Conversations
Saima Dawood: Oh, it's taking notes.
Erin Honeycutt: What kind of show in Bangalore? What's the lore in Bangalore?
Saima: Ah, f*ck it — what's the lore in Bangalore? Dawrān. Dawrān.
Erin: Darwin?
Saima: [laughing] No — wait, the last time this happened, I was in a book discussion meeting, and someone had sent an AI note-taker because they weren't able to be present. The entire time we were confused about the whole thing, because we didn't want her to miss out, but there was an AI taking our conversation down regardless. And then it sent out this summary afterward — I'll read it, it's too funny: "Dash Dash and Saima Dawood discussed their recent experiences and upcoming projects. Dash shared a story about cultural drinking etiquette in East Asia, highlighting the pressure on new employees. Saima talked about setting up a [press]... They discussed the use of AI for note-taking during their meeting, expressing concerns about privacy and data sharing. The conversation concluded with confusion over the AI's note-taking capabilities and the presence of other participants."
Erin: Speaking of AI listening and learning from us — I had a Zoom interview the other day where they asked how I felt about improv, so I brought out my lyre. It has sixteen strings. When I played it, the AI transcription completely blocked out the musical sound — like it was filtering it as noise. We thought that was a really weird and interesting glitch, a way to think about insurgent language.
Saima: So it’s censoring musical notes and has a hierarchy on language over sound? Why is the lyre important to Cutt Press?
Erin: Yes, it seemed exactly that. Which means perhaps we should be singing all the time! More and more lately I think about how publishing can be more representative of oral literature, of something changeable and unfixed rather than entombed and archived. I'm basically againstanti the institution of the book — not against books, but against the idea that there's one kind of knowledge, one kind of written knowledge, any one kind of knowledge representing the full picture; I’m considering all the holes in the archive. Everything I do is a little chisel — bink, bink, bink — against that towering institution.
I have a kind of mascot, actually — I'm wearing her name right now on my shirt. Enheduanna. She's the world's first recorded poet, from roughly the 23rd century BC, in Iraq. I have this whole imaginary intercourse with her — intellectual intercourse, though "intercourse" is a funny word to land on. Sometimes I think of her as an actual publisher, if you consider all the medial ranges of authorship. She composed some of her hymns with a lyre. I imagine her writing a poem in the air and going, hey, scribe, write that down, and put my name next to it. Where does that first authority over a written thing, not ownership exactly, but authority, come from, the desire to have something attributed to you? I think about that moment in time a lot.
Saima: Jam out from the BC. So the sound of the lyre and the poetry — do they fully complement each other, and it comes out as one form? Do you use the lyre before, after, or during? Also, the entirety of the industry functions on this desire to have something attributed to oneself. “Intellectual property”, and how there are arguments that language in itself functions like money - are we denying it is nature?
Erin: I'm getting the feeling lately that poetry readings could use some new mediums — which is part of why I bought the lyre. So I can jam, but I’m more interested in the lyre as a compositional element not just accompaniment. I suppose I’m treating it like a Word Processor.
It's a new thing for me. I’m interested in LARPing to the sound and the word being in the same channel. It’s a shared currency, language. With the publishing projects, I do feel like it’s all an ongoing inquiry into making language, and following the agency of writing into a material form.
I feel like texts move like a gift that grows richer the more it's passed along, like one big riff, endless karaoke. Copyright turns that into a commodity, so what was the value of language before it had monetary value? I can’t say I have negotiated with myself how this utopic inclination lays on all scenarios but I would say in principle, circulation over hoarding.
I’m hearing Patti Smith in my head shout: “FREE MONEY!” Like free money from itself.
Saima: Can you explain what you mean by shared currency? How does one make language? All this is making me think of the genesis; in the beginning, there was the word.
Erin: So a word only means something next to all the words it isn't, the way a bill is only worth something inside a whole system of exchange. Is that completely true? Sure there are lots of sensations one can get from a word but we’re talking systems here. So language isn't a pile of private tokens I hand you. It's a system we're both already standing inside before either of us says a word.
Maybe that's the answer to how one makes language, like a soup. You're born into something already moving, and all you can do is bend it a little as you pass it on, like a currency that only stays alive by changing hands.
That's the thread I want to follow into the institution of the book, because I think that's exactly what the book tries to undo. The book takes something that was moving, shared, always with someone, and stops it. Binds it, dates it, puts one name on the spine, and calls that the origin. And it doesn't just enclose the language, it decides whose voice was worth enclosing in the first place. Which knowledge counts as knowledge ends up depending on whether it was written down, by whom, in what language, under what imprint. So whatever didn't get written down, in the right language, by the right hand, quietly stops counting as knowledge at all. That's not the same as saying the knowledge was absent. It just means the institution never extended its authority to it, which is where my ummmmm instincts start asking who got recorded and canonized, and who didn't.
So when I say I'm anti the institution of the book, I don't mean anti-book. I mean anti the idea that binding something finishes it, that once it's between covers it's stopped moving and becomes truth. I think that’s what all the CUTT PRESS experiments are collectively making a chorus of; pamphlets, zines, artist books that are explicitly unfinished, cheap, collective, mutable. They're already a quiet argument against the institution of the book. I'm not making anti-books. I'm making books that refuse to act like The Book as perceived in institutionalized literature.
