A few months ago I had a party to mark having dropped out of my PhD. The party included a homemade piñata filled with crab roe-flavoured broad beans (Alison helped make it and it destroyed their hairdryer, which, after a couple of hours of non-stop use, spontaneously combusted and began to spew out extremely toxic fumes), a Kahoot with difficult questions about my PhD topic and process (first place Alison, second place Michelle, third place Rowan—they were angry!!!), and an erasure/cutout poetry activity using pages from the chapter I'd most recently drafted (in April 2024).
The party was a really fun time and genuinely helped me feel a sense of closure towards the four-ish years I'd spent as a doctoral student. Even though only a handful of people participated, apparently news of it spread across the country and, later that week, my friend Lis heard about the dropout party from another friend who'd heard it from someone else. If you're looking for an excuse to have a dropout party, or a ritualistic gathering of any kind (e.g. I've twice had a funeral for an extremely important object in my life, first my 2013-2021 laptop that literally provided me with the means to discover and express my identity and have personal and private space, then my 2013-2024 pair of bright orange Doc Martens that finally fell apart), you really should. It's funny how much an event to mark the end of something communally, even one with much levity, can help in ferrying you across that marker of your life. Anyway, I don't really know what I'm saying anymore, but I just wanted to share and document some of the great work my friends did with my chapter.
I / call / half-naked women / Hard, soft, wet, sticky, and / the / lesbians / allow / that
—Rowan
have relations [fasheng guanxi] / union, climax / red tomato slice / beer bottle / play / imagination / trucks
—Michelle
Far / place / Opening Up / mass / emergence / in which / was conceived / a / people's crystallisation / a / Person's Federation. / A / disproportionate / power / to make / bodies / more / The apparently / individual / people were refashioned into boons / which are united / the / face/ shared / follow / assemble / assemble / alter / push / Maim
—Rowan
rise / revolutionary desire consolidated / excess economy / labour located in the future / the Sara Ahmed of It all / to touch intensity / this, too, was uncertain
—me!
gay / zombie / mermaid / available for / extraordinary feats / as showcased i / can / act / transgressive / I / push / the work
—Rowan
An origami heart by Michelle. On the top of it we can read: itself / language / 'I am here' / forever / unfinished and then love
i understood / the mantle of art: / it is / that / "art" / 'real art' / "all artworks have / force / (you must see / art / —even Duchamp's urinal.)" Even a / Fountain / demands audience / art / can treat / people / flippantly / when faced with / art / i acted as vessel / This resulted in / art / and / art / was art.
—Rowan (again! they had a lot of fun with this)
evasive tone: contradicts / You think / I think / I / oppose / I / impulse. I / feel / a number of words are worthy of consideration / form / content / fundamental role / to serve the masses. Art / successful socialist art / end goal of / "experience" and "emotions" / Realism / must leave Political / stage / This / tension / a desire / of interpretation / to pin down a definition
—Agnes
Alison made this gorgeous snowflake! They also composed a really amazing poem that I put into a joint mini-zine with my own cutout poem but, for some reason, I don't have a photo of this and I also cannot find it because I don't know where I put everything in my move... :(
Michelle made this cool shape! As well as an interactive poetry recital portal that I only have a video of, but even the video doesn't do it justice.
I love in excess / the heart full it overflows / much-ness / I think in excess too / what makes us / interested observation / thorough / would we distinguish between / the sense of being and desire / I diverge / I love I muse / to do so is / chaotic indulgent ordinary
—Wes. This love poem was so moving!!
And finally, I took this video of a whole zine Tala made, but for some reason the screenshots are extremely over-exposed, which looks kinda cool:
Flash/Flesh
queer / harnesses / positions / sexualities deemed 'deviant' / lifestyles deemed 'excessive' // the mannequins' hard plastic bodies / probe / consumerism / mannequins / forcing / wider / the dusty, littered environment // Labouring bodies / Making and Remaking // the production of garbage / garbage / meaningless / reputation / garbage no matter its quality / the utility and impact // Conclusion // the monstrous, the queer, the unwanted, the leftover / obscure and gleefully destructive.
I will properly look for the papers/zines I saved later this week and hopefully I can find Alison's poem as well as any others I've missed, and I will add them onto here!
These works that my friends created out of my work are some of the most beautiful things I've ever gotten to behold and I'm so grateful and happy to have had this moment. Maybe one day a version of the chapter I originally wrote will be published in some form, but in the meantime, this is what it is.
I had more I wanted to say about dropping out; I had started this document called 'preliminary notes on dropping out' where I wanted to put in fragments of the different things I've been thinking about that contributed to why I left... but after working on it for a while I suddenly was like, who cares? Definitely a blog post is nowhere near enough to encapsulate everything I think and feel. It's all still in my body anyway, and I don't know when or how it will come out. That's all.
xxx J
PS. I changed the title of my blog, I didn't want it to have my full name on it, that's weird! Instead it's one of the most important poems of my life. The other day I was reading Bhanu Kapil's Ban en banlieue and I came across this line: "Stupid me. I'm like a person waiting next to a fountain that's under construction for a lover who arrives, but is stupid." which made me think of the bit in June Jordan's 'I must become a menace to my enemies' that goes: "I live like a lover / who drops her dime into a phone / just as the subway shakes into the station / wasting her message / canceling the question of her call:"
Bhanu Kapil appeared to me in a dream last week, even though I'd never properly read her before (I only knew about the list of 12 questions from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers). Since then, I've read Ban en banlieue and also listened to her Between the Covers episode which was really moving. I really want to know more about how other people have engaged with her. Do you have a relationship to Kapil's work?? Let me know!!