Guided by a loose internal logic, Donato Loia filled six small LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks over the span of three years (beginning in 2020, during the pandemic) constrained by one rule only: each sentence should not exceed a page. “These sentences, to a large extent,” he writes in his preface, “became an exercise in fixing words into memory.” 1095 Short Sentences is divided into the sections “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Evening,” which I will refer to in our interview. Introduced by Deborah Shapiro, it was published by B-Side Editions on August 28, 2024.
I read Donato’s book over the course of three days in Buenos Aires. I had just arrived there for a research trip, and I was struggling at the time to find some semblance of a routine. I found 1095 Short Sentences to be grounding and meditative, and the advice and aphorisms within its pages gentle, self-reflective, and often candid in their expression of doubt. It was a book which led with, rather than absconded from, its contradictions. It was, in short, the perfect travel companion.
Donato, meanwhile, spent the summer between his native Italy and his most recent home in Chicago, where he teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He and I exchanged emails over the course of two months. Below is a selection of sentences from the book and a slightly condensed version of our conversation in which we discuss the habits and obsessions of our everyday, family lexicon, anti-self-help manuals, writing in community, and more.
Morning
1. Make your bed every morning.
2. If you are in a rush one morning and unable to make your bed, that’s fine.
3. When I wake up, I make myself a cup of coffee. For me, coffee is proof that joy is possible.
Anna Vilner
The speaker of 1095 Short Sentences often meditates on the automatism of habit—both his own habits and those he observes in others. I found it fitting that a quote by Viktor Shklovsky appears on the very first page of the book. Shklovsky wrote that the technique of defamiliarization, which pierces through the automatism of our everyday, is a central aim of literature. Considering that 1095 Short Sentences is so much about the cultivation of certain habits, as well as a resistance to obsessive acts—such as revisiting the emails we have already written and the pictures we have already taken (#205, “Evening”)—I am curious about your own habit of writing these sentences, and how you cultivated it over the course of three years. Can you tell me more about this process, as well as your interest in homing in on habits more generally?
Donato Loia
It is true that the cultivation of habits, or the need to resist them, is an important subject in 1095 Short Sentences. However, regarding the writing of the sentences, I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a habit. Habits, as I see them, involve a certain kind of regularity—a weekly, if not daily, routine. I never sat down at the desk at a specific time to write a short sentence. Most of these thoughts came to me while I was engaged in other activities, such as running, being in bed, reading, or talking to people. At the beginning of this project, in 2020, I recall that I would often think of sentences before falling asleep. If a thought struck me as worth remembering, I would leave the bed, jot it down in my notebook, and then return to bed. This behavior might have formed a habit for some time, but to me, a habit implies something you know you are going to repeat. For instance, I know that tomorrow I will make the bed in the morning because it is something I always do. I expect that from myself. However, I did not know in advance if I would leave the bed to take a note before falling asleep. I hesitate to describe this method of working as habits due to their lack of regularity.
But the cultivation of habits and the need to resist obsessive acts are certainly important themes in the book. Habits form a significant part of people’s everyday life, which is why reflecting on them seems worthwhile to me. At the same time, the routine of gestures can transform everyday life into something invisible and formless.
A brief note about Shklovsky—who is mentioned on the very first page of the book—I found a reference to his work in someone else’s book. I do not recall where, now. In my book of short sentences, I do not trace back ideas to original authors, as I might in my academic writing. Thus, I cannot speak sensibly about Shklovsky and the technique of defamiliarization as it is not something I have studied extensively. Your comment inspires me to do that. However, what you mentioned resonates with me. This entire book is my attempt to pierce through everyday life, possibly trying to mirror the confusion and automatisms inherent in it. In such a sense, I think you could say that any kind of writing—regardless of its format, of being a novel, diaristic writing, or a memoir—is an attempt to give some shape—no matter how fragmented and contradictory the shape of the writing might be—to everyday life.
