Architecture tends to be haunted

Allie Linn/C. Klockner

Key: Allie Linn C. Klockner Collaborative

Ajay Kurian



Josh Tonsfeldt



Cynthia Daignault



Sam Anderson



Sam Anderson




Van Hanos


Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik



Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik





Fatberg vs. Turd-nado

Kodi Fabricant

“Fatberg vs. Turd-nado” marks the seventh publication as part of These Essays, a series selected by editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing.

A close friend of mine was recently contracted to fabricate a window display at Barney’s in New York City. The installation was for designer Rick Owens. It was a large mass made mostly of dirt. Her coworkers called it “turd-nado.” I laughed to myself for weeks whenever I thought of this. To my surprise, the installation was affectionately nicknamed “turd-nado” before its arrival in New York City. The installation first debuted in Milan, during a Rick Owens retrospective titled “Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman.”

From an article published in “The Window” May 4th, 2018 penned by Anna Deutsch:

The team was especially struck by Owens’ Earthwork sculpture—a giant globular installation made from crushed lilies, his actual hair, concrete, and sand that was suspended over the entire exhibit. The piece was inspired by a 20-year-old Owens quote: “I would lay a black glittering turd on the white landscape of conformity.” And though there’s a sense of humor in that the sculpture is dubbed “turd-nado,” as with all things Owens, it is far more cerebral. “It really is supposed to represent something urgent, a kind of creative primal force that we all have,” he says. To Mazzucca, bringing that force to the Madison Avenue windows was a must. Owens agreed.

Window display photographed by Tom Sibley

It reminds me of that time I participated in a live performance planned by Matmos at a Chelsea art foundation gala. I perched on a sink with a video camera, recording Angel, the plumber who removed the toilet from the gallery bathroom, and proceeded to snake an endoscopic camera into the sewage pipes. We poured a mixture of gold glitter and water down the hole, and it showed up as a projection behind the performers. High society patrons watched a live feed of the plumber’s routine coming from my camera mixed with footage from the endoscopic camera.

There was no turd in the pipes that night, just glittering gold flakes in the system. Owens’ metaphorical turd is glittering black, not gold, and exists distinctly beyond the designer himself. The sentiment is not so much that upper upper class socialites shit just like “the rest of us”: the sewage system of New York City does not discriminate between classes of shit. No, Owens’ turd art represents a “creative primal force that we all have”–

Introducing… “fatberg.”

A fatberg is an amalgamation of non-biodegradable waste, like baby wipes, and cooking oil/fat that builds up in obstructed sections of outdated sewer systems. Seven fatbergs were recorded in the United Kingdom, and one in Australia, from 2013-2017. Baltimore is the first American city to make the list. On September 26, 2017 a fatberg was discovered in a sewer main between Baltimore Penn Station and the 1700 block of Charles Street. Right under the Male/Female statue. It caused 1.2 million gallons of raw sewage to overflow into the Jones Falls.

Capture from WBAL live footage of a fatberg in the Baltimore City sewage system

In February 2018, a dried section of a fatberg from Whitechapel, London was put on display at the Museum of London. Rick Owens’ retrospective at the Triennale de Milano ran from December 2017 – March 2018. For the months of February and March 2018, an individual could visit cultural institutions in two major cities and view a circumstantial byproduct of human waste and a designer’s subversive representation of human creation that resembles human waste.

Which one do you think took up more space in the gallery?

(The one with an ego.)

Photograph of fatberg on display courtesy of the Museum of London

Language escapes me as I try to articulate the symbolism of the synchronicity in the exhibitions of fatberg and turd-nado. So, naturally, I imagine the two competing in battle. The habit of denying the Source in favor of the Spectacle empowers the Source.

It feeds on negation, like a demon to fear or like the Japanese video game Katamari Damacy, whose title translates to “clump soul”. The Source suppressed mutates into Spectacle. Dwelling underground, under pavement we walk on everyday, beneath buses, cars, bicycles, people yelling, people walking their dogs, dogs pooping, dogs peeing, dogs barking, police officers directing traffic. Energy transference happens constantly aboveground while the Spectacle chimera of the Source sweats in its confinement. Solve et coagula.

The Baltimore Museum of Art should’ve put a dried piece of the First American Fatberg on display.

