Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):

2,063

Won’t she do it again! Keeping this up for four weeks means a lot to me. I am happy to have found a gentle but fulfilling routine for this newsletter. Welcome back to another list! We made it to four! If I make it to eight, I will restart paid content again, inshaAllah.

Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times; the second one, TL;DR: spite-based newsletter writing, gil scott-heron and nina simone wish you a happy 4th of july, castle rock, bad dating app AI, bone broth, speech disorders, open-toe sandals, harper’s findings; and third one, TL;DR: cute patio situation in Montpellier, FR, facts about cicadas and acoustic defense, my love of tajin, unpublishing, Pope. L, falling in new york, and my new doggie friend!

1. I am obsessed with the pigeons here! I was in a conversation with a human when I saw a pigeon, so I stopped the conversation and began talking to the pigeon. Thankfully, she understood exactly who I am and waited for me to finish my interspecies moment. When I become interested (maybe obsessed) in something, I start building an index of facts. Here are a few of my favorite pigeon facts:

   1. The pigeon belongs to the family Columbidae, which also includes doves; pigeons are the larger of the two, but scientifically, there is no difference between the two.

   2. There is a National Pigeon Association.

   3. And an American Pigeon Museum in Oklahoma.

   4. Pigeon fanciers have bred all sorts of distinctive pigeons. Fancy pigeons, they are called, and there are so many different breeds. There are over 800 breeds. Look at the frillback with the curls!

      

   5. Pigeons can “assess” art. A 2009 experiment by Shigeru Watanabe showed
      “that the utterly un-artistic pigeon could be taught to identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ children’s artwork. How was the pigeon able to perform this feat and why should we care that it did?

   6. Pigeons make milk! It is called crop milk, and it is a secretion from the lining of the parent bird’s crop. The crop is a thin-walled, expanding part of the gastrointestinal tract where food is stored before digestion. Flamingos and emperor penguins also produce crop milk. Both male and female pigeons produce crop milk.

   And some of my favorite pigeons of Montpellier:

   

   ---

2. I love oranges! When I arrived here, I bought a big bag of navel oranges. On my 1km walk home, I peel an orange and eat it slowly. I place the peels in my purse amongst my notebooks; I want the citrus everywhere. I have a new summertime drink. It isn’t that fancy — just San Pellegrino and grapefruit juice with one orange wedge.

   

   ---

3. My 41st birthday is on August 1st. It is hard for me. I have often spent my birthday alone, which isn’t a problem. However, in 2018, things shifted significantly because my now ex-husband did something absolutely terrible to me. I have not been able to forget this. And I do not think I should. While it has significantly changed me — I know I am different now — I want a different relationship to this change. I think I want to find a way to unmark my birthday. Some sort of overwriting. The palimpsest. The marks are still there, but they can no longer command such a dominant role in my memory. For folks who have had traumatic birthday experiences, what have you done to reclaim the day? Eight years of non-celebration is just too long.

   ---

4. In my last newsletter, I wrote:

   I unpublished everything published before 28 June 2026. I will be republishing bits of these in the coming weeks. At the time of writing, I did not know what I was coming into knowing now, and I wanted to return to the scene of presumed certainty to take another look, to linger, to stay with it. At a time of unchecked and compulsory growth, I want to honor what already exists. Instead of writing more and more, how can I return to existing writing and write from there? In my 28 June 2026 list dump, I wrote about compost as a method for poetry writing. As a death doula in training, KJR Studios engages with a poetics of life cycles rather than compulsory or uninterrupted growth. I revise, often publicly, using an ethos of activated compost piles. Nothing is disposed of. Nothing is wasted. Each gesture goes into the pile. There, it generates heat energy through active digestion and respiration – the ideas consume one another and share breath. I invite the worms and insects. When a new project launches, it launches from this compost pile where gestures and ideas have had time to be in a convivial relation.

   I am enjoying this language of compost and ecosystems; however, something was missing, and I could not name it. After a four-hour nap in this unbearable heat here in Montpellier, I received a Substack notification. Someone I’d recently subscribed to — — shared a newsletter titled “What is compost?” And I almost did not read it because I said, “You know what compost is.” I am glad I deferred that certainty (and we should all defer certainty, or at least suspend it). While I know what compost is, there was a blindspot, myopia one might argue. Marketos is the author of the yet-to-be-read, but top of my growing list of aspirational reads, book Compost this Book: A Practical Manifesto for Purposeful Decomposition. In their recent newsletter, they write:

   

   What I was missing was the role of “stewarding the conditions of the compost pile.” That is me. How does stewardship play into my practice? In building language to better understand my language, I was immediately drawn to compost. I have vivid childhood memories.

   

   And in those memories, I never reflect on my conscious role in the process. Even organic processes require collaborative intention. My parents did not select a random location. They nurtured the context for this process to happen. And then I inherited this pre-formed compost bed. What does it mean to start my own compost pile? If my practice emerges from the poetics of the compost pile, then what are the brown materials (carbon-rich), the green materials (nitrogen-rich), and the well-drained spot that hosts this entire process? The thing about me and metaphors is that once I go there, I need to really take it there. I do not use metaphors casually; they are not decorative or performative. When I draw myself closer to an emergent metaphor, I seek temporary scaffolding to prop up ideas as I am working them out. When I think about my history of metaphor use, I think about accountability, not solely beauty or seduction. I do not use language to ornament ideas, even though I love a “pretty” sentence. When I use language, I want to live inside it, fuse with it, maybe ingest it. Or as I noted for my 2024 REDCAT solo exhibition, i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter. I want to live inside the house of logic that the language has built. As I inhabit a metaphor,

   1. Have I considered all the limits?

   2. Have I stretched the comparisons beyond their elastic limits?

   3. How long can I inhabit this language before it becomes claustrophobic?

   4. Is this metaphor load-bearing enough to hold up these ideas? Can it sustain the future iterations and increased complexity over time?

