parapraxis's hannah zeavin on the answer to despair + our founder on live bird cams and more
monthly recs #34
Each month, we ask a writer to speak about what’s on their mind and share their tabs in our monthly recommendations. This month’s guest curator is writer, editor, and scholar Hannah Zeavin. She is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley and the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a magazine for psychoanalysis, and co-founder of The Psychosocial Foundation. She is currently at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance.
I spent most of the last year working through different kinds of mutuality: organizing, care, making. Working on the new magazine of psychoanalysis, Parapraxis, and its psycho-educational space, The Psychosocial Foundation — its second bi-annual seminar, this one on “Security,” starts this month — has been an object lesson in what the group can do. Much more importantly, this fall and winter, as we watch a genocide unfolding in real time, it’s been essential not to isolate, even in the face of acute despair. The answer, for me, has been various forms of collective acting and thinking.
Since October, many have come to organizing for Palestine for the first time, and it has been essential to collaborate with clarity and speed. It's a truism, however difficult, that we can't just organize and be organized by our friends. We may not agree on everything with our comrades (we, of course, may also not agree with our friends) and we move beyond that discomfort to work toward a shared vision of the future. I’m lucky that many of my friends have long been my comrades, but the last several months meant relearning how we can slip the mode of friendship for something more productive in times of crisis.
So, the last few months I’ve been thinking about groups, about devotion, about coalitions — about comradeship. What these structures of feeling portend, what they demand from us, what they offer, is something both more and less personal, more and less intimate, with different footings and emphases than other relations.
hannah zeavin’s
1. Organizing for Palestine — and more importantly, being organized by Palestine — has shown that we’re in a moment of invigorating old tactics and making new ones. Check out — and get involved with and support — the work of Samidoun, Palestinian Youth Movement, Palestinian Journalist Syndicate, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and the other members of the Shut it Down! Coalition.
2. I’ve loved magazines my whole reading life but, only since starting Parapraxis do I now appreciate fully what it takes to make one, let alone one that is truly vital (I’ll let our readers be the judge of whether our project qualifies). One thing that makes it even more difficult is the lack of funds for these kinds of projects — many rely on subscribers and small individual donations. To that end, right now, you can pre-order the latest issue of the excellent Pinko, put out by a collective for thinking gay communism together, subscribe to Logic(s), or support the ongoing work of Bookforum, n+1, and The Baffler.
3. I don’t write poems, but at least 3/4s of my friends do. A number of them are published by The Song Cave, which is co-published by Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes. For my money (and they get a lot of it), Song Cave is publishing some of the best books of poetry right now, including Sara Nicholson’s April, John Keene’s Punks, Callie Garnett’s Wings in Time, and Jane Gregory’s books, including the fabulously-titled Yeah No and My Enemies. Order their subscription set for 2024 and receive six volumes, including second books from Margaret Ross and from Felsenthal himself.
4. I spent winter break watching The Leftovers, a TV show with the premise that 2% of the world’s population disappeared instantaneously. What came next: nihilism, despair, but also so many claims to a direct line to God that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives added the term Cults to its laundry list title. We are living through our own, real version of ongoing disappeared and forgotten death — and it makes sense that we too continue to see cults flourish. Filmmaker Hannah Olson’s Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God is, I find, the most brilliant addition to the recent efflorescence of cult documentaries. Listen in parallel to the genius critical theorist Poulomi Saha, who recently spoke to Alexis Madrigal to explain why we’re still so obsessed by cults.
5. In 2024, the one thing I know I am looking forward to is going to the Leicester Conference of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations — a 14 day experiment in group relations. Having convinced the writer Ari Brostoff to join me, I’ve been preparing by reading in this tradition of group relations. I’ve deeply enjoyed returning to the very early work of Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups, which I hadn’t read since my husband, the poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien, wrote his book of nearly the same title (and in conversation with Bion) Experience in Groups. As he writes there, “Things are worse than they are,” and yet, the only way to go on being is together.
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6. It’s as worthwhile now as it was when Woody Guthrie wrote his 1943 New Year’s resolutions to resolve to save some dough, beat facism, change our bedclothes, and — every day — wake up and fight.
7. Continuing that reflection and introspection, we’re thinking about what our lives and our relationship to work might look like. This makes it the perfect time to start — or restart —a journaling practice, offline or online, even if history suggests we’re likely to leave it behind as soon as February hits.
8. The cold is more bearable with beautiful, weather-appropriate clothes. We like this bow-bedecked, reversible jacket and these fringed socks.
9. Acacia Magazine, a newly-launched political and cultural magazine, brings together writers and artists from the Muslim left. The beautiful first issue includes contributions from our founder and from passerby Fariha Róisín.
10. If you’re all caught up on the best films of 2023 and need more suggestions to kickstart the year, try Galerie, a film club curated by a rotating cast of curators including Mike Mills, Taylor Russell, and Karyn Kusama.
#recs “I love love love Veronica Kohl -- she has two locations she practices out of -- one in Greenpoint, one closer to Williamsburg.”
#ask-a-passerby “I ended up going with Healthfirst Bronze for insurance. Haven't used it yet so idk how good it is, but it's what made the most sense to my needs rn. In my research, people seem to really hate metroplus so I'd stay away. Blue Cross is very popular and has a big network, but the added cost wasn't worth it to me. I did everything through the NY State of Health website, and if you plan on calling them, I'd set aside at least 30 minutes. Lmk if you have specific questions, I went down a few rabbit holes and happy to help!”
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