These Essays is a periodical mini-series of non-fiction writing curated for the promotion of joy and inquiry by E. Saffronia Downing and Suzanne Doogan. For the duration of the project, one essay will be posted each Sunday here on Post-Office Arts Journal. Writing is not restricted by theme, and ranges from pop culture criticism to personal essay and material analysis. For more information or to contribute an original piece, please contact

Hooked on Phonics: affect and erotics while struggling to write

C. Klockner

“Hooked on Phonics” marks the sixth publication as part of These Essays, a series selected by editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing.


thinking of you today.

i am working on some essay right now—it’s not good. it’s bad. i keep spinning the wheel (exhausting), i watch some TV (dangerous), i accidentally end up trying to justify the medium of language as a whole (foolish?). u ever find yourself doing this? they are real questions (i don’t think it is just anxiety): who for? what purpose? do I want to change a mind? self-consciousness in moderation, too: “do I have something to offer?”

a dumb idea: the most significant thoughts throughout history were never formalized into language, no? you’re right, I can’t prove that, but I can imagine ones that stayed shapeless, non-congealed, never weighted by self-serving performance in being spoken or written down. “pre-cognitive,” or something. Or thoughts that were expressed more purely through attitude. or love, or care. there are so many books that should have just been essays, but maybe just as many essays that should have been a brief, fluttering touch, too.

It’s usually that audience question: how can you know who you are trying to reach? really though: is it the audience who already knows what you’re talking about? Or is it the audience that you’ll spend your entire life trying to convince (but at least it’s not a life spent preaching to the choir)? That’s just marketing, probably. Maybe I write only to myself in order to remember some intangible series of thoughts on a later occasion. (Or are you the audience? I’ve always been bad at parties and good on dates.) 


References for “the audience you already know”: (1) A painting by Brad Phillips: “Shit! I’m an Artist’s Artist!” (2) That bit by Wittgenstein in his preface to Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:


(Do writers generally do this, or do most people work under the guise of novelty? Of offering something new to the world? How many texts have I been in the midst of (semi-) contentedly reading when—suddenly—-the writer is coining an empty neologism? My eyes roll backwards—I wake up dazed. (remember that one essay on hyperallergic trying to coin the term “Like Art” for “bright colored painting?” fuck that guy. he had a lot of other bad writing on there, too.) Sometimes you need a new word; sometimes you’re just lazy.)

Ludwig is pretty transparent with non-novelty in a way that seems sweet. He wrote the notes for that text while fighting as a soldier for the Austrian Army in WWI (after attempting to avoid the position, I should mention) and finished while on leave in 1918. It’s the only book-sized text he ever published. That’s always amazing to me, when someone like that keeps such a hard boil that anything they put out seems indivisible. (tbh I’ve only read bits of it—oops—but I do get the sense that it’s up our alley: language and world, what can be said vs. what can be shown, etc.) I guess it makes sense for that to become a point of reference here when I am trying to figure out how to write, thinking about that translation, thinking about that filter. I wonder how many soldiers he spoke with when writing his notes, what kind of lines he heard uttered into a bowl of stew at evening time.

(did u ever see that movie Restrepo? i watched it while sweating painting my room in the copycat in summer 2013. it’s a documentary on the soldiers of a combat team in korangal valley in afghanistan, a record of the boy-fighters playing xbox while on tour and sleeping and killing. it’s soft and intimate and disturbing. i think about the boys I knew in high school who joined the military and of the times I saw their smirks dissolve in the halls. and the acne they had. i also wonder how much is not said in war.)

This aspect of formalizing the pre-existing that Ludwig gestures towards seems to be what so much useful writing is for: crystallizing some latent synchronicity. There is a looming shadow that is unnamed, unnameable, and perhaps the tools don’t exist to name it; it is your job to do so.


What is that shadow? Some portals: Melanie Gilligan’s text Affect & Exchange” consolidates a few points of reference. On Spinoza’s binary distinction of ideas and affects, she notes that the work outlines “the idea” as a mode of thought defined by its representational character, while “affect” might be a mode of thought “which doesn’t represent anything.”

