William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on the radio during a University of Virginia football game, and was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize. – David Markson, Vanishing Point (2004).
I’m sitting in a reading room at the Thompson Library at this Ohio State University where I teach. Surreptitiously speaking these words into a voice recorder. A black rectangular machine with a fluffy grey windscreen.
Footnote 1.
I bought it in Bilbao this past summer, having lost my smaller sleeker silver recorder on a road trip around Scotland into which I had been muttering for several years now, even using it to make amateurish radio shows as part of my work as a decolonial arts and education professor.
Footnote 2.
It was that older recorder that I used in Athens during the 2017 documenta 14 exhibition. I still have the file that captured the grating sounds of skateboarders at the Odeon venue, recorded after walking through the archaeological site that has been identified as Aristotle’s Lyceum, although not without controversy, keeping an ear out for the sound work installed there by Post Commodity, a far cry from the silenced environment of this university library. The then members of Postcommodity, Raven Chacon, Cade L. Twist and Cristobal Martinez had used LRAD speakers, often used by law enforcement to disrupt gatherings of protesters, most pointedly at Standing Rock, to play an opera called The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking.
Let me just pause here to say that I’m now putting on my headphones to listen to a pirate recording I made when it was aired on the exhibition’s public radio platform every time at Ile de Sune.
Footnote 3.
It was one of several commissioned soundworks that would be aired on radio stations around the world, and given that I often listened to the radio with my recorder in hand, I was lucky enough to be there at the right time and place, as a radio station in Brazil, Rádio MEC FM Rio de Janeiro, happened to air it.
I will continue speaking while listening on low volume, here in the library, and if there are moments when I pause, I can always edit them out later. Back in Athens, I recall straining my ears to hear the opera, as I walked along the dusty paths between the ruins. I have a recording, but even in listening back to it, I cannot be sure of what I hear, maybe just the seed of a sound.
Speaking of seeds, I would later write a blog post on my Minus Plato blog, platform and persona, 2012-2022, called Listening Like a Seed, Postcommodity with Theophrastus. I used to be a classicist, if that helps.
Footnote 4.
But I didn’t come to the university today to record myself speaking about this. When Marco invited me to write for this issue of FT on Camp, I not only needed to accept to see my words appear here, in a typeface created by the one and only Vier5, who created Pueblo, that accompanied visitors to documenta 14 in Athens, and which I borrowed as the signature typeface of Minus Plato, I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to read Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, ‘Notes on Camp’.
Footnote 5.
I currently have the PDF open on my laptop in front of me, and my plan is to record some verbal notes as I read it. And no, not reread it, as it is somewhat shameful to admit I’ve not read it before.
In doing this, my hope was I could not only transcribe the recording for FT, but also use it in a future radio show.
Footnote 6.
Scrolling through the text, I’m immediately shocked. Sontag’s essay comprises a sequence of 58 notes, numbered almost like footnotes to an unknown other text from elsewhere. I guess I should have been prepared given the title.
And now it has been cited all over the place. Probably within the pages of books in this very room. But now I find myself excitedly googling Sontag camp 58 to see if this numbering has been part of the conversation about the essay.
The second hit is a news article from 2018 about her 54 year old essay. I pause, do the math, and eventually realize that it is the essay, that the essay, that it the essay. That I realize that it, the essay.
And eventually realize that it, the essay, is 58 years old this year. I turn 43 this September, and my narcissism prompts me to scroll to her 43rd note. Maybe it will tell my future.
Footnote 7.
So here it is, the note, and possibly my future. So this is note 43 from Susan Sontag’s note on camp. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness, irony, satire, seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.
Camp introduces a new standard artifice, wait, camp introduces a new standard artifice as an ideal theatricality. I pause, not only because I’m distracted by the harrowing voices of refugees offering their border crossing testimonies during post-commodities opera playing in my ears, but also because I’m stunned by this 43rd note on camp, which seems to encapsulate all I wanted to talk about today. Specifically in the phrase, the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.
I know Sontag isn’t thinking here about the medium of radio, nor the context of the university. But it is immediately unclear to me, scanning the rest of the essay, to what medium Sontag is referring and how it schools a sensibility. Brackets.
Did Sontag write about schooling elsewhere? Close brackets.
Footnote 8.
Closing my laptop, and with it the PDF, I sit back, listening and looking around me, registering how both Sontag’s medium as a writer and that of this reading room is the book.
This prompts me to reach for my backpack, and for a slender tome, David Markson’s Collected Poems from 1993. Whenever I am here, and whenever I think about Sontag, I’m reminded of Markson. When I have transcribed this, I will place an epigraph. (I almost said epitaph, to a tramp, a deadbeat). By Markson at the top of the page. Let me tell you why.
Footnote 9.
A few years ago, I worked with the staff at the University Libraries to purchase Markson’s archive from his family. He wrote his novels on notecards, and after his death in 2010, they had been sitting in shoeboxes in a closet.
Tragically, or predictably given the priorities of the corporate university, there simply wasn’t the available funds to purchase the archive. This doesn’t stop me, when I’m in this building, dreaming of what could have been. Just think of the scholars and students who could learn from this archive.
The letters unsent, the notecards left unpublished. As I make these voice notes, I’m meant to be writing an essay for an edited book on Markson. I’m seriously late, and I’ve barely started it, so you may not even see the light of day.
The essay is provisionally called ‘Unsettling Recognition: the Decolonial Option of Markson’s Theory of Art in ‘White Apache’ from 1956 and The Last Novel from 2007.
Footnote 10.
I plan to trace Markson’s early engagement with William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955), and its aesthetics and ethics of recognition in his early short story, published in the Saturday Evening News, called ‘White Apache’. I read this simple story and the western genre in terms of Markson’s engagement with Native American history, experience, and sovereignty throughout his career, from conversations with Vine Deloria at the Lion’s Head Pub, to incorporating quotations by Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Conchise, accompanying a disparaging reference by Mark Twain to Fenmore Cooper’s work and its representation of Native Americans in his final work, The Last Novel.
As part of my research on this paper, I came across a letter to Markson from Malcolm Lowry, from February 1957, that not only discusses Gaddis’ The Recognitions, a copy of which Markson had sent to Lowry previously, in the publication of ‘White Apache’, but also another earlier work by Markson called The Happiest Gun Alive, from 1957. According to the notes, to the letter, this was an essay on the historical gunslinger Clay Allison. However, I was able to track it down, and is in fact a work of fiction based on Clay’s life.
Furthermore, it has some of the camp ironic style of humor found in Markson’s early novel, Ballad of Dingus McGee, from 1966, but which is curiously missing from ‘White Apache’. Lowry, in the same letter, notes how Markson had been unhappy with proposed edits by the Saturday Evening Post, so perhaps he had to remove some of the humor, another question that could have been put to the archive, if only it were here. To my knowledge, no one has written anything about Markson’s ‘The Happiest Gun Alive’, and so in an email to the editors of the edited volume, I shared the news, along with a PDF of the text.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me group.
Footnote 11.
Camp. Medium. Books.
Sontag. Right. So instead of writing this Markson essay, or reading Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’, I am here to tell you about a poem by Markson that addresses Sontag, included in his collected poems.
It begins as follows.
Susan Sontag says
She owns fifteen thousand books
And has not only read them
All, but reads them over
And over.
I find this extraordinarily impressive.
Markson’s poem is called ‘See Susan Read’, and I return to it now here in the library, speaking into a voice recorder as part of an ongoing interest in radio, not as a medium, but as a method. A few months ago, when I first thought about what I wanted to write for FT, I was searching online for Sontag on the radio. I came across a recording of a lecture that she delivered at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, back in 1964, the same year Notes on Camp was published.
58 notes, 58 years ago. I like to nap while listening to the radio, and to be honest I prefer the radio rather than a podcast or another type of recording, because I think there’s something about falling in and out of sleep knowing that I’m not able to catch everything, and perhaps will not have a chance to hear it again. It makes the nap all the more delicious.
Not that I know about these things, since I’ve yet to read Sontag’s essay, but there could be something of the camp about listening to the radio today. Not just the quaintness of tuning in to the rants of right-wing ideologues like Clay Travis and Buck Sexton in the car on my way back from teaching critical race theory to college students.
Footnote 12.
But also the way it has fallen out of the media saturation that otherwise tries to school our sensibility in our contemporary moment. Think of how much is written and produced for and on so-called social media. Radio feels more like the magazine you are holding.