Anna Vilner
Where do habits fit in for you, in the everyday, as opposed to practices or addictions?
Donato Loia
It’s necessary to distinguish between habits, automatisms/addictions, and “practices,” because, while habits can become automatic behaviors or even addictions, they are not inherently the same. For instance, making your bed in the morning is a habit, but it is neither an addiction nor an automatism. The latter terms imply that a person has become a function of their own actions. Habits are generally more neutral or seemingly innocuous.
Of course, there is a sense in which any habit can obscure the meaning of a person’s actions, making them repetitive and shallow. However, habits are somewhere in between automatisms/addictions and “practices.” I’m not fond of the word “practice” because it is overused and feels rather generic today. But in some ways, it helps me clarify the nature of habits a bit more. Sometimes people use the term “practice” for habits that are empowering and might contribute to making a person a better individual, a better citizen.
Afternoon
45. Why these suggestions? Because, as Edoardo Sanguineti writes and shows (notice the colon at the end) in a wonderful poem, finished and unfinished as life itself: “the banal, usually, is the hard part:”
Anna Vilner
In “Afternoon,” the second section of the book, the speaker reflects upon his discomfort with form, genre, and audience. Who are these sentences for? he wonders. Included within the audience he imagines are “. . . the people with temporary houses. . . The confused. The people without much courage, but with enough courage to leave their homes. Me.”
A self-help manual announces itself by announcing its intentions. It knows its audience well, or believes it does, and it speaks from a position of authority. The ambivalence present in 1095 Short Sentences encourages me to read it as an anti-self-help manual. Yet it still speaks with and against this genre, and must reckon with the connotations implied by its occasionally imperative structure and the paternalistic “shoulds” that appear throughout. For me, the many voices in dialogue with the speaker’s—from Simone Weil’s to Oscar Wilde’s, to the speaker’s own friends, family, and partner—as well as the ambivalence I mentioned just a moment ago, undercut the speaker’s authority in very productive ways. How important was it for you to craft an authoritative voice for this project? (A related question, perhaps: how important was it to then challenge this authority?)
Donato Loia
In many ways, your brilliant question provides the reply to itself. The book started with this idea of writing a book of suggestions. But it became immediately clear to me that this was not what I truly wanted to do. I really like what Deborah (Shapiro, the publisher of the book) says about it: It is more searching than prescriptive. It is not only a motivational guide but also an anti-motivational guide.
A book that is searching cannot be a self-help book that pretends to speak from a position of some authority.
The idea of writing with other voices—authors I cite, and family and friends—is meant to signal a challenge to authority; if by authority we mean an individual detached from a multitude. And yet, am I trying to suggest that I, too, contain multitudes? I don’t think so. In many ways, and a bit depressingly, I am afraid that I contain only myself. But I need these multitudes who are outside of me since, without them, I would be completely lost.
. . . One more thought regarding authority. I do assert in the book that rules and discipline are important. And I think this stance is deliberate because in the art world and the humanities—the realms in which I mostly operate professionally—we still experience the lingering effects of the Romantic Revolution and the 1960s counter-culture, which emphasize originality, authenticity, and often hold a certain distaste for authority. Given how pervasive this myth of absolute freedom is in the arts, I wanted to begin the book by emphasizing the importance of rules and discipline.
That said, I do not believe in authority or discipline for their own sake. For instance, I harbor a distaste for institutions that claim to offer protection from sin only if one adheres to certain rules. To speak with other voices and through other voices—apart from asking questions and at times even relying on the reader to better understand the intentions or unstated desires of this little book—seems a way to undermine authority, especially this kind of paternalistic authority that claims to know so much about its own audience.
Anna Vilner
Continuing with this idea of writing with others, I would like to linger for a moment on the voices of your family, which often appear in Italian. The speaker intersperses Italian, and the Cilentano dialect in particular, a decision which, in addition to creating a multi-voiced text, also creates a multilingual one. Why did you choose to keep some of these proverbs, sayings, and quotes in Italian? And how does translation, both linguistic and cultural, figure into your project? For me, a lot of the humor of 1095 comes from the speaker’s “outsider” perspective, which lends itself to wry observations such as the following:
Afternoon
38. I love how Americans ask about your feelings regarding highways. It’s a question no Italian would ever ask. A friend once asked me: “How do you feel about I-35?” It is part of my life, I replied.
Donato Loia
The multilingual aspect of the book is quite straightforward. I am Italian, but I have lived in the States for the past eight years. In the US, I primarily speak and write in English. However, I converse almost daily with my family in Italian. I often watch the news in Italian and think in Italian. My father speaks almost exclusively in dialect, and while my mother speaks in Italian, she also uses the dialect, having spent sixty years with my father and being from the same village. Although I was born in a seaside town in Southern Italy, my family hails from a very small village in a remote part of Cilento, where I spent much of my childhood and teenage years. Some of my most important memories are rooted in that village.
Regarding the proverbs and sayings in Italian or my parents’ dialect, popular and peasant culture often communicates through proverbs. In some ways, proverbs are a popular version of short sentences. They usually have a moral, while my short sentences do not necessarily have a moral purpose. Nevertheless, the legacy of proverbial sayings in my family is part of the genealogy of this project.
So, there is a multilingual context in my work, but the predominant language is English, as this is the language in which I have been most assimilated. In other words, the multilingual aspect exists within a broader framework of unrootedness that I have experienced, and still do. That said, I learned to speak English rather late in life, and I still struggle with it at times. I never fully abandoned Italian, which is why I mention in the preface that even though I wrote the sentences in English, I didn’t necessarily think of them in English. My inner dialogue is a melting pot of English and Italian. As for translation, both cultural and linguistic, my way of speaking English is deeply influenced by my way of thinking in Italian. My English is far from being perfect, and it reflects a blend of Italian and a unique version of globish—this strange kind of English that one learns by simply living and working in English-speaking countries, without having received a strong formal education in English.
The US has an incredible assimilating power. To live in the US, you almost have to sacrifice a part of yourself and adapt to the American way of life. My sentence about highways illustrates how one gets assimilated into American culture—highways become a part of your existence. By the time I started writing this book of short sentences, I had already begun to feel that my home had shifted to the US. When I visit my family in Italy, as I am doing right now while writing this, I feel like a visitor, a guest in my hometown. This is also an American experience. I think there’s a saying in the US that I do not recall where I heard: “You can never really go back home.” I think this is true, and in the US the idea of home seems so fluid and uncertain. The US teaches you not to take your idea of home for granted. You must always be ready to move or even face expulsion. . . .
Anna Vilner
Do you have any ideas of where you would like to go next in your writing, either formally or thematically . . .? Are you working on something at the moment?
Donato Loia
I am always working on academic writings and currently have several essays in progress. I am writing on the influence of African arts in the work of Theaster Gates. I also need to write a short catalog essay on Per Kirkeby and work on a review essay about influential books in the field of art and religion from the last fifty years for an academic journal, Religious Studies Review. I need to start thinking about another essay for an anthology on Arthur Jafa and religion. I also have an idea for a short book on contemporary “academic art,” where I aim to reflect on the category of “academic art” both inside and outside academia.
The book of short sentences, however, was unrelated to my academic endeavors and aligned more with some philosophical writing I’ve been doing. I would like to write an essay on the short sentence as a form and explore the format of this book itself.
I also have an idea for a long short story, or a short long story, tentatively titled “The Guardian of the Elevator.” This story is inspired by a professional experience I had in Italy before moving to the US. I worked as a guardian at the Dome of Milan, where part of my job involved operating the elevator and taking tourists from floor 0 to floor 1 to visit the terraces of the Duomo. It was what David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” but I am intrigued by the concept of a person spending several hours a day in an elevator within a cathedral.
Evening
356. Endings are never flawless.
357. Do not overstay.