Jumping to Brian Massumi, she moves to offer more language by paraphrasing him: “that affects are pre-personal while emotions are social.” Further, that “feelings…can be interpreted to exist somewhere between affect and emotion… as affects that register in the subject’s conscious world of personal signification [my emphasis added].” Feelings and emotions both function here as “recognized affect,” that is, ~ the shadow ~ that finds its name. But since emotions function socially (and are externalized), they become independent from a subject’s interiority. (This is a similar independence that affect performs inversely, being neither recognized nor named, but still experienced.) Feelings, then, “are the only point in this process that can rightfully be considered confined to the individual’s inner world.”

This creates a pipeline of sorts between inside and outside that interfaces with Wittgenstein’s showing/saying nicely. Here is a diagram I made:


pre-personal             (interiority)         social space

    affect ——-> (   feelings   ) ——-> emotions

exteriority                (     self      )          exteriority


The public, in general, mocks affect beyond that which can be harvested for exchange-value. It becomes gendered, racialized, weeded out. Massumi’s language, appropriately, will always feel like the wrong tool for wading through muck, but it illuminates experienced moments in which it seems impossible to verbalize why someone has made me feel embittered, used, useless. Related: Amy Sillman once explained to her student Paul Chan that, “dumb people make great work, too,” but the word dumb remains gravely uninterrogated here.

(How does that shadow become the shape? Perhaps it’s like McLuhan’s analysis of Gutenberg’s influence, where Western thinking becomes an imitation of technological ability, where the development of movable type privileges and develops the visible as much as it privileges linear discourse.

Here is a proposed continuation of that theory of human consciousness: first the inner world either does not exist or mimics the shadowy cloud of affect, then it mimics spoken word, then the page, then the radio, then the television, then the network. Arriving at mind-as-network, you come close to full circle: zoomed-out views of network visualizations look like the shadowy cloud of affect, but zoom in and one encounters a deep architecture built from countless connections.

btw did u see that 2018 olympics opening ceremony? They made that floating cloud with thousands of drones to draw a 3D point cloud of some running man. horrifying)


i feel like these shadows are externalized all the time, though. Writing of Wittgenstein’s kind is what social media has perfected: an orchestration of mass-subjectivity from the ground up by pointing to [something] and saying “This is me” (by typing “dra g mi”). it seems appropriate, since it functions through such a cloudy, soft-edged network, that the image complex of meme production and exchange is so affect-oriented.

it is only the context that changes in memes; the feeling itself stays constant, becomes shared and communal. authors and audience find that they don’t identify with but, rather, embody these depicted avatars in a way that ends up functioning pre-personally. this is seemingly only a semantic shift, but it significantly repositions the subject/object relationship: the audience’s embodiment here is of an object (that feels), and is not identification with a subject that one understands. Because of that, the meme-subject is always actually the meme-object.

The roleplaying aspect of the meme-object finds relationship with BDSM’s positioning of the agencies of the subject/object and the props surrounding them. A Chris Kraus line resonates: “S/m’s a double flip around the immanence of objects in the theater: the objects aren’t blank and waiting to be filled with meaning by the actors. The objects here are meaning-cards, they hold all the information.” She is referencing the gags, the whips, the chains and their implied uses here, but it is the notion of meaning-card as script that draws a strange thread between our meme-object and their access to agency. One proposed meme: a servant is bound in a medieval sex dungeon and cries out when the paddle whistles through the air and lands on exposed, swollen ass cheeks. Labeled over the sobbing face: “me”; labeled over the dungeon-master: “this essay”.

Presenting affect in such an image based platform intuitively privileges the concise—-a word or two is almost too much, but increasing the number of typos allows longer captions. These misspellings become phonetic, moreso serving purity through performative immediacy than strategy. I’m thinking about sadpapsmear69’s and scariest_bug_ever’s femme memecraft now and how they selectively subvert and reinforce all of these dynamics. How much information is actually stored in a blurry photo of a lipstick smeared borzoi rolling on its back, me as my g o o d boi cortical homunculus? A version of my body as I feel it from the inside out? It’s a little unclear if it could be a monograph or a percussive, demonic grunt.


from audre lorde: erotics function as power, where erotics is outlined as a resource deeply within a femme and spiritual plane, a power in an unexpressed, unrecognized space, a space that is publicly both encouraged as a signifier of inferiority and rejected as a contemptible virtue. “A longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered,” she says. “Women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.

i am imagining a bookstore called Erotics and Erotica. it is full of theory, sci-fi, non-fiction, fiction, and ah, yes, erotica, too. it’s a queer space: the books are always sharing touch with each other, always being held, yielding, opening, bending spines. romantically and platonically, always pouring forth this unrecognized shadow of a space through haptics. i flip through a few selections, letting the book touch my hand, sliding against its yellowing paper and letting its contents dictate my interiority. it’s a small bookstore, very intimate. only a few books, lots of essay collections, a very sweet staff.

lorde’s erotics function as a linchpin for me between these worlds. the intangibly networked somehow functions within and external to the inherently bodied nature of affect, despite that contradiction. maybe text finds a place here after all.


letter writing as the virtual: an effort towards epistolary (if I am bad at parties and good on dates). I drafted a virtual version of you in my head while I write. Actually, I was trying to write this letter in a cafe right now, but tbh you’ve been texting me erotica the whole time trying to get my pants wet. I should write a little longer so I can walk out the door without embarrassing myself. Is that what Lorde was thinking when she said that fear is what relegates erotics to the bedroom when it might just as readily be embodied by the act of painting a fence? Probably not, but I will write another paragraph or two purely for the sake of letting my pants dry off.

A related question: who is bottoming in this letter? The text is a score and you perform it for me. I have you eating from my palm; you follow in the order in which I prescribe, comma by comma, following the text’s turns and dictations, allowing it to lead you wherever I choose.

but I am writing now and watch myself take shape as “the page” and its contents, ossifying the shadow into parts to be distributed, dog-eared, abused, written on, torn up, confined to the shelf for days, then eventually months, years. uploaded, circulated, and then downloaded. you look down on me in your lap and open me up. I feel your gaze and yield my contents to you. your grip is firm. 

but maybe this letter should be a brief touch, instead, too, and do away with that question. This letter as touch: something slow, a little less than a graze and a little more than a brush.

ok, love–

image credit: Keenon Brice


Hedera Helix

E. Saffronia Downing

Hedera Helix, Kodi Fabricant. Pen and Sharpie.

Hedera Helix is the fourth publication as part of These Essays, a series selected by editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing.

In the forest, English ivy slowly climbs a tulip poplar. The ivy spreads to envelop branches and twigs, caressing the tall tree, winding its way toward the sky above. As seasons pass, the vine’s growth engulfs the tree beneath a cloak of deep green ivy. Shaded from sunlight, the tree cannot photosynthesize. The tall tree buckles under ivy’s weight. The vine entwines the tree to death.

In the Eighteenth Century, European Colonists brought English ivy (Hedera Helix) across the ocean into the “New World.” As they moved past the boundary of mapped earth, settlers brought plants that reminded them of home. Faced with vast untamed wilderness, colonists cultivated plants they knew. “[Ivy] is so well known to almost every child to grow upon the stone walls of churches, houses, &c. and sometimes to grow alone of itself, though but seldom” wrote a British physician in 1653.1 They knew ivy; the vine had grown with them since before memory.

I wonder how ivy went across the sea. Who tended clippings of Hedera helix on the journey into the unknown? Who moistened it’s roots, shone light on it’s leaves? Elseways, was the plant brought as seed? Dried in summer, stratified through winter, then stored away in a trunk below deck to be propagated on unknown shores. Still another option is that ivy was brought by accident. The seed stuck to the bottom of a settler’s boot.

With ivy in their satchels, settlers journeyed across the vast ocean. Their desire was palpable as they gazed onto blue shores beyond. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit finds words for desire resting on the horizon– distant places cast in a blue hue. She calls it the blue of distance. You may long to go to the blue place far away, but it won’t be blue when you arrive. “Blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” Desire took the shape of blue distance as they gazed into the unknown. When they arrived however, color became green.

Hundreds of years later, forests of green-coated mammoths lined the highways of my childhood. The landscape of my East coast memory is green ivy desert. The vine spread across the wood singles of my childhood home. It coated the pavement of the abandoned lot next door. It reached toward the trunk of my backyard magnolia. Dark green, white veined, three pointed leaves are imprinted in my memory.