Saima: Thanks for simplifying so well - I would basically ask about imagining architectures of circulation in this soup, then. This is where I am wondering, on the basis of what you’ve just fostered - which reads like situated, dense theory and its critique - how to interrupt The Book too.
Erin: I'm still figuring most of this out as I go, honestly, but the architecture I'd say is very much a soup.
Saima: There was a poet in the Indo-Persianate tradition, Amir Khusrau, very famous for — well, credited with inventing the sitar. He used to compose with it. I wonder how much of that tradition carried the same impulse. I just wrote about music and language — I translated some core concepts of French theory into Urdu. There's one word, hāl, which is the inner state, existential ontology. Tahwīl, which is the bridge, the transformation that occurs — I don't know how to translate it cleanly into English. And mahoul, which in theory is closer to linguistics and semiotics — the semiotic structure of an environment. I took those three and mapped them onto existential ontology, linguistics, and semiotic structures.
But what I was always befuddled by is the role of music in the Indo-Persianate world, before and after, and what it has to do with scripture. Because the sonic architecture of collapse is the sound of modern music. The timbral richness Adorno heard in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is, I think, the same sonic architecture of collapse that comes with eschatology in the Quranic tradition. I wrote an essay about it — arguing that the long-running debate around sonic architectures and technologies in the Islamic canon is actually a critique of modernity and assimilation, and that it pre-empted that critique within scripture itself. So I'm grappling with sound and text through the apophatic tradition.
It would be so interesting to trace how, when poetry first ran up against accusations of blasphemy — poetry and wine — that wasn't really just about wine. There was so much more going on, and it's something inflammatory that's since found itself useful for a postmodernity. Right now, whenever I go out and listen to whatever people are calling avant-garde, it's this oversaturation — it sounds like the apocalypse, atonal crap. And I feel like the lyre — well, it's probably pre-harp, right? At least that's what it sounds like.
Erin: Yeah, it's very harp-like — a kind of ancestor of the harp.
Saima: I think that's very interesting to understand.
Erin: I love the way you phrased that — the sonic architecture of collapse.
Saima: The harp was what David played, wasn't it — and it pleased the Lord. There's something there about the harp during the sonic architecture of collapse, the harp as the perfect antidote to alienation.
Erin: Definitely. But if the harp pleased the Lord what did it do to the human listener passing by? Maybe this is something that can be answered with the hospitality of publishing or translation.
Saima: So you’re negotiating with the metaphysics of it all?
Erin: I don't think I can say whether the harp actually pleases God, but what it does to the person standing nearby when it's played I can work with.
I keep thinking the harp's real power was always in its side effects, in who overhears it and what it does to them uninvited. Like how something appears as entertainment but is actually medicinal, or a real ritual; that’s certainly been an anti-colonial tactic.
So maybe that's what I mean by hospitality: building a small passage for whatever's traveling underneath. Honestly, I want to make books that work the same way. Books might as well be entheogens, right?
Saima: I feel like it's a very — I don't want to use the word "contemporary" like that, but because of how saturated sound has become, your endeavors have found themselves in the right kind of expression with Cutt Press, and the lyre — the forces at play, perhaps I'm assuming, are antidotes to atonality, to alienation, in a very deconstructed way. I don't want to say "deconstructed," I just said it out loud, I want to put something else in my mouth instead.
Erin: It's an interesting instrument, because you can't really play it wrong. If it's in tune, it's in tune, and it sounds incredible.
Saima: I'm not a music person, but it did guide me through a lot of modes of subjectivation. I thought that was very interesting.
Erin: It makes me think of the bootlegging aesthetics that we are both attuned to in publishing, and of bootlegging as a kind of slipping of information through the main waves, and of the way tonal qualities can carry information below a certain register, and it’s a funny parallel with micro-publishing perhaps, a wave for the whispered and the fragmented and the voice that maybe needs to stay hidden. I'd love to read your essay.
Saima: It's coming out next month, with Shared Ecologies — a magazine in India. I write about it in an autotheoretical format. It was interesting for me to explore the arguments around the disallowance of music, and then read about cultural diplomacy and how it used music as a tool of deception. That's reductive, but basically — Cold War cultural diplomacy situated music within deradicalization narratives toward "the other." There were literal deradicalization missions in the banlieues of Marseille that used music to measure whether someone was moderate or extremist. That, I think, was my real introduction to theory, because that's when I got pissed off and went down this whole rabbit hole of music-this, music-that — grappling with why text and sonic logics seem to contradict each other.
And then I was reading about tajwīd — do you know what that is?
Erin: A poet?
Saima: No — it's a form of reciting the Quran. Very poetic, and it's actually credited with helping found the blues. So for me it became: is sprechstimme in Adorno's reading of Pierrot Lunaire — that oscillating sound of rupture and collapse, the unveiling of psychic interiority — the tajwīd of modernity? Is that the debt German idealism never paid to Islamic philosophy? It's kind of speculative sonic philosophy.
Erin: Is this all in the essay? I’m wondering what a publishing practice that took tajwīd seriously looks like? Not as metaphor but formally like what would it mean for a text to be recited into existence rather than edited into it? And when you talk about the sonic architecture of collapse — do you think the small press is trying to build something within that collapse, or is it also a collapse aesthetic?
Saima: Yes. It's kind of dense.
