The Corresponding Society

Earshot of the Endless Room

2011-02-10T16:11:00.004-05:00

As you might have noticed, The Corresponding Society's blog is on a bit of a hiatus. While you wait for us to get our shit together, though, we'd really love for you to come to this event in Brooklyn tomorrow:

Earshot of the Endless Room: a Reading

Friday, February 11 · 8:00pm

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn, NY

This won't be your standard "I've finished my wine and these mono-toned, self-absorbed academic laureates won't shut up so I can get more and ultimately tolerate this" type of reading. Physical, theatrical, and non-academically self-absorbed, maybe with a little wine spillage on your new coat if you're lucky. Think the Donner Party with plenty of meat, but no knife, just voices.

Plus, It's free.

FEATURING TWO STORYTELLERS AND TWO POETS:

Jody Buchman is a storyteller from Brooklyn, New York. His work is focused on making new oral traditions out of the old-hag mythologies his ancestors put on his bookshelf when he was sleeping.

Popahna Brandes lives in Europe for some time, Chicago for some time, Providence for some time, and has been writing a book she can not not end, and bows a cello she can not end, and teaches young writers in Brooklyn that she can not end.

Benjamin Winkler lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he serves as the editor of Splitleaves Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Monongahela Review, The Apiary, Otoliths, Counterexample Poetics, and Raft Magazine.

Robert Snyderman will be reading from his new chapbook RIVER TRIED TO NOT BE RIVER, which he wrote last summer in Brooklyn, while he was making a living writing poems for passersby on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

All the Conspirators

2010-12-29T14:30:00.003-05:00

Lonely Christopher is reading All the Conspirators by Christopher Isherwood; below are his initial thoughts.

I was recently given a copy of All the Conspirators, Christopher Isherwood’s first novel from 1928, and, by a fluke, began reading it immediately (instead of relegating it to languish on the shelf, next to my unread copy of The Berlin Stories). I am not a diehard Isherwood fan, having only read A Single Man after watching Tom Ford’s delicious film adaptation, and was wholly unaware of this novel’s existence.

All the Conspirators, from what I understand, is commonly perceived as a piece of juvenilia: an amateur attempt that falls too often into pastiches of various modernist writers. It is indeed rather tonally uneven, overly ambitious in technique, and lacking clarity of style. Despite its obtuseness, though, I instantly found the story to be engaging. Although Isherwood apparently lacked a fully developed craft-sense, he was the perfect age (at twenty-one) to tackle a story about a listless young man named Philip who harbors a perpetually unfulfilled desire to become a painter and writer while his mother pressures him to keep his boring desk job.

Philip’s lazy idealism betrays his unfocused nature, especially in this self-righteous speech he delivers to his sister: “Mind you, I need every bit of my time. Just because I don’t want to be cooped up in this room all day, it doesn’t mean I could be at a job. One must move about and see things. Get ideas. Go to theatres, cinemas. One’s mind’s got to be free. Oh, it’s so obvious. But, of course, nobody understands. How can you, unless you paint or write yourself? People think an artist ought to sit on a stool and do his seven hours like an office clerk.” Of course, when given the freedom, Philip merely sits about, brooding and chain-smoking cigarettes. His mother, a few pages later, rebuffs her son’s ideological stance in this way: “When one’s young one wants to have all the fun out of life one possibly can. It’s only natural. And it isn’t till you grow older that you begin to see how true that old proverb is of the Hare and the Tortoise. The people who’ve idled about and wasted away their time get left behind[.]”

Although, later on in the story, the narrative begins to focus more on the courtship and engagement of Philip’s sister Joan, I instantly connected and identified with the struggle of the young artist desperately trying to actualize himself only to fall further into a despondent rut. This is basically the story of a family ruled by a practical matriarch. Her daughter falls under her reasonable influence while her son petulantly (albeit unsuccessfully) tries to break free. I have about fifty pages to go and Philip has just decided to leave his office job to relocate to Kenya and work on a coffee plantation. I can only guess he is riding, again, toward humiliating defeat.

Proust/Reynolds

2010-12-09T01:19:00.001-05:00

This week the Proust Questionnaire sheds some light on poet Christie Ann Reynolds. For the uninitiated, she co-wrote one of our great What Where chapbooks (Girl Boy Girl Boy) with Ben Fama (his Proustian answers can be found here). Enjoy!

An Introduction to Christie Ann Reynolds

Christie Ann Reynolds is a native New Yorker and was once the president of her sorority. She was the winner of the 2008 New School Chapbook Contest and has two other chapbooks out with Supermachine and The Corresponding Society. Christie Ann teaches writing at Hofstra University and her work can be found or is forthcoming in BlazeVox, Maggy, Lit, La Petite Zine, Pax Americana, So and So Magazine and Sink Review. She is the co-curator of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series at Good Bye Blue Monday.

Christie Ann Reynolds Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Sincerity

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Ambition, creativity, humility, friendliness, open-minded view of the world,

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Same as men!

Your chief characteristic.
I had trouble with this one, because I would say, “friendly.” That seemed boring. So I asked Ben Fama and he said: Compassion in the long-run, stubborn in the short-run. Also you don't respect authority and it makes it impossible for you to use a GPS device.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Friends that weather all.

Your main fault.
Sometimes I’m really oblivious, even when I think I’m not being oblivious.

Your favorite occupation.
Teaching, writing, being just a little bossy

Your idea of happiness.
The excitement of planning for things and then that planning not happening but then still arriving somewhere amazing anyway.

Your idea of misery.
A room of old ladies wearing too much Jean Nate.

If not yourself, who would you be?
When I was little I thought I could actually grow up to be a horse. I love horses.

Where would you like to live?
Brooklyn--or any city within driving distance of a beach.

Your favorite prose authors.
Murakami, Brautigan, Jane Austen, Salinger, Capote

Your favorite poets.
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Alice Notley, Jack Spicer, Larry Levis, Hayden Carruth and Henri Michaux is a new one!

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Holly Golightly, Franny Glass

Your favorite painter.
Louise Bourgeois

Your heroes in “real life.”
The little kids I nanny for. They wear Batman capes and such.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Hitler

Your favorite names.
River, Cecily, Reeve

What do you hate the most?
People who don’t use their blinkers before making a turn.

What military event do you admire the most?
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride

What reform do you admire the most?
Roe v. Wade, no cell phones while driving.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
I wish I could sing and also not hyperventilate while snorkeling.

How do you wish to die?
Slowly.

What is your present state of mind?
Love.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
People who chew with their mouths open.

Your favorite motto.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The Tipsy Critics: The Trial

2010-11-25T14:43:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans. The Corresponding Society is drunk to present a little holiday treat: the long-awaited return of the Tipsy Critics. Lonely Christopher and Mae Saslaw sat down recently with way too much red wine to discuss The Trial by Franz Kafka. And they filmed it. We think everybody will agree that nothing says Thanksgiving like Franz Kafka. Thanksgiving is a pretty miserable holiday but the Tipsy Critics have reserved all of their vitriol for The Trial, which they have decided just plain sucks. You heard it here first from the definitive source. Enjoy the following video and, we hope, all the libations and regrettable behavior (typically unfolding in close proximity to family members) that accompany this joyous season!

Tipsy Critics Present The Trial from Mae Saslaw on Vimeo.

Chapbooks 4 Sale

2010-11-22T13:31:00.001-05:00

The Corresponding Society is pleased to announce that our new What Where series of chapbooks is now available for purchase through our website’s online store. Please click here to check it out. This limited edition series --- including titles by Anselm Berrigan (pictured), Ben Fama & Christie Ann Reynolds, Ryan Doyle May, and Robert Fitterman --- is already very popular and has been selling fast; so, as it is said, order without delay!

What Where

2010-11-15T14:26:00.001-05:00

If you are in the New York City area, make sure to come join us for the launch (at long last!) of the What Where chapbook series. More information on these wondrous poetry books to follow...

