Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Girl Trouble

Feminist Anecdotes from Some Guy
a story about thinking about feminism one day a while ago
by Lonely Christopher

[Editor’s Note: This essay was unearthed from the blog’s unpublished archive, so is a little less than timely, but perhaps thematically pertinent…]

I couldn’t get any of my girlfriends to come with me to the feminism panel; I went alone to the feminism panel. Today I lost the sheet with all the info on it in my room. I looked but only found overdue electricity bills. The panel was moderated, I remember, by the curator of the feminist wing at the Brooklyn Museum. Her name is Catherine Morris and the full name of the feminist wing at the Brooklyn Museum is the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I have seen, I think, everything that has come through the center since it opened. I reacted impatiently to most of the material currently up in the video art exhibit [Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video ran from 1 May 09 to 10 January 10 --- Ed.] . I use being a disinterested male as an excuse to avoid intellectualizing the very idea of the feminist center, its implications and influences. My default opinion is, half-seriously, that the Brooklyn Museum is desperate to be relevant and opening a major feminist wing is a sort of cynical and trendy move. Also, I think it’s a positive idea. The space dedicated to the feminist wing would have otherwise been dedicated to a bunch of white guys, which is the group that makes most of our art. The taxonomical straightjacket implicit in the feminist wing designation must be problematic on some level, and all that “now now now” video art further argues the sardonic intentions of a feminist art ghetto --- but stop squinting, take off the snide white male glasses, and the project looks liberatory again.

There were, I remember, probably seven women on the feminism panel; the room, which was in a Chelsea gallery (P.P.O.W.), was packed. Some of the audience drank all the vodka in a few minutes and left presently. The crowd remained standing room. I feel very delicate around feminism because I am a privileged member of the patriarchy, sort of. Anyway, I’m not female. I don’t really care to list the names of the individual panelists, because it doesn’t suit my brief purposes here, but am scared you’ll think I’m trying to suppress the identity and/or agency of each by forcing upon them anonymity. Okay, the only superlative panelist was Dotty Attie, there. Her art was featured prominently. Two of the panelists were older (the other, Martha Wilson, there) and the rest were much younger. Most of the panelists were artists except for one art historian. Dotty Attie and Martha Wilson talked intelligently, for example, about the different groups of artists and political activists that identified as feminist in, I guess, the 70’s. I think, unless misremembering, Martha Wilson was the first to say post-feminism is a bullshit concept. I think she blamed it on the patriarchy in half-jest. There wasn’t too much talk about the canonized periods of feminism, the waves, even though this progression of eras (each with a broadly definable character) provides the logic for the invention of post-feminism as a historical marker. Neither older panelist cared to define feminism in a totalized way, but the ambiguity didn’t seem to bother them artistically or intellectually, and they knew for certain feminism, in its many shapes, was not today “post” itself. The younger panelists, who I finally decided to ignore, seemed less prepared to be there. One woman didn’t know the name of the panel and another had never heard the term post-feminism before she was invited to the panel. I can’t provide a comprehensive review of the panel because I walked away out of frustration and boredom. I wandered into the other room where the vodka used to be.

I read an article in the New Yorker about feminism on the subway on my way to this panel. I guess I lost that issue somewhere on the street later, it’s not in my bag, but it was one of those New Yorker articles that feels as if it could almost fit in Time magazine. Ariel Levy asks “Why is feminism still so divisive?” which feels at this point like a rhetorical question, or at least not answerable. I guess my answer would be “Because it’s feminism.” Fortunately nobody asks me. Anyway, Levy makes some points about how much feminism changed the paradigm that today won’t acknowledge it, glosses over a whole lot, and ends on lamenting how we never worked anything out about affordable child care. She establishes identity and ideology as opposing engines behind different feminisms. Her worst-case scenario is “feminism without feminists,” which is a “simple insistence on representation.” At the end of the panel, when I wandered back to the audience, the crowd was sort of taking over the Q & A session and mostly sounding like overexcited undergrads in a seminar. They were chiming in rather than querying the panel (never a good choice). One audience member stood up and claimed that feminism isn’t over until the media stops perpetuating unreasonable standards of beauty. I think she was a photographer and she spoke of resisting touching up her portraits because she wanted to represent the “reality” of her subject’s appearance, while feeling a simultaneous urge to alter the image in the interest of formal aesthetics. The commercial manipulation of social values cannot be scoffed away because it is indeed an invidious force working through images. However, the only unproblematic part of her statement was the implication that feminism will never be over. It’s not an endless war because it’s not a war and some endless concepts are good. Now, the politics of aesthetics is a monolithic subject. I thought this chimer-in sounded rather daft, though, as if she wanted to do what was correct more than she had a responsibility to create artwork. Now, morality and art is something I’ll also avoid out of largeness. Anyway, photography is as subjective as anything else: it doesn’t reveal empirical truths any more or less than painting. Truth is a foundation of sand; there I said it.

