Jacob Wren

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.

"Perhaps it is the role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen."
- Lyn Hejinian, Happily

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
- Ivan Illich

"You worried that the crisis was following you and, because of how closely it mirrored your thinking, that you were the crisis."
- Renee Gladman, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

All this as the world burn and drowns, says every cut-rate Cassandra in statements that gain no traction.

Culture will not completely collapse, but at some point soon it might be made almost only by the very rich.

This situation produces the art of our time.

"Then I imagine him melting, that eventually he will melt away to nothing, leaving a long purple sticky trail behind him, like a purple popsicle snail. And it occurs to me this might be what I most want, for the problems of the world to simply melt away..." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

"It is difficult to retain your standards with the pressure of trying to make money... Whatever is popular now—that’s all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."
- Nina Simone

"It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula."
- Ted Gioia

The final footnote in Georges Bataille's final unfinished book reads:

"I don't intend to deal in this work with the question of the means of acting effectively. However, I will set out the principles of such action elsewhere."

We're still waiting.

“Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”
- Stuart Hall

All the essays and stories I have published on A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality: radicalcut.blogspot.com/search/label...

"No wound is unique. Nothing human is unique. Everything becomes terribly banal over time. There’s the conundrum; but somewhere in there, literature has a chance to emerge.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

"An economy is a system of apparently willing but actually involuntary exchanges."
- Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene

Somewhat related, I highly recommend the novel Diego Garcia
by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, which is about the Chagos Islands among other things: mitpress.mit.edu/978163590162...

"Popular culture’s designed by a highly-trained popular culture elite"
- Momus, The Philosophy of Momus

I joined Tumblr in 2012 and since then have posted 15,505 times: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2022/12/four...