Erin: To go back to a dialectic of mediums — another sonic intervention I've been thinking about and am thinking about most of the time underlying everything else is the word ekphrasis, the Greek word for the description of an image, which in Greek actually means "to speak out." I always had this feeling there was a lost auditory element in there, even though now it's just equated with art writing, very simplistic. Historically it was set up as a crisis — which is the better representation, text or image, which is more evocative. The first example is the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad — a description of a painting on a shield. Somehow it feels relevant to this whole line of thinking through mediums and perhaps it’s that ekphrasis got off on a bad translation birth because it doesn't just translate image to text but animates and sonifies it. In that way it’s not about which medium does it better but what happens when language tries to carry something that language isn't supposed to be able to carry. It’s a crisis of mediums and their adequacy, which is also tied into our changing nervous systems and like atmospheric conditions, I think, but that’s a whole thread, the physiology of it.
Saima: I think that linguistic trajectory might connect to the Second Council of Nicaea — that's the art-historical moment that, formally and hegemonically, cemented and transmuted the image into a representative of the divine. And that's the fundamental critique that image-representation gets within, say, the Iranian or Islamic tradition — because for them the apophatic happens through text.
Erin: Which brings us to the institution of the book. Everything’s a riff.
Saima: Right, and that's something I have no idea about.
Erin, on Cutt Press, told anecdotally: This morning Cutt Press was beside a bridge, by the canal in Berlin, with an author — we were wheat-pasting excerpts from A Glossary of Holes, squirting wheat paste onto this little canal ledge. I'm interested in all these alternative ways of having a book launch, like introducing the lyre to a reading, I'm always exploring ways to make a text accessible, playable — that's the absolute pleasure of being a very small press.This excerpt will also be in an anthology, Womanhood: The Smut Gazette. I liked the idea of doing the wheat-paste version during Miss Read, the big art-book fair here. It'll bring a lot of great book nerds through.
Cutt Press itself began seven years ago, in a Berlin bookshop called Hopscotch, more or less out of bootlegging — copying books customers wanted that had become hard to get because of pandemic shipping constraints. But honestly I think it started when I was ten, when I got a clunky little IBM laptop, and my first instinct was to type out all my favorite books, just to feel what it felt like to write them. Those were my actual first bootlegs. That opened up this whole inquiry into the materiality of writing, this obsession with authorship and mediumship, which I'm grateful to keep playing with through Cutt Press.
Saima: That's incredible.
Erin: Is it?
Saima: I think you're asking and navigating the most poignant philosophical questions. With LLMs and— oh, why is the free meeting ending in ten minutes?
Saima: Tthere's a sense of the afterlife of a text. I don't know anything about it, but — you're never writing alone. Everything you write is never alone.
Erin: It's a chorus, a response, an addendum. Actually, when you said "the sonic architecture of collapse," I thought — that's also the net of Cutt Press, in a way. It's a kind of listening project, where I'm picking up these marginalia texts that are asking to be resurfaced. It's a lot of following an algorithm but getting underneath it — like, what's actually going on here, why is my algorithm full of twinks, I'm kidding — but also, what's the actual current moment underneath it. I think it has to do with the palindrome of time, how nothing is really linear — the afterlife of literature is happening now, all the time. That's the magic of a book: you're transported, it's activated by the readership of the body and consciousness. It's a quantum object. So I think of this custodianship of text as part of that same sonic architecture of collapse, maybe.
Tomorrow I'm getting on a train — a lovely little bookshop offered me a small publisher residency in their window. I asked the owner what the missing French-language pamphlet was, what his customers were actually asking for, and he wasn't sure. But I'd been thinking a lot about this Vietnamese-French Marxist phenomenologist, Tran Duc Thao who has this Marxist take on phenomenology, that language originates out of working realities, the actual conditions in which one works. So I printed one chapter from his book on the origins of language, made twenty copies, folded them, hand-wrote the covers. One could say he kind of paved the way for a French anticolonialism which Fanon ran with.
It's been fun to just respond to a moment, and supply the goods someone out there is hopefully looking for. I'm also sitting right now in storage for an online bookshop I won't name — there are these GDR educational films found on the street here, one of which someone told me is a warning against the dangers of Tupperware, housewives going crazy over it. I haven't watched it myself, that's just what I was told.
Saima: What are your preferred modes of dissemination?
Erin: I travel with a suitcase a lot lately, so hand-to-hand is my favorite. Or under the bridge, like a troll. And a question for you - can you say more about the title of your new press, Dawrān?
Saima I started Dawrān because I wanted to interrogate notions of time and its consequences — it literally means duration. I first heard it on a Hindi news channel, in the phrase is dawrān mein, "in this duration," and thought, hm, interesting. It's so easy to make puns with the name, because there's so much lacking in the spatio-temporal discourse around it. In Urdu, dawrān mein refers to duration, but it can also refer to a place — come to this place. A spatio-temporal situation. I thought that gap was very interesting, and I kept wondering why it was so easy for me to make jokes about time.
It's a Persian word originally, but it's transmogrified across other languages — in Emirati Arabic it means staying out late, in Farsi something else again — but all of them orbit a circular notion of time. That was the one argument holding together my translation of French theory into Urdu, and the bridge I wanted to draw to what I consider "the environment."
I was writing the manifesto for Dawrān and thought, my god, this is so funny, because it ended up being about time — about liberating Bergson's la durée from its mechanical restraints, the dialectics of mourning and jouissance, shadow poetics and surface glitches, publishing from the debris of neoliberalism's stultification. There's more I'm working on, but I think that's too broad on its own. Now I'm mostly sitting with the fact that Dawrān can mean so many things because it's occupying a gap — which is also why I'm struggling with the manifesto, trying to create a space of clearing rather than a definition.
