(post)Occupation
Jo Novelli
These editorial notes are offered as an attempt to return you to the issue of (pre)Occupation. My intention is for these notes to resonate with the tone of the pieces we selected. But please feel free to randomly read this editorial and this issue of Trivia. Occupy yourself.
Beginning at the Beginning
(pre)Occupation emerged as a theme in the late summer of 2012, when I was thinking very intently about my dissertation. I have thought very intently about my dissertation since 2002. My most recent thought is: it’s as done as it’s going to get. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Act of Occupation
(pre)Occupation sits on a nerve that’s very close to the bone in Arizona, a young state that is contiguous with many nations. Here, they name cross-town thoroughfares after institutions like The Indian School, which operated until the mid 20th century. (See Mary Lucking’s Here We Are.)
Editing Snafus
I made more than a few snafus during this, my first guest/co-editing process. There was nothing deft about my blunt comments or the hours I spent trying to re-write without being heavy handed. I made indecipherable promises to deliver all sorts of PDFs and differently tabled contents downloadable from various links across the editorial. As someone interested in the archive and performance studies, I imagined an exhibition of snail mail and handwritten notes, framed as editorial gesture. In any case, I repeatedly burst into laughter and I persisted in trying to make heads or tails of what had accumulated in my inbox, without screwing up all the hard work that my colleagues had been doing. I couldn’t figure out how to write about all the pieces in one editorial statement. Read Patty’s words – I’m pretty sure hers is how an editorial should read: clear and concise, organized and objective.
Why the parenthetical (pre)?
The parenthetical (pre) in our theme emphatically points in the direction of time. It tells of administrative time, written in deadlines and destinations, arrivals and departures. This accurate, Greenwich-centric numeric time of colons and minutes doesn’t feel anything like when you step off a plane in a new and unfamiliar time zone. I wanted to solicit writings to foreground this slippage between the administrative and the lived, the technocratic and the embodied.
The Phenomenology of (pre)Occupation
I thought my primary interest in (pre)Occupation was the phenomenological experience of being preoccupied. Personally, I wanted to understand why nearly every endeavor I took up seemed to preoccupy me and yet I could still be entirely focused on the matter at hand. Philosophically, I wondered about a word that pointed so emphatically in the direction of time, but had no afterward, or after-word. There is not a (post)Occupation of thought, right? This seemed a rich opportunity to get lost in thought and I took it, bumping into all sorts of questions…
How many preoccupations can one person have at any given moment? What specific intensity, emotion, or thought did these preoccupations require? What qualities distinguish one preoccupation from another? What frictions exist between them?
I started paying more attention to how I paid attention. I considered when I became preoccupied and how those gestures resided in my body. I wondered if I could discern such things about contributors’ experiences from the content we would gather in this process.
OWS and (pre)Occupation
(pre)Occupation is also relevant because of the ubiquitous Occupy movements. I was curious about Occupy Wall Street and how our world might have changed as a consequence of the actions in New York. Who were these people gathered in resistance, marching with signs like the one Casebeer made for her brother? I wondered what kinds of jobs they had (or did not have) to afford spending days at a time encamped. Who were the people repeating after Judith Butler in the park? How are their voices articulating the future?
Why capitalize the O?
The O is capitalized, and I intend it to be (although sometimes I forget), to signify that someone has been there before you. La Muñeca’s work insists that we remember. Capitalizing the O is a feminist move.
Why is (pre)Occupation a feminist concern?
Curating this edition is a feminist act: creative and performative. If we did our jobs, it was a generative event that we can propose to you. I just know it. Trivia could act, has acted, as a salon, a place to share writing while surrounded by amazing images. I wanted the writing to hang all around the visuals we’d collected to make mobiles of meaning. I imagined these clusters of thoughts that moved each idea around the other, softly drifting into each other and off the breath of (pre)Occupation.
I began trying to sift the selections into an order, to find themes within the theme.
The creatives we heard from make worlds and futures from their preoccupations. These contributors’ voices are possibly the most feminist gestures of all.
These editorial notes are offered as an attempt to return you to the issue of (pre)Occupation. My intention is for these notes to resonate with the tone of the pieces we selected. But please feel free to randomly read this editorial and this issue of Trivia. Occupy yourself.