   Is my practice in conversation with a poetics of compost, or do I just like how it sounds to say that? Before I answer that, I want to talk about how I feel about metaphors. (Also, would love it if provided more formatting options! How am I supposed to really write with this limited range of options to play with the position of text? Just like I spent almost a decade trying to jailbreak Google Docs to get them to do more of what I desired — with some success, I will approach this platform limitation in the same way!)

   

   I do not believe the hype about mixed metaphors. A mixed metaphor is “a figure of speech that combines two or more incompatible or inconsistent metaphors into a single, often illogical comparison.” The Gotham Writers’ website says, “Mixed metaphors are a common slip-up in figurative language, and they’re a sure mark of the writer losing control of the language.” But isn’t using a metaphor already an admission that we’ve lost control of language? That concrete or siloed language cannot do what I need, so I must go in search of scaffolds, supports, and surrogates. Language is relational. Not using a mixed metaphor is arrogant – something like a self-aggrandizing savior figure: no one other than me is needed to clarify this idea. To talk about the complexity of relationality, I find myself dancing between several metaphors at once. 
   
   ****
   
   A student once told me that human skin doesn't have receptors to feel wetness. She said it is called hygroreceptors or the process of hygro-reception. Humans do not have a single, dedicated sensory receptor. To perceive wetness – this erotic and abject sensation – humans must use multisensory integration. The nervous system combines information from different senses to build a unified understanding of the environment. The unity of understanding comes not from a single stimulus but from the collaboration between many stimuli. If wetness, a banal and routine experience, requires collaborative sensory technologies, why shouldn't my description of a complex experience likewise benefit from the multisensory integration of a mixed metaphor?
   
   ****
   
   My relationship to mixed metaphors is parallel to my devotion to interdisciplinary practice and syncretic spiritual practice. Syncretism is a durational practice of uneven signal merging. Purity (and its attendant co-conspirators) is an illusion that assumes a disentangled world of hostile and hermetically sealed individuals. Resisting the uncoupled or refusing to "keep the proper confusions" (Charles Olson via Nathaniel Mackey's "Discrepant Engagement") is to seek an unhealthy alliance with fiction. Syncretism is the meeting of many signals and the negotiation at the point of contact. As I build mixed metaphors, I consider latency (signal delay), packet loss (when one or more transmitted data packets fail to arrive at their destination), and sensory gating (the brain's automatic process of filtering out irrelevant sensory information). 

   

   But, back to this question: In what ways does the composite metaphor align with my practice? Perhaps I am composting the unused/misdirected potential of abandoned projects, noise in old field recordings, sundry science facts, essay drafts, screenshots, lucid dreams, and…

   ---

5. I am making very bad music, and it’s quite liberating. As I approach 41, I want to do many things without the goal of mastery. I am okay with being an amateur. In fact, I thrive here because there is more space for play and pleasure. While teaching this week, my fan was facing the mic, and I loved the sound! I am trying to make bespoke instruments that are quite finicky and impossible to play consistently. I like a small fan fed into a mic and cicadas. I am also thinking about how to incorporate my theremin again. And! And! I am doing some fun field recordings. I am also returning to an old project I abandoned due to time constraints.

   ---

6. I have been falling back in love with photography. I think this makes a lot of sense. In 2021, when I started making video works, I could sense this was a slide back into a love for lens-based work. Once upon a time, I was shooting every day and loved the high intensity of it all. Here are some of my favorites from almost two decades ago, lol!

   

See you next week for another list!

Thanks for being a pal!

All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):

1,745

Welcome back to another list!

Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times. And the second one, TL;DR: spite-based newsletter writing, gil scott-heron and nina simone wish you a happy 4th of july, castle rock, bad dating app AI, bone broth, speech disorders, open-toe sandals, harper’s findings

1. I was going to apologize, but never mind. I landed in Montpellier, FR yesterday, took my little vitamins and meds, then passed out. I actually called my mama and told her to wake me up on time so I could finish this newsletter, and she called me. Then I told her, “Please, don’t call me again. Let me rest.” That was some amazing jetlag sleep. I was supposed to publish a short essay on Thursday, but see #8. I busted my knee on Wednesday and needed to rest.

2. I am here in Montpellier, for the 5th (6th?) year in a row in the Bennington MFA Low Residency Dance program with my friend and co-conspirator, Yuchen Chang. We will teach writing, publishing, and adjacent acts to amazing movement artists.

   

3. Our favorite cafe is temporarily closed. It has been such a lovely homecoming each summer, and her not being open throws me off a bit. I love a good routine and a grounding location. Hopefully, we find a new little home.

4. I am now sitting on my patio, writing to you as I listen to the birds talk to one another. The birds sound like they are having an amazing conversation, and I do not yearn for translation. I could grab one of those sound-decoding apps, but I think, like humans, they deserve privacy, and I wonder about their rights to opacity, especially at a time of accelerated interspecies translation efforts and their akin projects of demystification. I don’t actually want to know what the birds are doing; I am just a bit envious that they’ve managed to elude some registers of datafication. And I often laugh about classification. I wonder if they have secret meetings where they laugh at us about our overconfidence concerning their origins and behavior. Whenever I have a moment to slow down, I am humbled by the beauty of non-human beings’ sound production. I like to think we are asked to pray Fajr so that we can learn to listen more capciously beyond human speech. The morning time is such a gentle moment. As I am typing, I am startled by the sound of rustling in the tree above me - the girls are fighting! Or mating? I do not know the schedule for these birds! But, I do know that something is biting me up bad out here, and since I decided to have a private hit girl summer in shorts on my private patio, my legs are now covered in only what I can assume are mosquito bites. Back inside me and these thighs go!

