before you even got round read it you pondered the nature of the word catalogue....there are lost of catalogues in literature, for instance the one of ships in the iliad, there are lists, enumerations....what to make of those, are they not failure as well, they're not properly coherent texts, are they, arbitrary stuff...ready to be discarded, failures, because they do not offer a neat conclusion......?
alexander gottlieb baumgarten writes in meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735) how catalogues have not been regarded as poetic by certain thinkers; however, baumgarten claims that those catalogues (his examples include indeed the catalogue of ships in the iliad, a certain passage in ovid's metamorphoses and a few others) cannot come into being without having studied with effort that which has been listed. and that that whatever is described in great detail is very well poetic, therefore lists and catalogues are poetic.
and one can certainly say that failure is studied in great detail in this zine... with respect to the content it says this on its etsy page:
Including an entry from the curator of the Museum of Failure in Sweden, the poems, anecdotes, pictures and stories cover the full spectrum, from big love rejections to public speaking screw ups and first job fails.this means that it covers a lot of things that can be failure and this manifold can fit into Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism as outlined in the Genealogy of Morals (III.12) where perspectivism suggests that objectivity can only be achieved when as many viewpoints as possible have been taken into consideration:
There is no other seeing but a perspective seeing; there is no other knowing but a perspective 'knowing,' and the more emotions we make speak on a matter, the more eyes, the more different eyes, we place in our face, the more complete will be our 'concept' of this matter, our 'objectivity'.this selection is an approach to the objectivity that can be called failure. taking from the nietzsche quote the concept of objectivity and from baumgarten the poetry of lists we could end up with something called the poetic objectivity of failure........
so the description of failure, it is scrutinized, why did this happen, why have i done this, why. any possible question or angle one could think of. failure goes hand in hand with rumination and scrutinization. there are approaches to frame failure in logical terms (maria leonard), there is poetry, and quite a bit of it, there is the one called vhs to dvd, the contribution by joseph schreiber contemplating the difference between regret and failure and quite a few end up with the insight: ok that was kinda shit, but maybe, indeed, the light came in through the crack, the faint encouragement of hope (it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows - chloe stopa-hunt), to hold on, to try again, this was shit, maybe it can be made less shit. something has been learned. the slowly but growing insight that one has survived. then there are the failures that are hard if not impossible to redeem, and one could say with buechner's woyzeck, what else is there to do but to sit down and cry. then there are are those that describe the failures in relationships, downcast, irretrievable losses, the things not had not lived, the never to be had, and yet on the other hand, how hard it is in turn to get over things...
[...]and maybe it is good nothing can ever be gotten rid of entirely, where else would we be with our lists and poetic objectivity, all of it needs to be in it, otherwise it is not life and world.
Getting rid of things we don't want
is not as easy as it seems:
we twist and turn, hung up on
this word, that phrase,
this house, that life.
(Karen Paterson)
common to all of the contributions is the heartfelt nature of the events, the insight that this was crap, exuding sympathy, literature and human experience as something others can relate to, from and for other people, and it was an explicit intention (as said in the introductory note) to make others feel a little less alone, and a little more ready to take the next chance. this has been achieved wonderfully, in a collection of failure where everyone and everything is included, what could possibly go wrong?