Earlier in the day I ran into a prof I briefly studied feminism under. I told her about the panel, which was titled “Post-Feminism: Do We Need to Go There?” She guffawed and said, “I thought we already went there and came back.” We talked about the remaining importance of a praxis-based feminist ideology. I know nothing about that side of it --- I keep on theory’s turf out of habit and timidity. Anyway, the male relationship to feminism is a prickly subject. There were about five males there for the panel. One of them had his hand raised to speak at the end and somebody called out from the back that we should hear from the man. He was more tactless and awkward than I feared when he opened his mouth. He said something along the lines of feminism is complicated and we shouldn’t start thinking about post-feminism because “feminism hasn’t fully blossomed yet.” He really said that. At least he didn’t stay quiet because he was nervous about being a jerk, but consequently he was a much larger jerk. Poor guy. After the panel let out I lingered in the other room, next to a male friend, and a random girl came up to us and asked what, as male feminists, we thought about the event. I said I don’t understand the following conflict: is a female implicitly a feminist? Definitional arguments seem to charge feminism more than any other comparable value system (even queer studies, which takes ambiguity in stride). I am not troubled by whether I really am or am not a postmodernist just because I live in late capitalism. Feminism should operate less as a club (I am a feminist, biracial performance artist) and more as a discourse (how do we negotiate as sociopolitical agents ideologically practicing feminism?). So saith the white male blog editor.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Proust/Fama

The Corresponding Society is pleased to present another entry in our ongoing Proust Questionnaire project. This week, poet and editor Ben Fama reveals his deepest secrets.

An Introduction to Ben Fama

Ben Fama's work has appeared in GlitterPony, Gigantic Sequins and Pank! magazine, among others. He is the author of the chapbook Sun Come and the founder of the SUPERMACHINE reading series and poetry journal. Please enter his world >-----------> SUPERMACHINE!

Ben Fama Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Resilience. I aspire, I aspire!

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Disinterested Philosopher-King, but thats only if he is giving me advice. If he is my brother I want him to be younger. If he is my father I want him to be rich.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Witchy, imaginative. Oh, and knowing how to makeout while driving.

Your chief characteristic.
Fiery

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
They are all heroic.

Your main fault.
Immaturity.

Your favorite occupation.
Laying in the wheat and staring at clouds.

Your idea of happiness.
A good tan.

Your idea of misery.
Lack of love.

If not yourself, who would you be?
...?

Where would you like to live?
A country where certain things that I like would come true by magic.

Your favorite prose authors.
Musil, Dalton, Gossip Girl.

Your favorite poets.
Salamun, Minnis, Turovskaya.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
I saw a few episodes of The United States of Tara. The husband in the series was the most negative-capable person I've ever encountered. I thought he was the model person I aspire to me.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
...Holden Caulfield's little sister seems totally game for anything.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Helen Frankenthaler

Your heroes in “real life.”
Angela Moore.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
My history teacher from 8th grade. She was a total asshole. I had to write a report on New Mexico (are you kidding me?) and it sucked really bad and she chastised me by pointing at my t-shirt and saying “If you had to write about Kurt Cobain I bet you'd do a good job.” Well now I work for a publishing company that just published a punk memoir that is partly about Kurt Cobain. Fuck You Ms. McCafferey and Fuck You new mexico.

Your favorite names.
Names with three syllables. They are so easy to riff on!