Beginning at the Beginning
(pre)Occupation emerged as a theme in the late summer of 2012, when I was thinking very intently about my dissertation. I have thought very intently about my dissertation since 2002. My most recent thought is: it’s as done as it’s going to get. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Act of Occupation
(pre)Occupation sits on a nerve that’s very close to the bone in Arizona, a young state that is contiguous with many nations. Here, they name cross-town thoroughfares after institutions like The Indian School, which operated until the mid 20th century. (See Mary Lucking’s Here We Are.)
Editing Snafus
I made more than a few snafus during this, my first guest/co-editing process. There was nothing deft about my blunt comments or the hours I spent trying to re-write without being heavy handed. I made indecipherable promises to deliver all sorts of PDFs and differently tabled contents downloadable from various links across the editorial. As someone interested in the archive and performance studies, I imagined an exhibition of snail mail and handwritten notes, framed as editorial gesture. In any case, I repeatedly burst into laughter and I persisted in trying to make heads or tails of what had accumulated in my inbox, without screwing up all the hard work that my colleagues had been doing. I couldn’t figure out how to write about all the pieces in one editorial statement. Read Patty’s words – I’m pretty sure hers is how an editorial should read: clear and concise, organized and objective.
Why the parenthetical (pre)?
The parenthetical (pre) in our theme emphatically points in the direction of time. It tells of administrative time, written in deadlines and destinations, arrivals and departures. This accurate, Greenwich-centric numeric time of colons and minutes doesn’t feel anything like when you step off a plane in a new and unfamiliar time zone. I wanted to solicit writings to foreground this slippage between the administrative and the lived, the technocratic and the embodied.
The Phenomenology of (pre)Occupation
I thought my primary interest in (pre)Occupation was the phenomenological experience of being preoccupied. Personally, I wanted to understand why nearly every endeavor I took up seemed to preoccupy me and yet I could still be entirely focused on the matter at hand. Philosophically, I wondered about a word that pointed so emphatically in the direction of time, but had no afterward, or after-word. There is not a (post)Occupation of thought, right? This seemed a rich opportunity to get lost in thought and I took it, bumping into all sorts of questions…
How many preoccupations can one person have at any given moment? What specific intensity, emotion, or thought did these preoccupations require? What qualities distinguish one preoccupation from another? What frictions exist between them?
I started paying more attention to how I paid attention. I considered when I became preoccupied and how those gestures resided in my body. I wondered if I could discern such things about contributors’ experiences from the content we would gather in this process.
OWS and (pre)Occupation
(pre)Occupation is also relevant because of the ubiquitous Occupy movements. I was curious about Occupy Wall Street and how our world might have changed as a consequence of the actions in New York. Who were these people gathered in resistance, marching with signs like the one Casebeer made for her brother? I wondered what kinds of jobs they had (or did not have) to afford spending days at a time encamped. Who were the people repeating after Judith Butler in the park? How are their voices articulating the future?
Why capitalize the O?
The O is capitalized, and I intend it to be (although sometimes I forget), to signify that someone has been there before you. La Muñeca’s work insists that we remember. Capitalizing the O is a feminist move.
Why is (pre)Occupation a feminist concern?
Curating this edition is a feminist act: creative and performative. If we did our jobs, it was a generative event that we can propose to you. I just know it. Trivia could act, has acted, as a salon, a place to share writing while surrounded by amazing images. I wanted the writing to hang all around the visuals we’d collected to make mobiles of meaning. I imagined these clusters of thoughts that moved each idea around the other, softly drifting into each other and off the breath of (pre)Occupation.
I began trying to sift the selections into an order, to find themes within the theme.
The creatives we heard from make worlds and futures from their preoccupations. These contributors’ voices are possibly the most feminist gestures of all.
Don’t believe everything you read.
At one point, I was sure the reason for the journal’s doing was buried in the marginalia and notes from our meetings, which I could cross-reference with quoted email. I spent hours dwelling on an image of my notes and wrote at length about redacting sensitive information. What exactly makes information sensitive? How do you render the event of redacting? And how the hell was I going to demonstrate the likelihood that it is all related to (pre)Occupation?