There was a whole debate between Einstein and Bergson that more or less ruined Bergson's notion of time-as-endured, which had been closely aligned with certain Eastern philosophical traditions — and which the Frankfurt School both deployed and critiqued. I don't fully understand it yet, but I want to, in a way that lets me apply it, interrupt rudely, and swerve.
Erin: What I find with publishing is that navigating its space-time can happen on that level — the manifesto level that you just offer more overtly by saying it out loud and less overtly like bay leaves offerings — and then the other way to get down to the bones of it is so easy, because then I can just say: the actual materialism of this press right now is in describing the conditions in which I’m operating and what’s in my hand, and what is the task at hand, like one of those mystical to-do lists by Laynie Browne, or what poet was it?
The reality right now is two suitcases, heavy as hell, full of books, sitting outside my door, that I'm taking on a train in three hours. This morning I printed a book by an Icelandic poet, published in Icelandic last year — a pun on a place name and the name of a schizophrenia medication— and I published it bilingually, in Icelandic and English, since Icelandic is my only other real language. I found red napkins at the euro shop around the corner and sewed them into the spine. Now everyone's asking when the launch is — maybe September, maybe a triple launch alongside a novelization I wrote of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman that a friend is publishing, and the zine version of A Glossary of Holes I pasted this morning. A whole symphony of women falling into holes, basically. It's like — what else is happening, how can I be one body and do all the things, so you throw them together, and there's a correspondence between this text, that text, a living person, a dead person, a film they made — in this big Dawrān of time.
Erin: How has the reception of the name Dawrān been in Bangalore?
Saima: Great, most are confused at first, but then it clicks — we have a launch coming up at the Bangalore International Centre, for a play about Bangalore's startup culture ruining theatre via neoliberal economics, basically a social experiment in startup culture. We'll be on a panel with a physicist-philosopher (who didn’t show), playwright and another playwright who's a critic of the current powers that be — we're going to chat shit. I didn't expect to feel this institutionalized, but here we are.
Erin: Does that feel like institutionalization — being part of the Bangalore International Centre?
Saima: I think it's fine. It's not where counterculture goes to die, but it's definitely something — a nice place for dialogue among an older crowd. I'm hoping this play brings in a younger audience.
Erin: Your other question — how has AI affected your position as a smuggler of online texts? Makes me go back to the lyre not registering on the Zoom AI — I clocked that as a kind of analog mechanism against AI, almost by accident. I'm gathering these small analog tools. I'm all for Anna's Archive and the shadow libraries, which I plunder regularly, obviously. But it's made me curious about books that refuse to be scanned. A standard scanner can take a flat page, but an experimental book with flaps, with a structure that depends on duration — what you do, when you turn, when you listen, when you feel — can't be translated into that experience. It's a gap, almost like Dawrān itself: a placeholder, a gap where AI can scrape, and a gap where it can't, where there's some inevitable analog physicality to the technology. I think everything is just asking for more clever experiments, more finesse, more curiosity.
Saima: So it's like a placeholder, a cut.
Erin: Precisely — which makes me think of the slash in Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body, which I've been working on translating with a group. Wittig treats the text as a very physical object — every instance of the pronoun je, "I," is split with a slash, breaking apart any holistic self. It's not pronounced differently; your eye takes it in as an incision, a marking, but you don't hear it as sound. It opens a gap between the imagination gathering the story and the physical act of reading — which is also very Cutt Press. Cut, pray, cut, scrape. I'm going to get a sword logo…
Saima: There's a library in Dubai, shaped like a book, with a giant sculpture out front — of a single hamza, the Arabic glottal stop. It exists as a letter, but there's no sound to it; it just elucidates a word. I look at it and it tells me to shut up. It's like a void — at least that's what it's felt like, reading Arabic and Urdu: the hamza exists, but there's nothing to it, an emptiness within.
Erin: I think so. It makes me think of when Prince named his album in the early ‘90s an unpronounceable symbol — record labels were so annoyed because they couldn't say or type the name of the album.
Saima: Another question on the list — how we met at Focal Point in Sharjah, and our conversation meandered to decolonization, as it should. How does the literary engage in this endeavor?
Erin: I think our conversation upon meeting was extremely playful, and I think that's one way to engage with the endeavor — starting from mundane observations. I'd just spent a few months in Japan, and coming back to Europe felt like going back to the Middle Ages — the physical infrastructure of it. I was still thinking about that trip when I said to you, in Sharjah, that if everyone in Germany had a bidet, they'd be ten percent happier, ten percent less stressed. So — what's the relationship between the colonizer's lack of, let's say, hygiene infrastructure, and the rest? We landed on this pun, half-formed: "decolonize the colonizer." Which doesn't quite work, because to decolonize isn't to remove anyone's colon, but it got us to talking about enemas, giving the colonizer one, and you gave me a book — Sabine Schülting's Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality — on the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life: industrial novels, slum fiction, blue books, sanitary reformers' reports. I started it, walking around reading it, and never quite finished, but it stuck with me.
Saima: Sound, time, the written word — I think that's the throughline we've landed on here.
Erin: Agreed. I'm excited about you changing the landscape of publishing in Bangalore.
Saima: I hope so. Bang the lore.
Erin: I would love to help you with a whole list of puns.