The Corresponding Society presents
The What Where Chapbook Series Launch Reading

featuring Anselm Berrigan, Ryan Doyle May, Christie Ann Reynolds, Ben Fama, and Robert Fitterman
hosted by Lonely Christopher

at Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn
Wednesday, November 17th, 8pm

The Corresponding Society is pleased to announce that its long-forthcoming second series of poetry chapbooks is finally ready! The What Where series, curated by Lonely Christopher, features gorgeous looking editions of these titles:

Primitive State by Anselm Berrigan --- a sculpture of sentences, a mad device sans off-switch, establishing a poetry of subjectivity

The Anatomy of Gray by Ryan Doyle May --- melts definition off the skeletons of words, turns the page into an arresting hospital of identity’s tragedy

Girl Boy Girl Boy by Christie Ann Reynolds & Ben Fama --- uses a discursive form to develop a love story of achingly clear ambivalence, revealing the lover’s dialogue as truths written down in dreams in disappearing ink

Pillbox by Robert Fitterman --- sinisterly inappropriate slogans in advertising culture are redacted into giddy pills of rhetoric, bizarrely complex pageants for the happy consumer now available in an adjusted dose

Together, these titles represent an exciting step forward for The Corresponding Society. Never before published works by the heroes Berrigan and Fitterman plus glowing introductions to projects (which you will never shut up about when you finish them) by three writers at the beginning of their individual careers.

Each title is available in a handmade edition of 100. As we have already said, these little books look beautiful (letter press printed covers were created by Sonia Farmer through Peter Kruty editions) --- and it only gets better when you open them up and, you know, read them. So please come celebrate with us at Unnameable Books, where all five authors will be on hand to read and otherwise make your dreams come true. The titles will be available at terrific discounts! plus in bundles! plus there will be a raffle! This is the first public event The Corresponding Society has thrown in a long while, so we really hope to see you there.

Proust/Hawkey

2010-10-29T20:39:00.008-04:00

This week, for our modified Proust Questionnaire project, we are very lucky to be able to feature the poet Christian Hawkey. Mr. Hawkey’s latest book, Ventrakl (which was excerpted in issue three of Correspondence), was just released from Ugly Duckling Presse. If you are unfamiliar with Christian Hawkey, read his bio (below), read his books, and, more immediately, you might be interested in this awesome conversation (PDF) he had with Bill Martin, where he asks the very important question: “is that Mike Myers/Austin Powers, playing Derrida, with a wig?!”

An Introduction to Christian Hawkey

Christian Hawkey is the author of three previous books of poetry. His first book, The Book of Funnels, appeared in 2004 and won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, a chapbook called HourHour, includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski, and was published by Delirium Press in 2005. Citizen Of, his third book, was released by Wave Books in the spring of 2007, and received enthusiastic reviews from numerous magazines and online journals, including Time Out New York, Octopus, Silliman’s Blog, and the New Yorker. His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Crowd, BOMB, Chicago Review, Best American Poetry, and Conduit, and his art criticism has appeared in frieze and Meatpaper. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Fund, and in 2006 he received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award. In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. He is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, where he teaches the practice of writing poetry in the Writing Program. (via UDP)

Christian Hawkey Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Regrouping.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Hunchiness.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Truculence.

Your chief characteristic.
Lack of self-knowledge.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Rutilant loyalty.

Your main fault.
Lack of self-knowledge.

Your favorite occupation.
Hand-taming wild birds.

Your idea of happiness.
Ibid.

Your idea of misery.
Industrialized animal slaughter.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Exactly.

Where would you like to live?
To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, an art-house movie theater.

Your favorite prose authors.
Beckett. Stein. Marie Redonnet. Walser. Derrida.

Your favorite poets.
Stein. Clare. Vallejo. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Anti-heroes.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Anti-heroines.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Andy Kaufman. Mandelstam. Anna O.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Karl Lueger; Mayor of Vienna, 1897-1910; he brought anti-Semitic rhetoric into the political discourse of a fading Austrio-Hungarian empire; big influence on Hitler.

Your favorite names.
Gerald. Riven. Blondie.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Ability to carry a tune.

How do you wish to die?
I will die in Paris, on a rainy day, with all of my school loans unpaid.

What is your present state of mind?
Distracted attentiveness.

Your favorite motto.
An embryonic thing is a sort of embryonic thing.

It Gets Better

2010-10-13T18:45:00.004-04:00

A Statement by Lonely Christopher

For those of you unfamiliar with Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project congratulations for being so sheltered from all media, but it’s a YouTube video campaign designed as a reaction to the recent publicity over the bullying-related suicide deaths of gay teenagers across the United States. The idea being that, upon hearing stories of tormented LGBT youth who killed themselves out of despair developed through environments of homophobia, abuse, and anti-gay hostility, writer Dan Savage wished he could speak to the teenaged queer community to try and convince troubled youth that middle and high school is torturous, but life gets a lot better and is therefore worth sticking around for. Then he realized that he needn’t wait around for invitations to address this demographic, as YouTube offered him a platform to forgo traditional venues and speak to them directly. The It Gets Better Project began with a great video by Dan Savage and his husband Terry (watch it here) and then opened up the floor for other video contributions. Since then, hundreds of videos have been posted, including a humorous one by actor Jeffrey Self, a very moving one by a councilman in Fort Worth, and many others by regular folk and celebrities alike. While the furious stream of videos tends to become repetitious (the main message being “Don’t kill yourself, wait it out, because it gets so much better”), I feel the project is complicated and tremendously justified. Early on, I decided to create my own contribution for It Gets Better. After drafting a statement and filming it, though, I declined to submit it for several reasons. The project became a cause célèbre overnight and I felt my slightly academic tone was incongruous with the accessibility of the main and, considering the wealth of videos from everyday individuals as well as the slightly condescending ones from famous media figures, both gay and straight, the anti-suicidal musings of a frequently suicidal experimental poet named Lonely Christopher could be both inconsequential and confusing.

First of all, the idea of some weirdo calling himself Lonely Christopher trying to convince queer youth that one day they will not feel so alone is problematic. I felt like I had to address this situation before reaching the fundamental point of my statement, which resulted in an overlong, self-involved preamble. I explained, don’t worry! it’s only an arty pseudonym, I’m really a friendly, semi-adjusted, and sociable person. Wondering if that was really enough, I then went on to try to posit the concept of “loneliness” as a profound and positive characteristic. I attempted this by citing my favorite poem by Emily Dickinson (you can tell how the video is already derailing here). Here is the poem:

‎There is another Loneliness
That many die without –
Not want of friend occasions it or circumstance of Lot

But nature, sometimes, sometimes thought
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be revealed
By mortal numeral -

I then attempted to pose this heightened concept of loneliness as a metaphor for queerness, in such a way that a traditionally negatively perceived disposition could be viewed as a liberatory, ultimately subversive, benefit. Like loneliness, queerness is also often viewed in an unfavorable, unhelpful way. But, as Dickinson proves in her poem on loneliness, there is also no singular definition for queerness, what it means to be gay, or whatever word one uses to identify as LGBT. That suggests that one can push past the stereotypes and cultural restrictions around being gay and understand queerness as a special opportunity --- a gift, even, that not everybody has, through which one can really actualize one’s self in a tremendous way. I ended this overwrought point with the only line in the statement I really like: “I guess this is an overly complicated way of saying that I think being queer is basically a super power.”