Weeks later, I scolded myself for still being unfocused on my own writing… It was the Ides of March and I still had no clear editorial statement about (pre)Occupation. I liked the idea of leading with an image followed by several selections of text.
Some Preoccupations:
(these are preoccupations I experienced during the editing process, presented here in no particular order, from memory and notes)
taxes, Hurricane Sandy, illegal marriage, the Ides of March, four more years of Obama, too many shootings, footnotes, love and death, human rights (won, violated, and lost), redaction vs. translation, Niagara Falls, my niece’s birthday, Sandy Hook, travel arrangements, etc.
This is Not the Whole Story
The things, thoughts, and words that don’t translate are sometimes the most important. Not because we don’t get to understand or see them but because they are present in their absence. This is not a news flash, nor is it the whole story. It’s something I learned more about as we edited this selection of texts and images.
Writing the Editorial…
I had to get to work.
I wanted to cluster the submissions into nodes of meaning that overlapped with each other by a hyperlinked essay. That was the answer – it’s the Internet, couldn’t we just link it all together? Then I realized this idea was so very 1999, and re-focused on social media. If you like the Trivia Facebook page, you will see these quotes again:
Say no and be exclusive; say yes and be in danger.
The Tent, Cathy Bryant
She studied the stained tan carpet, looking for feet in the opposite dressing room, but only saw piles of clothes dumped on the floor.
Voices, Janet Yung
Acknowledgement is a lush loam for sympathy.
Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics, Renee Guillory
What if it weren’t so easy to blame children?
A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken, Jane Attanucci
When I go out for a run and wonder if I’ve had enough to eat that day to sustain me, I think of men dragging sledges of 180 pounds across crevasses and stubborn, wet snow.
Finding Edges, Jen Urso
Things were going well, I thought, until the five-hour date went to use the bathroom. He must have accidently touched something because a stack of something came tumbling down in the hallway.
Occupy Me, C.O. Moed
A Long Time Ago
I wrote a little bit about each submission, vowing to somehow illustrate how concrete and dynamic they were. This just generated longer notes and more elaborate mind maps. My preoccupation with each selection also conveniently delayed the moment when I’d have to stake a claim in my writing and tie all these bits together around a thread of thought that’s unnecessarily punctuated: (pre)Occupation. Then I realized, I will write until Easter and not finish all I have to say on the matters.
RE: Falling
It was a relief to read something about falling that did not have to do with falling from a 110-story building or improvisational dance. Has anyone else noticed how many images of falling people we’ve seen since the World Trade Center crashed to the ground? Go to the movies… all the drama happens while the protagonist free falls from the highest possible point… if someone isn’t falling, there’s a high speed mass transit emergency – like a runaway train or 911 calls gone awry. It’s not my imagination, nor is it a red flag, nor an accurate chronology.
RE: Sussland’s Paintings
Colorless iridescence is what it might look like to be (pre)Occupied.
Looking all the world like a queer Ed Mell painting, Karolina Sussland’s Sunset 2 (the colorful one) tells the story of a fantastically low horizontal event. While the saturation of the colors, lack of modeling, and clean lines suggest a flattened space, her palette reaches for all the colors of real sunsets in the desert, the hues that defy reproduction. In White Sunset #3, she reduces this fantasy to “interference gold” on a white ground. All golden-ness, she reduces the imagined sunsets of Arizona Highways to a scrim of shimmering transparency. From a distance (the remove from which you watch a sunset, btw), the canvases appear white.
RE: La Muñeca
We see them tucked into unobtrusive corners, fit to their scale. La Muñeca’s wheatpastes of Mexican women engaged in quotidian chores are embedded in the city. Her public art is not permitted; she works unobtrusively, like a guerrilla. Her women foreground the infill of Phoenix. They remind us of women who walk across the desert every day, only to find an even less hospitable place in the governance of our State.
RE: Murder
I love this writing, how it invokes class and all the forces of gravity in aging. Particularly the gravity of our own relationship to being a daughter, a mother, a sister, a woman. I will rely on my mother’s fierce intellectualism to know that this poem is not pointed at her, but that it is because of her that I can appreciate it.
Weeks later, I scolded myself for still being unfocused on my own writing… It was the Ides of March and I still had no clear editorial statement about (pre)Occupation. I liked the idea of leading with an image followed by several selections of text.