What do you hate the most?
BORING PEOPLE.

What military event do you admire the most?
This current lifelong event when I never enlist!

What reform do you admire the most?
Health care for full-time farmers in Massachussetts! LOVE IT!

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Singing. I wish I had that talent.

How do you wish to die?
Touching skin (or a car crash)

What is your present state of mind?
Anticipating the best Spring of my life!

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Grammatical errors, I dont give a fuck about those. Oversleeping, it makes me look good!

Your favorite motto.
Imagination is funny it makes a cloudy day sunny

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Sweet Tomb

Sex and Candy
Trinie Dalton’s New Skewed Bedtime Tale
by Lonely Christopher

Like her previous book Wide Eyed, the cover art of Trinie Dalton’s new novella inspires the reaction “I must read this thing.” Sweet Tomb is decorated by illustrations, by Matt Greene, of sexy witches amongst gingerbread houses. You either love Dalton’s precious obsession with fantasy or you don’t. It is recommended that, despite possible prejudices, you should align with the former position (at least taste it). The author’s continual magic act is that her thematic interests never lapse into tacky or saccharine territory. The fairytale universe of Sweet Tomb also avoids the postmodern posturing of, say, certain spinners of fable retellings with academic/feminist/whatever-pretentious bents (you know the authors). Minus the winkingly critical edge of those guys, Dalton’s story is more like a Nickelodeon show for adults. It is published by Madras Press, a just-established venture that issues short volumes of new fiction and donates all proceeds to charitable organizations of the authors’ choosing; Sweet Tomb benefits the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers & Native Plants. This is a tale of a witch named Candy who grew up in a gingerbread house at the foot of a pink volcano. This is not to be taken ironically or absurdly because it’s, straight-up, a grown-up fairytale (and is as fun and touching as one generous enough to admit it might imagine). Sweet Tomb skillfully repeats how Wide Eyed dodges the smug-shruggy hipster flimsiness lesser authors than Dalton oft succumb to especially when dealing with the thematically fanciful (the secret is earnestness, which hipster writers lack like a birth defect).

More surprisingly is that this book excludes the mechanism that’s probably her previous collection’s brightest virtue: the way that the macabre lurks, constant, under every rainbow bedspread ruffle of the prose. Sweet Tomb does contain a few creepily insidious set pieces that might confuse and upset any child who tried it out as a bedtime story, but this tale is predominantly anchored in the sweet with only sometimes tombish tinges. Even the gross-out grimness is cartoonish. Since the balance of dread and joy absolutely made Wide Eyed, it was hard to imagine success without it, at the outset anyway. Such choices, with other decisions of craft, are proved valid and made a problem in different ways. This new book is probably slightly less cohesive, overall, when compared to her previous effort (although what does that claim really mean?); Sweet Tomb definitely shows structural flaws, when totally considered, qua narrative, feeling slightly unfinished, loose ends waving like colored yarn off the flirtingly unshapely arc, but in terms of style all must nevertheless/inevitably rejoice at Dalton’s precocious victory and succumb to the sugary pleasure of her world (warts and all).

Candy has mom issues and boy problems: not typical witch stuff. She worries over her witch status as if afflicted pathologically (indeed, she curses her mother for cursing her in passing along genetically her witchy condition). Anyway, her mom’s dead, being one of the first witches to go from old age (usually it was being burned or drowned), but Candy still resents the life she was born into. Her mom told her, “Be a good witch, Candy.” She responded, “What should I do with my life?” Her mom instructed, “Make candy, practice magic, and do something great every day.” Of course, Candy’s mother also ate her playmates (as witches are wont to) --- a grim reality she only detects in retrospect --- which distracts Candy from appreciating the witching life about as much as does her unfortunate habit of dating “unsavory men.”

Romantically, she’s in rough shape. She begins menaced early by a real epic creep (his description is best left to be discovered: a very fine and unsettlingly comic caricature of evil) who apparently makes her his unwitting child bride, a stalker situation that requires some morbid spell activity to counter, and later she does hardly better with an on-again-off-again relationship with a douchey vampire named Chad. Sometimes Chad can be a charmer, and writes cute notes sentimentally recalling their sexy days spent in the woods: “Makeout Forest was the best place for making out. It had big, green oak trees, lots of benches, and soft, dry places to lie down, and streams running through it, making it more private. These were the Privacy Streams.” But Chad is an enabler of Candy’s waywardness. They accidently burn Makeout Forest down, of course, fooling around with their supernatural powers. Also, Chad really really likes sucking Candy’s blood, which puts her at risk of being his undead slave bride (we’ve all seen it). Candy describes her boyfriend’s “no means yes” date-rape approach to sucking blood from her neck: “‘Stop,’ I said, nudging him. I didn’t push because his fangs would rip me if incorrectly withdrawn. He extruded his teeth slowly, to cauterize the spots. It didn’t work, so two streams of blood ran down my shoulder. I touched my fingers to them.” She’s pissed and insists, “Take me home.” Her vampire boyfriend responds with seductive insensitivity: “‘Calm down,’ Chad said. ‘Or you’ll lose more.’ He laid me down, rolling a sweater up under my head. The blood pool next to me looked like an oil slick.” Eventually, Candy fights back with magical girl power, and turns Chad into a cat. And then into a chocolate cat.

Strangely, although Candy feels fated to die of a sugar rush, she secretly develops vegetarian sympathies. She shirks on candy making and cultivates a garden. The sad but inevitable occurs as she continues to be menaced by a needy and selfish male: viz. an apparition of Pinocchio, appearing near-death in her garden having cut off his nose leaving a bloody gash. Yeah, so, vaguely related but abrupt, that’s one of the parts that kind of juts out of the baggy narrative shape. Before long, this aside is abandoned as an undigested anecdote, and the adventure swerves off toward a new situation. The major plus of Sweet Tomb is that our heroine Candy, always with us (becoming the chapters’ most reliable aspect), is bloomy (or like a fat, colorful flower bud, whatever) and drawn in saturated definition: she’s a girl we get used to and like.

Yet the story considered as a sum of its parts (basically a novella of six interconnected tales/chapters) reads as emaciated enough to have to remark upon; sometimes it feels like an outline for a longer, more comprehensive novel. Although the final narrative turn, which introduces a wandering Candy to the feminine but skeletal figure of Death (who becomes a friend and helps Candy dress for a party thrown on some mystical plane by Evil, who takes the form of Olivia Newton John, naturally), reads delightfully and is real fun, this skit-like disruption of pre-established themes (and introduction of new elements/characters/levels of consciousness) is somewhat awkwardly incompatible with the flow-in-progress; well, it feels a tad bathetic --- and leaves the reader happy but craving more unity, consistency, and depth. Mind, it would be worthless to attempt such picky criticism unless Sweet Tomb was an utterly fantastic read, which it is. Importantly: the heart of the matter is this thing has huge heart. That’s what does it; that’s why it’s so enjoyable, hilarious, and touching; and that is why the joyful dark playfulness that characterizes Dalton’s work draws lacey resonance in unlikely but welcome strokes of crayon and chalk. The compact book is a little gift that reasserts Trinie Dalton, with her unique quirks and craft-sense, as one of the most exciting emerging writers of contemporary fiction. Madras Press, which operates on a worthy model and should be monitored/supported by anyone interested in the best of small press activity today, couldn’t have found a nicer match for its format than this imperfect and delicious Sweet Tomb.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Proust/Levitsky

Many thanks to everyone who attended the reading last week at P.P.O.W. Gallery. For those of you who missed it, here’s some pictorial evidence (care of The Hostess Project). And, below, please find some enlightening answers (to our new and ongoing Proust Questionnaire project) provided by featured reader, and all around wonderful writer, Rachel Levitsky.

An Introduction to Rachel Levitsky

Rachel Levitsky’s fist full length volume, Under the Sun, was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky also writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Levitsky’s work has been published in magazines such as Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and in the anthology, 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. She founded Belladonna--an event and publication series for avant-garde poetics in August 1999. A past fellow of The McDowell Colony and Lower Manhattan Community Council, she teaches at Pratt Institute and lives steps away from The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Her latest book, Neighbor, was recently released by Ugly Duckling Presse. (Source.)


