Abundant Number

it's here, and I'm gone, goodbye, goodbye

(This post is “too long for email”, so if you want to read it all, you’ll have to click through.)

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So all I want to do is find you in the material world.

I want to find you on telephone poles and on bulletin boards, on the door of the local coffee shop, at the back of the weekly paper, in the classified ads. I want to find you in the record store, the bookshop, the diner, the back of the bulletin at church. I want to find you in the Yellow Pages. I want to find you within the circumference of my arms, as I turn in a circle. I want to be able to keep track of you. I want to be able to put you where I know how to find you, and I want to be able to find you.

I want you to be exactly as you are. I want you to never feel you have to write with the other hand or hide your home way of speaking. I want to see the world as you do, in your words, in your ways of moving. I want to recycle your letter, hang the postcard you sent me above my desk. I want to carry a sign with you. I want to see your handwriting on a wall. I want to sit with you on the front steps. I want to put my arms around you. I want to go for a walk with you. We will get tired, and we will go home and have a cup of tea, and sit on those front steps. When you leave, we will each go to the Post Offices in our neighborhoods and buy stamps for the next round of letters.

I want to see you everywhere. Your mark: whole world of words and images we move through. Irreplaceable each! And the place I can see you, find you, want to slow down time to be with you is that world, the one that reminds me that we are all made of dust. So take your time.

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I can’t keep track of things very well on the internet or on my computer, and I think that’s because those are two basically limitless spaces. I use Zotero, I use my Notes app. I use tags and labels and folders. I reorganize my computer files, figure out better ways to name them. I keep lists in my notebook. But I can’t navigate it all. I have seventy-five tabs open, even though last month I closed seventy open tabs and said to myself, never again! You don’t even go back to them!. There is just too much there. And it’s not only a matter of I can’t find you. It’s also a matter of I don’t know where to begin, which often leads to I feel incapable and lost. So I want to stop this: stop adding my pretense of weightless, frictionless, easeful endlessness to the pretense of weightless, frictionless, easeful endlessness of screen-based technologies and social media. I want to let friction, weight, and space teach me how to be. With you.

I want to spend the bulk of my creative time and energy and life making things, and having things, reading things, seeing things, that I can hold in my hands, and you can hold in yours. Finite material objects, for our finite material world. Using material reminds me that material is precious—even (especially?) those everyday kinds of material called “paper” and “ink” and “staples”. I can’t keep everything. I can’t make everything. There’s already so much out there. (The moment I started seeing junkmail as printmaking supplies, and jars as glasses and vases, and plastic tubs as paint and ink containers… it became difficult to look at all the packaging around me as anything but a miraculous—because look at all this useful and useable stuff!—and horrifying waste.) There is not unlimited space to store things. We have to work to the dimensions of our actual spaces. Material itself makes demands on us: space, time. However, it also makes certain things possible: by its limits, material frees us from the infinite scroll/infinite search, from the appearance of availability that makes everything (including our own taste, our own desires, our motivation, our imagination) hard to locate. Material reminds us how much knowledge there is in our hands and other sense organs.

Also, to get right down to it, you can pass around a physical copy of a book, and that’s a different sense of sharing than a post on the latest “social” network. And if you make it, or I make it, no billionaire makes it, and no billionaire owns it, and ideally we can, to some degree, take care to make the book in such a way as to make it possible for those involved (printers, postal workers, etc.) to have a life as rich as the one we want for ourselves.

Let’s do that.

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So, material. Abundant Number is in print. It is available for now as a subscription of four issues, sent irregularly, for €20. (That pretty much covers shipping—worldwide, which is included in the price—tax, and printing. The four-issue subscription is numbers 1-4, so whenever you subscribe you’ll get the first four volumes.) If the subscriptions sell out, the form will stop accepting responses and there will be other information there.

Here is where you can find out about, and check in on, Abundant Number. Everything will be in print, but that static webpage and its linked forms have and will have basic, updated information. (Some essays that first appeared at Bewilderment will appear in print in AN, and disappear from here. In fact, essays have already begun to be taken offline. I will be removing most of the work from this place in the next few months.)

Here is where you can subscribe, and how. Yes, it’s going to be the postal service, trust, paper, and time for us! Let’s see how it goes. If you put your details into a form a month or two back, asking to be notified when subscriptions became available, you should have had an email from me with all of this information. If you have already subscribed, your first issue will be in the mail by the end of August.

If you want to know more, I also talked about Abundant Number here and here. Those posts will give you some background on the project.

If you aren’t interested in Abundant Number and just want to hear from me if/when I have a new book out, am teaching a class, etc., you can put your details here.

No sending work for now, thank you, but you can (please do!) send a classified ad (or more than one!): you can sell something, announce something, ask for something, thank your patron saint or deity for something, pronounce something, wish for something, put a hex on something, wonder about something, share information about something. It can be playful and unimportant; it can be serious and important; it can be goofy; it can be po-faced; it can be both, something else, or on a spectrum between points. If I print your ad, I’ll send you a copy of the volume it appears in. If you’d like to be involved, i.e., in Abundant Number, in the future, then the best thing would be to get a copy of one volume from me or someone else (maybe a friend or a stranger will have one and send it to you; ideal) and see what the feeling is. This is less “literary magazine” than “indie weekly, slowed way down”, or “Fluxus object”, or “table of zines”, or “happy accident”.

One exception to the above: if you make a comic that you draw by hand, and you’d like to have your strip printed—one-off or serialized—in Abundant Number, please be in touch. I am thinking of how formative Violet Days, Red Meat, Dykes to Watch Out For, the comics of R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry (etc.) were for me. Absurdity, yes. Banality, yes. Profanity, probably. Weirdos are welcome.

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Thank you again for reading over the past 15 months. When I come upon you in the world I feel less alone and less afraid. I want to be found by your questions anywhere I go.

Peace everywhere in the world, the active peace which is the presence of justice and liberation. Free Palestine.