Some Preoccupations:
(these are preoccupations I experienced during the editing process, presented here in no particular order, from memory and notes)
taxes, Hurricane Sandy, illegal marriage, the Ides of March, four more years of Obama, too many shootings, footnotes, love and death, human rights (won, violated, and lost), redaction vs. translation, Niagara Falls, my niece’s birthday, Sandy Hook, travel arrangements, etc.
This is Not the Whole Story
The things, thoughts, and words that don’t translate are sometimes the most important. Not because we don’t get to understand or see them but because they are present in their absence. This is not a news flash, nor is it the whole story. It’s something I learned more about as we edited this selection of texts and images.
Writing the Editorial…
I had to get to work.
I wanted to cluster the submissions into nodes of meaning that overlapped with each other by a hyperlinked essay. That was the answer – it’s the Internet, couldn’t we just link it all together? Then I realized this idea was so very 1999, and re-focused on social media. If you like the Trivia Facebook page, you will see these quotes again:
Say no and be exclusive; say yes and be in danger.
The Tent, Cathy Bryant
She studied the stained tan carpet, looking for feet in the opposite dressing room, but only saw piles of clothes dumped on the floor.
Voices, Janet Yung
Acknowledgement is a lush loam for sympathy.
Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics, Renee Guillory
What if it weren’t so easy to blame children?
A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken, Jane Attanucci
When I go out for a run and wonder if I’ve had enough to eat that day to sustain me, I think of men dragging sledges of 180 pounds across crevasses and stubborn, wet snow.
Finding Edges, Jen Urso
Things were going well, I thought, until the five-hour date went to use the bathroom. He must have accidently touched something because a stack of something came tumbling down in the hallway.
Occupy Me, C.O. Moed
A Long Time Ago
I wrote a little bit about each submission, vowing to somehow illustrate how concrete and dynamic they were. This just generated longer notes and more elaborate mind maps. My preoccupation with each selection also conveniently delayed the moment when I’d have to stake a claim in my writing and tie all these bits together around a thread of thought that’s unnecessarily punctuated: (pre)Occupation. Then I realized, I will write until Easter and not finish all I have to say on the matters.
RE: Falling
It was a relief to read something about falling that did not have to do with falling from a 110-story building or improvisational dance. Has anyone else noticed how many images of falling people we’ve seen since the World Trade Center crashed to the ground? Go to the movies… all the drama happens while the protagonist free falls from the highest possible point… if someone isn’t falling, there’s a high speed mass transit emergency – like a runaway train or 911 calls gone awry. It’s not my imagination, nor is it a red flag, nor an accurate chronology.
RE: Sussland’s Paintings
Colorless iridescence is what it might look like to be (pre)Occupied.
Looking all the world like a queer Ed Mell painting, Karolina Sussland’s Sunset 2 (the colorful one) tells the story of a fantastically low horizontal event. While the saturation of the colors, lack of modeling, and clean lines suggest a flattened space, her palette reaches for all the colors of real sunsets in the desert, the hues that defy reproduction. In White Sunset #3, she reduces this fantasy to “interference gold” on a white ground. All golden-ness, she reduces the imagined sunsets of Arizona Highways to a scrim of shimmering transparency. From a distance (the remove from which you watch a sunset, btw), the canvases appear white.
RE: La Muñeca
We see them tucked into unobtrusive corners, fit to their scale. La Muñeca’s wheatpastes of Mexican women engaged in quotidian chores are embedded in the city. Her public art is not permitted; she works unobtrusively, like a guerrilla. Her women foreground the infill of Phoenix. They remind us of women who walk across the desert every day, only to find an even less hospitable place in the governance of our State.
RE: Murder
I love this writing, how it invokes class and all the forces of gravity in aging. Particularly the gravity of our own relationship to being a daughter, a mother, a sister, a woman. I will rely on my mother’s fierce intellectualism to know that this poem is not pointed at her, but that it is because of her that I can appreciate it.
About the author
Jo Novelli was born in a steel town in Pennsylvania but comes from many places. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her wife. Jo is currently preoccupied with how quickly things change, matters of the heart, and the relatively petty need to update her website: jonovelli.com. Her next creative project is to curate a show (February 2014) on the many problematics of "drones."