Footnote 13.
Unlike Sontag, I have no designs of pronouncing some new sensibility.
I’m speaking here just to mark the passing of time by remembering a half listened to recording from 1964 when I was dreaming of listening to the radio. It’s a way for me to keep count, which brings me back to Markson, picking up where he left off in ‘See Susan Read’:
Fifteen thousand books is one
Book a day, every day, for
Forty-one years.
I would have to look up when Markson’s poem was written. Yes, I know I could do the math again, but maybe I can leave that for you this time. The slim tome doesn’t provide this information.
I’ve still not read ‘Notes on Camp’, but I have the feeling that like the recorded lecture I listened to while napping, it would include multiple uses of the word sensibility, a word that now makes me think of the idea of curriculum and being schooled.
Footnote 14.
By the way, this university where I’m speaking to you from, and where I teach, was founded thanks to the 1862 Morrill Act, providing an endowment from the federal government generated from the sale of expropriated indigenous land, none of which was from the state of Ohio, since by then all the tribes had been removed.
I wonder if we have been able to purchase Markson’s archive, if there would have been a letter between him and Vine Deloria about Native American sovereignty, it could have been added to the under commons of the land grab university to counter the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.
Footnote 15.
Okay, enough, let me, sorry, let me get off my soapbox and back to the poem in the book in the library. Before I do, I just remembered there’s another Markson archive, the books he left the Strand Bookstore in New York.
His last work was to ask his children to donate his vast library there, many of which contained extensive marginalia. There used to be an amazing website called Reading Markson Reading, created by Tyler Malone, that posted images of this marginalia sent in by owners of the Markson books he bought at the Strand.
Footnote 16.
Much of it was somewhat disgruntled, the marginalia, not unlike the Sontag poem.
Speaking of which, reading the next part of the poem, I often wonder if Markson had scribbled into the pages of any of these tomes and if so where and in whose library are they now?
One book a day meaning including fat
Books such as The Anatomy of Melancholy and
Jean-Christophe, and hard
Books such as Kant and the Tractatus and Paul Celan, and which
Is incidentally only five, and so would still leave
Susan’s weekend.
Not to add that if she were to skip that for, say,
Just this once for a couple of late
Nights out or who knows? even some writing
Of her own, whew, nonstop
Through Aeschylus and Lacan and Finnegans Wake
On Monday.
The name of one of these books jogged a memory of my dad which just flickered across my mind and caused me to pause.
Footnote 17.
(I’m still listening).
Markson’s writing on writing and art in general is often infused with a morbidity that can startle us in its bluntness. Here’s a random sampling.
Kant almost certainly died a virgin.
Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.
Devon, Jean Rhys, died in.
Philip Larkin died of cancer of the esophagus.
Only hours afterwards, a twenty-five-volume diary that he’d kept for almost fifty years was destroyed by one of his executors.
And here we find an expansion contained within one page, page 58, of course, of his novel Reader’s Block (1996).
Friends die.
And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died
Of starvation and typhus.
Francoise-Palleau-Papin’s This Is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson, published in 2007, is the only book-length study of Markson, and it offers an analysis of this single page in a section called ‘Reading a Page’, noting its striking associations between individual deaths, collective deaths, and death camps. Speaking of the latter, and still listening and thinking about radio, elsewhere, Markson writes:
I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald, pleaded Edward R. Murrow, on transatlantic radio, after reporting much the same soon thereafter.
Footnote 18.
The library is now bustling with students, and I gotta go teach.
So let me wrap this up. Sontag once told an interviewer, years after ‘Notes on Camp’, that how to name a sensibility, that was the problem, I started from, and then looked for a model. Morbidity was my first choice, producing ‘Notes on Camp’ instead of ‘Notes on Death’.
The Ears between Worlds are always Wpeaking has ended. Verge FM, the radio station that has hosted two of my radio shows, dear fellow settler colonizer, and This Decoloniality?, is ending next month, November 2022, although I’m still thinking about radio as method, as a temporary site of unlearning.
Footnote 19.
Meanwhile, this is how Markson’s ‘See Susan Read’ also comes to an end.
I did indicate that I’m impressed?
(And to think we haven’t even gotten
To the over and over
Part yet?)
