Cirrus@Austlit

'You can write about gender – many do. You can also write about the writtenness of gender, about gender as a form of writing. Many do that too, but what does it really mean?' (Introduction)

'A collection of twenty-seven texts by Snack Syndicate, written over the course of 2016-2020. Published by Discipline, with an introduction by Tom Melick and design by Robert Milne.

'HOMEWORK considers the manifold ways that embodied life (birth, death, love, friendship, solidarity, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship) are conditioned by a world that appears both ruinous and full of potential. Snack Syndicate asks how to read ruins and how to read the prophecy of hope that threads together a long history of survival and struggle. The book offers a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

'“HOMEWORK is done in all those ‘illegitimate’ places, which are everywhere, if one takes the time to look and listen. And even if done in isolation, in all the places where nonhistories live, this work is never done alone. Leave the geniuses to squabble over their canon, the best art usually occurs in kitchens, bedrooms, side-alleys, and public libraries. It is written in the margins, with love, alongside and through what we choose to read and hear. That’s why this book invites snacks, coffee stains, and dog ears on top and bottom, let your notes trespass into and through the text. This is the best way to respond to books, and this book in particular.”—from ‘Homework for Love and Trouble’ by Tom Melick' (Publication summary)

'We find ourselves in love or out of it; in a friendship but with an enemy; under contract; inscribed by the law; giving birth; accompanied by ghosts; making pacts; in pursuit of a lost object; oriented towards new and unknown attachments.

'We find ourselves in a relation, even when that relation is broken or non-reciprocal.

'This book is about relations and their ambiguous intimacies. The three poems approach the question of how to endure, survive, destroy or protect the relationships that both constrain and make life possible.

'I wrote these poems while reading the work of Andrew Brooks, Brandon Brown, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Silvia Federici, Elena Gomez, Stefano Harney, Saidiya Hartman, C L R James, Fred Moten, Jordy Rosenberg, Hortense Spillers, Wendy Trevino and Frank Wilderson III. The three poems that comprise this book are in debt to these thinkers and should be read as marginal notes to their ideas.

'One way to perceive relations is to study them intently and to construct a poetics in their shadow.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'Last year we had a baby, an event that impelled us, literally and figuratively, toward a new body of knowledge. For the duration of the pregnancy - a temporality marked by both abstract and concrete milestones, periods of sickness and hormonal ecstasy, anxiety and optimism, and the intense, relentless, often absurd process of initiation into the bureaucracy of 'health' and the baby industrial complex, or what we came to refer to as Big Baby - we read. We read about gestation, labour, birth, breathing, perineal massage, public health, hospitals, postpartum recovery, baby names, baby equipment. We watched birth videos and listened to birth podcasts. We both work as academics who teach at an art school and so, while we went through the pregnancy, we not only read, we also wrote and taught. We wrote about bodies and the ways they are mediated in contemporary capitalism, we taught courses on the pornographic spectacle, we thought about the gendered and racialised production of subjects, and we studied the violent processes of settlement and the crucial but difficult work of unsettling history.' (Publication abstract) 

Has history another places, we’ll see OK.

— Lionel Fogarty, ‘1788 to the Gates of 2028s’