After that regrettable introduction, which was unnecessary and haughty enough to discourage me from posting the video, I got around to my main purpose (and drew my point out in such a way that my video would have been significantly longer than most offerings available through the project). So that my misguided efforts do not go completely to waste, I here offer the entirety of the rest of my statement (addressed directly to the hypothetical youth watching the video):

You have to celebrate yourself as a queer individual. I know that it’s hard --- and it doesn’t automatically entail coming out to your friends or school or parents, but what I really mean is that you not only have to accept yourself in your own mind, but you have to allow yourself to understand all the ways that you are valuable, unique, and gifted --- and how being queer plays into your perception of self and the world around you. Again, that’s an incredibly hard task. I know I didn’t understand how to view my sexuality in a wholly positive light for many years after I discovered I was queer. That was when I was maybe thirteen, if you can believe it. Many other LGBT people say that they knew at a much earlier age, but I don’t think I was situated in a cultural climate where I was able to understand that about myself preternaturally. It really took until puberty, when I began developing sexual attractions to boys instead of girls, when the possibility dawned on me. And when it did, it was very bad news --- a real private struggle that I was completely alone in and lacked the critical faculties to negotiate. Basically, when these attractions came to my attention, I thought, “Oh no! Please, no! Not another problem I have to deal with!” And this particular problem really did feel like the biggest one in the world --- and one I was experiencing in complete isolation at first.

When I was growing up, “the gays” were only discussed in what was perceived to be a negative context such as AIDS. Being gay was construed as such an unspeakable fault, it seemed almost like anybody so much as talking about it was under suspicion for being a sexual deviant. Sometimes it seems so easy to understand how silly and thoughtless this cultural taboo placed around homosexuality really is, and how insubstantial and indefensible. But that didn’t help me much in school. I was so afraid of being abnormal I really didn’t come out to anybody throughout middle school and high school. It was just inconceivable that something like that, an out gay kid, could actually exist and be in any way accepted or live a normal life. There was a definite environment of homophobia, perpetrated by the students and enforced by the adults, which kept all the queer kids at school very, very quiet about it. At the time, I had male friends who were very worried that I wasn’t taking the same interest in girls as they were. So they set me up with a string off blundering homecoming and prom dates, girlfriends who lasted about a week and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t interested in making out, all of that. And, of course, I had to suffer, day in and day out, hearing almost everybody my age using the word “gay” in a derogatory way, “That’s so gay,” accusing each other of being sissies or fags when they were acting stupid, and all the rest. And whenever I was suspected of being one of those unspeakables, a fag, there was verbal abuse and casual bullying involved.

It was just not a pleasant environment for me to grow up in. I hated school so much. And, you know, when I was a junior, at sixteen, I did try to kill myself. In many ways, first of all, not feeling able to be honest with my parents about who I knew I was, but also, the climate of abuse and mental torture which I experienced, and which I know is prevalent for many others even now, in many ways these were the major contributing factors to my decision to try and prematurely end my life. Fortunately, my attempt was nonfatal --- I was discovered and hospitalized. Being in the hospital, personally, didn’t help me, because even in that drastic situation I was not able to be honest with the doctors and with my family about my sexuality. So that wasn’t really addressed, but I survived, and went back to school --- and somehow I just got through it. And now, of course, it is very obvious that the idea of ending my life was the absolute wrong way to handle that situation. I know that now because, as they say, it gets better.

One of the ways I got through it, I think, was with the Internet. This was a new instrument that just a few years before wasn’t really around. But since it was there, and I had access to it, I was able to discover whole worlds that existed outside of my drab small-town nowhere life --- worlds that were so much more vibrant, cultured, exciting, sexy, and filled with opportunity. I realize that the Internet is and always was a platform for hate and cyber-bullying, which is a problem it seems many teenagers deal with today, but it’s just as much, and I’m sure more, of a positive resource for intelligence, for learning, for communication. Online, I was able to connect with other queer kids my age, far away but in the same situation as I was in, and we were able to form a sort of way of supporting each other from a distance. Also I was afforded access, through the Internet, to forms of culture and troves of information that I would have not otherwise received. If you are watching this video right now, that means that you are utilizing the Internet as a tool to learn about what exists outside of your personal experience. And that’s fabulous.

With the Internet, and reading a lot, and watching lots of movies, and coming into contact with gay culture whenever I could, whether that meant watching Queer as Folk late at night with the volume turned down low so my parents wouldn’t hear or renting John Waters movies from Blockbuster, I gained a lot of perspective and realized that my world, the one I felt stuck in, was not the end of the world. So while my experience with boys was rather limited as a teenager --- and when I did have brief encounters with boys, usually boys from a few towns over, we had to sneak away to the isolated train tracks to even hold hands or briefly kiss --- while I didn’t have much in the way of boyfriends at that age, I did eventually grow comfortable with being more of myself more openly, and expressing myself publically. And although that still did not mean coming out to more than a few very close and understanding female friends --- it meant that I learned how to care less about how the bullies and dullards around me thought of what I did and how I looked or acted. So, with varying degrees of success, I tried to keep afloat during an extended period of depression, self-hatred, confusion, guilt --- all of which contributed to frequent absenteeism in school, plus alcohol and drug abuse --- and then, one day, it was all over.

I left town, went to college in Brooklyn, and never really looked back. And of course I’ve continued to have bad periods, and I make mistakes all the time, but… really, really… the struggle was worth it and the struggle was an education… and, very quickly after I left high school I was prepared to live out of the closest, even though it took me four more years to tell my family, I never again had to lie to my friends about who I was. Because I went to college, I went to art school, I went to the city, and found it very liberating, and found it a place where my queerness was a benefit rather than a deficit, and all sorts of wonderful things happened. I met so many fantastic friends, both queer and straight, who are very supportive, I read a lot of queer theory and became very interested in gay rights activism, I even met my beautiful boyfriend Ryan when we were both featured in a queer poetry reading --- and never again did I have to worry about those things that tormented me when I was younger on the overwhelming level which they were occurring at the time. The first time I held hands with another boy, in the city, and walked down the street without anybody batting an eye, let alone yelling “fag” at us --- it was a revelation. It gets better, seriously, and you’re going to see that so soon.

In conclusion, I want to return to the Dickinson poem, a little bit. Because there is another queerness that many die without. But not you. You have it. If you take anything from this statement, I hope it’s that being queer is whatever you can possibly define it as --- you. Nobody else has the right to define what your sexuality means to you, and the role it plays in your life. And nobody has the right to make you feel terrible about being LGBT. The reality is that we live in a heteronormative society, and that kind of violence and discouragement is still widely tolerated, and you are going to experience discrimination --- but we all face those challenges, we all have our stories, and when we’re determined to stick it out, to refuse to be beaten down by anti-gay abuse, we win. We allow ourselves to live, and to love, and to grow, and that makes us unfathomably lucky. And, you know, I think kids that are fifteen, sixteen, going to school right now --- you are the kids that are going to change the world. So much has happened for gay rights since I was that age --- just that it has become a topic of consistent national debate seems like a miracle to me (despite the vitriol over the issue that comes from certain, ignorant groups of people). So, please, think big, continue, and don’t let your present circumstances cloud your vision of the future.

***

That is the end of my statement. Reading it over again, I feel slightly sorry I wasn’t able to figure out how to reformat it to fit the general structure of the project, but I don’t think its absence on YouTube is a terrible detriment, especially considering all the great videos available on the It Gets Better channel. I recently visited my family, in Western New York, and regrettably dragged some of my old notebooks out of storage in the backyard shed. Reading my journals and letters from high school for the first time since I wrote them, I was struck by how absolutely miserable I felt. One friend with whom I corresponded at the time described my lengthy and tortured letters as a model in suicidal ideation. And, at the time, I absolutely lacked any foresight whatever, beyond the intense desire to leave my hometown surroundings as soon as humanly possible, so whatever happened in school, with being ostracized and mocked, and with my non-comprehending family, it all felt completely inescapable. But, of course, it wasn’t; that is the primary message the It Gets Better Project is delivering to our nation’s LGBT youth. And that is entirely admirable.

River

2010-10-11T19:25:00.002-04:00

The Corresponding Society is very excited that Splitleaves Press, a chapbook publisher based in Philadelphia, has just released a new poem cycle by Robert Snyderman with illustrations by Esther Ward: River Tried to Not Be River.

Click here to learn more about it!

River Tried to Not be River is a study in contradictions. Graceful and elegant, yet one cannot help but feel an undercurrent of violence and aggression subsumed beneath the surface. Robert Snyderman’s poems can alternately feel like sketches or stories. Either way, one can’t help but relish his turns-of-phrase. Esther Ward’s enigmatic, black and white illustrations could easily stand on their own. Here, as a work of ekphrasis, they only perpetuate River‘s dichotomy.