I’d Bootleg You
august 2026
Saima Dawood: Oh, it's taking notes.
Erin Honeycutt: What kind of show in Bangalore? What's the lore in Bangalore?
Saima: Ah, f*ck it — what's the lore in Bangalore? Dawrān. Dawrān.
Erin: Darwin?
Saima: [laughing] No — wait, the last time this happened, I was in a book discussion meeting, and someone had sent an AI note-taker because they weren't able to be present. The entire time we were confused about the whole thing, because we didn't want her to miss out, but there was an AI taking our conversation down regardless. And then it sent out this summary afterward — I'll read it, it's too funny: "Dash Dash and Saima Dawood discussed their recent experiences and upcoming projects. Dash shared a story about cultural drinking etiquette in East Asia, highlighting the pressure on new employees. Saima talked about setting up a [press]... They discussed the use of AI for note-taking during their meeting, expressing concerns about privacy and data sharing. The conversation concluded with confusion over the AI's note-taking capabilities and the presence of other participants."
Erin: Speaking of AI listening and learning from us — I had a Zoom interview the other day where they asked how I felt about improv, so I brought out my lyre. It has sixteen strings. When I played it, the AI transcription completely blocked out the musical sound — like it was filtering it as noise. We thought that was a really weird and interesting glitch, a way to think about insurgent language.
Saima: So it’s censoring musical notes and has a hierarchy on language over sound? Why is the lyre important to Cutt Press?
Erin: Yes, it seemed exactly that. Which means perhaps we should be singing all the time! More and more lately I think about how publishing can be more representative of oral literature, of something changeable and unfixed rather than entombed and archived. I'm basically againstanti the institution of the book — not against books, but against the idea that there's one kind of knowledge, one kind of written knowledge, any one kind of knowledge representing the full picture; I’m considering all the holes in the archive. Everything I do is a little chisel — bink, bink, bink — against that towering institution.
I have a kind of mascot, actually — I'm wearing her name right now on my shirt. Enheduanna. She's the world's first recorded poet, from roughly the 23rd century BC, in Iraq. I have this whole imaginary intercourse with her — intellectual intercourse, though "intercourse" is a funny word to land on. Sometimes I think of her as an actual publisher, if you consider all the medial ranges of authorship. She composed some of her hymns with a lyre. I imagine her writing a poem in the air and going, hey, scribe, write that down, and put my name next to it. Where does that first authority over a written thing, not ownership exactly, but authority, come from, the desire to have something attributed to you? I think about that moment in time a lot.
Saima: Jam out from the BC. So the sound of the lyre and the poetry — do they fully complement each other, and it comes out as one form? Do you use the lyre before, after, or during? Also, the entirety of the industry functions on this desire to have something attributed to oneself. “Intellectual property”, and how there are arguments that language in itself functions like money - are we denying it is nature?
Erin: I'm getting the feeling lately that poetry readings could use some new mediums — which is part of why I bought the lyre. So I can jam, but I’m more interested in the lyre as a compositional element not just accompaniment. I suppose I’m treating it like a Word Processor.
It's a new thing for me. I’m interested in LARPing to the sound and the word being in the same channel. It’s a shared currency, language. With the publishing projects, I do feel like it’s all an ongoing inquiry into making language, and following the agency of writing into a material form.
I feel like texts move like a gift that grows richer the more it's passed along, like one big riff, endless karaoke. Copyright turns that into a commodity, so what was the value of language before it had monetary value? I can’t say I have negotiated with myself how this utopic inclination lays on all scenarios but I would say in principle, circulation over hoarding.
I’m hearing Patti Smith in my head shout: “FREE MONEY!” Like free money from itself.
Saima: Can you explain what you mean by shared currency? How does one make language? All this is making me think of the genesis; in the beginning, there was the word.
Erin: So a word only means something next to all the words it isn't, the way a bill is only worth something inside a whole system of exchange. Is that completely true? Sure there are lots of sensations one can get from a word but we’re talking systems here. So language isn't a pile of private tokens I hand you. It's a system we're both already standing inside before either of us says a word.
Maybe that's the answer to how one makes language, like a soup. You're born into something already moving, and all you can do is bend it a little as you pass it on, like a currency that only stays alive by changing hands.
That's the thread I want to follow into the institution of the book, because I think that's exactly what the book tries to undo. The book takes something that was moving, shared, always with someone, and stops it. Binds it, dates it, puts one name on the spine, and calls that the origin. And it doesn't just enclose the language, it decides whose voice was worth enclosing in the first place. Which knowledge counts as knowledge ends up depending on whether it was written down, by whom, in what language, under what imprint. So whatever didn't get written down, in the right language, by the right hand, quietly stops counting as knowledge at all. That's not the same as saying the knowledge was absent. It just means the institution never extended its authority to it, which is where my ummmmm instincts start asking who got recorded and canonized, and who didn't.
So when I say I'm anti the institution of the book, I don't mean anti-book. I mean anti the idea that binding something finishes it, that once it's between covers it's stopped moving and becomes truth. I think that’s what all the CUTT PRESS experiments are collectively making a chorus of; pamphlets, zines, artist books that are explicitly unfinished, cheap, collective, mutable. They're already a quiet argument against the institution of the book. I'm not making anti-books. I'm making books that refuse to act like The Book as perceived in institutionalized literature.