5. I did not hear the cicadas this morning, unlike yesterday when I arrived, so I went sleuthing. I literally typed in, “What time do the cicadas wake up in Montpellier?” I learned that cicadas come out when the ground temperature reaches 22°C. That is so cool! The cicada is one of the world’s loudest insects. In Montpellier, this sound can reach up to 100 to 120 decibels - considered “very loud” to “painful”. We only hear them when the temperature reaches 22°C because, below that, their diaphragms lose the elasticity needed for sound production. Because I am a glutton for animal facts, I did some research, and I am bursting at the seams, so I will share with you all!

   1. Most cicadas are cryptic. In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an animal or plant to avoid detection by other animals. Think camouflage, strategic notutnality, mimicry, and subterranean vibes. We love an evasive queen! My other favorite cryptic insect is the mighty hawk moth. They vibrate their genitalia to jam bat sonar. Acoustic defense! Adding this to my noise studies research. I need to create a list of all my favorite cryptic insects!

   2. They lay their eggs in the slits of bark.

   3. The rapid buckling and unbuckling of their tymbals produce the loud sound we are most familiar with. The males are singing to attract mates. As I learned, only the males stridulate, but in the Subpsaltria yangi of China, both the males and females stridulate!

   4. According to a Science.org article reporting on a preprint, “A fungus called Massospora cicadina attacks a cicada, destroys much of its abdomen, and releases the mind-altering drug psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic in mushrooms, and cathinone, an amphetamine. This allows the infected insect (pictured) to continue to fly around as if a third of its body isn’t missing, researchers report this month on the bioRxiv preprint server. Infected cicadas are hyperactive, spend less time eating, and the males are hypersexual—all of which may help the fungus spread to other victims, The Atlantic reports.”

6. I brought Tajin with me to Montpellier. This summer, I had a brief love affair with Hot Cheetos. I am not proud of myself. They are terrible for you, but I love heat and tang. Somehow, Tajin on anything kind of hits the spot, but be careful of the sodium! Upon learning that the desired flavor and sensation is citric acid, I have been chowing on a lot of naturally occurring citric acid — so a lot of citrus and tomatoes. I am allergic to mango, but one day, I will just take a Benadryl and have some mango with Tajin!

7. I unpublished everything published before 28 June 2026. I will be republishing bits of these in the coming weeks. At the time of writing, I did not know what I was coming into knowing now, and I wanted to return to the scene of presumed certainty to take another look, to linger, to stay with it. At a time of unchecked and compulsory growth, I want to honor what already exists. Instead of writing more and more, how can I return to existing writing and write from there? In my 28 June 2026 list dump, I wrote about compost as a method for poetry writing. As a death doula in training, KJR Studios engages with a poetics of life cycles rather than compulsory or uninterrupted growth. I revise, often publicly, using an ethos of activated compost piles. Nothing is disposed of. Nothing is wasted. Each gesture goes into the pile. There, it generates heat energy through active digestion and respiration – the ideas consume one another and share breath. I invite the worms and insects. When a new project launches, it launches from this compost pile where gestures and ideas have had time to be in a convivial relation.

8. This past Wednesday, I wore my sandals. Remember my open-toe sandal foray from last newsletter? Well, I wore them. I am walking toward Wooster Street to see the Pope. L show at the Drawing Center, and I completely fell forward. Banged up my knee and my ego. New York City is really that place where people will watch you fall. When I looked up after gathering what was left of my dignity, I saw a man in his truck, windows up, chomping on his sandwich, looking directly at me. This man didn’t flinch, lol! A security guard who happened to be in the area told me to be careful, like thank you, sir; I will remember that the next time, but this does not help me at the moment when my bags flew into the street, and the knee of my pants is ripped. My bum knee and I carried on to see a really lovely show. I got a free copy of the Pope. L book because the docent liked my work at MoMA PS1. The free book made up for the truly overpriced and underwhelming lunch at [redacted].

9. My flat feet and I are finally the proud owners of my first pair of orthopedic shoes. These Hoka shoes are very ugly, but my feet are very happy. I was told they aren’t ugly, so maybe I am just not used to them yet!

10. Not only are airports masterful in choreographing consistent inconvenience and performative bureaucracy, but airports are also fascinating contact zones where difference collides and holds. Traveling also reminds me that many people lack spatial awareness. Actually, I do not think it is a lack of spatial awareness; it feels like an intentional invasion of private, dignified space. I need a no-fly zone around my actual body. Like, why are you literally two inches from my neck and now annoyed that each movement I make causes you to get bumped by my bag or my arm? We all have assigned seats on the plane. And while we are here, the way people use reclined seats is absolutely maniacal. I am writing this to you with my computer not open to a perfect 90 degrees or an even more desirable 115 degrees to better see my little letters. Not my screen is bowed toward me at a 70-degree angle, forcing me to compete with the sun glare, poor eyesight, and a dimmed screen, so folks cannot see me typing about them.

11. I rewatched Idris Elba’s Hijack before flying, but I’m still pretty chill with no sedative. In the last twenty years of travel, I have noticed that airplane-centric movies and TV shows are not offered on flights. I am curious about the curatorial process for in-flight viewing.

    ---

12. I made a few new human friends this summer, but I also made a doggie friend! Meet Maxine! She is Anne’s doggie, who often hangs out at Shoestring Press, where I am working on some prints. She ate all my chicken!

See you next week for another list!

Thanks for being a pal!

All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):

3,282

Welcome back to another list!

Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times.

1. In the last newsletter, I wrote, “And believe it or not, I have already drafted the next two newsletters.” In under an hour, a friend sent me a hilarious voice note.

   

   I felt confident about my changed ways, but this put a battery pack in my back. This newsletter emerges from the bowels of spite and shame-based motivation, written primarily to prove him wrong secondarily because I have some things I'm genuinely excited to share.

   ---

2. Speaking of this newsletter, I have archived all my past posts before June 28th. In a recent interview, I spoke with someone who discussed how they actively remove works from view — works they want to have a different audience. I am doing that, too. As I approach 41, I am thinking more deeply about access.

   ---

3. Last newsletter note, I updated the about me page :-) Read more here, but a snippet below:

   What is crossed out below was gleefully aspirational, ha!

   This newsletter is a series of lists, science infodumping (or everything infodumping), event announcements, bad jokes, and lore. I have tried for a few years to make this newsletter “thematic,” but I am not one to stay on topic, ever, and not sure why I tried to do this here. I love tangents, misdirections, and wanderings. Your girl has a lot of interests and never enough time. I won’t promise a focused approach, because I will only let you down! And I don’t want to do that to you! This newsletter is me yapping on a digital substrate.

   […]

   I explore the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual systems of communication. In doing so, I consider the radical possibilities of noise, unintelligibility, discrepancy, and the refusal of frictionless datafication. I create language-saturated installations, film/video (poems?), handheld physical and digital text objects to be read, performance-adjacent improvisational artist talks, archival collections, scores/prompts for humans, software, esoteric fiction stories and loglines, (intergenerational) learning environments, curricular materials, stand-up comedy sets, wayward translations, (unrecorded) infodump lectures about special interests, devotional kits, walking paths, theremin sound works, and photographs.

   ---

4. Happy Fourth of July from Gil Scott Heron. Whitey on the Moon was released as the ninth track on his debut album in 1970. Below is without the drums, but you can find it with the drums here.

   ---

5. Also, Happy Fourth of July from Nina Simone. "Mississippi Goddam" was released on Nina Simone in Concert in 1964.

   ---

6. What is it called when your abusive and manipulative ex-husband, whom you’ve blocked on everything, for whom you changed your entire going out schedule to avoid them, and have spent countless years in recovery therapy to quell extreme anxiety, is then suggested to you as a good match on a dating app?

   

   Bumble App, count your MF days. Another reason not to trust AI! I need to sue for emotional distress, ha! I had a good chuckle. And then a sad reminder that I will always feel fear at the sight of his face. Thankful to Allah (swt) for guiding me out of what could have become a truly terrifying situation. There is no other side to leaving an abusive relationship; there are just future days. I have spent the last several years trying to feel safe in my body, in my home, and in my neighborhood. I have so much to say about marriage, specifically, the contours of how people weaponize marriage in Islamic communities, despite the Qur’an mentioning divorce on so many occasions. Realizing that Allah (swt) would rather see me alive and divorced than psychologically tormented and married was a transformative moment that has made leaving other things much easier. Now, my favorite thing to do is say, “Yeah, nah, I am not doing that!” I can’t believe this process began in 2021, half a decade ago, and through it all, I just kept grinning like an idiot because I had no choice but to keep going. I cannot wait until I can say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I don’t even remember how many years ago.

   ---

7. Has anyone seen Castle Rock? I want to talk to someone about it :)

   ---

8. Some time ago, I was assigned a nutritionist because I would forget to eat, and by the time I did, it was terrible, and it was 11 pm. Recently, I learned that I can only eat at home if the meal is quick and pre-cooked. I have been on a bone broth kick and have been making big pots of this bone broth soup, which I top with crumbled tortilla chips. If you have food texture issues and the kind of hyperfixation that prevents you from transitioning tasks without a lot of annoyance and energy, I suggest blocking out 60 minutes on Saturday to make enough microwaveable bone broth soup for the week. My recipe:

   • five cups of chicken bone broth

   • 14oz of extra firm tofu

   • 1 pound of thinly sliced chicken breast

   • bok choy

   • spinach

   • baby bella mushrooms

   • green onions

   • a lot of garlic

   • a tiny bit of salt

   • jalapeno pepper

   • white miso paste (do not add while cooking!)

   You will need about 30 minutes to chop everything, so please account for that. I listen to Jersey club music to keep myself focused.

   Not a chef, but here is what I do:

   1. I toss the sliced chicken breast with a little sesame oil, salt, and pepper, then throw it into the air fryer as I bring 5 cups of chicken bone broth to a slight boil.

   2. I toss in a bag of spinach and let it wilt with the lid on.

   3. Put in the chicken.

   4. I toss in all the other veggies and let them hang out for 20 minutes.

   5. I put in a little salt.

   6. Let everyone hang out a little more.

      Separate them into some containers and put them in the fridge. When I am hungry, I just microwave with a little water. I add a tiny bit of white miso, stir, add something crunchy on top, and eat. And this is something I can easily make while traveling this summer.

   ---

9. Also, for my dehydrated girlies, get yourself some electrolyte packs, particularly in this heat. I can go a whole day without coffee, then it will be like, “Why do I have a migraine?” I make a gallon of water with a little electrolytes sprinkled in and set it prominently on my workstation so it can taunt me. You can, of course, make your own electrolytes, but if making them slows you down from staying hydrated, choose the low-barrier-of-entry option.

   ---

10. After a panel some time ago, a woman walked up to me and said, “You are terrifyingly intelligent.” This was in the same register that many white people have spoken to me throughout my life. This is not a humble brag; it is an expression of exhaustion because I have to choose between smiling and nodding or engaging in verbal gymnastics about what makes my intelligence so surprising or extraordinary. I am tired.

    ---

11. Speaking of public engagements, I gave one earlier this week, and someone chose to tell me they did not like the way I speak. Funny thing is, the lecture was about the expectation of standard expression and its intersection with my emerging research on noise and speech disabilities. Some people know this, but I was in speech therapy as a young person. Since elementary school, I have been to camouflage, but last fall, when I was under a lot of stress and severely exhausted in Europe, I found it slipping in despite decades of unconscious suppression. It was startling. I struggled to get words out in a “normal cadence.” I chalked it up to exhaustion, which was part of it; I was running between several European cities installing multiple works, not sleeping, not eating, and just generally burnt out. I speak about this a little more openly now than I have in the past, even though I still worry about redirecting attention away from people whose speech differences are more readily perceived and who have been treated far less kindly because of that perceived severity. If nothing else, I am a master masker; even if I do not understand the metrics of “normality,” I can watch, analyze, and mimic.