Kodi Fabricant

In Europe, ivy is part of the native ecosystem. The plant is a valuable source of food for species of wildlife. This naturally prevents ivy from invasive spreading. In North America however, where insects and animals have not evolved to eat the plant, ivy spreads to envelop forests, backyards, and wastelands. The earth longs to be covered in plants. Vigorous plants brought from distant shores take root in bare soil left behind bulldozers. Plants brought by colonists displaced native plants like colonists displaced native people, creating a new ecosystem of adapted species.

Colonists brought ivy to the “New World” to remind them of home. Now, people spend hours removing the plant from the wilderness, an effort to preserve something already lost. The vine is pulled away from the tree with a pry bar, and then cut in a wide band across the tree’s trunk using pruning shears, saws, loppers or a hand axe. The plant is then burned or bagged in black plastic and thrown into the garbage. As homeowners tear the plant from their trees, ivy continues to be propagated by garden centers for commercial sale. The rows of plastic pots come adorned with a caution tag warning buyers of invasive qualities.

In the post-industrial city where I live, the fibrous vine spreads across red brick.  Brought by my ancestors from distant shores, the plant has altered the landscape of the place that I live– shaping a modern ecology where biodiversity falters and monoculture reigns.  Ivy is well known to almost every child, to grow on row-homes, trees, and telephone polls. The plant has grown with us since before memory.



Tedium, (Re)production, Craft

Ivy Vance

I Bleed, I Weep, I Sweat (dedicated to Ursula K. LeGuin), Embroidery on hand woven cottolin, 34″ x 49″, April Camlin, 2018.

Tedium, (Re)production, Craft is the third publication as part of These Essays, a series selected by editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing.

The connection between tedium and reproduction is found in the feminized aspects of the decorative arts and crafts, which are traditionally separated from the realm of high art. Weaving, knitting, and embroidery are examples of crafts that are typically designated as feminine. These crafts are characterized by their tedious attributes: monotonous, repetitive, and time-consuming. They also contain the feminized aspects of reproduction: they are typically designated to the home, mainly practiced by women, and often worked from circulated patterns rather than original designs.  In the novel The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector the specific aspects of tedium and reproduction complicate the feminized nature of craft.  

The novel details an afternoon in the life of a woman known only to the reader as G.H. The novel reads as a document of thoughtful free-association wherein the reader is acquainted with the musings of the protagonist’s mind. Throughout the work certain themes prevail and intertwine, both directly and indirectly, forcing the reader to come to their own conclusions. Tedium and reproduction are two motifs that are indirectly linked, but are present throughout the novel. In different ways, aspects of tedium and reproduction comment on a broader issue of the feminized nature of craft and production.

There are several instances in the novel when G.H. expresses her desire and distaste towards tedium. Although feelings of distaste towards the tedious are fairly typical, finding tedium as a desirable trait is less expected. A tedious task is characterized by aspects of boredom, repetitiveness, and monotony. However, partaking in, enjoying, and mastering tedium creates a new set of parameters for aesthetics. In this passage G.H. struggles with her rejection, then acceptance of tedium:

My old constructions had consisted in continually trying to transform the atonal into the tonal, in dividing the infinite into a series of finites, and without noticing that finite is not a quantity, it is a quality… But tedium—tedium had been the only way I could feel the atonal. And I just had not known that I liked tedium because I suffered from it.1

In accepting tedium, G.H. finds other aesthetic qualities that she had previously tried to transform and compartmentalize. It is through the tedious that she interacts with aesthetics in ways that resist normative modes of engagement.

Addressing tedium as a subversive act is key to understanding this passage. Sianne Ngai discusses tedium as an aesthetic category in her book Ugly Feelings. These dysphoric or “ugly feelings,” as she coins them, operate as a new set of aesthetic qualifiers as well as modes of resistance against capitalism. She states, “for although dysphoric affects often seem to be the psychic fuel on which capitalist society runs, envy, paranoia, and all the emotional idioms I examine are marked by an ambivalence that will enable them to resist…”2 Tedium is in opposition with traditional neoliberal modes of production: profitability, productivity, and commodification. G.H. acknowledges that tedium is transgressive, since it is through accepting it that she rejects her “old constructions.”