Proust/Lasky

2010-10-02T17:55:00.002-04:00

Okay guys, the Proust Questionaire is back in business (again). This time we are very pleased to feature super-awesome-uber-poet Dorothea Lasky. If you haven’t heard of Lasky, you need to go read her books (Awe and Black Life) right now. But, most likely, you know very well of her and you love her. The Corresponding Society loves her too. For the curious, blog editor Lonely Christopher reviews Lasky’s latest book, Black Life, here. Now, let’s get to it!

A Brief Introduction to Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is an American poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri on March 27, 1978. Lasky earned her BA in Classics and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers, and her Ed.M. in Arts & Education from Harvard University. (From Wikipedia.)

Dorothea Lasky Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Kindness

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Humor

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Humor

Your chief characteristic.
A changing center

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Loyalty

Your main fault.
I always want to make everyone happy.

Your favorite occupation.
Teacher

Your idea of happiness.
Freedom

Your idea of misery.
Being constrained

If not yourself, who would you be?
A wolf

Where would you like to live?
Ideally, I would like a house in every town.

Your favorite prose authors.
Lydia Davis, Cicero, Flaubert, Yasunari Kawabata, Eileen Myles, Ivan Turgenev, Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein

Your favorite poets.
Sylvia Plath and Catullus

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Ivan Denisovich

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Madame Bovary

Your favorite painters and composers.
Painters: Arshile Gorky, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Oskar Kokoschka, William Blake
Composers: Timbaland, Virgil Thomson, Handel, Bach, Stevie Nicks, Brian Wilson, Tom Petty

Your heroes in “real life.”
My father and Martin Luther King, Jr.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Hitler

Your favorite names.
Violet, Roz, and Buzz

What do you hate the most?
Injustice

What military event do you admire the most?
The founding of Rome

What reform do you admire the most?
Dorothea Dix’s reform work in improving treatment for the mentally ill.

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

How do you wish to die?
In my sleep

What is your present state of mind?
Clear

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Tardiness

Your favorite motto.
Stay loose.

Interestingly enough, Lasky seems to be the only of our participants so far who has previously answered the Proust Questionnaire. Here is a beautiful video she brought to our attention of her answering the questions the first time around:

Mischief + Mayhem

2010-09-15T20:47:00.003-04:00

Here is a press release and launch party invite from our friends over at Mischief + Mayhem:

New Writers Collective Joins Forces With OR Books
in an Alternative Approach to Publishing

Novelist and critic Dale Peck, blogger Choire Sicha among those collaborating with OR to launch Mischief + Mayhem imprint

Meghan Daum, Nick Flynn, A.M. Homes, and Joseph O’Neill are among the noted writers joining forces on the evening of Sept. 28, 2010 to launch Mischief + Mayhem, a new imprint affiliated with OR Books, the alternative publisher that made headlines and bestseller lists in 2009 with Going Rouge, its controversial anti–Sarah Palin polemic. The event will feature burlesque dancers, live music, a raffle, and an interactive literary game involving more than thirty writers from around the world.

Mischief + Mayhem’s noteworthy founders are Lisa Dierbeck (One Pill Makes You Smaller), Joshua Furst (Short People, The Sabotage Café), DW Gibson, executive director of Ledig House and Sangam House, Dale Peck (Martin and John, What We Lost, Hatchet Jobs), and Choire Sicha, co-owner of The Awl, whose first book of nonfiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Utilizing OR Books’ groundbreaking publishing methods, the collective intends to promulgate fiction that is formally inventive, socially irresponsible, and sometimes just plain reckless without having to worry about pleasing conservative editorial boards or corporate bookstore executives. It will also help writers earn a living wage without compromising their radical aesthetics.

“Mainstream publishers are more risk-averse than ever,” said Peck. “Instead of courting a mass audience with formulaic, commercial books, Mischief + Mayhem will look for weird, wild voices and writers of idiosyncratic, even skewed, vision. We don’t just want the new, we want the strange, the unsettling, the scary.”

The imprint’s lead title, Dierbeck’s The Autobiography of Jenny X, forthcoming in November 2010, has already been hailed as “Fast, funny, and twisted,” by Netherland author Joseph O’Neill, while Pagan Kennedy, author of The First Man-Made Man, dubbed it “Baader Meinhof meets Marvel comics.” Dierbeck’s novel will be followed by DW Gibson’s debut, An All-American Field Guide to the Outside World. Other writers on the M+M docket include Calvin Baker (Once Two Heroes, Dominion), Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and Mike Heppner (The Egg Code, Pike’s Folly).

Like OR Books, Mischief + Mayhem’s titles will be produced only in electronic or print-on-demand editions, and will be available, initially at least, exclusively for purchase online from the publisher. This arrangement avoids the enormous waste of the current publishing system, which ships books to stores, fails to promote them, and then sees many of them returned, unsold, to the publisher.

The company’s publishing mission is supported by Wild Rag, a blog and webzine whose regular contributors include such well-respected writers as New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, journalist and editor Zia Jaffrey, and New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener, each of whom will offer a challenging, rambunctious perspective on things literary, cultural, and political. Additionally, the company plans to host readings, performances and other social gatherings in order to build a literary community in the real world as well as online.

“Reviews for Sale”
Launch Party Sept. 28

To coincide with the launch of the imprint, Mischief + Mayhem invites the public to join them for a celebration featuring tequila, burlesque, graffiti, rock and roll, and, of course, literature on Sept. 28, 2010 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at Room Service, at 35 E. 21st St., in New York City. The evening’s centerpiece will be a massive literary exquisite corpse, a collectively written story that dramatizes what can happen when writers work together for a common goal. Between thirty and forty writers from around the globe are expected to join in; as of this writing, participants include Taylor Antrim, Rebecca Brown, T Cooper, Meghan Daum, Helen DeWitt, Tishani Doshi, Nora Eisenberg, Ben Greenman, Daniel Handler, Mike Heppner, Kaylie Jones, Jim Lewis, Lonely Christopher, Lauren Mechling, Sigrid Nuñez, Joseph O’Neill, Donald Ray Pollock, Irina Reyn, Julian Rubinstein, Ben Schrank, Owen Sheers, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, and Amy Sohn.

Also on the agenda: a burlesque dancer with a dress made from the pages of a book, a live band (TBD), and the first-ever Mischief + Mayhem Read-In, which champions reading in any environment, no matter how loud or drunken. Speaking of which: guests are invited to sample the Mischief + Mayhem cocktail, a shot of tequila with a whole habañero pepper dropped in. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

The evening’s final lure is a raffle whose prizes include a graffiti kit (stencils, spraypaint, and a wild rag to conceal your identity), a half-case of wine from Tinto Fino, a free dinner at Tipsy Parson, and a photograph by acclaimed artist Matthew Pillsbury. In keeping with the collective’s mischievous spirit, the grand prize is a review-to-order by Dale Peck---good or bad, of (virtually) any author the winner chooses. Who knows, perhaps the Hatchet Man will end up slamming himself?

“No Book Printed Until It's Sold”
A Bold New Way to Publish Books

“No book printed until it's sold” is the unofficial motto of OR Books, which will publish the Mischief + Mayhem list. A genuinely new type of publishing company, OR sells direct to the customer in print-on-demand formats and e-books. There is no warehouse, no returns, and no waste. The savings this makes possible enables unprecedented levels of marketing, both online and through regular channels. Once momentum has been created behind a title OR looks for rights deals with conventional publishing partners to make the book available in bookstores.

OR was created by John Oakes, who co-founded the independent publisher Four Walls Eight Windows and has published Andrei Codrescu, Sue Coe, R. Crumb, Abbie Hoffman, Gordon Lish, Harvey Pekar, John Waters and Edmund White, and serves on the board of PEN America; and Colin Robinson, the former publisher of New Press and Verso, who, among many other accomplishments, made an upscale edition of The Communist Manifesto into a bestseller. Writers Robinson has published include Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Norman Finkelstein, Lewis Lapham, Rigoberta Menchu, Sheila Rowbotham and Jann Wenner.