    

    

    When I go home with family, I say “I let my tongue get heavy,” meaning I am in the company of others for whom I do not have to perform. In elementary school, I had speech therapy. My “disorder” was fast speech and transposing sounds. Part of this is anatomical — my mouth is simply too small. This year, I had a tooth pulled, which I think improved my speech, but then I got Invisalign to reposition the remaining teeth, which resulted in slurred speech and a noticeable lisp. I finally learned how to work with the retainer to get back to “normal” speech: I do a sucking gesture and reposition my tongue, hold, then speak.

    

    I spent the last several years being blindsided by neurodevelopmental “disorders.” I have diagnosis fatigue. I need to see a speech pathologist, but I am also exhausted by being told something is off or wrong with me and my brain. I am aware that I struggle with executive processing, and this impacts my speech. I know that I struggle with fluency at times.

    

    To be honest, at this point, seeing a speech pathologist is more for others than it is for me. I’d make the argument that an unfortunate portion of diagnostic work seems to be less about the person learning about the intricacies of the difference, and more about teaching them to make those differences less prominent — to be made more legible, to prioritize everyone else’s comfort. We are taught to accommodate others. In fact, I do not even like the word accommodate.

    

    I want something different. I want a diagnosis to offer the person being diagnosed greater self-understanding, compassion, and self-reflection within the context of the larger social and structural forces that shape how difference is constructed, perceived, and weaponized. At the same time, we must all interrogate our relationships to legibility and efficiency.

    I am considered “low support needs,” so maybe I am not the right person to write about this. I do not know.

    ---

12. If you go to a restaurant and order avocado toast, make sure it says 'avocado' and not 'avocado spread'. The latter is some unholy pea, avocado, green mush.

    ---

13. I wore open-toe sandals for the first time in maybe a decade! One of my greatest fears (after returning home to my apartment full of opossums) is someone vomiting on my feet. Well, I wore my open-toe sandals and no one vomited on my feet, so I now have a data point (possibly) in the direction of more open-toe shoes. I will keep you posted! My next fashion adventure is wearing a color other than black. I will report back.

    ---

14. I once actively wrote autocorrect poems. We must return to this, because it is so fun, collaborative, and full of poetic surprises! I like writing poems, but do not want to be a poet. I do not know if I’d call these poems as much as I’d call them compost. It is usually detritus — words and phrases that linger, and I find a home somewhere on the page/wall because I will not abandon them entirely.

    

    ---

15. I started doing Gua Sha. I have no idea if it means anything, but I never realized how amazing a face massage is. I almost didn’t leave the house because I was so relaxed.

    ---

16. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a guest writer for Harper’s Index, a poetic hodgepodge of science news smashed together in hilarious ways. Reflecting, it is still a dream of mine, so if anyone knows Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, the current writer, let me know. I want to share a few of my Harper’s Index ersatz goods. Actually, scratch that! Erastz implies inferiority, and I rebuke all proclaimations of inferiority! This offering is just different. I reinaugurate this, the 🕸️ Primitive Hypertext Index, in honor of Octavia Estelle Butler, who reminds us:

    

    So here are a few past ones (with grammatical edits, lol):

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    “Alien” Wow! Signal, Conspiracy Theory Generator, Human Eggs “Woo Sperm,” “Glacier Mating,” Ice Cores with Stories, + Glycerol=Better Bubbles, Underwater Bubbles for Survival

    20 January 2025

    The Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope detected the Wow! Signal in 1977, becoming one of the most noteworthy examples of alien intelligence. However, a non-peer-reviewed paper published on arXiv last year “hypothesize[d] that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR).” When prompting Bitlife, an AI-powered conspiracy theory text generator with the word “eggs,” we are given “[s]ome conspiracy theorists believe that eggs, particularly chicken eggs, hold mystical properties that are linked to alien civilizations.” In 2017, Joe Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest hypothesized that sexual selection happens after copulation when the egg attempts to “woo sperm” instead of “passively” awaiting random fertilization. Other fertilization approaches are found amongst farmers in Pakistan's highlands of Baltistan who are racing against climate change by attempting to produce “glacier babies” using an ancient ritual of “glacier mating” of mixing chunks of white glaciers (presumed to be female) with black or brown glaciers (presumed to be male) in order to create a new water source for farming. At the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, scientists store ice cores containing bubbles of Greenland air from more than two millennia ago, which can provide details on the progression of climate change. Scientists have developed an optimized recipe for making giant bubbles, which requires that the surface-active agent (a chemical compound that reduces the surface tension between two substances) not be too high, that the bubble solution include long, flexible polymer chains, and that glycerol provide stability and resistance to evaporation. Possibly to escape predators, water anoles and semiaquatic lizards produce a bubble behind their nostrils that allows them to breathe underwater for 20 minutes. Alongside Lindsey Swierk’s water anole research, other scientists have found that the alkali fly (Ephydra hians) uses superhydrophobicity to create a bubble of air around its body (but not around its eyes) while underwater in Mono Lake, California. And some water beetles form a temporary bubble to carry the oxygen they need while underwater.

