Subject to Changes

Twelve year ago Renee Rodin published a collection of personal essays with Talonbooks called Subject to Change (2010). The book covers her early days in Montreal, followed by her young adult passage to hippie Vancouver, where she ran a bookstore and began publishing her writings while raising three kids to young adulthood themselves. Had the book exaggerated its reality, given it a perm, we might be looking back on it as a progenitor of autofiction -- but no, Rodin knows how life works, how readers consciously or otherwise bring their own narratives to what they're reading, and somewhere in-between, as Foucault used to say, is the difference, the potential for all kinds of weird shit. Rodin's Subject to Change is in my collection of important books on and about Vancouver.

A couple days ago another book called Subject to Change was published, this one by visual artist Liz Magor and subtitled Writings and Interviews. Magor's book includes writing in all its genres, short of shopping lists and tweets (she is not on Twitter). Yet while Rodin chronicles the subtle changes in her life, Magor, like Byung-Chul Han, seems at odds with the concept of a subject (Han begins Psycho-Politics, 2017, by reminding us of the subject position: "literally, the 'one who has been cast down'"), a position supported by a book whose own formation is non-conforming, at least in terms of genre. For more on Magor's book, see my review at BCR.