NOTES ON DEVILS by Jacob Dwyer
with a reading at 8.30 pm
Thursday March 23, 8pmNotes on Devils is a transcription of the audio drama The Devil Museum (Jacob Dwyer, 2021) — a script— which, with the benefit of time, the author has re-read, reconsidered, and annotated.
In The Devil Museum, we listen to the audio diary of a man tasked with photographing all 3,000 devil sculptures in a nearby museum. As the project begins to fail and the protagonist spends more time alone in their wooden cabin, the narrative moves subtly into subjects such as boredom, masculinity, and isolation. They cannot start their project because they’ve lent their entire working budget to a character named Martin, who’s constantly promising yet failing to pay him back. In Notes on Devils, we learn how Martin is a construct, an amalgamation of Jacob’s real-life male friends and acquaintances who have awkwardly found themselves in adulthood. Through his annotations, Dwyer elaborates on these influences, thinking through them to eventually imagine new scenes in the piece. Scenes in which these real-life relationships and the forms of masculinity at play within them can also be reimagined.
The book is accompanied by an online archive of Jacob’s original, unedited field recordings, made at the start of 2018 in Lithuania.
For the launch of Notes on Devils, he has developed a performative reading in which he moves between the radio play, his written reflections on it, and a selection of unedited field recordings.
Notes on Devils is published by Building Fictions.