Rachel Levitsky Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Sloth

Your favorite qualities in a man.
What is a man?

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Repeat.

Your chief characteristic.
Disobedience.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Brains.

Your main fault.
Sloth.

Your favorite occupation.
Writing.

Your idea of happiness.
Sexual love.

Your idea of misery.
The loss of political discourse.

If not yourself, who would you be?
I can’t recall her name.

Where would you like to live?
In my apartment.

Your favorite prose authors.
Kafka, Renee Gladman, Gail Scott and many others. Proust too, though it seems foolish here. And Musil and Walser and James Baldwin too.

Your favorite poets.
Marcella Durand, Carla Harryman, and Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. I like Joan Retallack too and Akilah Oliver, and now I am reading David Wollach who is good.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Character: Jenny Petherbridge in Nightwood

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
The doctor in Nightwood

Your favorite painters and composers.
Which era. Of a certain one I like Edward Hopper and Maurice Ravel.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Eileen Myles, Nicolas Veroli

What characters in history do you most dislike?
They are all the same character. Dick Cheney could act as a representative.

Your favorite names.
Ruby is the only one I can recall.

What do you hate the most?
Guile.

What military event do you admire the most?
M.A.S.H.

What reform do you admire the most?
I prefer revolution.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Voice.

How do you wish to die?
Old.

What is your present state of mind?
Foggy.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Sloth.

Your favorite motto.
I am me because my little dog knows me.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Scotch Slam

An announcement via Broooklyn the Borough:

The Scotch Slam 2010 at the Bowery Poetry Club is meant for drunken intellectual types, but anybody can come! Bob Holman and Robert Fitterman host this crew of vagabonds and have matched each writer with a single-malt beverage. You can pick your favorite match at the end, but by that point it might be a tall order. Featured authors include Kriten Prevallet, Steven Zultanski and Matvei Yankelevich. Standout Lonely Christopher of The Corresponding Society is an adventurer of queer politics and cliché. Christopher’s editions of “Gay Plays”, “Satan”, and “Wow Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” can all be found at Vanderbilt Avenue’s own Unnameable Books if you're looking for a head start. The drinks will be neat, the authors will be drunk, and so will you! Attend in person at 308 Bowery or catch it live online. Get into it and sit down for a warming bevy and some words in the air.

Sun 10 Jan at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery). $20 to drink $5 to listen sober.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Talent Circus

The Corresponding Society and The Hostess Project present a Reading at P.P.O.W. Gallery!

The Corresponding Society gleefully presents a convergence facilitated by the Hostess Project, a special concern, located within Chelsea’s P.P.O.W. Gallery, that’s poised as an energetic point of organization for new poetry, literature, art, and music. This “thing,” which might be called a poetry reading, or “talent circus” quite honestly, is designed to welcome in a new decade of innovative verse and unfamiliar prose by functioning as a platform for an excerpt from the catalog of contemporary poetics. Five readers, most present locals with one import from the Bay Area, have been selected (by Master of Ceremonies Lonely Christopher) to represent in performance a small but powerful sample of the most important work being published today. Combined they form an awesome evening of kick-ass superhero verse staged in a gallery space dedicated to providing engaging experiences in art, sound, and letters. So, if you’re brain’s whetted, here follows introductory details and, of course, the names of this special league.

First the identities of the featured readers then the date, time, and location of this event:

RACHEL ZOLF
--- author of Human Resources, Shoot & Weep, &c.
ROB FITTERMAN
--- author of Metropolis, Notes on Conceptualisms, &c.
CHRISTIAN HAWKEY
--- author of The Book of Funnels, Citizen Of, &c.
RACHEL LEVITSKY
--- author of Under the Sun, Neighbor, &c.
& RICHARD LORANGER
--- author of The Orange Book, Poems for Teeth, &c.

TOMORROW,
7 JAN, AT 7 PM SHARP,
AT THE P.P.O.W. GALLERY!
address: 511 West 25th St Rm 301

For more information about the P.P.O.W. Gallery and its Hostess Project please reference these websites: P.P.O.W. Gallery & Hostess Project