Saima: Thanks for simplifying so well - I would basically ask about imagining architectures of circulation in this soup, then. This is where I am wondering, on the basis of what you’ve just fostered - which reads like situated, dense theory and its critique - how to interrupt The Book too.
Erin: I'm still figuring most of this out as I go, honestly, but the architecture I'd say is very much a soup.
Saima: There was a poet in the Indo-Persianate tradition, Amir Khusrau, very famous for — well, credited with inventing the sitar. He used to compose with it. I wonder how much of that tradition carried the same impulse. I just wrote about music and language — I translated some core concepts of French theory into Urdu. There's one word, hāl, which is the inner state, existential ontology. Tahwīl, which is the bridge, the transformation that occurs — I don't know how to translate it cleanly into English. And mahoul, which in theory is closer to linguistics and semiotics — the semiotic structure of an environment. I took those three and mapped them onto existential ontology, linguistics, and semiotic structures.
But what I was always befuddled by is the role of music in the Indo-Persianate world, before and after, and what it has to do with scripture. Because the sonic architecture of collapse is the sound of modern music. The timbral richness Adorno heard in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is, I think, the same sonic architecture of collapse that comes with eschatology in the Quranic tradition. I wrote an essay about it — arguing that the long-running debate around sonic architectures and technologies in the Islamic canon is actually a critique of modernity and assimilation, and that it pre-empted that critique within scripture itself. So I'm grappling with sound and text through the apophatic tradition.
It would be so interesting to trace how, when poetry first ran up against accusations of blasphemy — poetry and wine — that wasn't really just about wine. There was so much more going on, and it's something inflammatory that's since found itself useful for a postmodernity. Right now, whenever I go out and listen to whatever people are calling avant-garde, it's this oversaturation — it sounds like the apocalypse, atonal crap. And I feel like the lyre — well, it's probably pre-harp, right? At least that's what it sounds like.
Erin: Yeah, it's very harp-like — a kind of ancestor of the harp.
Saima: I think that's very interesting to understand.
Erin: I love the way you phrased that — the sonic architecture of collapse.
Saima: The harp was what David played, wasn't it — and it pleased the Lord. There's something there about the harp during the sonic architecture of collapse, the harp as the perfect antidote to alienation.
Erin: Definitely. But if the harp pleased the Lord what did it do to the human listener passing by? Maybe this is something that can be answered with the hospitality of publishing or translation.
Saima: So you’re negotiating with the metaphysics of it all?
Erin: I don't think I can say whether the harp actually pleases God, but what it does to the person standing nearby when it's played I can work with.
I keep thinking the harp's real power was always in its side effects, in who overhears it and what it does to them uninvited. Like how something appears as entertainment but is actually medicinal, or a real ritual; that’s certainly been an anti-colonial tactic.
So maybe that's what I mean by hospitality: building a small passage for whatever's traveling underneath. Honestly, I want to make books that work the same way. Books might as well be entheogens, right?
Saima: I feel like it's a very — I don't want to use the word "contemporary" like that, but because of how saturated sound has become, your endeavors have found themselves in the right kind of expression with Cutt Press, and the lyre — the forces at play, perhaps I'm assuming, are antidotes to atonality, to alienation, in a very deconstructed way. I don't want to say "deconstructed," I just said it out loud, I want to put something else in my mouth instead.
Erin: It's an interesting instrument, because you can't really play it wrong. If it's in tune, it's in tune, and it sounds incredible.
Saima: I'm not a music person, but it did guide me through a lot of modes of subjectivation. I thought that was very interesting.
Erin: It makes me think of the bootlegging aesthetics that we are both attuned to in publishing, and of bootlegging as a kind of slipping of information through the main waves, and of the way tonal qualities can carry information below a certain register, and it’s a funny parallel with micro-publishing perhaps, a wave for the whispered and the fragmented and the voice that maybe needs to stay hidden. I'd love to read your essay.
Saima: It's coming out next month, with Shared Ecologies — a magazine in India. I write about it in an autotheoretical format. It was interesting for me to explore the arguments around the disallowance of music, and then read about cultural diplomacy and how it used music as a tool of deception. That's reductive, but basically — Cold War cultural diplomacy situated music within deradicalization narratives toward "the other." There were literal deradicalization missions in the banlieues of Marseille that used music to measure whether someone was moderate or extremist. That, I think, was my real introduction to theory, because that's when I got pissed off and went down this whole rabbit hole of music-this, music-that — grappling with why text and sonic logics seem to contradict each other.
And then I was reading about tajwīd — do you know what that is?
Erin: A poet?
Saima: No — it's a form of reciting the Quran. Very poetic, and it's actually credited with helping found the blues. So for me it became: is sprechstimme in Adorno's reading of Pierrot Lunaire — that oscillating sound of rupture and collapse, the unveiling of psychic interiority — the tajwīd of modernity? Is that the debt German idealism never paid to Islamic philosophy? It's kind of speculative sonic philosophy.
Erin: Is this all in the essay? I’m wondering what a publishing practice that took tajwīd seriously looks like? Not as metaphor but formally like what would it mean for a text to be recited into existence rather than edited into it? And when you talk about the sonic architecture of collapse — do you think the small press is trying to build something within that collapse, or is it also a collapse aesthetic?
Saima: Yes. It's kind of dense.
Erin: To go back to a dialectic of mediums — another sonic intervention I've been thinking about and am thinking about most of the time underlying everything else is the word ekphrasis, the Greek word for the description of an image, which in Greek actually means "to speak out." I always had this feeling there was a lost auditory element in there, even though now it's just equated with art writing, very simplistic. Historically it was set up as a crisis — which is the better representation, text or image, which is more evocative. The first example is the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad — a description of a painting on a shield. Somehow it feels relevant to this whole line of thinking through mediums and perhaps it’s that ekphrasis got off on a bad translation birth because it doesn't just translate image to text but animates and sonifies it. In that way it’s not about which medium does it better but what happens when language tries to carry something that language isn't supposed to be able to carry. It’s a crisis of mediums and their adequacy, which is also tied into our changing nervous systems and like atmospheric conditions, I think, but that’s a whole thread, the physiology of it.
Saima: I think that linguistic trajectory might connect to the Second Council of Nicaea — that's the art-historical moment that, formally and hegemonically, cemented and transmuted the image into a representative of the divine. And that's the fundamental critique that image-representation gets within, say, the Iranian or Islamic tradition — because for them the apophatic happens through text.
Erin: Which brings us to the institution of the book. Everything’s a riff.
Saima: Right, and that's something I have no idea about.
Erin, on Cutt Press, told anecdotally: This morning Cutt Press was beside a bridge, by the canal in Berlin, with an author — we were wheat-pasting excerpts from A Glossary of Holes, squirting wheat paste onto this little canal ledge. I'm interested in all these alternative ways of having a book launch, like introducing the lyre to a reading, I'm always exploring ways to make a text accessible, playable — that's the absolute pleasure of being a very small press.This excerpt will also be in an anthology, Womanhood: The Smut Gazette. I liked the idea of doing the wheat-paste version during Miss Read, the big art-book fair here. It'll bring a lot of great book nerds through.
Cutt Press itself began seven years ago, in a Berlin bookshop called Hopscotch, more or less out of bootlegging — copying books customers wanted that had become hard to get because of pandemic shipping constraints. But honestly I think it started when I was ten, when I got a clunky little IBM laptop, and my first instinct was to type out all my favorite books, just to feel what it felt like to write them. Those were my actual first bootlegs. That opened up this whole inquiry into the materiality of writing, this obsession with authorship and mediumship, which I'm grateful to keep playing with through Cutt Press.
Saima: That's incredible.
Erin: Is it?
Saima: I think you're asking and navigating the most poignant philosophical questions. With LLMs and— oh, why is the free meeting ending in ten minutes?
Saima: Tthere's a sense of the afterlife of a text. I don't know anything about it, but — you're never writing alone. Everything you write is never alone.
Erin: It's a chorus, a response, an addendum. Actually, when you said "the sonic architecture of collapse," I thought — that's also the net of Cutt Press, in a way. It's a kind of listening project, where I'm picking up these marginalia texts that are asking to be resurfaced. It's a lot of following an algorithm but getting underneath it — like, what's actually going on here, why is my algorithm full of twinks, I'm kidding — but also, what's the actual current moment underneath it. I think it has to do with the palindrome of time, how nothing is really linear — the afterlife of literature is happening now, all the time. That's the magic of a book: you're transported, it's activated by the readership of the body and consciousness. It's a quantum object. So I think of this custodianship of text as part of that same sonic architecture of collapse, maybe.
Tomorrow I'm getting on a train — a lovely little bookshop offered me a small publisher residency in their window. I asked the owner what the missing French-language pamphlet was, what his customers were actually asking for, and he wasn't sure. But I'd been thinking a lot about this Vietnamese-French Marxist phenomenologist, Tran Duc Thao who has this Marxist take on phenomenology, that language originates out of working realities, the actual conditions in which one works. So I printed one chapter from his book on the origins of language, made twenty copies, folded them, hand-wrote the covers. One could say he kind of paved the way for a French anticolonialism which Fanon ran with.
It's been fun to just respond to a moment, and supply the goods someone out there is hopefully looking for. I'm also sitting right now in storage for an online bookshop I won't name — there are these GDR educational films found on the street here, one of which someone told me is a warning against the dangers of Tupperware, housewives going crazy over it. I haven't watched it myself, that's just what I was told.
Saima: What are your preferred modes of dissemination?
Erin: I travel with a suitcase a lot lately, so hand-to-hand is my favorite. Or under the bridge, like a troll. And a question for you - can you say more about the title of your new press, Dawrān?
Saima I started Dawrān because I wanted to interrogate notions of time and its consequences — it literally means duration. I first heard it on a Hindi news channel, in the phrase is dawrān mein, "in this duration," and thought, hm, interesting. It's so easy to make puns with the name, because there's so much lacking in the spatio-temporal discourse around it. In Urdu, dawrān mein refers to duration, but it can also refer to a place — come to this place. A spatio-temporal situation. I thought that gap was very interesting, and I kept wondering why it was so easy for me to make jokes about time.
It's a Persian word originally, but it's transmogrified across other languages — in Emirati Arabic it means staying out late, in Farsi something else again — but all of them orbit a circular notion of time. That was the one argument holding together my translation of French theory into Urdu, and the bridge I wanted to draw to what I consider "the environment."
I was writing the manifesto for Dawrān and thought, my god, this is so funny, because it ended up being about time — about liberating Bergson's la durée from its mechanical restraints, the dialectics of mourning and jouissance, shadow poetics and surface glitches, publishing from the debris of neoliberalism's stultification. There's more I'm working on, but I think that's too broad on its own. Now I'm mostly sitting with the fact that Dawrān can mean so many things because it's occupying a gap — which is also why I'm struggling with the manifesto, trying to create a space of clearing rather than a definition.