“We’re excited to be working with Mischief + Mayhem,” said Robinson. “Their zest for adventurous, intelligent writing and enthusiasm for seeking new ways of reaching readers chime very closely with our own approach.”

The Day After I Answered Them

2010-09-13T22:21:00.002-04:00

Previously, in June, Lonely Christopher posted an I Remember exercise, inspired by Joe Brainard; coincidentally, fellow Correspondence editor Robert Snyderman was asked to complete a similar exercise in a pedagogy class he is taking this fall at Brown. Please find his piece below, for your perusal.

I Remember
by Robert Snyderman

I remember a paradise of yarrow in each eye

I remember not praying in Brooklyn with my head in the ground asking prayer what
prayer is and thinking to question prayer is prayer

I remember the civil war of sleep

I remember being ashamed of my unruly curly hair in fourth grade

I remember reading Carl Sandburg to a table of friends the night before I left Brooklyn
for Vermont

I remember reciting nothing

I remember wanting to remember the horizon in northern Vermont as a long white force
below the night field falling like a calf slipping bathed in black flies and cow tongue

I remember "There is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its reality"

I remember practicing my eternal intentions

I remember losing. The earth of my knees. Ash is still

I remember my dreams and my brother's dreams

I remember the uprooted and the falling, where men seemed wooden because I had not
been wooden. Ash is still

I remember the wolf that rested upon the back of my neck in California beside Lake
Tahoe

I remember looking down and speaking. The rules harvested me and so I disobeyed the
illusion of my father. And my brother ran right. My other brother ran left

I remember needing to speak with my brother in the morning after waking. I dream
violence, and he is consistent and I sweat our mother's hands, and here, there is an
illusion

I remember praising someone in a formless state

I remember losing strength like a birth
I remember leaping off a bridge after her and after her and after her

I remember the Tower of Babel. Surrender the spherical weather of your sexual beliefs
and improvisational stillness. Sell your books. Maintain the faith of goats

I remember constructing ideals in states of mountainous illusion, though gaining strength
and attention and wingspan, though losing the spade of body mass, though puncturing
though piercing human longevity, hardening longevity

I remember desiring less possessions

I remember desiring more possessions

I remember not to trust myself all day, all night

I remember making so as to ward myself off

I remember my brothers asking me if I believed in G-d. I traveled to see them the day
after the day after I answered them

Super Reading

2010-09-04T16:49:00.001-04:00

From our friends over at SUPERMACINE:

SUPERMACHINE ISSUE #2 LAUNCH PARTY
7:30pm, Sept. 10, 2010
The Schoolhouse
330 Ellery St
Brooklyn, NY 11206

Readings! Music! Your Autumn Crush!

with:

Macgregor Card
Chris Cheney
Lonely Christopher
Corina Copp
Jon Cotner
Joanna Penn Cooper
Anne Cecelia Holmes
Lauren Ireland
Simone Kearney
Dorothea Lasky
Paul Legault
Emily Pettit
Christie Ann Reynolds
Matvei Yankelevich
Matthew Yeager

Are You Fucking Kidding Me ?!

The Tipsy Critics: Hamlet (Part 2)

2010-08-22T14:39:00.002-04:00

The Corresponding Society is drunk to present the second part of the first installment of our new video feature The Tipsy Critics. Recently, writers Mae Saslaw and Lonely Christopher sat down to discuss the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare over drinks. In part one, which you can watch here, an attempt to summarize the action of the play led to a discussion mainly about ghosts and the Twilight movies; in part two it is concluded that, contrary to popular belief, Shakespeare wasn’t a black woman (but he was a terrifically bad writer, who knew?). See for yourself:

Tipsy Critics Present Hamlet, Part II from Mae Saslaw on Vimeo.

New Deadline

2010-08-20T00:08:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody! As you might have realized, The Corresponding Society has been vaguely inactive this summer, due to the traveling schedules of so many of our editors. We’re ready to vamp up again and have a lot of work ahead of us --- including finishing our long-awaited, long-delayed second series of poetry chapbooks, which should be forthcoming in the very early Fall and editing issue four of our lit mag Correspondence. As you may know, our original deadline for submissions to issue four was August 15. We have already received a bounty of exciting work, and can’t wait to start sorting through it all, but we’d also like to present the opportunity for those of you who have not yet submitted anything to do so. So! We’d like to announce an extension of our deadline (a very common occurrence in independent publishing, to be sure). We will now continue to accept new creative work for consideration through September 20, 2010. If you are curious about what exactly we’re looking for, please refer to the guidelines on our submissions page. We are very serious about publishing the most exciting work from emerging writers that we can find, so please let us know if you happen to be an extraordinary writer (we bet you are) and have material we might want to publish in our next issue. Thanks!

Fama Rama

2010-08-14T18:15:00.000-04:00

big pic!

Ben Fama, in his life and his work, fancifully cultivates an aesthetic somewhere between mid-cult mystic and cosmic troublemaker. Sitting on the couch of his Brooklyn apartment, you’re as likely to find him enthusiastically watching a documentary on Aleister Crowley as you are an episode of My So-Called Life; a conversation with him about the publishing industry is likely to be speckled with incongruous references to the Twilight Saga and the films of Kenneth Anger. The earnestness with which he absorbs a psychedelic patchwork of cultural influences, and reformats them under the rubric of his personal style, eschews the twee irony of hipsterdom. Not to mention he is an exciting and kick-ass poet. Not to mention he is one of the trendiest and integral operators in the youthful Brooklyn poetics scene today.

Let me explain that previous statement. Ben is the driving force behind the Supermachine reading series, which has run at Brooklyn’s Outpost Lounge, and which has routinely featured some of the greatest, probably coolest, contemporary poets in and around the city. A list of the most recognizable names from Supermachine’s sparkly stable of featured readers include Joshua Beckman, Chelsey Minnis, James Copeland, Matvei Yankelevich, Christian Hawkey, Jen Bervin, and Dorthea Lasky. The Supermachine series has been providing a catalog of fantastic examples re what’s up in poetry today (at least on the East Coast), not to mention ensuring an array of fabulous nights for lovers of verse. Moreover, this year Supermachine launched its own biannual journal, also called Supermachine, with the purpose of presenting some dazzlingly great poetry all wrapped up in the giddy, trance-like, but impacting style that characterizes Ben’s endeavors as organizer and publisher. A few poem titles featured in Supermachine #1 might help illustrate what that style leans toward: “Do Me, Dreamlife,” “Your Mom’s a Falconress,” “Journey to the Sun,” “Two Small Vampires,” “Your Sorcery Embarrasses Me,” “Dreams in Winter,” and “When It’s Sunny They Push the Button.”

Fama’s newish chapbook is titled Aquarius Rising; it was smartly selected by Ugly Duckling Presse for their really awesome series of chapbooks. For anybody who happened to miss Fama’s earlier poetry collection Sun Come, or what he’s published in journals like GlitterPony, Pank!, and No, Dear Magazine (plus, let us not forget, Correspondence), you’re going to want to hunt this baby down. A weirdo pessimist might dismiss Ben’s shiny verse with some semi-clever put-down (“Ben Fama is the Progressive Insurance Lady of poetry,” for instance, and no I cannot recall if I made that up, or if Ben did, or if somebody actually said that), and granted: his poems have a distinct and fun lightness to them, but if you let the kid talk to you from his pages, and he will, gregariously, you will, omg, totally develop a crush on this writing. There is a sassy gravity to his lines… take this (the opener from his ingenuously and ingeniously titled piece, “Glitter Pills”): “To live a serious life / that’s a fucked up thing[.]” That really strikes me, for its honesty wrapped in playfulness, but I might as well just reprint the whole poem:

To live a serious life
that’s a fucked up thing
I would have to rent out a cabin
beneath terrible angels
if I get old wipe the dust off my tits
I should have a serious log cabin
the cabin’s name is Ben Fama
find directions on the internet
when you want to leave you can
I’ll stay there just me and my heart
bigger than the sun

That’s not the best poem in Aquarius Rising, but it’s pretty representative of his ability to mix real feeling with the unpretentiously transcendental and some trademark winking, celebratory, hyperbolic mystification of the self. He plays fast and loose here and there, but not to the detriment of the reader’s possibility to enjoy, which seems like something Fama strongly wants you to do, even if he’s dancing around other complicated emotions. So, here’s this book, little and winsome, that Ben’s given us as a sort of spirit gift. Go and play with it in the grass. Try to keep an eye on Fama himself too, as he continues to engineer stellar venues, in print and in performance, for contemporary poetry. Yay!

