So three months came and went without me writing a single word, at least for this newsletter. The thought of writing to an audience was a part of this procrastination. I’d bailed out on one commission, and months later I’m still working on two separate essays commissioned in December, plus snippets of my book. But let’s start again.
It was my cat’s first birthday in April. When I say “birthday” in this context, I don’t mean the day of his birth, because his origins are shrouded in mystery. He appeared at someone’s house one day, and because this person already has two cats and a newborn baby, decided to put it up for adoption. At the time, my boyfriend had just hired someone he’d noticed at another pub while playing a gig there, whom he thought seemed unhappy at their workplace (true; they were the only one who opted to wear a mask in that establishment—this was the brief window between the April and July lockdowns in 2021) but also looked like they were willing to put in the hard yards (i.e. not a rich kid pissing about). He turned out to be right, and now the three of us are good friends. But before that, this person knew the person who was putting up the cat, and being a cat fanatic herself, showed J the Instagram post. He proceeded to show it to me, and after a month or so and a few hundred dollars (I mentioned this a few posts prior, in November), the cat came home with us.
I called the cat Ming—short for Lamington. Friends around me knew I’d been holding on to this name for the last 4 to 5 years, and every time I told it to someone I’d crack up. Sometimes to the point of tears. This is how I know I’ll never regret it.
Ming eventually adopted many more names, as cats—or any pet, really—do. Mingus was one of these. Initially, J called him that because he thought the word sounded like “mucus” (funny) but it dawned on us that he was also Charles Mingus’s namesake. Charlie Mingus, the jazz great who died way too young. He taught himself music, and never undertook formal education, going on to put out a few dozen albums over twenty-eight years, with four released posthumously. And funnily enough, the more I paid attention, the more that strange chaos magick of knowledge appeared. Mingus was born on the 22nd of April 1922, and I’d long been obsessed with the number two, having been very excited at the recently passed 22/2/22 this year. What’s more, Mingus was obsessed with cats, and during his life published a one-page brochure titled the ‘CAT-alog’, his manual to (ostensibly) toilet train your cat. His cat was called Nightlife, a little tuxedo cat whom his endeavour was said to be a success. In the documentary Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968 (dir. Thomas Reichman), Mingus was also caught on camera shooting a rifle at the ceiling at home. His memoir, Beneath the Underdog (1971), which took him twenty years to write, is an astonishing work of autobiography that leans into experimentation in the same way his music does: ecstatic, ambivalent, playful and caustic while never descending into oversentimentality. So that’s the story behind Ming the cat’s day of existence. It is Charlie Mingus’s centennial this year.
I regale you with this long-winded story not because I’m pointlessly waxing lyrical about myself (remember: I’m not a memoirist), but because I’ve been thinking about autodidacts again. About how so many are hidden in plain sight, but you wouldn’t know it unless you studied their oeuvre. There are the famous ones: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jimi Hendrix, Terry Pratchett, Frank Zappa. Then there are the lesser-known ones such as Jorge Luis Borges and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s almost fascinating how this fact is almost never brought up when they are being referred to. Not in the sense of “oh haha, good for them!”, but more that they battled these systemic odds to seek intellectual and artistic pursuits and alter the cultural discourse in a meaningful way. They did not just appear.
As someone who has lacked role models in life, increasingly so as I grow older, these precedents are important. I hesitate to call myself an “autodidact” however; it almost sounds too lofty and has a certain “lone genius” ring to it which I don’t particularly agree with, particularly as I see tech moguls play up this so-called deficiency in individualistic ways. I wrote about this dilemma in a recent short essay I read at the Emerging Writers Festival’s 2022 program launch in June.
To wit:
I’ve been told—through whisper networks of course—that there are people who think I play up a certain disenfranchisement when I mention the fact of never having been educated beyond high school (in so-called Australia, it’s a Year 10 equivalent—go figure); it’s affirmative action, and all that jazz. What’s really resulted through this is a kind of reverse impostor syndrome: do people say my work is good, because I’m actually good, or is it because they think I’m “good for someone who didn’t go to uni”? You know, like “that drummer is good for a girl” or “that lawyer is good for a Black guy”, that kind of shit. It plagues me all the time. When I first started writing “professionally”, I would hide this fact, as if it was a shameful secret. No one can know. But I began to realise it’s pointless trying to play catch up: our experiences and reading trajectories form our own mental maps, and that is what art is. There isn’t and shouldn’t be one way to do it; we should be allowed to embarrass ourselves, and constantly.