Throughout the novel, G.H. grapples with reproduction as a mode of expression. Reproductive labor is typically assigned to the domestic and feminine sphere. The masculinization of authenticity and the feminization of reproduction are themes that are present in capitalist society and within the pages of this book. When G.H. is trying to describe what happened to her that afternoon she addresses the subject of reproduction:

Until I create the truth of what happened to me. Ah, it will be more like scratching than writing, since I’m attempting a reproduction more than an expression. I need to express myself less and less. Is that something else I lost? No, even when making sculptures I was already trying only to reproduce, and only with my hands.3

In this quote G.H. is reclaiming the act of reproduction as an authentic means of expression. To create the truth, the written word will not suffice. Instead she must make primordial scratches to recreate the authentic experience. She worries that she may have lost her ability to express herself, but reminds herself that even as a practicing artist she had always used reproduction as her main form of expression. Although her cultural production directly corresponds with her stance within the capitalist economic system, reclaiming reproduction as a means of expression disrupts traditional conceptions of authenticity.

If tedium has been established as subversive and reproduction has been reclaimed as a genuine means of expression, then craft contains the characteristics typically assigned to high art and the avant-garde. Ngai points out that, “the most ‘shocking,’ innovative, and transformative cultural productions in history have also been deliberately tedious ones.”4 In fact, many modern and contemporary art practices incorporate the very aspects of tedium and reproduction that are at play in The Passion According to G.H. Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, two highly masculine artists, engage with repetitive sequences of appropriated, then reproduced images taken from consumer society. Besides the actual medium that is used to create these pieces, it is difficult to see the difference between the features of tedium and reproduction found in craft and the ones featured in the works of Warhol and Koons.

The difference between art and craft lies in the traditionally feminized nature of craft and reproduction. However, it is novels like The Passion According to G.H that begin to blur the divide between these two similar yet opposing forces. Acknowledging the tedious as a way to subvert traditional modes of production and reclaiming reproduction as a form of expression are small steps to accepting craft as art; the aesthetics of desire and distaste are rethought. For the time being, tedium and reproduction stand as feminized modes of production. However, reclaimed by women, they can act as a meaningful modes of engagement with the material and cultural world.


Merry Métier

Rahne Alexander

Merry Métier is the second publication as part of These Essays, a series selected by editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing.

“Rahne, are you a witch?!?!” G yelled, slapping the steering wheel. I writhed, silent. “I knew it! You’re a witch!!!”

I just stared out the windshield. We had to get to rehearsal. G was a bit much for me. There’s this kind of physical privilege that some people possess, where they can be free with their bodies to do whatever, and that includes their mouths. G was responsible for maybe the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, but that hadn’t happened yet. We were still on our way to rehearsal.

When you don’t have a driving license you make a lot of concessions. You have to put up with the driver’s ideas, whatever they are. You have to listen to their music and smell their smells, and trust that they know what they’re doing behind the wheel.

I wish I remember what I said that tipped my hand. I wasn’t out about my witchcraft. I was barely even out to myself. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: it was easier for me to come out as a transsexual lesbian than it was for me to come out as a witch.

I mumbled some half-assed thing to G to get her to drop the subject. My ploy worked; soon she was talking about another one of her interests instead and I was happy to hear it. My time had not yet come. I still had to get through rehearsal, and then the show. And maybe some time after that I would allow myself to come out into the light just a little bit more.

* * *

We’re in this moment in which it seems like witchcraft as an idea has never been so popular, and of course, you know, the more the merry-meet-ier. I’ve been through enough generations of temporary radicals to develop a certain skepticism of vagaries.

But you know what’s different about this current moment? There’s a lot of us who been waiting a long long time to come out and now we are. This reminds me a lot of the time when I was wandering around looking for someone, anyone like me at all. And it wasn’t until the internet became a thing for me that I began to find trans people I could communicate with.

I had discovered I was trans years before the internet shined its light on me. I discovered that I was a witch in childhood as well. I didn’t really have words for these things at the time. But I knew. And I knew the words by the time I was able to walk to school on my own.

I’ve always been a walker, you know. It’s my most long-held earth practice.

