Glasgow book launches

I am launching Chimeras and Nothing As We Need It at Good Press in Glasgow on 18th April.

The event is organised by the Art Writing MLitt at the Glasgow School of Art.

https://goodpress.co.uk/pages/events

Saying Nothing: A Conversation with Daniela Cascella

Saying Nothing is a conversation I had with Tristan Foster around my two recent books, Chimeras and Nothing As We Need It.

It is the third instalment in an ongoing conversation that Tristan and I began in 2017. You can also read Part 1 – Some Speaking After-Speaking and Part 2 – Spirit Training.

Malagola

Just back from Ravenna, where I led two seminars on Voice, Voices, VOCE, listening, reading, dialects, transcelations…. at the wonderful Malagola: Scuola di vocalità e centro internazionale di studi sulla voce organised by Ermanna Montanari and Enrico Pitozzi.

A Sound That Never Was / I Want To Break Into The Leaping Sea

I Want To Break Into The Leaping Sea is my response to Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s book Voice Of Hearing. The text was commissioned by The Dim Coast as part of the project A Sound That Never Was, ‘a new digital instrument that generates a score writ from software code modulated by weather data and seismic activity’, with contributions by Félicia Atkinson, Matthew Cardinal, Raven Chacon, crys cole, Isabella Forciniti, David Grubbs, Timothy Herzog, Sasha J. Langford, Mani Mazinani, Christof Migone, Marc A. Reinhardt, Anju Singh, Aho Ssan, Mark Templeton.

Words Are My Warders But Don’t Keep An I On Me (Words Are My Worders)

Words Are My Warders But Don’t Keep An I On Me (Words Are My Worders) is a text commissioned by Samuel Brzeski for the Vibrational Semantics project at Lydgalleriet, Bergen. The series also includes texts by Cia Rinne, Holly Pester, Lisa Busby.

Download here

A Year of Carte Blanche and Other Chimeras – final instalment and summary

A Year of Carte Blanche and Other Chimeras, the series I have commissioned for MAP Magazine since November 2022, comes to a close this week.

Here are the contributions to the last instalment, and a summary page with links to all the pieces in the series.

Julia Calver, Vocal Recall: Reading for a Friend’s Voice

Gemma Blackshaw, The Sick Train, Part 1 and Part 2

Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright, Listening with Eunice

Autumn Richardson, A Prayer to Tláloc – Fragments of an Invocation 

YouTube book launch

On 12 October I spoke with Jennifer Hodgson about my two new books, Nothing As We Need It and Chimeras.

The conversation is now on YouTube.

Chimeras, new book and launches

My new book Chimeras is now published on Sublunary Editions, and available here.

On 12 October I will be in conversation with Jennifer Hodgson on Zoom, to talk about Chimeras and its non-identical twin volume Nothing As We Need It, published by Punctum Books / Risking Education. 

You can register here.

On 22 November I will launch both books at Good Press in Glasgow, in conversation with Kate Briggs. The launch is organised by the Art Writing MLitt at Glasgow School of Art. 

I will also present the books at Arnolfini Bristol on 18 October, in the inaugural event of the Writing In Through To Art (WITTA) series curated by Lizzie Lloyd, which will feature readings and presentations by Polly Barton and myself. 

Chimeras is a book concerned with silences, the unspoken undercurrents of untranslated texts. Prompted by the author’s encounters with the lesser-known prose by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72), and with the essays and letters by the Italian writer and translator Cristina Campo (1923-77), Cascella finds her voice in the uneasy space where there seems to be little to say because there is too much that is difficult to articulate; and she asks what happens in writing before translation, what faint signals may be heard, and how to transmit them.

The resulting text presents three approaches to writing in these conditions, all of them arguing for a writing of criticism as kinship, resonance, conversation, entanglement, haunting. In the Deranged Essay the author’s conflicts, euphorias, struggles in reading Campo and Pizarnik become part of the text rather than being excluded; in the Imaginary Conversation, written in the lineage and in the artificial tones of the ancient Dialogues of the Dead, she talks with Campo and Pizarnik drawing on their letters and journals, allowing her words to merge with theirs, in the gaps she found while studying their archives, where evidence is missing and another form of thinking with their works can be imagined and written; finally, the Transcelation is a text written in the form of the making and the tolling of a bell, fusing the old bronze of Campo’s prose into the author’s own, attempting to transmit Campo’s tone, working with the resonance of her words to the point where it is no longer clear who is commenting on whom, transforming, interfering, repeating, as footnotes overspill and become frayed, fictional, confused.

A Year of Carte Blanche and Other Chimeras – June, July, August issues

Upreference (from the urn-taciturn)
editorial, by Daniela Cascella
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/upreference-fron-the-urn

By Night, Tidal City
Ella Finer and James Wilkes
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/by-night-tidal-city

Object-Urn
by Dan Beachy-Quick and Kylan Rice
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/object-urn

Rhythm: The Subtle Noise of Prose, That Road of Many Songs
editorial, by Daniela Cascella
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/rhythm-the-subtle-noise-of-prose-that-road-of-many-songs

On Repentance
by Snejanka Mihaylova
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/on-repentance

Unremembering
by Jen/Eleana Hofer
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/unremembering-2

Singing, Fading
editorial, by Daniela Cascella
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/singing-fading

To Be Elastic
by Enxhi Mandija
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/to-be-elastic-part-1
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/to-be-elastic-part-2

Too Likeable (To The Side of Rosemary Mayer)
by Alice Butler
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/too-likeable-to-the-side-of-rosemary-mayer-part-1
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/too-likeable-to-the-side-of-rosemary-mayer-part-2

Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera

Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera – the first of two books around Chimeric Writing – is now published on Punctum Books’ new imprint Risking Education, edited by Ansgar Allen and Emile Bojesen:

Nothing As We Need It

The second book, Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation will be published by Sublunary Editions in September.

Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera imagines and writes a composite and impure form of criticism that embodies the writing of research as recursive, entangled, and many-voiced.

Shaped by encounters with literature not translated in English, by the polyphonies, artifices, and concealments of a bilingual self, and by the sense of speechlessness and haunting when writing of works that cannot be instantly quoted, this book’s subtitle derives from the mythological Chimera: a monstrous creature made of three different parts, impossible in theory but real in the imagination and in the reading of the myth. Similarly the book is written in different styles, some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, and disturbing. It manifests critical writing as enmeshment and conversation with its subject matters; favours impurity rather than detachment; embraces exaggeration, repetition, laughter, and self-parody as legitimate forms of knowledge. Yet a chimera also designates the object of a yearning deemed unattainable: this book exists in the space of such yearning, in the tension between words and what exceeds them, their overtones. The critic is exhausted by yearning, rather than the owner of exhaustive knowledge.

A Menippean satire for critical writing, Nothing As We Need It sustains its argument for composite and impure writing in its form. It demands ways of reading equally varied, and wildly imaginative. Listening to literature beyond the limits of textual analysis, it dismisses the visual implications of reflection, which assumes detachment and polished surfaces, in favour of an aural method of resonance, allowing enmeshment and interference. This book unsettles language, welcomes uninhibited exaggeration and wordplay, and manifests possibilities for working with citation beyond the boundaries of inverted commas.