(Lonely Christopher, editor.)

White Swallow

2010-08-08T18:27:00.001-04:00

The White Swallow series, a queer literary event hosted by Angelo Nikolopoulos, will be featuring the following performers tomorrow (Monday the 9th) at the West Village’s Cornelia St Café: Lonely Christopher, Matthew Hittinger, Billy Merrell, and Paul Lisicky. It’s going to be great fun!

The White Swallow Reading Series
(featuring guest host Zachary Pace)
6pm-8pm
$7 (includes one house drink)
Cornelia St. Cafe (Downstairs)
29 Cornelia St.
New York, NY

MATTHEW HITTINGER is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009), and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Matthew received his MFA from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.

BILLY MERRELL is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), and a co-editor for The Full Spectrum (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006), which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Most recently, he is co-author of Go Ahead, Ask Me (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently the Web Developer of Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review,StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.

LONELY CHRISTOPHER will be presenting two arias from his new opera Stegosaurus (a collaboration with composer Reese Revak). Featuring pianist Jennifer Peterson, soprano Heather Green, and tenor Brandon Snook. Presented by The Walt Whitman Project.

The Tipsy Critics: Hamlet (Part 1)

2010-07-28T00:32:00.001-04:00

The Corresponding Society is drunk to present a new semi-regular video feature for our blog, The Tipsy Critics. The premise of the videos will be pretty simple: writers Mae Saslaw and Lonely Christopher sit down to discuss works of classic literature over drinks (lots of drinks). For our inaugural video, which apparently is going to turn out to be a two-parter (we had sixty minutes of soused footage to edit down), we decided upon tackling the immortal classic Hamlet by William Shakespeare. A few drinks in, we also got around a bit to the Twilight movies, but it’s mostly Hamlet. So, Internet, here come the Tipsy Critics:

Tipsy Critics Present Hamlet, Part I from Mae Saslaw on Vimeo.

Proust/Killian

2010-07-11T17:03:00.001-04:00

Delight of delights, this week we are pleased to be featuring the multi-talented Kevin Killian’s answers to our redacted Proust Questionnaire. See here:

Introduction to Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian has written two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1990), and three books of stories, Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001) and Impossible Princess (2009). He has also written two books of poetry, Argento Series (2001), and Action Kylie (2008). With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written often on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer [1925-65] and with Peter Gizzi has edited My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008) for Wesleyan University Press. For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino), The American Objectivists (2001, with Brian Kim Stefans), and Often (also 2001, with Barbara Guest). New projects include Screen Tests, an edition of Killian's film writing, and a new novel Spreadeagle which Alyson Books will publish one of these days.

Kevin Killian Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Compassion.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Versatility.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Steadfastness.

Your chief characteristic.
Addictive behavior.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Looking the other way.

Your main fault.
I can’t stand to have anyone upset with me.

Your favorite occupation.
Following Kylie.

Your idea of happiness.
Not for the public to know!

Your idea of misery.
To have lived without meeting Dodie Bellamy.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Nicholas Hoult

Where would you like to live?
Vancouver

Your favorite prose authors.
Outside of my friends: Agatha Christie, John Cowper Powys, Faulkner, Proust, Charlotte Armstrong, James Purdy

Your favorite poets.
Outside of my friends: Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jack Spicer, Victor Hugo, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy,Ted Berrigan.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Sherlock Holmes, Holden Caulfield, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Oddjob, Clay (Less Than Zero), “Lord Jim,” Eric Ashley (in Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us)

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Cymbeline, Imogen, Miranda, Alice, Scout, Emma, Gwendolen Harleth, Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Dalloway, Janie Crawford, Maria Wyeth, Veronica (Mary Gaitskill), Erica Kane

Your favorite painters and composers.
Outside of my friends, Seurat, Tintoretto, Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Florine Stettheimer, Warhol, Sturtevant, Sarah Lucas; Puccini, Mozart, R. Strauss, Brian Wilson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Michael Brown, Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix, Laura Nyro, too many to name in each category

Your heroes in “real life.”
Not too many! Writers mainly, Robert Gluck, Dodie Bellamy, Dennis Cooper, Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delany, Eileen Myles, Raymond Pettibon, Kota Ezawa, Derek McCormack, Thom Wolf....

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Stalin, Nixon, Mao, Hitler, St. Paul.... On a different scale, Robert Frost, W H Auden, Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Rilke, many more

Your favorite names.
I wanted to have twins Ricky and Raquel, and we would call them Rick and Rack. I also thought Brando Killian would be a nice name for my son or daughter. But that didn’t happen.

What do you hate the most?
The unrelenting ignorance I see in the world and I can see in my own soul.

What military event do you admire the most?
Is this a trick question? I suppose the liberation of Hitler’s death camps, if that was a military event.

What reform do you admire the most?
Civil rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Either drawing or playing the guitar.

How do you wish to die?
“In the saddle” would be nice, though embarrassing for my partner.

What is your present state of mind?
Thanks to Welbutrin, hopeful.

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

Your favorite motto.
“Try anything once. Then keep trying it until you like it. Then never stop.”

Street Poet

2010-06-26T22:53:00.004-04:00

Robert Snyderman, "international editor" for Correspondence no. 3 (when he was abroad, working as an itinerant farmhand in Quebec) and street-poet-of-interest, was profiled recently by the New York Time's Fort Greene blog. Read all about it here (if you haven't already). Unfortunately, if you're tempted to hit the streets to find Robert peddling his verse (at his favorites haunts: the Bethesda Angel, the Brooklyn Bridge, or Brooklyn's flea & farmer's markets), you're out of luck. He's relocated to Vermont for the rest of the summer, to study farming, and heading to Brown in the fall, to pursue an MFA in poetry.

Proust/King

2010-06-20T20:39:00.001-04:00

Hey, the Proust Questionnaire returns! with none other than accomplished poet, essayist, blogger Amy King. Amy King’s bio is below, followed by her intimate answers to those Proustian questions:

Introduction to Amy King

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press), and most recently, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox). Forthcoming is I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press).

Amy edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. Amy King was also the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.

She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet, Ron Padgett, and is also co-editing Poets for a Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples. She maintains a blog you should read, right here.

Amy King Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
I wish I didn’t bleed so much… profusion.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
He thinks about the world and is open and intuitive to the point that people say, “Including Mike Young is like including a woman.” He enjoys the insult as compliment.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
When she surpasses backchanneling to put her words out there for everyone to target or admire, whichever matters not.

Your chief characteristic.
My last name says it all. “Not as a god but as a god might be.” Determined.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Their poetry. And love, which is in the same proximity.

Your main fault.
I can’t keep up.

Your favorite occupation.
Sage. Open to offers.

Your idea of happiness.
A lawn of books, on blanket, bottle of wine, something tasty, my lover and friends, a live band perhaps, events on the horizon and spontaneous poetry.

Your idea of misery.
Going through the motions, fruitless and numb.

If not yourself, who would you be?
That holy hippie guy with the beard and no pants. Or someone like Claude Cahun.

Where would you like to live?
In the cradle of Walt Whitman’s birth, where I live now. And a second home in the south of France or up to Paris or Barcelona. And a few other places. I like living.

Your favorite prose authors.
James Baldwin. Donald Barthleme. Gertrude Stein. Claude Cahun. Virginia Woolf. Laura Riding Jackson.

Your favorite poets.
Ouch, the limits of lists. Cesar Vallejo. Larry Levis recently. Gertrude Stein. Claude Cahun. Walt Whitman. John Ashbery. Tomaz Salamun. Ana Bozicevic. Laura Riding. Many more.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Sofia from The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Is that the kind one snorts or puts in the arm?
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; he’s a hot heroine.

Your favorite painters and composers.
O’Keefe. Picasso. De Chirico. Basquiat. Robert Frank. Diane Arbus. Claude Cahun. Photographers are painters too. Chopin’s Etudes.

Your heroes in “real life.”
In this very moment, Joan Retallack (for recent essays I’ve read online) and Ana Bozicevic. Look them up.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
God, Allah, Jehovah, and the like.

Your favorite names.
Zora. Barack. Walt Whitman.

What do you hate the most?
Apathy. Passivity. Guilt by excision.

What military event do you admire the most?
The disbandment of such machinery. Read Three Guineas. Future forward, baby.

What reform do you admire the most?
Huh? The What Else.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Music-making. Bringing an audience to a range of conditions akin to that of Bonnie Prince Billy, the Avett Bros, Chan Marshall, etc.

How do you wish to die?
In love and loving.

What is your present state of mind?
Anxious and hopeful, despite recent environmental undoings.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Misguided effort.

Your favorite motto.
Where’s your joie de vivre?!

I Remember

2010-06-18T02:04:00.031-04:00

Recently the Wilde Boys, a salon for queer writers, met to discuss the work of Joe Brainard. I was unable to attend, but I hear the discussion was lovely and Keith McDermot was there with some of Brainard’s collages and letters. I did read the text I Remember, which is something I had been intending to get around to for years (I remember Richard Loranger telling me about it when I was a freshman). It was a delightful, friendly book, inventing a form that’s impossibly tempting to try out. Anselm Berrigan, for example, used it here. While I’m sure the risks of narcissism and sentimentality are great, below I’ve written an I Remember exercise focused around experiences related to The Corresponding Society. I was eating a tea-soaked madeleine when I wrote this. (Lonely Christopher)

I remember whole nights writing in the living room with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman (we were listening to Sufjan Stevens the entire time and even if we left for the day it would still be playing when we got back). I remember The Corresponding Society’s first official meeting, attended by an impractical number of our friends and held in the biggest bedroom in the Bed-Stuy apartment. I remember I serendipitously met Bob Snyderman on the first day of school when he introduced himself after overhearing me telling somebody on the phone the first thing I was going to do in the city was go see the new Gus Van Sant movie. I remember the first verse poem I ever wrote was a rhyming satire called The Joke of Rape. I remember Richard Loranger taking very seriously the readings we held at Central Park’s Bethesda Angel (when we were freshman). I remember filming Bob recite a poem and filming Sweeney, shirtless, talking about Foucault. I remember when Zachary German read for us at the KGB Bar and then wanted to leave immediately. I remember the first time I saw our journal at St. Mark’s Bookshop. I remember reading Kenneth Koch freshman year, around when I decided to study fiction not poetry. I remember drawing a picture of Roland Barthes on the wall, which kept reappearing when we tried to paint it over. I remember I wanted to start a "salon" like Gertrude Stein. I remember when Bob Snyderman made paintings by hanging a canvas on his wall and stabbing it repeatedly with paint-smeared knives. I remember when Bob bought a violin, then decided to play it without formally learning it. I remember stealing bikes from Pratt and riding over the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember seeing Sweeney perform with his hardcore band at ABC No Rio. I remember Sweeney brought a coffeemaker to a party one night and couldn’t explain why. I remember he also would drink coffee in class from a big glass vase and everybody thought it was wine. I remember when our academic advisor, a recovering alcoholic, brought several dozen 40 bottles of malt liquor into our apartment, and we drank it all that night, and somehow it was all paid for by Knopf. I remember Bob became obsessed with this (huge) ratty, creepy doll named Dakota that he found somewhere (he put her in his fiction and plays, but his devotion began to concern us). I remember when Bob brought an entire tree into our apartment. I remember reading Moby-Dick on the subway on the way uptown. I remember eating hotdogs in a backyard and talking about Proust. I remember my favorite random present: a copy of Turco's Book of Forms from Mae Saslaw. I remember my academic advisor telling me he knew I thought I was smart because I understood Gertrude Stein, but I couldn't take an independent study on Joyce's Ulysses. I remember getting expelled from PS 122 for bad behavior at an after party. I remember when Bob observed Shabbat, but he cheated by leaving his room full of lit candles and keeping every door to our apartment unlocked so he could leave and get back inside. I remember the time Bob turned in some dead leaves for a critical theory assignment. I remember sitting on the street near Times Square with Sweeney and watching him as he ripped a book by Beckett in half, gave me a piece and put the other in his bag. I remember the year I was obsessed with Hamlet. I remember driving to Robert Frost’s house, but not going inside because an old lady was there charging five bucks per visitor. I remember walking fifteen minutes in the snow in the morning to study grammar. I remember almost the whole program was hung over in our Friday morning writer's forum because the salon was the night before. I remember Chanelle Bergeron stayed in a teepee in my living room one summer and almost everybody wrote a poem about her. I remember after reading in Providence, a Brown student asked me, “Are you gay?” I remember working in a library and listening to Philip Glass as I shelved books. I remember I wrote a story that won a contest at school, and the prize was a critique by Mary Gaitskill, and she hated my story, really loathed it, and was openly cruel about it. I remember Adrian Shirk, fiction writer, frustrated at rampant abuse of the title "poet," being a super loaded term and easy to exploit, and time was I agreed with her and preferred to think of myself as a "creative writer," but then I gave up again because I secretly wanted to be a Mythic Poet. I remember taking Bob and Sweeney to see the Richard Serra exhibit at the MoMA, trying to convince them I was applying minimalist processes in my poetry, then we sat in the sculpture garden and taped an interview while Sweeney smoked a cigarette. I remember when everybody would talk about Gender Trouble at parties and one girl named her dog Judith Butler. I remember issue 1 of Correspondence went fast because Bob sold copies in Central Park. I remember we called the kids who acted unruly at our salons “the groundlings.” I remember Josh Furst telling me the rules for writing were “live cheaply, don’t kill yourself, and write what hurts.” I remember when everybody but me went on tour for Correspondence and I convinced myself our cat had rabies (when they returned I found out Sweeney had been arrested). I remember Bruce Andrews was extremely particular about how the em-dashes looked in his poems for issue 2. I remember how the spine of issue 1 was accidentally backwards (nobody said anything). I remember our first business card had a misspelling (nobody said anything). I remember Anselm Berrigan approving vigorously of the self-publication in our journal, even sort of angry about people who think it's distasteful. I remember we were going to watch Basketball Diaries because we had that and Hook, but when we put it in the VHS player, we discovered it was really Freddy Got Fingered in the wrong box, but we watched it anyway, and I honestly thought it was a masterpiece. I remember finally reading John Ashbery. I remember the editors binding chapbooks together while watching Do the Right Thing. I remember having to meet with a disciplinarian at school after a production of one of Bob's plays was shut down for safety reasons. I remember when Bob did a play at St. Mark’s Church that also was forced to end prematurely (it never bothered him). I remember acting in a play by A. E. W. at the Bowery Poetry Club, yelling the line, “I gave you that kerosene to save you, not the baby!” I remember Jody Buchman began periodically conspiring to direct Waiting for Godot, staged outside on a huge mound of real cow shit. I remember nobody believed my insistence that "Godot" is always pronounced wrong. I remember we drove to the Cloisters to watch an outdoor production of Hamlet (everybody but me left early because it was terrible). I remember when Dave Swensen got us obsessed with Beethoven’s thirteenth string quartet. I remember the first play I wrote was ten acts long and featured no actual people, only furniture. I remember taking Bob to see Philip Glass at Carnegie Hall for his birthday. I remember trying disastrously to learn music theory (too much math). I remember memorizing the poem “The Rainbow,” by Gerard Manely Hopkins, and attempting to set it to music. I remember the editors trying to figure out what The Corresponding Society was principally about without writing a mission statement. I remember when we went out to buy new footwear and that somehow led to stealing a bagful of books by William S. Burroughs. I remember telling Sweeney all his favorite poets were gay. I remember how Greg Afinogenov would yell “Wisdom, let us attend!” to get people to shut up for readers at our salon. I remember sitting in a pile of trash near Columbus Circle and talking about Kafka.

