Jordan Scott

Mouth sounding room

Oana Avasilichioaei

Jordan Scott’s blert, simply put, is a book about stuttering that stutters. Which in fact means that it is anything but simple. blert is a mouth that mouths me as I mouth its phonemes with my mouth. It is intensely physical, clinical and my mouth becomes both hyper personal and treacherous.

“Imitate: frazil ice. Say clacra, frazil ice, clacracla.

Imitate: muskoxen. Say flafra, muskoxen, flafrafla.” (Jordan Scott, blert)

I imitate and my utterance “fails.” Or does it? For how can an utterance fail or succeed. Doesn’t an utterance just utter? Don’t all mouths approximate the sounds of other mouths? And yet we place so much judgement on accents, speech discordances, lisps, stammers, stutters, even pitch and gender. In these judgements we fable, much as the fables of cures for stuttering that blert dissects:

“The chichara has to sing inside the mouth… You will learn to use your mouth.”  “You will lunge your thorax unto spring… You will sing like the birds.” “If you wish to become an eloquent speaker, you should bury the hyoid bone of a lamb in the wall of your house.” “You will learn to eat your grasshoppers.”

Commons as folds

Oana Avasilichioaei

How can we once again common a commons?

“What is your address?

you are everywhere

and nowhere at once” (Anarchive, 71) An address, as physical location, necessarily connotes boundaries, ownership, enclosure. Land is demarcated and receives an address, a name and number, so that it can be owned, so that it can enter into an economy of production and consumption. But as you, dear Stephen Collis, through your multi-volume, on-going work, “The Barricades Project,” turn the address back into an address, into speech, into the spoken toward someone, I, among many, find myself addressed and become part of this spoken which is not enclosed, not monetarily and economically situated, and which moves. And the spoken that you evoke between us, dear Collis, is not in straight lines, it meanders land and lexicons and authors, swims in rivulets, gets tangled in brambles.

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