#I just wonder why studios feel the need to remake and then completely alter a truly beautiful story

[crownedbythewatcher]

Obsessed with this

[hello-im-not-a-possum]

If it bites, curses, claws, and hisses, It’s very unwise to ask it for wishes.

Hey @r-rowancore remember that uwu fic I threw out but said I would rewrite? It may be a lot different than how I originally had it, but here it is:

There was only so much that Inkwell could do to help. Likewise, there was only so much that he wanted to do to help.

When Thomas went to him asking for his humanity back, the demon declined, stating that it was impossible for him to turn a being of ink into a being of flesh again. When he went to him asking if he could look human again, the demon again declined, stating that he didn’t have access to any pictures of how the mechanic had looked before his death, nor could he find his body, thus, he had no proper reference and could end up making him something that he was not.

And he gave a similar excuse when Tom asked for his voice back.

It smelled of bullshit if you asked him, with the demon’s exaggerated body language, annoying amount buffer words, refusal to look the wolf man in the eye while he spoke, he knew that he was lying through those daggers that he called his teeth.

He could make them human again, or at least make them look human enough again, Henry Stein was living proof of that. The Ink Demon just insisted on redrawing them as cartoons because misery loves company.

Instead of doing something like making him feel comfortable in his ink skin, the demon simply ‘updated’ his character sheet. He looked more like a wolf than a dog now, he was bigger in both size and stature, and his fur was starting to gray, especially around the muzzle.

Don’t get him wrong, he liked not having to look at Boris every time he looked in a mirror, but he hated everything about this and honestly, it was only a matter of time before he’d grow desperate enough to try to do something that even he thought was completely stupid:

Summoning a demon, a different demon from the ones he knew, one who would hopefully, help him out.

Thomas gathered the correct items for the ritual; four candles, one mask, some thick ink, and a place to call ...it. He didn’t know what would come from out of this, but if Buddy and Boris of all people could summon this thing enough times to dedicate a bathroom to doing it, then whoever or whatever he was going to call must’ve been safe enough for him to summon.

He had everything set up just the way he saw the alter in Buddy’s safe house bathroom; lit the candles, placed down the mask, and waited.

...

...This couldn’t be it, could it?

It couldn’t just be some weird decoration in a closed-off bathroom, like it or not, magic was real and so were demons! Something was supposed to happen! Did he screw it up? Lit the candles in the wrong order? Did he not do it at the right time? What was it?!

Oh right, he wasn’t in the studio anymore.

He wasn’t in a “whimsical” cartoon world made entirely by the machine and its ink, the ritual dedicated to whatever Buddy summoned might’ve worked back in the studio, but just like how a normal human being couldn’t take down a living park ride with soup cans, the alter where it was had been just as effective as spraying silly string in the shape of a star on the ground.

The cursed wolf let out an annoyed huff and started to slunk out of the basement, he would be cussing up a storm if he could, but he didn’t have a voice.

CRASH!

As he was halfway up the stairs, he heard a loud noise coming from the failed ritual. He turned around and saw something large flailing on the floor.

He cautiously descended back down and realized that he had indeed fucked up; the entity he had summoned had a humanoid upper half, the lower half of a fish, and more importantly was struggling to breathe.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

The cursed mechanic tried to carry the deep sea demon bridal style as the slippery creature flailed harder and started to claw at him and bite him. No wonder the alter was set up in the bathroom, this thing needed water!

“Gad fi fynd!” Between futile gasps for breath, the creature shouted at him in a voice that he could swear was like someone taking a bunch of instruments and trying to use them to mimic human speech. “Dydw i ddim yn mynd i fod yn rhan o'ch cynlluniau, llaw dde Joey Drew!”

Tom didn’t understand a word out of the creature’s mouth aside from the name he said, nor did he think of that at this time. Desperate to keep the angry sea demon alive, when it has struggled free from his grasp, Tom seized the being by his tail and started dragging him up the stairs that way. He considered pulling him up by the hair at first but that only made his mouth closer to his hands.

The merman continued to thrash against his captor, now hissing at him like a snake and barring a mouth full of long, sharp teeth that the creature had too many of for comfort, especially now that they were stained with Tom’s ink.

But the wolf wasn’t impressed by the demon’s attempt at intimidation, he could hiss and claw all he wanted but he was not dealing with Inkwell’s refusal to help him, or having to explain to Henry why there was a dead demonic fish on the floor!

After the longest one and a half minutes of both of their lives, the fish demon was unceremoniously dumped into the bathtub, and the water was turned on. In spite of the awkward positioning, the demon squeezed himself into the end of the tub with the facet, it was an uncomfortable position, but the running water over his gills relaxed him a bit.

Both parties let out a sigh of relief as the demon waited for the tub to fill up and Tom went back into the basement to fetch a notepad, a pencil, and an english-to-welsh dictionary.

---

The latter of the three items became the hardest one to find, and by the time he did and got back to his ‘guest’ the sea demon looked like he was both anxious and bored out of his mind, his long hair pooling in the tub like a cloud and his claws still tapping away on the side of the bathtub. He was not happy to see him again per se, but at least he didn’t look like he was going to bite him again.

Helo. Tom flipped through the dictionary, found the words he was looking for, wrote them down and showed the creature. Allwch chi ddeall hyn?

The demon rolled his eyes and spoke in that voice made of instruments again, not sounding like a human being in the slightest, but it was easy for him to make out the creature’s words, almost like he listening to a song with the lyrics replaced by another instrument. Tom could already see Wally making a joke about ‘how he heard of people with musical accents before, but this one takes the cake!’.

“I can understand and speak English fluently, Thomas Conner.” He stated coldly. “There’s no need to patronize me or waste both of our time with that book.”

How do you know my name? He wrote down, And how did you know Joey?

The sea demon paused for a bit, seeming as if he was trying to predict the wolf’s reaction to his answer before saying it out loud.

“The two of you are very... infamous down there...” He folded his arms behind his back and tried to keep his expression as neutral as possible. “For more reasons than you think.”

Why did Buddy summon you?

The demon frowned at the question. “Who’s ‘Buddy’?” He then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, the reasons why my former summoners have called me are not to be freely discussed with other people. And before you ask how he knew to summon me, he learned from his own story.”

Tom tore out the question he had and wrote a new one:

What is your name?

“Forgive me, but I am not interested in any more small talk, and I doubt you summoned me just for the sake of friendly conversation. You called me here to help you with something, haven’t you?”

Tom huffed and reluctantly nodded. Yes; Can you make me human again?

“Can I remake you from ink and magic into a being of flesh and bone?” He tapped on his fangs and smiled in a way that made the mechanic wolf’s hackles rise. “Eventually, but yes.”

His ears perked up instantly, hastily, he started scribbling down his (hopefully) final question.

Well, what are you waiting for?!

“Materials, tools, and payment.” The demon shifted in the tub to make himself more comfortable, folding his arms behind his head as if he was reclining in a hammock, his hair fanning out behind him. “As you can see, I’m not exactly in the position to fetch the former two, and you should know that nothing comes without the latter.”

What do you need?

“Just your standard sculpting tools, some time to work on the thing, your cooperation as working with living canvases other than myself can be difficult, and...” The sea demon’s chilling toothy smile resurfaced. “...Meat.”

Tom hesitated, it took him a while to get the single word onto paper.

Meat?

“Not just any meat. Raw meat, meat that’s so freshly killed that the blood’s still warm. The amount can be debated if you were unsatisfied with your human body’s height and or its weight.” He waved off before smiling again. “And unless you want to become a sentient beast, it had better be human meat. You know the old saying, right? ‘You are what you eat’? Well, it can be rather literal.”

He looked like he was biting back laughter at Tom’s horrified expression.

“Don’t give me that look, fy pup blaidd, your hands are already stained with the blood of others, it makes no difference to the eyes of heaven and hell if you start staining your teeth as well.”

NO!

“No?” The mechanic was almost infuriated by how genuinely confused the demon sounded, as if he was surprised that he’d be disgusted by suggesting cannibalism, but luckily for him, he merely shrugged off Tom’s refusal. “Suit yourself then.”

He was just about to leave the bathroom before the siren spoke again.

“But it would be such a shame if there wasn’t anything at all I could help you out with, I hate it when my time is wasted. Tell me, would you like to speak again?”

He froze there, and looked back with an eyebrow raised.

“I see that got your attention.” The merman smugly remarked. “And as it’s a much smaller job than say, completely rebuilding you as a different being altogether, it will not only be a faster job but also cost you a lot less. Why, I won’t even need any materials or tools other than your cooperation!”

I’m interested...

“Good! Now, all you need to do is come closer.”

He approached the bathtub.

“Closer... Yes, just kneel down so we’re directly face to face...” The siren crooned while looking as welcoming as an empty grave. “...This will only hurt like Hell for a little bit.”

Tom instantly regretted his action, the siren lunged at him, his arms wrapping around him and holding his own down. With his teeth and tongue, the sea demon pried the wolf’s mouth open and purged a fluid that felt like boiling oil down his throat.

With newfound vigor forged from the sheer disgust of the situation, he pried the creature off of him and flung him at the bathroom wall, coughing and sputtering out the vile fluid before confronting the sea beast who crawled back into the bathtub.

“WHAWT THE FUCK IWS YOUW PWOBWEM?”

He slapped his hands over his snout in sheer shock and embarrassment.

“...Pardon?” The sea monster was very obviously trying very hard not to laugh, and failing. “I didn’t quite get that, Tommy~.”

Tom’s cheeks were flushed gray, his fists were clenched and steam was coming out of his ears, he didn’t want to speak ever again! His new voice sounded nothing like his old one! It sounded more like a kid’s voice if the kid inhaled helium! And don’t get him started on the new speech pattern he was cursed with. He’d use the notebook, but sadly, it looked like it was destroyed by water in the struggle.

“Why did uwu duwu thiws tuwu me uwu bastawd?”

“This was unintentional, truly. But this is so much better than what I had planned!” The demon ignored the wolf’s growling as he pinched his cheek. “Awen't uwu juwst the cutest wittwe whewp!”

“Knock iwt off, uwu sea whowe!” He swatted the hand off of his face. “I wawnt my voice tuwu be nowmaw!”

“Well, we don’t always get what we want now, do we?”

“But, but uwu pwomised uwu'd get me my voice bawck!”

“Now that’s just a bold-faced lie. I said I’d help you speak again, I never once said that I’d give you your old voice.”

“Okay, wisten hewe.” He reached into the bathtub and grabbed a hold of the tub stopper. “If uwu change my voice bawck, i... I'ww give uwu whatevew uwu wawnt. But if uwu down't, i'ww puww the pwug wight hewe awnd now!”

“Do it, coward.” The demon looked the wolf dead in the eyes. “I dare you.”

He didn’t even react when Tom yanked the stopper out and put it in the sink, well out of the siren’s reach.

“At least now you’re a man of your word.” The merman sighed as the water slowly drained from the tub. “Better late than never I suppose.”

He laid down in the still draining tub. At first, Tom thought this was an attempt to keep his gills wet for just a little bit longer, but then he saw the water turn black as it went down the drain and the musician said his last words to the wolf, not in a voice made out of instruments, but his own, human voice.

“See you again soon, Conner.”

“SAMMY WAWWENCE?!”

He called out in shock as he frantically reached into the now quickly draining tub. But no matter how desperately he dug his claws in there, he found nothing but water.

The remaining liquid went down the drain, leaving nothing but a few clear puddles on the tub’s floor and the now-verbal wolf alone with his thoughts.

“Oh my fucking god... Whawt am i going tuwu teww Awwison awnd Henwy?!”

[katherinemacbride]

solidarity in sites of temporary hospitality, you do what you can with what you’ve got

Text written August 2018. For Hagen Verleger (ed.), Margaret van Eyck—Renaming an Institution, a Case Study (Volume Two: Comments, Contexts, and Connections), Peradam Press, NY, 2018.

https://hagenverleger.com/portfolio/margaret-van-eyck-volume-two/

 Prelude/Postscript

He was talking about the library as a site of radical hospitality: because the person holding the space cannot know the content of all that is being held, in fact it is better if they don’t, because then their focus is on the hospitality, rather than making their own voice among the tangles of sentences in some of the books. [1]

She was critiquing the Western European perspective of not articulating a voice as a way of dealing with colonial guilt. Her critique was that this was both an attempt at empathy but also extremely privileged. [2] What do you do when you’ve wasted your own epistemologies by using them so violently, when you’ve taken up all the space already, how is it possible to make work that listens, can you speak, how do you learn to speak more quietly when you’ve been trained to be at the centre, should you shut up and fuck off? What are all the men doing?

We were swimming in the studio, lesbian empathy. Notes everywhere, to self, to unknown, to a different self, from a different self.

“Capacity Based Exchange,” he was saying; each according to what they can do. All share. [3]

“We share values,” someone says [4], but the values didn’t get a name so how do “we” know? And even if they had a name, there is that big gap between the word and its meaning, that space for editing and remaking and erasing, as Christina Sharpe says. [5]

While you’re reading this, think about friction. Dirty fingers rubbing paper, skin on skin, bodies that don’t fit. Rubbing up the wrong way. “Remember: deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard.” [6]

I was supposed to be writing about dust, and dirt, and sweat. And books. The books that you taught me tell you things even if you think that as books they’re boring, the books I was learning to read as a context not as content. The catalogue shelf for example, filled with female editors care-taking the writing of male essay writers, the exhibitions in regional institutions, the work of the institution we are in represented as books, all this labour and how do I read it now. Not carefully enough, I feel. 

Making change is dirty, tiring, boring, upsetting, enraging, finding your allies. Unending.

It was dark, to protect the books, and cool, but not cold, and certainly not damp. The room was sound-proofed, from the mixed musical fragments thrown out the windows of the conservatory, by the trees standing in the garden, the blanket of carefully selected ground-covering perennials, a village of bicycles chained to the fence, and the partial jutting out of the opposite wing of the building. A place to go and write. A place to go and hide in plain sight. A place to go and observe from your quiet seat the comings and goings of the management (collective noun) and the management (verbal noun). The caretaker, writer, poet. The librarian, writer, novelist. Two of the beautiful possibilities of provincial life where people are allowed to slide into roles for which they are not officially trained but are precisely skilled, temperamentally matched, committed, and able to bring some flow and energy.

Dust/Dirt made from particles of paper residue left over from cutting the pages, microfibres from cleaning cloths, dead human skin cells detached from their organ, sugar granules, dust mites, desiccating coffee molecules, food particles, broken-down hair follicles, tobacco threads, traces of drugs in pre- and post-ingestion forms, clay particulate from the soil outside, DNA, fragments of art materials, faeces, sand, sweat. It is sticky from the proteins; the human matter. The type of paper in each book must alter the dust composition through its attractant or repellent qualities. And what is that smell, the book smell that indicates its age roughly, is it accumulated dust and sweat? 

A room with a dry smell. Most of the books too well-kept, or not so old as, to have foxed pages and those moist smells familiar in memories of rummaging in boxes at sales and in garages. Archival quality papers, hot pressed smoothness, the chemical grassy smell of freshly printed large distribution. The occasional papers [7]—A4 printed essays, stapled and set into plastic folders, flopping awkwardly among the books, their matt surfaces supporting tough content asking questions of the ranks of catalogues memorialising indistinct exhibitions of regional and international artists; remnants of the theory department persisting in participants that came after holding fast to writing as a critical tool. Radical, beautiful thought unfolding in 11pt fonts. Their format whispering, refusing, sticking to academic norms; their words shouting “find me you fucker.” Documents of group processes made public in pages—the process evading the printing press—presented fragments and transcripts, quotations and diagrams, occasional bit-mapped photographs; everything is Riso-printed, upstairs, on creamy absorbent paper stock. 

She was angry. Sunday morning. Dressed prettily, playing music, angry. She was tired, sitting among the aisles working quickly, but making slow movement along. He was bored, writing lists of new curricula. They were sad. The energy was held unevenly, fed by stolen-or-shared cigarettes and sweet coffees, chatting outside on the wooden platform, red wine, moments of recognition and pleasure, durations of pointlessness, biscuits and trail mix. How many days? Rushes of energy—who bought all this African philosophy in the early 1990s! Quick shelves: bleak. Fiction for instance, clang each spine on the metal shelf quickly. Quick shelves: like friends. Feminism for example, this, this, this, oh not that one, wonder why, not much to turn here because women wrote this shelf mostly. Put the single book about masculinities on the collective pile. Finding things like jewels on the beach, books you’d forgotten about, books you’d heard of but never encountered, books you’d never met, books not very present on the internet. Fantasies of who was ordering these, stories of books being trashed and rescued resistantly from the piles of waste. Epistemological wastage [8] comes in overlapping layers: firstly, and undoably always continuingly, violent; later or simultaneously through violence’s secondary forms of stupid, penny-pinching, “progressive” [9] bureaucracy. 

They were fighting a bit, one likes big gestures, one likes small details, so it is difficult. Strategically, politically, and ontologically different ways of dealing with the question and its answer: “And who does the labour benefit? The institution really.” These positions are fighting around and within me. The details liker is directed, like an animal following a scent, there is a sensitivity to something in the air that I can’t perceive, they’re sure of the path they’re moving along, but not so sure that they’re not open to taking another one if something comes up. The big gestures seeker worries more—I can relate to this—maybe because the pressure of that expectation is a bit crushing. What kind of self-confidence and stamina do you need to continue with a task that is so temporary, that many would regard as futile? 

Learning

Learning the knowledge that your body is remembering anew, again—

does it forget in order to survive, like some bodies somehow forget the physicality of cumulative not sleeping in baby feeding periods and desire to fuck reproductively again, 

does it forget because it takes too much energy to remember the way it stiffens when it is threatened, in between all the times when someone chooses to assert their existence in a mode of power and threat against yours,

does it sometimes ignore what it actually is knowing all the time, because life would be too sad and raging if it did acknowledge this without the caring company of the others in this room, or other others in other rooms

—of how hard it is to make change, just how repetitive and boring and physically hard it is to do even this one tiny thing. When this one tiny thing is complete the how hard is suddenly so visible and makes that systemic oppression clear. This is what it means. It means billions fewer words in space. Galaxies of thought that have no space in here. Making stories to remember important information. Making gatherings to learn how to do things. Getting out of bed to go take care of the thing you were doing yesterday and see how it is now it’s tomorrow. Making peace. Making reparations. 

Learning the contingencies of making decisions as you go along, the system can never be perfect and consistent. This time I felt generous, this time not, this one was a balance of problems, this one breaks the rules entirely but it is an important book that should be visible so I put it on the table.

Books are carbon, captured, stable, running without a data centre. A wasted epistemology is also often wasted land-water-air. My wasting epistemology is made of your natural resources, and your body, because mine weren’t and isn’t enough. But I feel my greed and overuse as not having enough, being underfed, dysmorphia of the body, the culture, the interconnectedness of it and us all. 

Prelude/Postscript

The difficulty of doing things differently, the slowing down or changing of methods. Inductive reading, reading across time, lingering in the period between two publication dates to see what changes between one text and the other. Time, hearing and time, time is material, time is everything, time is not straight, time was, time is, time will, now and not now, two kinds of time, or three, past present future, or more, entanglement of all the possible and actualised times, waiting for time to pass until something heals, but what if it doesn’t ever heal, or it can’t, it’s eaten into the DNA that’s being passed around, it's so embedded in the structural oppressions that it can’t yet heal into something else, because it never stopped happening, it’s not past, it’s now. 

Everywhere the time is being stolen that’s needed to do this work. Stolen from and stolen by, stolen in order to do, and stolen from that possibility.

In the car you said something like, “maybe we should all refuse to speak in the moderated and mediated rational language we’re taught to think it’s better to fight in so we don’t look emotional.” [10]

[door of the public speaking/shaming room slams, shaking the seats]

[walls of the broken-into-on-the-weekend library ring with thought and study and laughter]

[1] Nick Thurston, “Speculative Libraries” (talk, PrintRoom, Rotterdam, June 18, 2018).

[2] Cristina Bogdon, “Fuck off Transmediale (provisional title),” Revista-Arta, (February 8, 2018): http://revistaarta.ro/en/column/fuck-off-transmediale-provisional-title/

[3] Michel Bauwens, comment made during “FAQs on the Commons and Art” roundtable (launch event, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, June 9, 2018).

[4] A comment I have encountered, unspecified like this, on too many occasions recently.

[5] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[6] Sarah Ahmed, “Refusal, Resignation and Complaint,” feministkilljoys, (June 28, 2018): https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/

[7] E.g. E.C. Feiss, A Critique of Rights in “We Are Here” (Maastricht: Charles Nypels Lab, 2015).

[8] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

[9] Conversations with various friends and acquaintances who work in libraries indicate that numerical quantities of loans, stripped of any other information, are being used as the marker of success and value, at the level of the whole library, the performance of the individual librarian, and the worth and necessity to the collection of each individual book.

[10] I’m paraphrasing a private conversation here.