Notes on A Cosmic Talk with Jackie Wang

by Andrew Felsher

April 9, 2024

I discovered Jackie Wang’s writing in January 2019 by googling, “Writers who juxtapose capitalism with prison.” Thanks to Google’s thoughtful algorithm, Carceral Capitalism, arrived on my digital doorstep before arriving in my apartment mailbox 1-2 days later. Soon, like many, it altered the trajectory of my socio-literary existence. 

Half a decade has passed. Jackie has since authored The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Finalist for the National Book Award, Poetry), co-authored Technoprecarious, and most recently authored Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun. 

Last October,  after witnessing Jackie “intellectually ball”[i] in Brooklyn with Christopher Soto and Ludwig Hurtado, I invited Jackie to be interviewed for 128 LIT.  

This conversation or interview began in January in Google Docs before it retreated in February, and then reemerged for a few minutes on the phone in March, after Jackie returned from traveling and settling into a fellowship at Harvard. 

We had been reconsidering the ideal form of the interview. 

While chatting with Jackie on the phone, I confessed that I approach this interview no differently than my writing, that I find no distinctions, which actually means that I can get carried away. I also revealed that this is only my second time interviewing a writer. The first time was with a well known Brazilian author, lecturer, and mathematician, Jacques Fux, but that turned into an essay about literary references and then he translated a story of mine (Um livro em Julgamento) too, so I guess this is actually my first time conducting a literary interview. 

Jackie said something like, “I’m down for an oral, podcast-style interview. A lot of people think that’s the best kind.”

Since I knew Jackie has so much experience as a versatile interlocutor—and I had no desire to send a list of questions for her to respond to in cybernetic isolation—I agreed. 

“So, I guess we’ll just talk,” I said.

“Yeah, let’s jump right in.”

“I think I have a good handle of your writing.”

“Okay!”

On early Sunday (Easter) morning, my legs were sore because I had played basketball two days in a row for the first time in seven months.

I intended to shoot around for a half hour in the park, stretch, and then return to my apartment to prepare for talking to Jackie in the afternoon, but someone at least six inches taller than me had been watching my off-balanced, mid-range, step back repetitions. 

In other words, someone was watching me work on my moves.

He approached me, perhaps not so unlike Nightboat Books’ approach of Jackie’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, and asked to play 1-on-1. 

I’ve never ignored a request for 1-on-1 to 21, win by 2, so I said, “Sure.”

I won 22-8. 

Then another person, who had been observing from afar, emerged and asked to play me too. He was probably half my age, a few inches taller, and had loads of energy.

He requested to play to 7, which I thought was so stupid.  

I said, “Not to eleven or fifteen?”

“Seven,” he insisted.

Agitated, I told him to take the ball first. 

“I’ll shoot for it,” he said.

“Take the ball.”

He won 7-5. 

Back at my apartment, I was not only mad that I lost but I was hungry, sore all over and my right calf had locked up. It suddenly occurred to me that I should probably settle down and think about how to be a good podcast host for the interview with Jackie, because I not only had never led a literary interview but I had also never engaged in the podcast form. 

That’s why I thought about podcasts and watched my favorite one, All the Smoke, hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. 

They are both wonderfully humble and never march into pretension and superficiality. 

Although deep down I suspect I probably still want to be a professional basketball player, I also want to be a good host for Jackie without marching into pretension and superficiality. So, I watched and listened to this interview of Allen Iverson, AI (not to be confused with OpenAI), who’s among the most iconic and influential basketball players of my generation. 

To be honest, I was nervous because Jackie must have already started on a few “intellectual baller”[ii] All-Start teams. I wasn’t sure where to situate myself in the universe of “intellectual balling”[iii] or whether I could compete with the best. If Jackie’s Carceral Capitalism, I wondered, was the Michael Jordan of books that combine personal narratives with an incisive command of theory and their practical applications to life’s flood of differentiation, exploitative structures and revolutionary modes, then was it possible that I could, for a moment, become Allen Iverson crossing her over? 

Thankfully Jackie told me I have a good podcast voice, which alleviated some pressure. 

For a couple hours, using RiversideFM’s virtual recording studio, we covered all sorts of topics: Carceral Capitalism; Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, Semiotext(e)’s Intervention Series, Jackie receiving a B+ in Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir writing class, The Suicide of the Other Jackie Wang, literary references and the infinite, Kafka, dreams and writing about dreams and their intersections with activism and socio-political movements, Assata Shakur, freedom dreams, live tweeting dream recalls, AI transcription of dreams, my student loan dream, the temporality of debt, Carceral Capitalism’s impact on 128 LIT’s formation, exponential accumulations, AI and its relationship to precarity, surveillance, digital capitalism, and intersectional identities; running poems through AI image generators just like this image that was born out of one of Jackie’s recent poems submitted to a workshop.

Jackie elucidated her initial thoughts on Large Language Models and the drift toward the statistical average. At some point, I interjected the need for not only Universal Basic Income but Universal Basic Living Conditions. And then there was the ease of generating information and deep fakes; the emergence of voice surveillance and the generation of fake evidence to convict black radicals in the 1960’s & 1970’s; Angela Davis; prison abolition; Fred Moten, anti-coloniality and teaching anti-coloniality while adhering to colonial intent; the corporatization of the Black Likes Matter; pedagogy and challenging the reproduction of colonial structures and intentions within an anti-colonial framework; academic authoritarian power structures; Michel Foucault; the current abolition and defund landscape; cycles of reform and backlash; intersections of the digital universe, its imposing rhythms and intermittent rewards, and carcerality; the attention economy and the harvesting of our attention; the swelling anonymity of power and control; overrated will power; technology embedded in a capitalist political economy; and the troubling commodification of sociality. 

I asked Jackie about the history of her music and her early music reviews dating back to middle school. She mentioned that her harp is now on display at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

We discussed handwriting and its varying histories and processes; Aliens as a form of Life: Imagining the Avante Garde, an epistolary essay for Lily Hoang; a desire to appeal to familiar forms and communicative impulse and relationality; a text message via Vi Khi Nao through Lily Hoang, and to Jackie Wang; Aliens, foreignness, the dangers of humanizing AI and robotics. 

It was natural to reference Neil deGrasse Tyson, Roswell, and UFO’s in the news and the popularity of believing Alien-operated UFO’s always falter and crash into the earth. 

When asked about life elsewhere, Jackie posited, “There has to be… There’s so many fucking suns in the universe.”