- I’ve been taking these 15-second videos of things and places where a picture would normally suffice. In one example, I’m on the roof of a museum in Kanazawa, where an artist collective has installed a screen: blackbirds drift by, in both the film and the sky. But I can’t leave out the two people standing before me, taking it all in, as though on my behalf. Their enthralment is as good as mine.
- In the business of making images we published a chapbook of poetry by a 27-year-old author who died a month prior. I cried at the conference call, about a minute after my boss had broken the news over my softening brain, and then cried, multiple times, at the bookstore that hosted the launch.
- I’m crying? In a bookstore? A facsimile of another bookstore that died, by the way. I shan’t explain it here.
- I say “business” cos, at the award ceremony, my mother told the president of our nation that she hopes my work will continue to have “economic value” (everyone laughed), and also cos, at the end of said interaction, the president’s wife pondered on the connection between my profession and my partner’s (he’s in radiology) and I responded: “We both deal with images.”
- I was so witty!! I claim it!!!
- Also: there are the images we make in our minds and the images we make with our machines, and it’s taking everything I’ve got to remember that there’s people that are dying, Kim.
- Another example of a 15-second video: one I took yesterday, when I found myself by the promenade of the Rochor Canal, when I realised it was easier to walk to the office than take the train from where I was window-shopping. The world appeared to reward me for my decision: I loved the image it made on the surface of the water, the tops of the trees and the yellow-blue troposphere shimmering in bands; everything looked quiet, but also on fire. There were some cars moving imperceptibly, over a faraway road built over the canal, when a crow flew by! right in front of my camera! One blackbird / after another.
- So we were determined to publish two chapbooks, one by Adeline, and one by nor. In the business of making images, the chapbooks were anti-profit endeavours, at least according to our costing sheets, which meant that we had to strategise: our chapbooks had to be conceptual and clear, quick to grasp and enticing to our customers; they had to be pretty, and released in time for the holidays, so that they could be LESS SING LIT and more OBJET D’ART. We had PLANS. To quote my colleague on the aforementioned conference call: “I just spoke to her a week ago.”
- Two weeks after she died, at a dinner party over Diwali: “I feel almost bad saying this, Daryl, but when I first heard about her death, I thought: her book’s gonna sell.”
- Instagram reviews of our chapbooks are quick to emerge: Cherry loves Adeline; @radha_reads loves nor. When nor, the chapbook author that’s gratefully still alive, tags me on an Instagram post about how wonderful it is to launch two books in a calendar year, I comment <3 <3 because I have no words, and because I first learnt virtual communication via MSN Messenger. And let me inform you, dear readers / you heard it here first: the foremost image-makers of my generation are using 🫀 in place of ❤️.
- How fucked is it that I, a writer of prose, still gets to write this still-ongoing poem? All while Adeline’s dead.
- In a 15-second video that I love, one of the first I ever started taking on my phone: dark, all dark, aside for the shining bulb of a streetlamp; a light rain’s a-fallin’, snow-like beneath the lamplight. But music’s leaking out from my headphones, for which I was once chided for in the library, but really, whatever, cos now this tableau has a score. And it’s Rhianna! And she’s asking the world, ad nauseam, oh what it’s willing to do, oh oh.
- In another 15-second video that I took recently: I’m in Karuizawa, by the side of a narrow road in the late-November dark, and the cars keep whizzing by in passing phwoars; amidst the barren trees, a road sign declares: 6日間で / 3件の / 死亡事故. Daryl! Daryl: there’s people that are dying, Daryl, and there are people that are going to die.
- An evening stained
by the staying of an afternoon.
It had rained
or perhaps, it was about to rainjudging from the swell
of this canal.
There was a blackbird on a bin
and I winked 🫀
