Raising funds for #Valentines4Palestine, an indie bookstore and publisher fundraiser for PEN International’s Writers at Risk fund. You can get The God File direct from me: please send £2/£4 postage (UK/ROW) + ur donation (anything is welcome!) via Paypal, and leave your address in the note. If you don’t have Paypal, email me and we can sort it out. It will also be available in store at Burley Fisher Books, London for £5.

The God File is designed by Loose Associations and printed by Loose Associations and Barely Printing.

Listen to “boundless” on SoundCloud.

Generator: that’s what the festival was called, and that was the first we heard of it, a biofuel conversion grinding to life. Popcorn smell getting stronger.

Lights, people, action.

They came to find the red curtains and they found us, hungry and alert. Words we hadn’t heard for years flew around the room: ‘event’, ‘development’, ‘air conditioning’. We looked at the rats, the rats looked at us. They scurried, we shrugged. Mutual understanding. Eat what you can, hide when you can’t.

Facemasks raised, we beat the dust from the velveteen seats until it floated up into the late evening almost-cool, a smell-memory of skin cells. We saw it glitter in the bioluminescent lamplight that the generator made.

Delighted to have a short story about my (least) favourite activity, breathing, in this gorgeous new issue of Riptide. It’s inspired by Pumzi and Silent Running and my own longings: hence it’s called “In Space.” And it starts…

In the box where it asks ‘Why do you want to work in space?’ you let the cursor flash, heart-hammering, then key in: ‘Because in a hard vacuum I might work out how to breathe.’

Delete.

Instead, you say something about opportunity.

You can read it online (1 article/month available free if you aren’t a Frieze subscriber) but the layout is so stunning – including full-page images from Four Corners archive, and amazing film stills and photographs from LUX, Amber Film Collective, Cinema Action, Black Audio Film Collective, Leeds Animation Workshop and more – that you really want to see it in print.

The history of British film collectives is shaped and given meaning by collective action in which filmmaking and protest inform each other as acts of critical liberation and social justice. The Workshop Declaration supported and formalized a groundswell of alternative practices that were already operating far beyond the boundaries of establishment filmmaking; that were, in fact, world-making.

Read and subscribe!

If monsters are the parts of ourselves we fear (including the fear of never enough and the fear of too much), this vision of a shared future seems to me the genuine bliss of wisdom. Here are our fears, laid out on the table, and we eat them. It’s not that we feed on fear, but that – seeing what our fears are – we are no longer afraid. We see our fears for what they are, warnings that come from our thwarted, complicated need to take care of ourselves when we were not taken care of. We see that the monsters that tried to eat us were trying to offer us sustenance.

Pre-order: Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin

New from Silver Press, the first anthology collecting UKLG’s writings on genders and sexualities, including work never before published in the UK! I’m honoured to have written the introduction with Silver Press editor Sarah Shin.

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, 19-26 December 2022, so if you prefer live radio to podcasts you can deck your halls to the sounds of queer anti-fascist speculative film history! There’s even cocktails in one episode, very seasonal.

Alternateily listen now via BBC Sounds podcast.

Adam Zmith has found some lost sound recordings from 1930. As he listens to this archive of intriguing noises, he imagines a film that could have changed the world, in collaboration with archivist So Mayer.

You can read the full poem on MODRON (part 1 below), with a screen-reader accessible version in a Google doc.

“Refer to people as they present themselves to you,” says musician La Bruja de Texcoco, telling us that she is quoting Dr. Elizabeth Montaño, a doctor and trans advocate who was murdered in Mexico City in 2020. In the streets of the city, protestors on the 8M feminist march call for the government to count them properly – meaning the number of femicides in Mexico, including those of trans women such as Montaño – with the words of cult hit “Sin Miedo” (“Without Fear”) by Vivir Quintana.

Read more on Open City, and see the film Sun 11 Sept, ICA.

There is no spoon

Olga Tokarczuk’s 1000-page opus Księgi Jakubowe was originally published in Polish in 2014, winning the Nike Award and selling 100,000 copies in its first year of publication. Jennifer Croft’s 2021 translation arrives on the heels of Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize, receiving a shortlisting for the 2022 International Man Booker Prize; a win would be the second for the Tokarczuk/Croft partnership. The novel’s title conveys less in English than for Polish readers, as the false Messiah Jacob Frank is a major figure in the nation’s history. Living from 1726-91, Frank’s life bridges the partition of Poland; quite literally, as he was imprisoned in Częstochowa, near what became the new eastern border. Placing his long imprisonment at the centre of her long book, Tokarczuk explores Frank as a border-dweller; as a Jew who converted to both Islam and Christianity; as a Messiah who numinously embodies the Divine in the material plane; and as a patriarch whose thirst for power clashes with his body’s queer and trans desires.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this radical approach, despite – or because of – its success, the book was also met with an overtly hostile reception in some Polish nationalist circles, leading to a sustained online harassment campaign against the author. Ron Charles, in his Washington Post review of the book in translation, mentions that these violent threats related particularly to Tokarczuk’s brilliant examination of the ‘blood libel’ fallacy. The novel exposes this persistent, dangerous myth that claims the use of Christian children’s blood in making matzoh for Passover, as an intentional disinformation campaign knowingly executed by Church fathers, which the novel’s subject, Jacob Frank, queasily uses to leverage his and his followers’ security. Frank’s disturbing weaponisation of the blood libel – which he knows to be false, and knows that Church leaders know to be false, against Orthodox Jewish neighbours who disapprove of his cult – is one of the many contradictory, chaotic and sometimes chilling actions taken by this unscrupulously charismatic leader, who was known in his day as the Messiah.

Read more.

Published online 20 May 2022.