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Slim Confessions
Slim Confessions is an image-text about digital intimacy and visceral material. A work of “autotheory,” the book lays in parallel the history of “slime” as a vehicle for horror and entertainment with personal encounters with quotidian slime in the human and animal worlds. At its center is a story of farm labor: A cold spring spent birthing sheep in northern Iceland interspersed with confessions about the author’s sexual past. In the lineage of Dodie Bellamy’s “Barf Manifesto,” this is a book reveling in repulsion and attraction, a personal investigation of physical touch as approximated by visual media, a slow pour of parallel stories that chronicle a research trip gone awry.
100 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 2021
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December 5, 2024
slime (n.)
"Any soft, ropy, glutinous, or viscous substance" [Century Dictionary], Old English slim "soft mud," from Proto-Germanic *slimaz (source also of Old Norse slim, Old Frisian slym, Dutch slijm "slime, phlegm," German Schleim "slime"), which is probably related to Old English lim "birdlime; sticky substance."
This is from a PIE root *(s)lei- "slimy, sticky, slippery" (source also of Sanskrit linati "sticks, stays, adheres to; slips into, disappears;" Russian slimak "snail;" Old Church Slavonic slina "spittle;" Old Irish sligim "to smear," leinam "I follow," literally "I stick to;" Welsh llyfn "smooth;" Greek leimax "snail," limne "marsh, pool, lake," alinein "to anoint, besmear;" Latin limus "slime, mud, mire," linere "to daub, besmear, rub out, erase").
As an insult to a person from mid-15c. Figuratively, of anything clinging and offensive, 1570s.
Here we're already overwhelmed by contradictions. Is slime sticky or slippery? Does it cling or does it drip? The most surprising to me is the Christ-allusion in "anoint." But central to these many discrepancies is whether there is any agency: is slime mindless and natural, or is it intentional, even predetermined by the gods? Sarah Minor's book weaves her own several experiences of slime together, including sheep farming, sex/porn, youtube ASMR slime creators (fetishists?), horror movies, and "star-shot." This latter item describes the allegedly gelatinous state that meteors arrive to earth as, being melted into lumps of evaporating mush. Those might most clearly summarize this book's fascination with the transience and disappointment that so often accompanies slime and other viscous substances. Mercifully, Minor avoids the angle of slime's categorical liminality/queerness (being not-solid and not-liquid, a third thing, like how fungi are not plants and not animals). I am a little surprised she didn't mention fungi more, as they seem to perfectly accompany this little constellation she's identified, but perhaps they didn't make the cut.
The thing about the other "stars" is that they're each dubious in their own strange way. For example, morbid curiosity incited me to search for the youtube channels and video titles that she described, but I couldn't find any of them (at least on youtube in late 2024). This could mean a few things: A) she might be lying (for example, maybe they were never a trend on youtube, or maybe they were actually on porn sites), B) they might have been deleted (which seems more likely), or C) they may have been so buried by the algorithm that you can't find them without direct links or better keywords. It's disturbing to me that in 5 short years an entire trend could be completely nuked, but such is the transience of the internet.
The sheep farming part felt more trustworthy, more real, though she might have actually been faking that too, for all I know. We see cropped screenshots of goopy slime videos intercut throughout the hybrid text, so they must exist somewhere (whether on youtube or not). We don't see any images of farm animals, but even if we did we'd have no proof they were her sheep. In the introduction (and somewhere near the end) she writes about going to museums and libraries, but none of that features in the narrative of the book (nor in the photography). This thing holds a lot of mystery to me, because it touches on things in such glancing, passing grazes, despite often stating things in a straightforward, forthright manner. "In 19__, x happened to y" is often how she describes events. She narrates with authority, and I'm tempted to believe her. But so much of what she focuses on tends to fall in between acceptable categories of investigation: it dries up in the sun like manna from heaven or squelches in the dark of the bedroom. Either way, it leaves no residue, only a faint smell.
The book avoids linearity like it avoids direct sunlight, despite having a broadly chronological narrative. It doesn't avoid explicitness, either in terms of writing and content, and as a result it has some interesting musings on the link between porn and horror. I guess I had hazily made that connection myself: both are feared by evangelical Christians; both show too much of the body in a flaunting, haunting, surreal way; both were artistically underground until more recent years but have since exploded in popularity; both often end in an explosion of sorts: of blood, of other fluids, faces equally in agony. The connection is one I suppose I knew most intimately from Metallica's Lulu, whose extremity has brought me a surprising amount of comfort.
Likewise the frank depictions of the sheep farm had a curt honesty that undercut the grossness and gore, making them surprisingly digestible. The entire book as a matter of fact didn't get caught in the throat going down, but was smooth, soft. Minor sometimes breaks free from the usual directness in short prose-poetic bursts of gripping description. However, when these happen, I more felt their lack afterwards than their existence in the moment. I can't help but parallel this with the consumption and sexual acts she discusses elsewhere, those strange things prodded on by desire yet always radically empty, even, or rather especially, when consummated.
I really like what Minor is doing here: rather than writing a simple essay about the topic, she wove her own spider's web of allusions, historical events, personal experiences, media consumption, and archival material into an art object all her own, an achievement not marred by cliche or trend or excessive verbosity. The book ends right when it needs to, giving you just enough so you feel full. The old Modernists never knew when to end things, taking maximalism and violent excess as an imperative. Minor, however, has an excellent sense for "proportion" as Aristotle and other ancients would term it. This is what moving beyond modernity really should look like: a comfort with discomfort, a wisdom forged in the shadow of accumulation, a burning off the dross.
"Any soft, ropy, glutinous, or viscous substance" [Century Dictionary], Old English slim "soft mud," from Proto-Germanic *slimaz (source also of Old Norse slim, Old Frisian slym, Dutch slijm "slime, phlegm," German Schleim "slime"), which is probably related to Old English lim "birdlime; sticky substance."
This is from a PIE root *(s)lei- "slimy, sticky, slippery" (source also of Sanskrit linati "sticks, stays, adheres to; slips into, disappears;" Russian slimak "snail;" Old Church Slavonic slina "spittle;" Old Irish sligim "to smear," leinam "I follow," literally "I stick to;" Welsh llyfn "smooth;" Greek leimax "snail," limne "marsh, pool, lake," alinein "to anoint, besmear;" Latin limus "slime, mud, mire," linere "to daub, besmear, rub out, erase").
As an insult to a person from mid-15c. Figuratively, of anything clinging and offensive, 1570s.
Here we're already overwhelmed by contradictions. Is slime sticky or slippery? Does it cling or does it drip? The most surprising to me is the Christ-allusion in "anoint." But central to these many discrepancies is whether there is any agency: is slime mindless and natural, or is it intentional, even predetermined by the gods? Sarah Minor's book weaves her own several experiences of slime together, including sheep farming, sex/porn, youtube ASMR slime creators (fetishists?), horror movies, and "star-shot." This latter item describes the allegedly gelatinous state that meteors arrive to earth as, being melted into lumps of evaporating mush. Those might most clearly summarize this book's fascination with the transience and disappointment that so often accompanies slime and other viscous substances. Mercifully, Minor avoids the angle of slime's categorical liminality/queerness (being not-solid and not-liquid, a third thing, like how fungi are not plants and not animals). I am a little surprised she didn't mention fungi more, as they seem to perfectly accompany this little constellation she's identified, but perhaps they didn't make the cut.
The thing about the other "stars" is that they're each dubious in their own strange way. For example, morbid curiosity incited me to search for the youtube channels and video titles that she described, but I couldn't find any of them (at least on youtube in late 2024). This could mean a few things: A) she might be lying (for example, maybe they were never a trend on youtube, or maybe they were actually on porn sites), B) they might have been deleted (which seems more likely), or C) they may have been so buried by the algorithm that you can't find them without direct links or better keywords. It's disturbing to me that in 5 short years an entire trend could be completely nuked, but such is the transience of the internet.
The sheep farming part felt more trustworthy, more real, though she might have actually been faking that too, for all I know. We see cropped screenshots of goopy slime videos intercut throughout the hybrid text, so they must exist somewhere (whether on youtube or not). We don't see any images of farm animals, but even if we did we'd have no proof they were her sheep. In the introduction (and somewhere near the end) she writes about going to museums and libraries, but none of that features in the narrative of the book (nor in the photography). This thing holds a lot of mystery to me, because it touches on things in such glancing, passing grazes, despite often stating things in a straightforward, forthright manner. "In 19__, x happened to y" is often how she describes events. She narrates with authority, and I'm tempted to believe her. But so much of what she focuses on tends to fall in between acceptable categories of investigation: it dries up in the sun like manna from heaven or squelches in the dark of the bedroom. Either way, it leaves no residue, only a faint smell.
The book avoids linearity like it avoids direct sunlight, despite having a broadly chronological narrative. It doesn't avoid explicitness, either in terms of writing and content, and as a result it has some interesting musings on the link between porn and horror. I guess I had hazily made that connection myself: both are feared by evangelical Christians; both show too much of the body in a flaunting, haunting, surreal way; both were artistically underground until more recent years but have since exploded in popularity; both often end in an explosion of sorts: of blood, of other fluids, faces equally in agony. The connection is one I suppose I knew most intimately from Metallica's Lulu, whose extremity has brought me a surprising amount of comfort.
Likewise the frank depictions of the sheep farm had a curt honesty that undercut the grossness and gore, making them surprisingly digestible. The entire book as a matter of fact didn't get caught in the throat going down, but was smooth, soft. Minor sometimes breaks free from the usual directness in short prose-poetic bursts of gripping description. However, when these happen, I more felt their lack afterwards than their existence in the moment. I can't help but parallel this with the consumption and sexual acts she discusses elsewhere, those strange things prodded on by desire yet always radically empty, even, or rather especially, when consummated.
I really like what Minor is doing here: rather than writing a simple essay about the topic, she wove her own spider's web of allusions, historical events, personal experiences, media consumption, and archival material into an art object all her own, an achievement not marred by cliche or trend or excessive verbosity. The book ends right when it needs to, giving you just enough so you feel full. The old Modernists never knew when to end things, taking maximalism and violent excess as an imperative. Minor, however, has an excellent sense for "proportion" as Aristotle and other ancients would term it. This is what moving beyond modernity really should look like: a comfort with discomfort, a wisdom forged in the shadow of accumulation, a burning off the dross.
December 26, 2025
A Lori Beth Denberg reference! I've never really considered slime, other than that Millennials are the slim generation, but now I'll never think of it the same way.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews