Strange Machinery
2016: A time of crisis, a time for invocations of apocalypse, a time of escalating political and ecological catastrophe and the mass sense that late capitalism is a death machine that must fall. That September Miranda Trimmier lands in the Tucson desert from New York, dragging along the questions on so many others’ lips. How to compose oneself in the face of such upheaval? The usual answers won’t hold. Lost and disoriented, Trimmier embarks on a sprawling project to map the impasse, constellating between past and present stories of displacement and destruction, looking for the scrappy nuts and bolts of another kind of politics. Each essay becomes as much an unlearning as a learning. Visits to a Utah ghost town confront frontier dreams of freedom while asking what people have made of the rubble. A method-acting turn as a noir detective follow the dirty, racist legacies of LA oil production into an investigation of what activist storytelling can and can’t redress. Consideration of a failed quantum computer novella opens onto a tour of Bay Area tech centers and questions about solidarity an increasingly computer-captured world. Part crisis memoir, part experimental genealogy of US violence, part prehistory of a cyborg future and the latest fascist surge, Strange Machinery is record of what one writer does when the only path lies in inquiry, contingency, and a creative process that can’t parry brokenness.
Infinite Text Collective
The Infinite Text Collective is a vibrant space for critical-creative writing. Beyond the bounds of institutional pressures and disciplinary constraint, against the depredations of late capitalism, my co-founder Paige Sweet and I are exploring how writing experimentation might help nourish our lived-in creative and ethical praxes. Our sense of purpose and pedagogy grows out of a 15 year friendship built on shared writing and ongoing conversation. We have always talked about whatever was currently lighting up our brains: the supersonic dimensions of Clarice Lispector’s work, quantum computing as a metaphor for collective processing, or any number of other concerns about relationships, politics, and how to embody our convictions. These conversations weren’t academic or aimed at professional advance; they sought inspiration and solace and a deep, playful camaraderie premised on questioning—on experimentation—as a way of life. This is the spirit of collaboration Paige and I hope to cultivate. We launched our first class, Autotheory as Practice, in February 2022, where our theories of self and place mingled and were refined alongside the theories of those who joined us. One year later, we have added workshops and project consultation to what we do. Our name, the Infinite Text Collective, reflects our expanded offerings and is inspired by one participant’s estimation of our class spaces: a loving community pursuing the pleasures of language and the elaboration of infinite texts.