There was a whole debate between Einstein and Bergson that more or less ruined Bergson's notion of time-as-endured, which had been closely aligned with certain Eastern philosophical traditions — and which the Frankfurt School both deployed and critiqued. I don't fully understand it yet, but I want to, in a way that lets me apply it, interrupt rudely, and swerve.
Erin: What I find with publishing is that navigating its space-time can happen on that level — the manifesto level that you just offer more overtly by saying it out loud and less overtly like bay leaves offerings — and then the other way to get down to the bones of it is so easy, because then I can just say: the actual materialism of this press right now is in describing the conditions in which I’m operating and what’s in my hand, and what is the task at hand, like one of those mystical to-do lists by Laynie Browne, or what poet was it?
The reality right now is two suitcases, heavy as hell, full of books, sitting outside my door, that I'm taking on a train in three hours. This morning I printed a book by an Icelandic poet, published in Icelandic last year — a pun on a place name and the name of a schizophrenia medication— and I published it bilingually, in Icelandic and English, since Icelandic is my only other real language. I found red napkins at the euro shop around the corner and sewed them into the spine. Now everyone's asking when the launch is — maybe September, maybe a triple launch alongside a novelization I wrote of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman that a friend is publishing, and the zine version of A Glossary of Holes I pasted this morning. A whole symphony of women falling into holes, basically. It's like — what else is happening, how can I be one body and do all the things, so you throw them together, and there's a correspondence between this text, that text, a living person, a dead person, a film they made — in this big Dawrān of time.
Erin: How has the reception of the name Dawrān been in Bangalore?
Saima: Great, most are confused at first, but then it clicks — we have a launch coming up at the Bangalore International Centre, for a play about Bangalore's startup culture ruining theatre via neoliberal economics, basically a social experiment in startup culture. We'll be on a panel with a physicist-philosopher (who didn’t show), playwright and another playwright who's a critic of the current powers that be — we're going to chat shit. I didn't expect to feel this institutionalized, but here we are.
Erin: Does that feel like institutionalization — being part of the Bangalore International Centre?
Saima: I think it's fine. It's not where counterculture goes to die, but it's definitely something — a nice place for dialogue among an older crowd. I'm hoping this play brings in a younger audience.
Erin: Your other question — how has AI affected your position as a smuggler of online texts? Makes me go back to the lyre not registering on the Zoom AI — I clocked that as a kind of analog mechanism against AI, almost by accident. I'm gathering these small analog tools. I'm all for Anna's Archive and the shadow libraries, which I plunder regularly, obviously. But it's made me curious about books that refuse to be scanned. A standard scanner can take a flat page, but an experimental book with flaps, with a structure that depends on duration — what you do, when you turn, when you listen, when you feel — can't be translated into that experience. It's a gap, almost like Dawrān itself: a placeholder, a gap where AI can scrape, and a gap where it can't, where there's some inevitable analog physicality to the technology. I think everything is just asking for more clever experiments, more finesse, more curiosity.
Saima: So it's like a placeholder, a cut.
Erin: Precisely — which makes me think of the slash in Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body, which I've been working on translating with a group. Wittig treats the text as a very physical object — every instance of the pronoun je, "I," is split with a slash, breaking apart any holistic self. It's not pronounced differently; your eye takes it in as an incision, a marking, but you don't hear it as sound. It opens a gap between the imagination gathering the story and the physical act of reading — which is also very Cutt Press. Cut, pray, cut, scrape. I'm going to get a sword logo…
Saima: There's a library in Dubai, shaped like a book, with a giant sculpture out front — of a single hamza, the Arabic glottal stop. It exists as a letter, but there's no sound to it; it just elucidates a word. I look at it and it tells me to shut up. It's like a void — at least that's what it's felt like, reading Arabic and Urdu: the hamza exists, but there's nothing to it, an emptiness within.
Erin: I think so. It makes me think of when Prince named his album in the early ‘90s an unpronounceable symbol — record labels were so annoyed because they couldn't say or type the name of the album.
Saima: Another question on the list — how we met at Focal Point in Sharjah, and our conversation meandered to decolonization, as it should. How does the literary engage in this endeavor?
Erin: I think our conversation upon meeting was extremely playful, and I think that's one way to engage with the endeavor — starting from mundane observations. I'd just spent a few months in Japan, and coming back to Europe felt like going back to the Middle Ages — the physical infrastructure of it. I was still thinking about that trip when I said to you, in Sharjah, that if everyone in Germany had a bidet, they'd be ten percent happier, ten percent less stressed. So — what's the relationship between the colonizer's lack of, let's say, hygiene infrastructure, and the rest? We landed on this pun, half-formed: "decolonize the colonizer." Which doesn't quite work, because to decolonize isn't to remove anyone's colon, but it got us to talking about enemas, giving the colonizer one, and you gave me a book — Sabine Schülting's Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality — on the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life: industrial novels, slum fiction, blue books, sanitary reformers' reports. I started it, walking around reading it, and never quite finished, but it stuck with me.
Saima: Sound, time, the written word — I think that's the throughline we've landed on here.
Erin: Agreed. I'm excited about you changing the landscape of publishing in Bangalore.
Saima: I hope so. Bang the lore.
Erin: I would love to help you with a whole list of puns.