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    AI-Generated Images of Rat Genitalia, Ants Perform Life-saving Amputations, Japanese Honeybees Swat Invading Ants, Mapping the Seafloor, and Measuring the Mind's Eye

    12 August 2024

    A graphic of a rat with exaggerated genitalia was published in Frontiers. It was later retracted because it was an AI-generated image, raising concerns about the increasing, knowingly or unknowingly, use of AI-generated images and texts in scientific journals. Researchers found that Florida carpenter ants would amputate the injured legs of nestmates to survive. Using their ability to differentiate between different wound types, these ants can deploy different treatments, marking what scientists are calling the first “nonhuman animal performing an amputation on a fellow member of its species to save its life.” A new study revealed that a species of honeybee native to Japan uses its wings to slap back Japanese pavement ants that attempt to invade its hive. Researchers strap a camera and other tracking devices to endangered Australian sea lions to map the seafloor. Scientists learned that sea lions visited six diverse benthic (seabed) habitats: macroalgae reef, macroalgae meadow, bare sand, sponge/sand, invertebrate reef, and invertebrate boulder. Aphantasia, a new phenomenon coined only in 2015 but described by Francis Galton in 1880, refers to the inability to conjure mental images and may remind us that naming a phenomenon is not the same as the first recorded instance of observing it. Many early aphantasia studies rely on self-reporting, leading researchers to ask: “How do you measure someone else’s inner reality?” and “Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds?” thereby making aphantasia not an objective binary reality or even a well-defined spectrum, but something that challenges both systems of research methods and the failure of language. More recent research uses ultra-high-field 7T fMRI to compare domain activation across subjects.

    ---

    Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars

    22 July 2024

    A study of 40 healthy men found microplastics in all 40 semen samples, raising concerns about male fertility and the continued decline in sperm count. After Taro Kono, Japan’s digital minister, declared and presumably won its “war on floppy disks,” the national abandonment of the seemingly anachronistic storage system, he has a new target: retiring the fax machine. Masting, or the synchronized production of seeds by plants, is finally seen at a continental scale, with European beeches dropping their fruits simultaneously across several nations. Noise pollution from a newly installed Bitcoin mining facility is causing health issues for residents of Granbury, Texas. A 2022 study exposed Jupiter as a greedy little planet that “cannibalized baby planets” as it grew, or in a more dramatic summary: “Jupiter’s innards are full of the remains of baby planets.” A 2024 study investigating stellar chemical compositions found that at least one in twelve stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion. Planetary ingestion, or “stellar ingestion” or “stellar murder,” is when a star eats a planet. NASA predicts that in about 5 billion years, our Sun will undergo an “end-of-life transition” by ingesting a few familiar planets: Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. The soft halo of anthropomorphization follows the description of astrophysical phenomena everywhere, such as bestowing planets with the ability to establish healthy boundaries with their parent star — “planets should never feel too comfortable as they orbit their parent star.” Do some stars have dietary restrictions? A 2019 study seems to suggest that it may just be a matter of proximity: a planet migrates into the stellar envelope and eventually becomes a meal. Is there ever a point at which ingestion exceeds stellar social norms, and a star is forced to take some stellar Ozempic or a more generic GLP-1? Do some stars meal prep their planetary courses? If a star eats a planet that doesn’t taste as good as desired, does the star regurgitate the planet? Unsure! But, a quick inquiry into the cosmic dietary practices tied directly to stellar life cycles reveals that some black holes form from a dead star. One black hole shredded up, not swallowed up, a star that got too close, and according to a 2022 study, the black hole began “burping out” the energy from the shredded star two years later.

See you next week for another list!

Thanks for being a pal!

All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):

3,506

1. This is just a list of things I wanted to share. If I took the time to organize it into a narrative, this newsletter would never come up. And no, I didn’t reread for edits; a cursory glance would quickly turn into a week-long rewriting, and seriously, ain’t nobody got time for that.

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2. You should come to my talk on noise 🗓️ July 1, 2026, 6–8 pm |📍National Academy of Design

   A lecture-performance on the generative and radical potential of noise with Kameelah Janan Rasheed.

   In Praise of Noise is an emergent lecture-performance exploring the generative and radical potential of noise. As we listen for what exceeds the signal — what escapes intelligibility and standard perception — we look to instances presumed to be failures: latency, misalignment, and ectopia. In this turn toward error as method, noise becomes an invitation to other ways of knowing. Resisting the temptation to worship at the altar of coherence and immediacy, we consider strategies of being out of sync, non-compliant, and excessive. These modes of being are not episodic spectacles of refusal; rather, they are disorienting conditions sustained not through cohesion, but through dispersal.

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3. Shoutout to the lady I ran into in North Carolina who told me she was a reader and felt abandoned by my absence. I am popping back in. I hope you are still a subscriber because I said, “I got you” in early April, and here we are two months later. Also, looks like I have been away so long that Substack introduced new features, lol.

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4. Officially, this is a list newsletter. Does anyone remember the name of that book about the history of lists? Please let me know! Or maybe do not let me know? I keep starting new books. See #ah.

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5. I am being terrorized by a tiny gray mouse. Somehow, he breached the hermetically sealed boundary of my sanctuary. He doesn’t want anything other than to live rent-free in my house. He can stay if he kicks in some coins. Many moons ago, in a different apartment, but the same building, there was a mouse. He ate all my organic goji berries, my organic lentils, and the artisanal chocolate I’d brought back from the south of France. It was then that I learned the mice here are built differently. They like AC, organic food, and access to international treats. Even more moons ago, in a different apartment in a different building, I came home to find two mice frolicking in my bed. I wondered how often you convene when I am not home. I washed and wiped everything down. Set out traps. I go to bed, and I hear a scratching. This mofo is hanging out on my nightstand. I moved out 10 days later. However, I am in a rent-stabilized apartment (that is going to stay that way, thanks to Mamdani!) and there is no way I am leaving. Mr. Mouse and I are gonna have to get along and set up opposite hours or something.

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6. This year is kicking my butt. As I type this, it, like this mouse, is terrorizing me, gleefully. There is no good place to start to unfold the last nine months, but at the very least, the compliment I keep receiving is “wow, you are handling this very well.” What a pleasure to be crowned the most graceful and quiet sufferer! I will make myself a sash. I am thinking about my series How to Suffer Politely (and Other Etiquette). I am also thinking about Sadiyah Bashir’s latest essay, I Want to Be Remembered as Someone to Complain A lot. I try not to complain because I do not want to be ungrateful, but the contours of what I am calling ungratefulness are just me expressing displeasure. Why I have convinced myself that I cannot drop the mask and say, “this is rough,” is a complicated response, inflected by decades of being the “strong one,” serving as the understudy for the role of the most smiley, stressed-out person.

   Some very strange and unfortunate things have happened this year, so if you want to drop a coin, please do!

   • Venmo: @Kameelah-Rasheed
   • Cash App: $kr00

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7. January - late March, I don’t even remember what happened. But here are some photos. Together, let’s try to reconstruct that month.

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8. Actually, in January, I opened a solo show of some of my video works at High Line Art. Here is a photo of me before the artist talk in February. The boots and the jacket were thrifted in Berlin back in 2024.

   

   And me hugging a former Cooper student before the talk. Shout out to all my students — y'all really be showing up to my events, and it is so lovely.

   

   and eyes closed, just a yapping

   

   Also, me in front of my work.

   

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9. Oh, and in February, I cut my hair. Guys, it is not cute, and I am fighting the urge to chop it all off, but alhamdulillah for a hijab, so only I have to witness this awkward cut. But even I am embarrassed by myself. A mess, a complete mess. Someone told me not to do it, but I did it anyway, and did it poorly, ha!

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10. I taught a fun workshop at the Free Black Women’s Library on Valentine’s Day. Thank you, Ola, for the invitation! I want to do more of these! See #g.

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11. In April, I opened my installation Escape Orbit at the Greater New York group show at PS1. Double carpal tunnel syndrome, a baker’s cyst, and some gray hairs later, we have five new video works, some baby paintings, and the log lines for a film or maybe short story I promised myself I would write, but will most likely bask in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote:

    “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”

    I really like this “procedure,” but I am going to work on this amorphous piece of writing as soon as I get to Montpellier to teach for the 5th (6th?) year in a row in the Bennington MFA Low Residency program that hosts two months of study in Montpellier, France. Truly, a dream position. To be honest, April was a literal blur. I just remember going to the opening, and then it was May.

    Some photos from the installation:

    

    

    

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12. In April, I also closed a really transformative solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA.

    

    

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13. May was a cute month. I spent a week in the Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough at the Black Studies Conference. I do not have a PhD, nor am I pursuing one, so it was quite an honor to be invited to a conference for scholars. I presented some emergent research on digital capture, necropolitics, and generative AI death bots. I met a lot of lovely people, fell in love with Toronto, and was almost persuaded to pursue a PhD program. It was my first time back after 20 years of sleeping in a dorm.

    Earlier in May, I facilitated a reading room at the Black Zine Fair with my mama. A bunch of my grad students were there and got to meet my mom. It was a soft launch for an archival platform that’ll be peaking its head out soon, inshaAllah. It was very silly to simultaneously build nine websites, but who am I if not advantageous and slightly delusional about how time works? Here’s a cute video of me being cute, but also explaining the project, which is the more important feature.

    In mid-May, I delivered a commencement address to BFA Photography students at the New School. I think this is the second commencement ceremony address I have delivered. They are a lot of fun, and I am appreciative of students who continue to recommend me such an honor.

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14. In May, my longtime co-conspirator (Yuchen Chang) and I debuted our performance, Call Me by Your Practice: A Cross-Examination, at MoMA PS1. The structure: Two friends—both artists featured in the exhibition—deliver a performance lecture, intimately examining the use of language in each other’s practices. And some photos (all by Walter Wlodarczyk)

    

    

    

    

    In our talk, I expressed shame that I am not one of those friends who do unstructured activities like brunching — I need a task; it’s just who I am. It was such a relief to be reminded that friendships do not all need to look the same. In my journey to understand my relationships, broadly, I know that I grow intimacy through active collaboration. My best friend is my best friend because we have grown close by collaborating on music and video works. When I look at the other parts of my ecosystem, we write together, we yap together, we publish together. My language of intimacy is deep study and trance-like making. I have always been this way, but was terrified to admit that I need structure. Yes, I am 40. If you invite me over, I will ask, what’s on the agenda? And if there is no agenda, I love parallel play — just sitting in the room with someone I love is enough for me :)

    In my return to romantic partnership, this has also been a hard reminder. I will have an Excel sheet of activities I want to do together. We can eat a quick taco, but I really just want an adventure or activity. I will do debriefs; I am always curious to see how people are experiencing their time with me, to ensure we are aligned, or to identify any misalignment that could be generative. I'm not sure I want to be married again, but if that happens, I’d want separate homes. I know this makes me an odd one, limiting my partnership prospects, but again, I am 40 and do not have time to be anyone but myself.

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15. My mouth has been an expensive body part this year. Unfortunately, it isn’t a vestigial feature. Teeth pulled, Invisalign, and more teeth rearranged. Goodness. All I do is yap, so I have to take care of this goofy orifice.

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16. I told myself that June would be my month of pleasure, expansion, and frolicking. I could only afford a month, given deadlines and travel commitments.

    Anyone who knows me even tangentially knows I am just not outside. Part of that is just that I don’t like crowds and unstructured activities. The other part of that is that I have just been too busy. Since January, I have opened a solo show and five group shows (more on this soon), with much of it new work (which I am quite proud of), delivered a bunch of public talks, and taught full-time. When I finally get a moment to slow down, the last thing I want to do is be outside. I want to be in my bed with a cup of tea, a nectarine, and a Benadryl to counteract the effects of the nectarine I am allergic to but eat anyway because being allergic to most fruit feels aggressively hateful.

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17. So what did I do in June?

    1. walked a lot

    2. attended a virtual lecture on spies

    3. went to a friend’s panel

    4. saw Laraaji live

       

    5. ate Korean tacos

    6. got really into New Jersey club and house music

    7. went to a poetry reading as a guest and ended up reading some impromptu poems in a constrained writing approach I am developing — should I publish these poems somewhere? I am just going to put them here. Actually, I do not know if they are poems. They are activated compost piles. Back in 2023, I was invited to a poetry reading. I was the last reader, which meant listening was not enough stimulus, so I had to do something else with my hands. I started collecting words from each poet and then challenged myself to turn them into something before they finished. Then, when I read, I shared what I created:

       A self-sufficient God does not care about your analog sex or your neon composites. Just stay. The windows allow desire and discipline to overlap: the radio thickens around a punk airspace. (after J)

       I exist as an XXXXXXXXXXXX, but I am more than a mess; I am a boring dance crawling toward some rehearsal for a chance at pure gluttony yet to be seen. I am possessed by a harmony of five triangles, and my mouth is shuffling between different ghosts whispering a secret text. A black prayer folds itself into a position of before, and I learn that a duet that spreads like milk just wants attention. I am sorry, but I can only interpret at the edge because I have not been optimized. I pledge allegiance to an alien that has the vision. (after E)

       [All bolded words come directly from the poet; the syntax is my “own” as much as one can have their “own” in this epistemic entanglement we sometimes refuse to acknowledge]

       Maybe that is the name of this “method” is something like activating compost or something along the lines of what Bhanu Kapil describes in the beginning of Schizophrene:

       

       

       Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

       I. (after K)
       A blue dream is a theater for study 
       The breeze in motion marks the calendar
       An ant appears as a cop with hands, equal to the hole in the sky
       
       II. (after K)
       A fleshy machine blurs my vision
       Spiders return in protest of our casual approximations
       
       III. (after R)
       A correcting vibration
       
       IV. (after Y)
       I forget the damage of holes 
       Confused brains do not suffer, but
       unreliable hands do
       
       V. (after Z)
       I braid your face to make a home
       A thick mirror is nested in a cabinet
       A circle has no seams, but 
       it etches red rings into the smoke
       
       I shroud. God feed me mirrors
       I swell. God sheds me of my labor
       I sit at your hem. God, o God
       Water my mouth, flood it
       with the voices of the dead
       Make me soft, but not
       worn,
       
       VI. (after A)
       Go away in pain, but
       return yellowed and itchy
       
       VII. (after L) 
       unspool the sky

       I’ve been collecting words and writing things for a bit now. Check out my gift me a word project. Also, conjure a new sentence. I used Python to tokenize each sentence in Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva. From there, writers can reorganize a sentence into a new sentence! Go play!

       I want to make more games like this (shout out to the AfroLudix class I took in April/May and being offered again (take it!) — for getting me back into making lo-fi playthings.

       I am writing a lot about methods these days. Not that I do not care about what is made, but I can confidently say that I am enthralled by how we arrive at habits, routines, and expected forms.

       I have been grappling with my relationship to non-compliance and rules for my entire life because of the “autistic urge” to ask WHY, even when presented with the most mundane rule. I am not challenging your authority (well, sometimes, I am); I just want the lore for how you got here. This is a hard articulation for a “visual artist,” where the product's visibility is the regime. But what if I want to make work that considers methods for dehabituation? That is when I make something, I am not making it just because I like how it looks, I am making it because I am curious about how an unexpected (and sometimes unrewarded) misalignment has other possibilities — that I like dissonance, discrepency, and misalignment because they invite new ethics of looking and meaning-making. When I talk about experimental poetics, I am here for the aesthetics, but I also think about this as rehearsal — that if we can break the grammar of a paragraph, then…"? I speak about this a little bit during a BOMB interview from 2025:

       

       While yapping with a new friend recently, we began down this road of edges and sites. Anthony shared his wall label text, and then we took off:

       

       a substrate for otherwise? (guys, we need another word — help!)

    8. took a poetry workshop at UDP

    9. attended a class to learn how to make my own projector

    10. took an improv intensive and graduated from level 1

    11. performed improv

        

    12. ate dumplings somewhere

    13. learned about electron guns in CRT and analog video art

    14. played with lasers

    15. spent an ungodly amount of time in Bushwick

    16. watched Birdbox (I have questions)

    17. watched Hereditary (again, I have questions)

    18. began to teach myself calculus

    19. asked myself whether non-human beings like dogs have names for one another in the way that humans do

    20. learned about the soul theorem

    21. contemplated getting a cat (to get the mouse, see list item #5)

    22. contemplated getting locs (I didn’t – Thando said I am not built for the maintenance)

    23. slammed my nipple in a cabinet (the mechanics of this remain lost on me)

    24. met some of my internet faves at the SFPC graduation

    25. went to the Bones Museum in Gowanus

    26. had a delicious fried fish sandwich (I am thinking about it now)

    27. went to cafes most mornings to work and developed a financially untenable obsession with dirty chia latters and this avocado toast with smoked salmon, unnamed nuts, and unnamed spicy sauce

    28. went to a friend’s birthday party and took sunset photos on the roof while we ate cake

    29. made a few new friends

    30. ate a kimchi breakfast burrito

    31. made some terribly sounding music

    32. bought a new pair of Birkenstock sandals

    33. had a terrible day of pollen allergy irritation

    34. annoyingly bounced between four books of no relation: a history of the CIA and Charles Manson, a dark romance that was a little too spicy for me, a hard sci-fi book recommended by a new friend in Toronto, and random space stuff

        This was my first real New York City summer in the 15 years I have lived here. I have always worked or had some other commitment during the summer. It is nice to relearn the city. It’s cute. I wish I had journaled throughout this, but I was amazingly present and rarely took photos.

    KJR Studios: Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I am sure I am missing a lot, but in the spirit of completion over perfection, here it is! If I missed something, please let me know, lol. Thanks for reading. And believe it or not, I have already drafted the next two newsletters. I am looking forward to a slower rest of the year and more writing. I miss writing.

See you next week for another list!

Thanks for being a pal!

All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL