I happened upon Stewart Sinclair’s work by chance. Seeing a crowd gather in front of KGB Bar, a dive and performance space in New York’s East Village, I decided to follow it up a set of stairs. At the very top, I found myself at a book release reminiscent of a street show. Sinclair opened the event, reciting poetry while juggling swords over the prone body of a volunteer from the crowd.
The awe and wonder in the faces of the audience that evening expressed what the semipro juggler and author would describe to me in conversation — and in his book Juggling — as a through line of global history. Juggling, taught and performed by a large swath of people across the world — connecting Tongan women in Polynesia to Russian circus performers to Southern Californians like Sinclair himself — almost universally inspires joy, priming audiences for new experiences.
The use of juggling to arrest and influence spectators stretches back further than two millennia, and jugglers have adapted many forms of object manipulation, such as throwing swords or contact juggling (where objects appear to float and slide across the body), to gain audiences as court jesters, Soviet propagandists, and, in the extreme case of ancient Chinese juggler Yiliao of Shinan, military battleground victors. In this way, the practice mirrors art and literature in its ability to package meaning through various devices and modes of presentation, albeit with significantly lower stakes these days.
Juggling once depended on local cottage industries made up of small-time producers — those with “sawdust in their veins,” as Sinclair called them — and the objects they’d use, at least professionally, were difficult to find without connections to other jugglers. Although nearly any object that can be tossed can be juggled, what one has at their disposal often sets parameters for the limits of the craft. Juggling is hard — even harder when considering the strength and manual dexterity it takes to toss solid wooden bowling pins or other objects not built for such a purpose.
But this would all change as the hobby expanded beyond the circus and semipro performers, due in part to a “technological shift”: a new era of lighter and cheaper materials, as well as a global juggling community that became connected through the internet. One no longer needs the brute strength of a hardened circus performer, or the guidance of one, to learn how to throw pins.
This shift constitutes a democratizing force, in Sinclair’s estimation, with implications spreading beyond the practice but, in this case, also through it. Access has created not only the opportunity for larger audiences and a proliferation of styles but also, perhaps, atomization. The advent of tech may make up for material lack through access to cheap goods, and analogues of community through screens bring with them at least something resembling nearness, but the realities of contemporary alienation, that feeling of being an “outsider,” persist. For jugglers, jesters, and authors alike, even if you’re in the center of the crowd, you still often exist outside of it.
For Sinclair, whose upcoming book Space Rover considers the potential and limits of mankind vis-à-vis technology, this democratizing force doesn’t have its roots solely in technological piety. At his events, much like those he hosted for the tour of Juggling, he borrows from the street performer’s repertoire of rallying crowds, utilizing what he calls the “Whitmanian” possibilities of gathering strangers across vast differences. A position that may seem as likely to fall apart as a juggler’s rhythm but one that thousands of buskers, writers, and artists bet on every day.
I met Stewart Sinclair for this interview at a New York City jugglers’ meetup in Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, where, under the gaze of skyscrapers and billboards, we talked about technology, democracy, and outsiderness while plastic bowling pins and tiny beanbags flew overhead.
— Kevin Gonzalez for Guernica
Guernica: I think a good place to start is a topic that I’ve seen come up across a few of your essays and that seems to be front of mind for you — namely, who gets to be an artist, and are there enough working-class people in the arts?
Stewart Lawrence Sinclair: I think that question is getting at whether there are enough working-class people who work as professional artists. Because if you want to know if there are working-class people in the arts, there are plenty who make art, who write. But do they have access to the ability to be published? And when their work is out there, is it respected, or is it given this sort of tokenized folk art treatment — that what this person made is “special” because we think they’re uneducated or whatever? That’s one way to look at this. The other obvious answer is that, no, there aren’t. And to be honest, I feel so much more like an outsider to other writers. It feels like, Here is this world that’s always been kind of blocked off . . .
Guernica: Even though you’ve got one book out and another on the way. You still feel like you’re an outsider?
Sinclair: I don’t feel like it will ever go away.
Guernica: With that feeling looming, does it stop being fun?
Sinclair: No! It’s so fun. But the fun is about the hustle and everything else combined.
Guernica: Well, on the topic of hustling, in Juggling you wrote about busking and hustling as a street performer. Is there an element of being a hustler as a writer? A bit of showmanship?
Sinclair: They’re both hustles, and especially now. Except for a rarefied few, there isn’t a big apparatus to get a book out into the world, especially an academic book. Duke has done a lot for this; they’ve been very supportive, but you know, This is a $3,500 advance and best of luck. I say it all to say that I started doing what I should’ve been doing all along, which is thinking of being an author as being a hustler.
Guernica: In regard to the “hustler”: I feel like in America they’re simultaneously venerated and looked down upon. They’re a sort of ideal, but they can also, possibly, be scumbags. You’ve talked about the jester versus the buffoon in your work, that some people are bestowed with all the rights and prestige and others are seen as less-than, though what they’re doing is drawn from the same set of skills.
Sinclair: I think there are certain people whom we’re willing to bestow the title of artist on and all these other people that we are not. That can be the difference between someone who wrote an incomprehensible novel that ends up on The New York Review of Books’ most-notable list versus the fanfiction that, no matter how many people love it, is never going to be venerated. Some artists are going to make an impact, but there are also many buffoons who don’t get any recognition who are making impacts as well.
Guernica: Part of the reason I reached out to you is that at your book release, which I had stumbled into off the street, there was a strange crowd of people from all walks of life and, if I remember correctly, a guy in clown shoes.
Sinclair: Well, regarding that, there’s this obligation that I feel I have to my friends, to my family, and to literature to make this not suck. In my events, I’ve combined juggling and reading — and not just because readings aren’t the most exciting things in the world but because it influences both, and it informs the stories, and it becomes a show. It’s a way to bring more people into the fold. But, to be fair, I’d also like to mention that you shouldn’t expect authors to have to be entertainers. There’s a reason they became authors. But I feel there’s a special privilege in the position that I’m in. That I can bring joy into these spaces, that they can become democratic spaces in the Whitmanian sense of the word — where everyone is welcome and it’s not always what you’d expect. We can converge, if only in these weird events, to make them become more dynamic and to make them more fun than they otherwise would be if they were self-selecting or exclusionary. That’s what a street show is too.
Guernica: You’ve written that, as an author, you’ve felt obliged to wear many hats: a general practitioner, like the juggler of the past, the entertainer who, historically, had a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Conversely, the trend in juggling, as you described it in your book, seems to be moving toward specialization and technicality. I’m thinking about notation systems and routines like Moschen’s “Triangle” or some people’s push for [juggling] to be an Olympic sport. Do you see this as an ideological shift?
Sinclair: Well, there’s a couple things about that, but I would describe everything that has happened in juggling in recent history as a technological shift. Juggling used to be this rarified craft that you learned in the circus. You were born into the sawdust. You did it from the moment you were three years old to the moment that you died, and you passed that on to the next generation. It’s really in the 1980s that you start getting a broader sense of juggling as a popular hobby. And I think that’s happened to a lot of crafts.
This is a Dubé, a type of juggling club. It’s made by a guy named Brian Dubé and is basically a handmade product. You have a plastic bulb here [gestures to the wide end of the pin], and here [on the handle] you can feel this papery, vinyl-y type of thing. This is a super classic, and I love it, and it’s my favorite kind of club. And this is a PX3 juggling club. What’s happened here is similar to what’s happened with surfboards, where you used to only be able to buy custom-shaped boards — hand planed and expensive — but now they make them on giant machines. The PX3 is an excellent machine-made club. People love them, and this technological advance has done a lot to democratize juggling and bring more people in. Just like YouTube, siteswap notations [that represent juggling patterns], and all of these things that make it easier to communicate with each other, have allowed a lot more people to learn. Everything is accelerating at the pace that people can learn it. If you go on Instagram and start following a lot of jugglers, you’re going to see this world of highly technical people — like, the big thing now is to flash nine clubs, which is fucking mind-blowing!
Guernica: The limit used to be, like, ten?
Sinclair: Yeah. Mainly because clubs back then were made of solid wood.
Guernica: If you fucked up, it was going to hurt a little more.
Sinclair: And they were bulky. Just to keep five clubs in the air takes some muscle to maintain. My mind is always blown, because I learned to juggle pre-YouTube. I would get VHS tapes like “Caught Clean” or Jay Gilligan, and I would watch those repeatedly and practice what I saw there, but you only had the one tape.
Guernica: Did people used to have different styles because it used to just be you, your friends, and a videotape? Did you have to create your own little world and work with what was available to you?
Sinclair: I think there was a time when I was inclined to think that way, but people are doing more and cooler things because they’re iterating off each other. Once you move juggling out of the circus and into the public, styles bloom, and every culture gets to inflect itself onto it. It’s not that juggling wasn’t always everywhere — it always was — but it’s a slightly different expression of that now. We call it juggling now, but in different places, like the Tongan playing hiko — that’s a throwing game that every girl learned how to play — they wouldn’t have called it juggling. All these disparate, different object manipulations are now encapsulated in this word, and they are morphing and evolving within each other. When you open up a space, you see new things happen to it, new relations happening to it.
Guernica: So these sorts of shifts, these technological ones, are always positive?
Sinclair: I’ve always thought that technology is neutral. It’s everything from stones rubbing against each other to pencils to space rovers. Anything that augments our interaction with the environment beyond our body is a technology, and I think if we’re looking at it in that sense, we can’t see it as a negative, or even as a cause of our demise. New technologies may have been a mechanism that allowed for our demise, but if it wasn’t nuclear war or climate change, does it make a difference what it was, when it was really just our capacity to consume ourselves?
Guernica: But don’t you think we start forming ourselves to — like everything is oriented toward — these possibilities? Of disaster, of compulsive “progress”?
Sinclair: The thrill of advancing your craft isn’t going to go anywhere and, by the way, isn’t the only way to experience or love it. There are people here who will be juggling three clubs for the rest of their lives, and they’re never going to regret doing that. Frankly, it’s painful for me to juggle, but I’m going to do it because I love it. And we’re going to be in awe of the people who can do it on this level beyond us, just like I’m in awe of writers who do fantastic, complex, beautiful, amazing things that I would never think to do or know how to do. I think at the end of the day, when it comes to writing, I think it’s about a good story, and when it comes to juggling, it’s about a good performance. The spectrum is all allowed to exist and be there.
Guernica: We’re trying to bring everyone under the big circus tent.
Sinclair: Yeah, exactly. And to the point of the big circus tent, there’s the flying trapeze, and there’s the clown, and you’re entertained by the entire gambit. I was juggling this morning for two-year-olds, and they were sitting there with eyes wide open, minds blown. And these are kids who are growing up with access to everything, including all of New York, right? And I get it; they’re two, right? But there is, I think, in the same way that I get joy in watching a squirrel eat a nut, there’s levels of joy that we can get from everything.
Guernica: From the most elemental and basic things.
Sinclair: Yeah! Like, what kid isn’t going to make a dirt clod and throw it at another kid? Like, I mean, you can call that a metaphor for war . . . but you can also just say that we are all primed to find the joy around us.
