The theme for this list is CONCENTRIC MACROSCOPE, which is the title of my latest book. Concentric Macroscope (Crop Circle Press, 2026) contains several themes itself, and running ideas. It also contains everything I read, watched, heard, and experienced from 2021 to 2023 when I was writing it, and likely also everything before that. Perhaps even after? Such is a macroscopic vision. Macroscopic means not microscopic. That is, you can see it. It is large scale, the stuff of the naked eye—or one big eye, or all of our eyes. I was thinking about concentric circles as one big eye, or one big mouth, a pulsing vibration.
This list includes things related to vibration and sound and looking. I spent a lot of time listening and attempting to transcribe sound—not onomatopoetically, but metaphorically, and in places other than the ear. Where is a sound? It is in my body—in parts other than the ear—but where? And it is in the air, and in the objects the vibrations kiss. What I’m describing now is a kind of intimacy, maybe, which is another thing that happens in the book. There are romantic entanglements and there is heartbreak, and these reverberate, vibrate. As with my book No Measure, this one is a lot about work: how to describe labor, cognitive and otherwise, and how people work together (or not). These two books also involve work in isolation, which maybe relates to the solitary experience of personal hearing. This is also a book about secrets.
Alphabetically, and with either a little quotation or explanation (or both):
book: The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand
“Poetry is not even information.”
essay: “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Anne Carson
book: Quartz Hearts, Clark Coolidge
“Somewhat light. Left of the leather.
The tongue on the rod of air instead of
the key axis. Slowly the dusty room.
Anything circular worse than unimaginable.
A stair.”
—I did a deep dive into geology, geopoetics, and rock writing and rock life alongside this book. That thinking took the shape of what? A few talks (rock talks?). At the center of this was Coolidge, who also has my book’s epigraph. This one’s for our hard-edged hearts.
image: from The Arachnean and Other Texts, Fernand Deligny
—I love walking. I don’t read a lot about walking (or maybe I do?), but I do love looking at walking maps, or courses, or whatever these are—wander lines—the paths of Deligny’s students / patients. The overlaying, the palimpsest. What does walking look like from above? I never use fitness things like Strava, but I got a new Garmin watch that tracks my running routes, and when I get home, I like looking at the shapes of them.
video: climbing and exploring Duga-3 / Дуга-3, the Russian Woodpecker / Chernobyl-2 radar site
—This video makes my palms sweat. There are a lot of videos on YouTube where people explore the abandoned areas around Chernobyl, including climbing this massive radar array. Duga means “arc” or “curve.”
book: Transmissions: Speculative Field Studies at the Goonhilly Downs SSSI Earth Station, Jamie House
—A small in size, wondrous in scope book from the visionary press CLOAK. Many of the images within have existed—until I read this—only in my imagination. Here’s a partial summary from the press: “Transmissions documents two years of speculative field studies, fusing together photography, bio- and eco-acoustics, textual responses, and experimental geography to present a unique transdisciplinary portrait.”
documentary: The Science of Cymatics
—This is a documentary about vibration and how vibration can be represented by materials arranging themselves on a plate.
image: Androgin 3, Katalin Ladik
essay: “‘A Voice Without a Mouth’: Inner Speech,” Denise Riley
“[My inward voice is] not quite ‘somewhere in my head’ and not at all in my mouth. But maybe it is whirring somewhere vaguely behind my eyes, the only location which offers itself, perhaps because, in trying to concentrate hard on the site of the voice, I inevitably close my eyes. There seems to be no precise spot in which this inner speech unwinds itself.”
book: Soundwalking, edited by Jacek Smolicki
“Ultimately, to compose with soundscapes is to remain open to a possibility of being continuously recomposed by them.”
—I met Jacek in Patrick Farmer’s series of lectures On Vibration, and I wrote the entirety of this book as the series went on. I read essays and listened to recordings by both of them, which were at once immensely interesting and life changing. We could describe my book also as thinking about soundwalking.
book: Love, Like Pronouns, Rosmarie Waldrop
“Should it worry me that thought, in my sentences, seems never wholly present at any one moment? Let alone love, in my life?”
book: The Corner that Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner
“A good convent should have no history.”
—Nuns and their labor—I could read about them all day. This is a strange book, long and kind of boring—completely fantastic.
essay: “An Examination of Rhythm and Its Expansive Movement,” Jay Wright
“Have we leapt into the tangle of an indefinable event? Can we, at this point, think of progression—the conceptualization of a phenomenon that won’t stand still? // We catch ourselves playing with stillness.”
—With Jay’s permission I was gifted a scan of a typewritten draft of this essay while I was writing Concentric Macroscope, and I took many, many pages of notes, which are mixed in with my own handwritten drafts. I read most of the books he told me to read. The title says what this essay’s about, but you’ll never reach its expansive movement. You must accept the fact that you might not understand something—that—with grace—you can learn to expect not to expect understanding. Understanding is never total anyway. Jay teaches me that.
One more: “What a hell of a thing, to come this far with a companion who might refuse your offer of release.”