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Dark Pool Party
Dark Pool Party is a wide-ranging collection of artist Hannah Black’s essays, personal texts, and video/performance scripts. Black’s work reassembles autobiographical fragments to think about the relationship between bodies, labor, and affect. Drawing on feminist, communist, and black radical theory she explores sex, ambivalence, departures, history, and violence with characteristic wit and precision.
91 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 6, 2016
Hannah Black writes:
From Los Angeles I write, “Perhaps getting to know a person is like getting to know a city.” The plate glass windows of downtown, the way you are with your friends; the dull suburbs of a half-hidden unhappiness. On the East Coast I’m an animal and on the West Coast by a miracle I am changing back into a woman. But what kind of woman? At night I’ve found a wall inside myself and I try to describe it. I can’t stop crying! I hate myself! I’m a real girl! The wall inside is stone, it doesn’t have a body or a part time job. The person I’m considering falling in love with just as soon as I can stop crying, which should be any year now, brings me a book called Architecture without Architects to distract me from the luxury of my tears. In the book, white colonialists describe the buildings that seem to them miraculous, built invisibly, built by no one. I touch a black and white page to show that I love the image of an ancient city in the desert in Morocco. But imagine, I say, thinking of labor and domination, how terrible it was to build it. My person says, with certainty, because she is always sure, “They built it only at night.” By what light? I ask, looking at her. I can feel my eyes, which are nothing. She says, “They built it only on nights with a full moon.” My inside cracks, now it’s outside and I don’t deserve anything. There is anxiety in my touch but we are comradely now and then, both surprised for example by the thought of Hegel as a baby. Yes perhaps even Hegel can grow up to be a woman from time to time.
From Los Angeles I write, “Perhaps getting to know a person is like getting to know a city.” The plate glass windows of downtown, the way you are with your friends; the dull suburbs of a half-hidden unhappiness. On the East Coast I’m an animal and on the West Coast by a miracle I am changing back into a woman. But what kind of woman? At night I’ve found a wall inside myself and I try to describe it. I can’t stop crying! I hate myself! I’m a real girl! The wall inside is stone, it doesn’t have a body or a part time job. The person I’m considering falling in love with just as soon as I can stop crying, which should be any year now, brings me a book called Architecture without Architects to distract me from the luxury of my tears. In the book, white colonialists describe the buildings that seem to them miraculous, built invisibly, built by no one. I touch a black and white page to show that I love the image of an ancient city in the desert in Morocco. But imagine, I say, thinking of labor and domination, how terrible it was to build it. My person says, with certainty, because she is always sure, “They built it only at night.” By what light? I ask, looking at her. I can feel my eyes, which are nothing. She says, “They built it only on nights with a full moon.” My inside cracks, now it’s outside and I don’t deserve anything. There is anxiety in my touch but we are comradely now and then, both surprised for example by the thought of Hegel as a baby. Yes perhaps even Hegel can grow up to be a woman from time to time.
November 17, 2018
i gave this 3 stars but i still really enjoyed it, flippancy feels inadequate to me rn so this work didnt land as it might have. everything felt tweetable, which i admired.
"I wanted to say that hating yourself for hating yourself was femme, but anyone can do it"
"It would be easier to be a poet than a person but poetry is bacterial and not categorical."
"When the antibiotics stop working we will all die more often of love."
"I wanted to say that hating yourself for hating yourself was femme, but anyone can do it"
"It would be easier to be a poet than a person but poetry is bacterial and not categorical."
"When the antibiotics stop working we will all die more often of love."
May 18, 2022
I love this writing style so much
October 17, 2021
"Fate is always stupid, both real and not. ... Let the genome rattle off its wrong letters: the feeling of not being able to read yourself is a dark pool and this is a dark pool party." - Long Term Effects
Dark Pool Party is a collection of writings that are sort of fiction, sort of non-fiction, sort of autobiographical, and sort of non-autobiographical in a way that also examines some of those categories as well as their necessity. As she writes in another essay (?)/piece Celebrity Death Match: "It would be easier to be a poet than a person but poetry is bacterial not categorical." This feels like an imagining of the bacterial side of things. The questions raised in this collection remind me a little about the discussions around the relatability of characters in novels and all that brings with it... Here we also have the question what really happened along with it's conterpart is that superfluous or irrelevant .
Dark Pool Party is a collection of writings that are sort of fiction, sort of non-fiction, sort of autobiographical, and sort of non-autobiographical in a way that also examines some of those categories as well as their necessity. As she writes in another essay (?)/piece Celebrity Death Match: "It would be easier to be a poet than a person but poetry is bacterial not categorical." This feels like an imagining of the bacterial side of things. The questions raised in this collection remind me a little about the discussions around the relatability of characters in novels and all that brings with it... Here we also have the question what really happened along with it's conterpart is that superfluous or irrelevant .
May 13, 2023
"For the ducks it is still one million years ago plus plastic"
"The significance of relationships is actually inverted and the people you meet for ten minutes and under are the ones who determine your fate."
"The four genders of character are: pretext, archetype, self and fantasy."
Dope
"The significance of relationships is actually inverted and the people you meet for ten minutes and under are the ones who determine your fate."
"The four genders of character are: pretext, archetype, self and fantasy."
Dope
Read
May 20, 2020cool
May 23, 2020
3.75/5
December 19, 2024
So quotable, wish she still partied
April 21, 2025
to me, it was trite but I miss 2016 optimism
December 18, 2016
Sought this little book out because, after two years and a couple dozen rereadings with her essay "The Loves of Others", the thought of never finding something like it became unbearable. Dark Pool Party certainly captures the same voice, but if that essay was a sort of life/pep-talk from your hip, critical-theory-studying aunt, this is something altogether stranger (but just as heartbreaking in places).
I don't know what to call this other than "post-genre". If that repels people with the expectation of a self-gratifying meaningless mess, well, I can see where you're coming from, and all I can respond with is that it just... works. There are non-sequitirs aplenty, but they're funny and kind and vivid and end up making their own kind of sense. I don't know how else to talk about this book, so here's a quote:
"The trees grasp the high-calorie light in their branches though they must know it wants to leave them. There is no holding on. There was a hole in life and life leaked out very gradually; it's not yet clear if it was a liquid inside a container or was itself the container. I am not observant but even for me sometimes a current of air passes over the skin. Don't I live in this world just as much as you do, 'you' here a vague epithet for the strangers who pass in the street? If one of them is too beautiful, I avert my eyes, like the unclean in a caste hierarchy, or like workers on the set of a Tom Cruise film who have been told not to look at him, the star. He leaves, as you do, my lost loves, my failures, a blue imprint on each eye."
I don't know what to call this other than "post-genre". If that repels people with the expectation of a self-gratifying meaningless mess, well, I can see where you're coming from, and all I can respond with is that it just... works. There are non-sequitirs aplenty, but they're funny and kind and vivid and end up making their own kind of sense. I don't know how else to talk about this book, so here's a quote:
"The trees grasp the high-calorie light in their branches though they must know it wants to leave them. There is no holding on. There was a hole in life and life leaked out very gradually; it's not yet clear if it was a liquid inside a container or was itself the container. I am not observant but even for me sometimes a current of air passes over the skin. Don't I live in this world just as much as you do, 'you' here a vague epithet for the strangers who pass in the street? If one of them is too beautiful, I avert my eyes, like the unclean in a caste hierarchy, or like workers on the set of a Tom Cruise film who have been told not to look at him, the star. He leaves, as you do, my lost loves, my failures, a blue imprint on each eye."
April 18, 2016
I don't understand everything I read
Will read it again in the future
Appreciated some parts a lot
Will read it again in the future
Appreciated some parts a lot
May 8, 2017
Sought this little book out because, after two years and a couple dozen rereadings with her essay "The Loves of Others", the thought of never finding something like it became unbearable. Dark Pool Party certainly captures the same voice, but if that essay was a sort of life/pep-talk from your hip, critical-theory-studying aunt, this is something altogether stranger (but just as heartbreaking in places).
I don't know what to call this other than "post-genre". If that repels people with the expectation of a self-gratifying meaningless mess, well, I can see where you're coming from, and all I can respond with is that it just... works. There are non-sequitirs aplenty, but they're funny and kind and vivid and end up making their own kind of sense. I don't know how else to talk about this book, so here's a quote:
"The trees grasp the high-calorie light in their branches though they must know it wants to leave them. There is no holding on. There was a hole in life and life leaked out very gradually; it's not yet clear if it was a liquid inside a container or was itself the container. I am not observant but even for me sometimes a current of air passes over the skin. Don't I live in this world just as much as you do, 'you' here a vague epithet for the strangers who pass in the street? If one of them is too beautiful, I avert my eyes, like the unclean in a caste hierarchy, or like workers on the set of a Tom Cruise film who have been told not to look at him, the star. He leaves, as you do, my lost loves, my failures, a blue imprint on each eye."
I don't know what to call this other than "post-genre". If that repels people with the expectation of a self-gratifying meaningless mess, well, I can see where you're coming from, and all I can respond with is that it just... works. There are non-sequitirs aplenty, but they're funny and kind and vivid and end up making their own kind of sense. I don't know how else to talk about this book, so here's a quote:
"The trees grasp the high-calorie light in their branches though they must know it wants to leave them. There is no holding on. There was a hole in life and life leaked out very gradually; it's not yet clear if it was a liquid inside a container or was itself the container. I am not observant but even for me sometimes a current of air passes over the skin. Don't I live in this world just as much as you do, 'you' here a vague epithet for the strangers who pass in the street? If one of them is too beautiful, I avert my eyes, like the unclean in a caste hierarchy, or like workers on the set of a Tom Cruise film who have been told not to look at him, the star. He leaves, as you do, my lost loves, my failures, a blue imprint on each eye."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews