s books you should order from Amazon. His two short story collections, Boulevard Wrenand The Gospel According To Blindboy as well as the book on Irish-English, A Dictionary of Hiberno English(by Terrence Dolan), which he helped re-release, are all a little bit of a pain to get from bookshop.org in the US, so I am unfortunately directing you to Amazon for them. Still, get them. Get them. For the other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 140 on bookshop.org. It will help supportindependentbookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
Jacques Lacan once said something like, the only difference between “normal” people and paranoid schizophrenic people is that the latter has their frantic-Charlie-Day-bulletin-board on the surface. We all draw lines between seemingly disparate points, and our connections are ultimately meaningless. It’s just that you can see that process in the paranoid schizophrenic person.
Well, I don’t know that I agree that the points, the pathways, or the reason we select either are meaningless, but I do like this metaphor. Still, my question is why do you draw the lines you draw? Why are they different from the ones I draw?
I asked my pal Blindboy Boatclub – member of The Rubberbandits and host of The Blindboy Podcast (and also one of the most productively absurd people I’ve ever met) – to join me to talk about all of this.
You might remember Blindboy from my appearance on his show back in March 0f 2019 (and I talk about it in the intro to this ep), when we talked about the occult, ghosts, sex work, and more. This is a continuation of that conversation, and it leads us into weird territory.
ON THIS EPISODE
Versatile Irish words like “craic,” “ride,” and “horny,” why we have boners in America, and why we can say cunt in Ireland
Drawing lines between seemingly disparate topics
Why showing the process in art reveals its livingness
“The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.’
The connection between themes in our art and healing images in the world; and why birdflight is healing
Each problem has a virtue
Autonomous shadows and cartoon duck landlords
Anxiety, depression, and the recreation of time in the global crisis
• Here’s Jon Ronson’s story about his son saying the worst swear word ever.
• Duncan Trussell and I talked about the oblivion in the signal on his show here.
• Want to learn about the mind parasite of the fungal cordyceps? Yeah, of course you do.
• Here’s a good example of one of Blindboy’s drawings (which you can find in his books).
• AEWCH 40 with poet Zachary Schomburg is one of my favorite episodes of the show!
• My Irish Times essay about the changing nature of time and space is here. And here’s the Wittgenstein quote from it: “When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction,”
• Melancholiais my favorite Lars von Trier movie (maybe the only one I truly like?) and it’s a great comment on the power of depression.
• Here’s one of the first things I ever published, “Emit Time.” Just deciding that one of your first essays ever written would be a new ontology of time, nbd, Conner.
Conner Habib 