The venue is on a quiet street that leads from an underused London underground station that you also haven’t used for your journey. You notice, as you walk, that the buildings span eras, architectural aspirations, cultural preoccupations. The building you’re aiming for is a modern one, reached via four steps, two security guards, and imposing glass doors. These conditions cause a brief surge of anxiety, of unwelcome and not belonging. It’s not the atmosphere the hosts wish to convey, but without a venue of one’s own, compromise is inevitable.
The room that you enter is awkwardly shaped, despite being a square. Immediately in front of you is a spiral staircase encased in its own wire cage; beyond that, a table covered in books. To the left, a column, around which is a necklace, a shawl, of books. The books are so comforting, so companionable: you don’t need to search the room cautiously for people you know; instead you can absorb yourself in scanning authors and titles, until someone appears beside you – you’re here! I’m so pleased to see you! Such a gentle way to enter a space.
This is a real space, by the way: it’s one of the venues Something Other approached as a potential co-host for the live event of our Eleventh Chapter: On Distractions. Sadly, none of those approaches were successful. So, in collaboration with everyone who appears in the chapter, we are imagining the event instead. We are also imagining you; it may not help to know that the picture we have in our heads is the artist A. Lyre, who often contributes to the Chapters, and is a devoted follower of Something Other events.
The column sits at the centre of the room; to the left, leaning against the long glass front, is a black sofa; to the right, in shadows, are more sofas, a large white table, that space almost enclosed by further bookshelves. You wonder if it might be ok to take 14 books from the shelf and enjoy an evening reading through those instead. But there’s music playing – a little scritchy, mostly electronica; you recognise Aphex Twin but that’s about it – and there’s a hubbub beside the bar that would likely be distracting.
Distraction, of course, is the theme of the night, although it seems to you unlikely that it will inform the structure of the evening. One of the hosts, Diana Damian Martin, approaches the microphone opposite the sofa to begin the introductions. The call out for this Chapter was issued so many months ago, she admits, that we wondered if the theme was actually a curse, an imperative to distract ourselves with other work, with family obligations, and so prevent it from actually being published. What a pleasure to be able to introduce the first performer, Augusto Corrieri, and his text Deception, Productivity, and Kate Zambreno’s Drifts.
Augusto has requested that the three hosts of Something Other – Diana, Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa – each read out one of the sections of his text. Each section contains a line of graffiti, which Corrieri attempts to write, on a huge sheet – multiple sheets, joined together – of paper tacked to the wall, in sync with the readings. It’s a mistake for Maddy to read first: she’s altogether too giddy, distracted by what Augusto is writing (the word deception), which in turn distracts him. Or perhaps this is exactly the desired effect? By the third section, though, Mary reading, and Augusto writing ‘be the distraction you want to see’, the mood has become elegiac, the room suffused with memories of all the texts not written, yet existing in the cosmos of stories untold.
Mary herself performs next. She clutches a sheaf of papers in front of her with a small shiver of nervousness, and begins. ‘Fight despair with poetry,’ she says. And then, ‘fight despair with these two manifestation practices.’ A laugh washes through the room. You recognise the pattern quickly – she is reading a list of imperatives that start with the words ‘Fight Despair’ and end with phrases that hover between familiarity and meaninglessness. Some of the latter are obviously culled from internet adverts (‘Fight Despair with the 28 day wall Pilates challenge’) while others draw on a different, more ancient type of language (‘Fight Despair though the darkness is dense and light there is none’). You relax into laughter, too – a lovely feeling. You are laughing at the clumsy way that human language bumps into the human quest for meaning. And what are we all doing here, you wonder, if not re-enacting this clumsiness, this inevitable failure?
A short break is necessary before Karen Christopher performs, to set the sofa, its pair, and any other chairs in the room into two parallel lines, as far apart as possible. Karen’s text, ‘repeat as long as the signal holds’, is a meander through a perplexing day, and Karen sends it meandering along the rows of seated people, whispering directly into individual ears words for the audient to repeat aloud. Some words – for example, distraction – trigger a wave of people rising to their feet and sitting back down again, as though charting sound waves, signals through the air.
The seats remain in this position for brain wane art koan, a short text by Eddy Dreadnought, who chooses not to attend live because, despite the lax attitude of the current government, this is still a pandemic, and public transport remains an intimidating prospect. Instead, the four short sections of Eddy’s text are printed on to large sheets of paper, and held up in a rectangular arrangement – one sheet per sofa; one sheet for each space between them – where the words might be read in columns or circles, allowing each person to create meaning and connections for themselves.
There’s a proper break now, in which the sofas are repositioned, and you wonder whether there might have been other ways of using this space. What if each demarcated section of the room had held a different performance? What if each performance were durational, rather than presented sequentially? What if the koan were sited around the cage of the spiral stairs, so that engaging with it required movement, action? You think about messaging Something Other with these thoughts later.
But now Mary is back, to introduce Drs Chamarette and Mayer, two selkie researchologists who work – they claim – in a geothermal word laboratory under the sea. Each wears a pair of supersized goggles – protection, they claim, from the undiffused lighting in this over-the-sea room – and they begin with an apology: that the survey results they had come here to share have been lost in the waters on their journey. But they’re sure they can reconstruct from memory the very serious findings as well as the profound reflections and responses of the selkies, who – the Drs claim – regard human attitudes to waters, rivers, seas, as abominable in their lack of care.
They’re followed by Diana, who has been practising multi-lingual poetics, and is reading a text in Romanian and English that’s inspired by a book of poems by Illia Kaminsky. It’s called on the fence and she is on the fence about it, but also part of it was written with legs dangling from on top of an ill-conceived concrete fence back home. It was also written on a plane, passing by a stranger’s house, and in moving through distracted readings and conversations with friends, throwing the word ‘back home’ around with all its weight, these days. She wanted to read in one language only but likes the complication.
There is delight in Diana’s voice as she introduces the next reader, Jeff Ko: he has been a familiar face at Something Other writers gatherings since just before the pandemic, but this is his first submission to a Chapter. His text Pre:Para:Post has a slippery quality: written through the I and my, it has the air of autobiography, but the accompanying footnotes, which Mary holds up on sheets of paper, reveal that the words belong to other people. Other voices are heard speaking them, too, in audio recordings that slowly absorb the live voice: an effective and enjoyable layering.
The evening ends with Maddy’s text, a set of spells written in response to a song called Spells, which you don’t know, so the effect is maybe a little lost. But its final spell speaks of dancing with such urgency that you feel a kind of lightness enter you, a warmth and gladness for this community of people committed to the dance with language, even when it trips them, even when it’s all stumble and thump.
It’s been a good event, an engaging and absorbing one: if only, you think, as you saunter out into the night, it had actually happened live.
Something Other 