III. TULSASLUT
TULSASLUT is an experimental novel. It is organised around two prompts and a supplement that together form “a body of translations.” These different parts of the novel are distinct textual-visual forms.
Prompt One is composed as the notebook of a brown researcher from the University of Tulsa who spends a summer in Athens studying Greco-Islamic manuscripts from the Ottoman period. Research fragments are interspersed with handwritten interventions. Prompt Two is composed as a songbook that conveys, in enjambed verse, the future (im)perfect story of Tulsaslut in Whitehell, a faggot adrift in a ruinous world ruled by The Men. There, in a City driven by feverish sex and deformed freedom, an inner revolution is about to invisibly take place. The Supplement is a series of talismans, an “imaginary apparatus” that charts the catastrophic transubstantiation of a soul.
The development of this project can be traced through its intermittent and ongoing partial publication.
The first iteration appeared as a live reading at Studio Voltaire, London in May 2019 as part of the book launch event for Huw Lemmey’s Red Tory. This text was subsequently published in the zine DreamBabes 2.0, edited by Victoria Sin.
I further developed this material into a series of drawings and annotations using charcoal, pastel, and tracing paper.
I expanded the project’s narrative treatment into the form of an annotated Prologue that will be published in Informatics of Domination, edited by Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, forthcoming in 2021 from Duke University Press.
I presented the Prologue as a live reading at Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin on September 16, 2020 as part of the event “The Sibyl & The Sibilant” organised by the Fellowship of Feral Troubs (Dalia Neis, Seda Mimaroglu, Ashkan Sepahvand, Julian Talamentez Brolaski). The Fellowship produced a zine for the occasion.
As part of the songbook, I wrote and performed “There is a Fever Spreading” at the Klosterruine, Berlin on August 13, 2020.
Alongside the public episodes of TULASLUT, I have been privately exploring more intimate imaginations of the project as additional talismanic drawings and handwritten verse.
The development of this project can be traced through its intermittent and ongoing partial publication.
The first iteration appeared as a live reading at Studio Voltaire, London in May 2019 as part of the book launch event for Huw Lemmey’s Red Tory. This text was subsequently published in the zine DreamBabes 2.0, edited by Victoria Sin.
I further developed this material into a series of drawings and annotations using charcoal, pastel, and tracing paper.
I expanded the project’s narrative treatment into the form of an annotated Prologue that will be published in Informatics of Domination, edited by Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, forthcoming in 2021 from Duke University Press.
I presented the Prologue as a live reading at Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin on September 16, 2020 as part of the event “The Sibyl & The Sibilant” organised by the Fellowship of Feral Troubs (Dalia Neis, Seda Mimaroglu, Ashkan Sepahvand, Julian Talamentez Brolaski). The Fellowship produced a zine for the occasion.
As part of the songbook, I wrote and performed “There is a Fever Spreading” at the Klosterruine, Berlin on August 13, 2020.
Alongside the public episodes of TULASLUT, I have been privately exploring more intimate imaginations of the project as additional talismanic drawings and handwritten verse.
