Jacob Wren

move slow and repair things

"Obsessions are the most durable form of intellectual capital."
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Is there a moment coming in the near to distant future when the U.S. will be working to cut off China's oil supply, and China will be able to say: that's okay, we no longer need so much oil, we have enough renewable energy to get by?

“Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

"She had become the kind of reader authors dream of, for whom each sentence revises the universe."
- Harry Mathews, Cigarettes

"I didn’t want to be invisible, though sometimes I treated others at though they themselves were. My notebook in my hands changing the energy in the room. All of us do this, change the rooms we’re in."
– Amina Cain, Indelicacy

Either that capitalism goes or we do.

I believe it comes from this discussion: www.youtube.com/live/xGS5aP5...

"So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination."
- Saidiya Hartman

The artistic value of music you don’t enjoy listening too.

“Increasingly, I was losing sight of who I was, and that’s saying something, given the extent to which I’d been in the dark in the first place.”
– Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

The difference between how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is better than mine and how I feel jealous of an artist whose work is more successful than mine.

"The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been the victim."
- John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am

From the talk “The Black Outdoors: Sadiya Hartman and Fred Moten with J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak” at Duke University, September 23, 2016

“Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.”
– Fred Moten

People often ask me about the title of my book Polyamorous Love Song. The following is a short excerpt from the final chapter in which I explain it: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2016/12/exce...

"We’re in an emergency wishing it would go back to being in a crisis."
- Penny Arcade

"And then I move on to what I think the reasons are for this war and so many others. Because our leaders need therapy. Because a bully needs a victim. Because so-called powerful men are deeply insecure..." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/06/beca...

"No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."
- Lily Tomlin

“…for amongst the many small things we know about this great saint, soldier, and martyr, is that she cried very easily, whenever she was upset, frightened, cross, or hurt.”
- V. Sackville-West on Joan of Arc/Jeanne d’Arc

"Jean Cocteau said he preferred cats to dogs because no one has ever seen a police cat."
– Michel Tournier

"I had woken up destroyed and feeling the sunlight. It was brutal, like nature was reminding me that I was a bad person. Truth told I wasn’t a bad person – I was just hungover. These feelings come up sometimes."
– Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends

Xu Shaoyang is coming to Montreal on March 6th! Don't miss it: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2026/02/xu-s...

“I can never understand, I wrote to you, what form a work should take. It’s like everything has to be written not only from the beginning of the work but actually from the beginning of all writing, as if nothing’s ever been written before, as if I’ve never read anything.”
– Sofia Samatar, Opacities

I feel a perverse desire to try to write a book that every single person will hate. (I believe it has something to do with feeling imagined reader expectations before one even starts writing.)

“As we walked in silence, I realized I couldn’t help myself. I was talking to the Popsicle because I literally had no one else to talk to...” radicalcut.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

Fake it until you've faked it for so long you don't even really know the difference any more.

The homework all dogs want to eat.

“I am learning all the time. My tombstone will be my diploma.”
― Eartha Kitt

Elastic, the print magazine of psychedelic art and literature, is here. Our first issue, on the theme of dying, is available for order now—and it’s stacked, to put it mildly. Fifty contributors. 176 lush pages filled with work that bends time and space and perspective. Nab a copy at elasticmag.com.