Distinctively Dionysian

Some frequencies never announce themselves, yet bend the air around everything they touch… currents without station, without signal, only a saturation of presence. The Hum, as it’s named in the new issue, is not metaphor, not mood, nor is it theory draped in allure. It is the low, persistent resonance that precedes language, slips beneath thought, et threads itself through lives that will not be explained.

This issue is an immersion in that frequency: subterranean, sensuous, souverain. It does not illustrate; it arrives as traces—traces of life inhabited rather than performed. It does not belong to discourse but to résonance. The atmosphere here is not argued; it is lived… comme un parfum que l’on ne peut pas nommer.

This last issue of summer moves through Clarice Lispector et Rimbaud, drifts into Agamben and Blanchot, brushes against Marguerite Duras, Han Shan, and Diogenes, lingers with Michel Serres et Salomo Friedlaender, and slips at last through Genet et Sarrazin… into Taoist fragments, fugitive gestes, refusals, et le murmure souverain beneath any articulation. These are not portraits but passages. Not homage, but movement — composed from within the hum itself, always returning to my dérive.

The Hum is available now. The first issue of Fall ’25, the upcoming Lore et Disorder begins mailing Oct.1

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Since the last issue, The Radiant Void… traveling, playing, writing.

Outside the stale, stuttering timeline are places that break the seal, where life moves in stranger, richer currents. Like Poland, Romania is one of them: étrangement ensorcelée, where language thickens and atmosphere overtakes architecture. Since I already shared on Poland: Bine ați venit în Sibiu, România. In Sibiu, earth-rich markets et unadorned meals give way to narrow streets where time thinned et afternoons folded into nights under sun-drenched façades, with the faint ghost of Dada flickering through alleyways. Not far from Cluj-Napoca, just a two-hour journey into the land’s unsettled edge, lies Hoia Forest, which lingers in mémoire. Its trees stand wiley like unfinished formes, twisting mid-step in a danse no one was meant to see. The air is older than the city of course, et is threaded with the wildest tales of vanishings, wandering lights, et noises without origin.

Like much of Eastern Europe, Romania is not mystery for spectacle’s sake, but a rare concentration of présence: dense, untranslatable, et entirely itself. The wild Carpathians still whisper with lore et disorder. Leaving the forest, the road bends west across open fields et low hills, the horizon widening until it spills into the squares of Timișoara, where Austro-Hungarian façades in colors too soft to be accidental still hold the faintest traces of revolt. Cafés dérivent into wide squares with Romanian, Hungarian, et German folding together. Even in its most modern form, the city does still carry a restless undertow… something akin to the margins back home, something that refuses to be civilisé.

Somewhere between those trees et the underlit caverns, The Hum began to write itself. And now it awaits you. Travel holds me in ‘the hum’ like nothing else… not as escape, not as desertion, but as a shifting of the ground beneath my feet, loosening what clings.

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Speaking of desertion… alongside The Hum runs another thread: Dancing in the Backwoods, a five-book constellation.

A series, yes, but more a movement, just beyond the visible edges of Backwoods Journal, orbiting the same starless terrain. I had not picked up Backwoods, Zerzan’s Against Civilization, various writings of cher Bellamy, nor Michel Serres in some time. With all the love et thanks to cher Vincent, Seymour — merci! — mon doux Jae, et le brillant et tant manqué Bellamy, I skipped down that windy road once again. Returning to those reads reminded me of what had always struck me so clearly: that my perspective breathes in such a different atmosphere altogether… one that was worth writing down. It is a divergence long-formed, yet one that engages aspects of anti-civ, ‘green anarchisme’, and related terrains from an angle I have never encountered elsewhere (though always wished to).

So I wrote my cosmology down.

Dancing in the Backwoods is neither critique nor variation, but breathing where thought has thinned the air. Without mythic innocence, nostalgia, or allegiance, it stands in full flourish at the margins of my favorites. These books are reverberations, not arguments; gestes, not manifestos. A way of living long inhabited, written in my own weather… tout parfum et rupture. To set it down, at long last, is a pleasure. I believe the Dionysian and Madame Simone readers will savor it.

A separate update will follow with more on the series Dancing in the Backwoods, including ordering links and the new website.

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For this moment, The Hum, dernier souffle of summer, begins mailing today. Copies are ready to find their way. I was hoping to link you to the new Bacchus site, but Apio-cats MyOwn issues are still be listed in the bookshop section, along with other treats like Renzo Novatore -translations that have never been published, now in a beautiful hardcover book. (The site is so very close to complete!) For now, do as you do, et send for Dionyisan here.

Dancing in the Backwoods’ Books I–III (The Feral Masquerade, The Soil Remains Intoxicated, et Nothing Is Innocent) are available for pre-order, shipping begins September 1. Books IV–V (Wild Ethics of Maternal Presence et The Disloyal Animal) — also available for pre-order with  shipping beginning Sept.15th

The Next issue of Distinctively Dionysian, Lore & Disorder, begins mailing October 1.

Merci pour votre patience, mes chéris. I hope you are all well.
—XO
·✦· Fíona