I cannot stress how funny it is to me that it took longer to come to terms with being a witch than anything of my other challenges, even though I can pinpoint an awareness of this in me as early as third grade. I learned the names of my goddesses. They began to reach me. Thus began my night journeys; I began to need to look at the stars. And then the moon found me. The Feminine Divine would manifest in many ways in the ensuing years, usually without subtlety. For years I would find myself emotionally devastated by roadkill, every single time I passed a fresh corpse on the way to somewhere else.

Denying, filtering my witch nature has been the most hurtful thing I’ve done to myself. I tried to mask it with atheism, and through the can’t-beat-em-join-em kinds of Christianity and Buddhism.

it took me a long time to find witches I trust. I found some, and it turns out there are a lot more of us than I imagined.

The first time I met John Waters in person was the night before my familiar died. He had just released his Christmas album and my old confidante Denise bought me a copy and took me to the signing at Sound Garden in Baltimore. We stood in a long line, braving the wintery winds blasting off the harbor. I had no idea my familiar was going to die the next morning. I knew she was nearing her last days, but it wasn’t clear when.

Denise and I stood in that long line. She’s a lawyer and a mom of an amazing young person now but in those those days she was just one of those risk-taking college friends I could trade Foucault puns with. Finally we got to the table and met John and he signed my CD. He smiled asked me my name. He signed and asked me if my parents were hippies. I didn’t really hear him so I asked him to repeat the question, which he did, and then I got goofy and bashful and replied “Oh, no, more like hippie me.”

We walked away and suddenly I felt such shame. “I can’t believe I told John Waters I was a hippie,” I said, suddenly feeling like I had never left junior high in spite of being a thirtysomething GenXer.

Speaking of which, you all have NO IDEA how popular Thirtysomething was at my college.  Like a whole dorm would get together and watch it. WTF, it was nuts.

Early the next morning, my first familiar, Colette, my cat for 13 of her 18 years, died in my arms.

It took nearly 15 years for my esprit d’escalier to arrive: what I should have said to John Waters about the origin of name was, “More like witch me.”

* * *

Coming to terms with my epistemology — or maybe you’d call it my spirituality, my religion, my faith — has been immensely liberating. I don’t want to convince anyone to think like I do; I am convinced that it’s impossible to do so. You either understand me or you don’t; you either allow my place in this world or you don’t.

What we are witnessing is that many of us who have been working with similar epistemologies are connecting in ways we never have before. This means we are more powerful than we have ever been.

What’s more is that even if we are collectively hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge whose attainment is destruction, even if something happens to make it so that our fragile networks are never restored and we permanently lose touch with loved ones due to distance and disease, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE WITCHES.

We will always float among you. We are born as well as made.

If I had had this strength of knowledge when I was riding with G, I might have been able to meet her on her own terms, and talk freely. Instead I felt shame and fear, and we discussed something else. She may have rubbed me the wrong way with her enthusiasm, but this was an overall loss for me, because it added to my delay.

From where I sit now, it all seems so clear. This is why I love the feeling of my bare foot on earth. The spiritual calling was coming from outside the house I grew up in. My motion through the world was going to inevitably cause harm, and this feeling was devastating.

And now, we have arrived. We are awake, and we are aware. Now what are we to do?


The Tyranny of the Idiom

Spencer Compton

After some dormancy, Post-Office is happy to announce a new series of essays gathered and published by our Summer editors-in-residence Suzanne Doogan and E. Saffronia Downing as part of their project These Essays. The pieces push Post-Office towards a broader space of non-fiction writing, and will be published Sunday mornings at 8 A.M. between August 12 and September 16. 

The tyranny of the idiom is ubiquitous. Figurative rhetoric as abstract expressionism as grammatology as casual coercion as colloquialism as linguistic biopower, or something like that. The formula goes something like this: addresser employs a hermeneutic and/or ontic framing in a catch phrase to qualify what is said to addressee as being epistemologically sound.

For example, when I say take it from me I mean this object of knowledge is mine but I’m willing to loan it to you with a low interest idiomatic debt repayment plan. When I say go with the flow, I the anti-Deleuzian mean conform, buy subscription services and believe dogma. When I say to be honest, I mean every word so far has been relatively dishonest so let me interject and be the real author here ok? When I say it goes without saying, I mean duh but also let me tell you. When I say it’s a thing, I mean the subject of our conversation is actually an object that I can encapsulate and identify as super relevant, timely, but also a quaint nameless phenomena worth me naming and in such a way owning vis a vis owning up to with my last remark on the subject. You get the idea.

All of the above examples and more have their site-specific use value, but the real breadwinner is beginning a clause with the reality is. This high octane idiom is used today more than ever by politicians and pundits, anarchists and alt-righters, rich and poor alike to co-opt a dialogue and reframe it to their own ends, irrelevant to factuality or peer review. Is that a fact? Face the facts; the fact is, my alternative fact is in point of fact a fact of life. By saying that the reality is [comma so and so], the addresser is able to nullify any previously expressed conviction, sincerity, candor or validity in favor of their following argument. There’s this reality of the situation, and let me tell you how it is. My naming the reality as such gives me a hermeneutic upper hand in accounting for what we’re perceiving, and my stating that there’s this specific ontology at work where the reality is gives me an authority and groundedness previously absent and badly missing from our conversation. This idiomatic coercion is used everywhere: to set the record straight, to synopsize what really went down, to tell the truth, to lie, to defend rapists and activists and criminals and doctors and victims and tech bros and facts and fictions alike—all with the same turn of phrase.

The reality is, western states need to fight terrorism forever. The reality is, state regimes have sold ideas about freedom, liberty and rights for millennia. The moment the reality is, we jump into Jean Baudrillard’s idiomatic hyperreality, with no original referent in sight. The reality is, idioms today are employed across the board as power moves to both the benefit and detriment of their contingent, precarious employments. But where did their colloquial innocence go, and why all the syntactical fuss over winning an argument in subterfuge?

In Jean-François Lyotard’s book The Differend, he explains,“A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”1 In other words, the idiom is used to ‘regulate’ a conflict by rhetorically insinuating the non-signification of the addressee’s reality. The conversation ceases to converse and the addresser’s position in the dispute is rendered indisputable. Lyotard goes on:

In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human being who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learns through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure, which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quality of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.2

This pain is compounded by the split-second realization that the addressee can’t simply duplicate the territorialization that positioned them as addressee—they can’t simply ditto being told the reality is […] with but the reality also is […]! However, Lyotard suggests that the silenced addressee imperatively needs the impossible allowance to invent new, non-generic, DIY, hand-tailored idioms in response. While readymade, one-size-fits-all idioms tend towards coercion, idioms can also not fit—well—in their newness. In contradistinction to the latter, the emperor’s new clothes fit him very well.

Pop politics tells us to find the beef (Reagan),3 read lips (Bush),4 semanticize ontology (Clinton),5 pet the calculus (Bush pt. 2),6 romanticize poverty through shared sacrifice (Obama),7 refill the swamp with fluoridated spring water and make the USA qualitative again (Trump).8 The medium has gone from the massage back to the message.

The good news is that, like ideology, new idioms can be used for purposes other than coercion; the bad news is that the most universal of those idioms will likely sell out with age into tropey overuse. The good news is that the effect of using overabundant idioms is detectably different coming from an addresser with power and status versus an addresser without; the bad news is that, like fashion, smart phones, pop music and history, idioms seem to trickle down to average people with enough of a cogni-cultural delay that they are static, generic, drab, old news and potentially ineffectual upon arrival. It may not go without saying that we shouldn’t throw the new idiom baby out with the stale idiom bathwater, but the reality is it really depends on if that baby has prefigurative syntactico-privilege. People say not my cup of tea, not my president, when really they should be saying with non-hashtagged resistance: not my idiom.

It would be a lot easier to shoot the breeze without a house of cards.



Allie Linn

Estimated read time: 24 minutes.



























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The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right

M. Ambedkar


Estimated read time: 29 minutes.







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Economic Nationalism


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White Nationalism/Ethnonationalism/Nazism


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Graphic Design as Spectacle

May Kim



Figure 1. Commodity racism in Aunt Jemima packaging



Figure 2. The Eternal Jew poster (1940)


Figure 3. The Eternal Jew screen capture (1940)





Figures 5a and 5b. Black Panther promotion



Figure 6a. Holzer Truism Cut-off (1982)


Figure 6b. Holzer Protect, Protect (2009)





Figure 8. Ficciones Typografika display installed July 17, 2013.

Figure 9. Unlimited Greatness campaign, billboard installation (2016)