It’s weird: people talk about “impostor syndrome”, as in, when you don’t believe yourself capable to do something—which I don’t believe in, at least personally, because they’re often built around insidious yardsticks around perfection and desirability. I think there’s the inverse too, which I tend to call “reverse impostor’s syndrome”, wherein you fear that people are only saying your art or work is “good” because they didn’t expect you to be, and that they’re giving you a free pass in spite of it. Welcome! Thank you! This is how some people lose sight and become mediocre, I think. It is easy to succumb to complacency in the face of lavish praise.
That said, it’s a strange feeling to be one of the very few around you, and I’m not speaking about Representation here. I don’t want to represent anyone and I don’t expect others to represent me. Rather, I’m more interested in the structural barriers that disallow people to seriously pursue what is generally sold as “democratic”. Why is a self-published zine generally looked upon less favourably than a book published by, say, Graywolf Press? And why does the former mode of publishing, if partaken by those with significant cultural capital, become fetishised as a prime act of subversion? We can’t seem to win, and while many writers have dourly pointed out that “publishing is a business”, I often think about the ways in which we can use this line of thinking to pull at its logical seams—instead of hungering for sales or visibility, we may very well apply the DIY ethos when it comes to art-making, without deluding ourselves that the output will still remain a cultural product, only because we can’t escape it. Much like how the ethics around polyamory (i.e. interdependence instead of co-dependence; communication always; allowing space for romance to manifest in friendships, etc) can be applied towards a fulfilling monogamous relationship, I can make art that doesn’t lean on pre-emption, palatability or ease.
It’s a certain discontent with content that is unique to today’s accelerationism, which as Dwight MacDonald puts forward in “Masscult and Midcult”, his 1960 indictment of the middlebrow culture he was witnessing at the time, “offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience”. He continues: “The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, for this too implies life and hence effort, but merely distraction. It may be stimulating or narcotic, but it must be easy to assimilate.” This is most prominent in the rise of k-culture and East Asian hypervisibility, which when interpreted within the dynamics of the so-called “liberal” west feeds into racial capitalism; faultless within a certain kind of manufactured juvenility. Pair this with Sianne Ngai’s definition of “cute” in Our Aesthetic Categories—“the subject’s affective response to an imbalance of power between themself and the object”—and we have a formula for success.
We can see this in the hunger for niches too, ostensibly “new” genres of art and culture that really are pastiches of the past, and which cultural critic Dean Kissick has categorised as “meaningless temporal ‘ultra-contemporary’”. In the internet age the line between “masscult” and what MacDonald goes on in the above-mentioned essay to describe as “midcult” (i.e. so-called universal art “that are enough to impress the midbrows without worrying them”) continues to blur, “to be mined for $$$$, used for something it is not”. Context collapses, folk artists and autodidacts become subsumed, &c. More next month.
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A few updates before you leave…
What have I been doing? What haven’t I been doing? In the three months since I haven’t updated this newsletter, I’ve worked on a new issue of Meanjin, guest edited a special edition of Portside Review—on Singapore, with my dear friend Nina Chabra—as well as a new series of the Liminal Review of Books. I also launched a strictly-online reviews section over at Meanjin, featuring short-form reviews of new and upcoming Australian literature. And you thought editing was just sitting around looking at words…
I’ve also published these pieces of writing:
On digital colonialism for the ArtsGen k(not) project.
A short prose poem on the subject of “heroes” for The Age Saturday’s Spectrum pull-out.
A review of Paddy O’Reilly’s Other Houses, for The Guardian.
A profile of Rita Baghdadi, who directed Slave to Sirens, a intimate, genre-bending documentary on Lebanese all-female metal band Sirens, for The Big Issue.
On how contemporary novels need to fucking DO BETTER at depicting our online lives, for Kill Your Darlings.
And these Q&As, if you’re so inclined: 1) with Writers Victoria on my critical practice, and 2) with the Melbourne International Film Festival (where I’ll be a mentor at the Critics’ Campus).
Further, I’ll be appearing at three events in Narrm/Melbourne in the next fortnight, first as part of Snack Syndicate’s THESE THOUGHTS LARGE & PUBLIC program on labour. You can tune in via the radio station if you aren’t able to attend.
More info here.
You’ll find out the other two in due time, as they have yet to be announced.
Reading: Either/Or – Elif Batuman; Watching: Nothing, because I’m preparing for MIFF, starting off with Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Battlecry (2021).