And yet is where we are, reading and following these footnotes on Markson to Sontag and on radio, which maybe one day, if listened to, will send someone to sleep in a distant land.
Footnote 20.
1. I’m not actually doing this. I’m at home in a different kind of library, my, I guess, my personal library. And today is March 29th, 2025, which is two something years later than the words I was just reading were written, which was back in October 2022.
2. I’ve written in my little book here, write, say something about what that means. Decolonial arts and education professor, well, minus Plato, question mark, which you’re listening to this or reading this on, was inspired by a looking forward to the 10 year anniversary of the exhibition Documenta 14 that took place in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017. And as part of a kind of transition from the discipline of classics, where I used to teach the ancient Mediterranean culture and philosophy and literature to our education, which is the department and field I teach in right now, I used the education program at Documenta 14 that was named an education as a kind of crutch, really, in many ways to make that transition and to kind of recenter my foundational knowledge from ancient cultures of the Mediterranean to this exhibition, which had the subtitle Learning from Athens. And I’ve been thinking about and trying to theorize myself what continuing the an education program beyond the scope of the exhibition means, and that’s how I dubbed arts and education with the kind of ring of arts and education, arts and education. And this is necessarily a decolonial act, because here, and we’ll talk a bit about this in future footnotes, I am a guest on this land here in Ohio, which is the ancestral land of the Shawnee, the Miami, the Wyandotte, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Delaware, Peoria, Cherokee and other nations. And so to return to this learning from Athens, which itself, that exhibition centered global Indigenous artists. And we’ll talk about some of those artists in future footnotes. And so I kind of created this field really for myself, which kind of kept going back to this exhibition, while also grounding myself here where I live and teach.
3. So just like today’s date not being the date in which the text was written, and that I’m not sitting in a university library, but in my home, in my personal library, there’s another fiction in what I just said, which is that there was no pirate recording of The Ears Between Worlds, Always Speaking, but a gift, a sound file shared with me by one of the members of Post Commodity, and which I have playing in the background as I speak. When I was in the university library I was listening to this, but now you get to hear it alongside my words. Speaking of pirate radio, I just wanted to acknowledge the work of Diné artist Autumn Chacon and her conception of pirate radio, that has a lot to do with indigenous sovereignty not limited to the land, but also to the airwaves.
4. Kind of like a correction, I was writing this in October 2022, after I’d ended Minus Plato after 10 years, earlier that spring. But this past fall, in 2024, I restarted Minus Plato, not because I was returning in any way to my former life as a classicist, but because I wanted to prepare for the 10 year anniversary of the exhibition in 2027. I also was getting tired of sharing only on social media, and the blog, the website and the platform became a really important third space for me to share my work, and especially in bridging the writing of a blog and the recording through other radio experiments as well. So I used to be a classicist, if that helps, and I’m still not a classicist, if that helps.
5. So what I’m reading here is a text called Footnotes on Radio that I wrote for Marco Fiedler for the magazine FT, and FT, Fairy Tale, was a magazine that was created by the graphic design company Vier5, which comprised of Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichart. They no longer work together, but this project and the typeface that I mentioned, Pueblo, was created for Documenta 14 to be the kind of signature image branding, as it were, of Athens during that exhibition. And I’ve been really, you know, just as Post Commodity don’t have the same members anymore, so my memory and my going back to their work includes a kind of splitting from the members that are gone on solo projects and the members that still work as Postcommodity. Same thing happens with Vier5 as well. So I was grateful to Marco for inviting me. So my words, as I said, as I wrote, could be in a font typeface created by them. But also with Achim, I’m very grateful to him for, just before the pandemic, there was an exhibition here in Columbus at the Beeler Gallery, the Columbus College of Art and Design, curated by Jo-ey Tang, that was called Follow the Mud. And Vier5 created the posters and all the kind of design features of the sequence of exhibitions that included various artists, including Michel Auder, who was also a participant in Documenta 14, filmmaker, video maker, diarist. And just as the pandemic was beginning, Achim came to Columbus to do a talk, and I was going to have a conversation with him about the importance of Vier5’s Pueblo typeface for my work as Minus Plato. But I was sick at the time, not with COVID, but with something else. And so I had to not meet him. I couldn’t meet him, but I sent a sound recording to kind of participate. At the same time, we also activated the work Impostors by les gens d’Uterpan, Frank Apertet and Annie Vigier, who are choreographers, dancers, who were also part of documenta 14. And this retrospective book was printed on fabric, and we wrapped it around the CCAD professor. And so both I’m deeply grateful to Marco and Achim for not only their amazing work at documenta 14 and beyond, but also for allowing me the gift of using the Pueblo typeface in my writing with Minus Plato. And that includes this blog post today, which the text “footnotes to” is written in the Pueblo typeface.
