companion text as abrasion

The new Samatar/Zambreno book, Tone, is so wonderful. I read it some time in the Fall but had to keep my mouth shut about it (mostly in the form of resisting texting passages from it to Amanda Goldblatt) because I knew that I was giving it to her as a gift.

And now it's given.

I am teaching it this coming term, too--and half not wanting to break the spell it cast on me by "processing" it for work and half wanting to endlessly prepare little tinkering notes. And though I am ill read about/in Affect Theory, I think it'd be lovely to write/write with students some sort of companion to Tone that would actively take up its AT-ishness/-adjacent posture and to act as a kind of Barthesian "abrasion" . . . to be a companion text that is the "irritation" effect/affect . . . to write a companion like we're all in a soup together . . . to do as The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere (the name the two authors give themselves) does--and here I'll explain via a nice piece I also read this Fall and have been thinking about--act with wild wit in a communal Critical bread-breaking situation: "an international and collaborative effort . . . This project would traverse and exceed the institutions of the university, the publishing house, the library, the magazine, the festival, and the bookshop. It would touch our ordinary activities and conversations; our habits, our routines; the well-worn fabric of our lives . . . both future oriented and very old-fashioned . . . look[ing] back to the eighteenth-century’s optimism about civil society and its ability to forge free, voluntary, and active associations between readers and writers. These are the associations that permit wit, discrimination, judgment, and advocacy to cross the continents and the oceans, the languages and the institutions that separate us." 

(The Naimon interview with the authors is out, too, and I liked it: Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone - Tin House.)