6. in my notebook I’ve just written, the future has arrived. The question of what makes this radio is kind of an open one for me. I think of radio as a method, a methodos, a way. And while you will encounter this on SoundCloud, the way it’s made is within the spirit of radio. And hopefully I’ll be able to reflect on that in future footnotes.
7. Note 7. So when I submitted the text to Marco back in October 2022, when he said it would finally be published, and it was only just published this spring here in 2025, he said, oh, I’ve caught some typos, I need to make some edits. And Marco said, no edits. And so my typos were included in there. So me just stumbling over reading it, that it, the essay, is 58 years old. I guess there could be a couple of commas, that it, comma, the essay, comma, is 58 years old. But you know, these footnotes can also be a chance for me to catch my typos as well.
8. I guess a typical footnote might look that up and find out if Sontag had talked about schooling elsewhere. But these are not your usual footnotes. In many ways, returning to this essay written a few years ago, published recently on footnotes, I’m thinking about my engagement with footnotes more generally. For example, I have a Minus Plato post called Another Wex Is Possible: Footnotes for Collective Feminist Resistance, which was a talk that I delivered in the Wexner Center Store here in Columbus, Ohio. And I was inspired by a text by Anna Dezeuze called ‘Footnotes on Uchronia’, which is a contribution to another book by choreographers and artists, les gend d’Uterpan, which is a series of footnotes without a main text. And my interest in footnotes is in this post, but goes back further. In my book, No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life Under Trump, published after his first term, during his first term, the last words of it are, we are not his footnotes. And that we is a kind of aspirational we. And the he there is both Plato and Trump, the authoritarian proto-fascist dictators of truth. And a kind of opposition or resistance movement gathering in the footnotes, which is itself a feminist principle. I can’t remember which author said, we speak to each other in the footnotes. I think a lot about, because I’m teaching it this semester, Cheryl Harris’s text, ‘Whiteness as Property’, and the work of Kandis Williams and Cassandra Press, which is an investigation of the footnotes of Harris’s iconic essay from the early 90s, and an addition and supplement of new footnotes to her essay. But also in this footnote, when thinking about schooling, I’ve already mentioned Trump, but thinking back to that library space on campus, I remember being there with a group of students for justice in Palestine, doing a silent protest against the university’s complicity in the genocidal violence in Gaza and the West Bank. And we’ve seen this really come to its head in recent weeks, with the political abductions of Palestinian protesters, or those protesting the genocide across university campuses in the US, Columbia University and so forth, and the appeasement of the Trump regime through these horrific actions against students. And then also faculty who’ve raised our voices against what we see as wrong and against the violence.
And this text may have been written before October 7th, 2023, but within the text are the seeds of settler colonialism that were deeply ongoing in Israel and in the US and beyond. And the violence was to come, but also in the past at that time.
9. Since writing this, I seem to have misplaced my copy of David Markson’s Collected Poems. It must be somewhere, maybe among these shelves in front of me, maybe in my campus office. It’s actually a very rare book now, very slender volume. Markson was a novelist, famous for his notecard approach to writing, where he’d write down anecdotes about writers, philosophers, artists, and piece them together in a kind of narrative that only emerged through the juxtaposition of these lives of others. The phrasing I just read though, every time, or whenever I am here, and whenever I think about Sontag, I’m reminded of Markson, is the same phrase I use when thinking about the Shawnee poet Laura Da’. That whenever I hear a land acknowledgement or a reference to the Shawnee as one of the removed tribes from Ohio, I think about the poetry of Laura Da’. Markson and Laura Da’ will meet in a future footnote.
10. So, to this day, that article has never been published. I did finish it, and I ended up submitting it to a book that then, the edited volume didn’t materialize, so I tried to submit it to other articles. And I changed the title to: ‘Lazarus Riding Home: Settler Colonial Recognitions in David Markson’s ‘White Apache’ (1956), ‘The Happiest Gun Alive’ (1957), and ‘Ringo’ (1957). The title ‘Lazarus Riding Home’ comes from Laura Da’, the poet I just mentioned in the previous footnote. And actually, as far as I know, other than the editors of the book that never materialized, and the journal that rejected it, the only other person that’s read this essay is Laura Da’, because I sent it to her, because it engages with her work.
11. Correction. Let me regroup. So let me regroup.
12. This listening to the radio in the car and listening to right-wing radio specifically is something that I’ve documented in some of my radio show experiments. Specifically last year, 2024, I had a radio show called Radio Insistence that had sometimes weekly episodes throughout the whole year that were aligned with my teaching, and I shared with my students and beyond. And it also included my response to the aggressive suppression of Palestinian protests on the Ohio State University campus on April 25th, 2024, the anniversary of which is coming up in under a month. And Radio Insistence was inspired by the Aluutiq/Sugpiak artist Tanya Lukin Linklater and her concept of insistence. In short, it’s a daily practice that sometimes comes to visibility but also has a certain amount of opacity to it as well. It’s an Indigenous concept that she generously let me take up as a non-indigenous person to center it and focus on it and think through it using radio as an insistent form in that process. As for teaching critical race theory to college students, that was kind of a joke, at the same time it’s something I do, but it’s also the way the right-wing imagine a professor like me in my classroom indoctrinating students. So much so that yesterday, Senate Bill 1 passed the Ohio legislature, which is meant to get rid of all diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, to temper controversial topics, to instill a kind of all-side-ism of intellectual diversity, impose a course on American civics, and many other issues as well. We’ve been fighting this bill on campus and beyond for over two years now. It first materialized as Senate Bill 83, and finally it was been signed by the governor, and thousands of students, faculty, Ohio citizens protested against it, but it was still passed through our gerrymandered Republican state legislature. This obviously aligns with federal policies in the Trump administration as well. CRT, critical race theory, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, all part of the woke virus in our culture. But what they don’t tell you is the indoctrination, the limiting of views, is all in the wheelhouse of the right. And our students are not going to stand for it. They haven’t stood for it. And we’ll see what happens, but I’m going to continue my work as a faculty member in support of the students.
13. Marco, in making this issue of FT, which I’m holding in my hand, you can hear the magazine after the list of contents. Other contributors included Ed Fella, who helped design the poster. My text. Ken Lum, the artist. Olivier Subra did the drawings. There’s a lost and found photo. And above that photo is the text, forget social media when you can make your own magazine. And I appreciate that I’m bringing this text from the magazine to the internet, but I hope in doing so through this transforming medium of sound and voice, it still takes on some form that can’t be contained within the social media framework as well.
It reminds me a bit of the next documentary exhibition, Documenta 15, and I’ll just state here that it’s very unlikely I’ll be going to the next one. Documenta 16, mainly for the reasons that are also akin with the suppression of supportive Palestinian people here on campus is the way in which antisemitism has been weaponized by the German government and by the Documenta organizers. And so Documenta 16 is something I may not see.
But I did go to Documenta 15 and I decided to use radio as my kind of mechanism to navigate that space. And I created a show called Desire Lines in the Air: Radio as Methodos, where I would go to all the artworks and make little radio recordings and then release them. This was akin with the project of Lumbung, which means rice barn, collective rice barn, where you gather the excess and share it with your community. And this created the project of Lumbung Radio, which is still going and which is an inspiration for the kind of radio work that I do. So every time I had a sound from documenta 14 and then Lumbung Radio from Documenta 15, there’s an important link between those two projects, not least by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa who participated in documenta 14 for their radio program and they were the directors of Documenta 15.
14. In addition to Senate Bill 1, legislation was passed in the Ohio House and Senate. Well, we’ll come back to that in a minute. Back in the summer of 2023, that imposed intellectual diversity centers on Ohio university campuses, public university campuses. This was Senate Bill 117, which was never even heard in the House and smuggled through the budget. And so this created something called the Salmon P. Chase Center. This center is headed by an originalist scholar called Lee Strang. And they, through the legislature, they were able to hire 14 faculty members. And they’re going to have their own curriculum and everything like that. However, they were not passed through the university Senate. And so they were kind of a legitimate, independent place on the university campus. And I’ve recently been embroiled in debates around their curriculum, about how they can teach, kind of bypassing the usual curricular rules of the university. And so when thinking about schooling and being schooled, this center that really has the most narrow view of what it means to be an American, very originalist, going back to the founding documents, not necessarily to kind of give broad education to students, but actually to kind of limit what constitutes an American identity and American citizenship. And so, yeah, schooling and curriculum are all aligned there with the Chase Center.
15. If you think about the Chase Center, it’s about the land-grant university and the mission of education for citizenship. But what happens if we maintain the truth of the land-grab and as settlers reckon with that history and the legacies of it? And that this land that the university resides on, that occupies, is generative in ways and is abundant in ways that cannot be contained within settler colonial structures, whether here in the US or in Israel.
16. I guess a footnote is a good place for an anecdote. So when I found out that David Markson had passed away and that his children had donated his library to the Strand Bookshop in New York, I was in Bilbao, so the same place I was where my partner’s from, I was there. I was unable to travel to New York to see if I could find some of Markson’s books. So, what I did was I ordered, I was then a classicist and I knew that Markson had quoted Plato in his novels, so I ordered two copies of the complete works of Plato in the hope that I would find Markson’s Plato. So I had to wait until I got back to campus several weeks later and I had two boxes waiting for me. I opened one, looked in the box, found the copies of Plato, no marginalia, no Markson’s name.I opened up the second one and there he was, under the Strand Bookstore sticker, David Markson. I looked to the end of Plato’s Fido and the death of Socrates and there was underlined a quote that he’d used in The Last Novel, Markson’s last text.
17. A footnote would record which of the texts reminded me of my father, but these aren’t usual footnotes, but it’s nice to think of him here and think of my grief. It’s been five years since he passed and I remember I’m very grateful to the Listen Gallery in Glasgow for letting me create a series of radio works. One of them was about grief, it’s called Grief Listens, and I created a radio work for my dad that day.
18. From Buchenwald to Gaza, never again.
19. These two radio shows, I guess, paved the way for this. I’m really grateful to Verge FM for hosting them, and for dear fellow settler colonizer. I had an ongoing dialogue with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, as well as with Indigo Gonzalez-Miller, and those conversations really got me to understand my kind of path in this work that doesn’t forget who I am as I send to the voices of indigenous artists. This Decoloniality? was an interesting one. I only had three episodes of it, but it was like I was meant to be writing a book. And to quote Cannupa, it’s not like you’re writing a book, you’re making radio, you’re having a conversation. And I often wonder about how to translate this, what I say, what I speak into a book, and like what responsibilities come with that, especially when others’ voices are part of it. I’m just looking at my desk here, and I have the most recent issue of Inuit art quarterly looking back at me, which is dedicated to Northern Voices, a radio show for the Inuit.
And so, Inuktitut on the airwaves. But I think there’s still space for critical settler radio communication that knows its place, that knows what it can say from where it is, but it can never be alone. It has to be in relation all the time. I think that’s why I’m so grateful to Tanya Lukin Linklater, because she supported that in Radio Insistence. I’m reminded also of Markson. Oh wait, by the way, The Ears between Worlds are Always Speaking, hasn’t finished. I just turned it down for dramatic effect before. I’m reminded of Markson because in some letters to a friend he wrote, she said that, oh, you should read this blog post about your work. And he replied, I’m not reading a blog post about my work. How can anyone live in a first draft world? And sometimes when I submit essays to journals and things like that, I have that at the end of my essays. I try to live in a first draft world. Admittedly, this is a series of footnotes that isn’t a first draft, but there’s something about radio that has the sensibility of the first draft that the podcast can never achieve and the writing can never achieve. The grain of the voice and all else that comes with it. Maybe the sound of two dogs running across the kitchen floor, wanting to be let out. I’ll let you out in a minute.
20. To wherever you’re listening to this, whether it’s in a distant land or here. I mean, of course, not here. I’m just knocking on the words on the other side, waving at you through this voice to your ears. Thinking about the intimacy of the film No Other Land, the one in Oscar last month. A Palestinian and Israeli in shared solidarity against the occupation.
The violence that they are joined and join themselves against differently.