Dead Letters

2010-06-15T21:41:00.005-04:00

Hello. As it appears, The Corresponding Society has taken an unannounced hiatus from this blog. Do not fear, it is only temporary. We’ve been living on a farm, writing poems on the Brooklyn Bridge, studying in Berlin, and making new chapbooks. So, busy. We will return to this poor neglected blog soon with a series of entries about our forthcoming chapbook line, “What Where.” Until then, if you are that rare creature who reads what we post here, you’re in luck. We’ve been posting essays and interviews here for years; there is a bunch of possibly distracting writing available in our archives in lieu of a recent update. For your convenience, here is a neat list of some of our articles you might like to peruse. These are some favorites, anyway, or the few anybody once said anything about. These poor things, so long ignored, should at least be mentioned again. And, again, the hiatus’ spell is waning.

Selections from the Archive
old & forgotten essays & miscellany of bygone years

On Why There is No Definition of a Hipster. A critical attempt at reading contemporary hipster culture (part of our ill-fated “hipster week” theme).

Richard Loranger, Mammal of Verse. A profile of the greatest poet you’ve never read (unless, of course, you've read our journal).

Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith. Kenny G talks about Warhol, the Internet, and why he hates creative writing programs.

The World Is Round and You Can Go on It Around and Around. Richard Loranger hosts Lonely Christopher in San Francisco.

Placing Rhapsody in Blue. Adrian Shirk, fiction writer, on her relationship to Gershwin.

Who Cares if You Read?. A poet’s argument against meaning, kind of. (In an article about a recent Supermachine reading in Brooklyn, this essay was cited as evidence that Lonely Christopher doesn’t believe in poetry.)

A Night at the Opera. Richard Foreman and John Zorn at the Ontological-Hysteric.

The Four Seasons. Robert Snyderman on Cy Twombly.

Irony’s Poetics. A convoluted and unfinished study on irony (also, the reason why the blog gets so many Google hits for the line “Like rain on your wedding day").

Why Meadow?. Lonely Christopher on the poetry of Robert Snyderman.

Interview with James Hannaham. Novelist James Hannaham discusses Hassidic Jews at gay bars, gays exorcisms at Baptist churches, and how he nearly ended up with a role on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

All Warhol. The problem of Andy Warhol, philosopher.

The Epistemology of Emo. What does it mean to be an “emo kid”?

Sentimentalist’s Complaint. New technology, such as the Kindle, threatens a stubborn attachment to the book as object (and also it ruins creepy subway fun).

Poetry Download

2010-05-27T18:52:00.000-04:00

For everybody who missed out on the tremendous reading --- featuring Hailey Higdon, Seth Landing, Lewis Freedman, Robert Snyderman, and Dorothea Lasky --- at Bookspace in Fishtown: fear not! New Mp3 technology will bring Philadelphia to you. A recording of the event is available for download right here! Have a nice day.

Bookspace

2010-05-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

The Corresponding Society is pleased to help announce a not-to-miss poetry event this weekend in Philadelphia:

5 POETS @ THE BOOKSPACE

OH MY!

FRIDAY

MAY 21

8:30 PM

LEWIS FREEDMAN
DOROTHEA LASKY
SETH LANDMAN
ROBERT SNYDERMAN
HAILEY HIGDON

@ the BookSpace

1113 Frankford Avenue

(just south of E. Girard Ave)

www.phillybookspace.com

(BYO and we’ll provide the poets)

BIOS:

LEWIS FREEDMAN recently found himself in Madison, WI and then quickly founded, along with Andy Gricevich, the _______-Shaped Reading Series. He is the author of The Third Word (WHAT TO US press) and most recently CATFISH PO' BOYS, published by Minutes Books.

DOROTHEA LASKY is the author of Black Life (Wave Books, 2010) and AWE (Wave Books, 2007), an educational text Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), and numerous chapbooks. She currently lives in New York City.

SETH LANDMAN lives in Denver, CO, and where he edits Invisible Ear and is a member of the collective, Agnes Fox Press. His chapbooks, Parker's Band and The Wild Hawk the Sea, were recently published by Laminated Cats and Minutes Books, respectively, and poems are forthcoming in Skein, Jubilat, The Boston Review, and other places.

ROBERT SNYDERMAN is a poet and playwright. He currently sustains himself by busking with a typewriter and sign that reads 'poems'. He is a founding member of The Corresponding Society, a small press and community in Brooklyn. He is one of the three authors of the newly released INTO (Seven Circlepress) and in July he will walk from southern Vermont onward to the North until.

HAILEY HIGDON lives in Philadelphia, PA where she teaches pre-kindergarten and runs the small, small, small press, WHAT TO US (press). She is originally from Nashville, Tennessee. Her newest small book, How To Grow Almost Everything, is forthcoming from Agnes Fox Press.

Proust/Furst

2010-05-13T12:48:00.002-04:00

This week we’re pleased to present answers to our version of the Proust Questionnaire provided by the brilliant Joshua Furst. Read it!

Introduction to Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst’s novel The Sabotage Café was named to the 2007 year-end best-of lists of the Chicago Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News and the Philadelphia City Paper, as well as being awarded the 2008 Grub Street Fiction Prize. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune said it “should not be missed by anyone who has an adolescent or has been one…The book is itself a kind of brick hurled at a Starbucks window, but much more dangerous in the end.”

His critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People, was published in 2003 and described by the Miami Herald as “a near magical collection.” The Los Angeles Times called it “Startling . . . a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of what it means to be a child. Or, more to the point, what it means to be human.” And the Times of London said "Any one of these stories is enough to break your heart. . . . Joshua Furst's debut is both enjoyable and important.”

His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, PEN America, Five Chapters and The New York Tyrant among many other places and given citations for notable achievement by The Best American Short Stories in 2005 and The O’Henry Awards in 2007.

He lives and teaches in New York City.

Joshua Furst Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Compassion…is this a virtue? Or is it just an uncommon kind of grace?

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Recklessness, vice and folly. These are also my least favorite qualities in a man. Men are frivolous creatures, in my experience.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Forgiveness (see above) and kindness.

Your chief characteristic.
Paranoia…but don’t take that to mean they’re not out to get me.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
The long conversations during which we can briefly convince ourselves that we hold the world, whole, between us…oh, and their willingness to pretend that my crazy is a kind of normal.

Your main fault.
Sentimentality

Your favorite occupation.
Getting it right.

Your idea of happiness.
A brief respite from fear.

Your idea of misery.
Surrender.

If not yourself, who would you be?
I’ve spent so long now pretending to be me that at this point I’m not convinced I could be anyone else if I wanted to.

Where would you like to live?
Far away from it all, right here in New York City.

Your favorite prose authors.
Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, Peter Handke, Joan Didion…ask me again tomorrow.

Your favorite poets.
Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Auden…does Dylan count?

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Ivan Karamazov

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Grace Paley’s Faith, Aurora Zogoiby from Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

Your favorite painters and composers.
And artists of other stripes? Painters: Kokoschka, Klee, Rothko, and of course Picasso. But then, also, Modigliani, Edward Keinholtz, Gordon Matta Clark
Composers: Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell

Your heroes in “real life.”
Abbie Hoffman, George Orwell, Emma Goldman, and all other delusional idealists who refuse to shut up when told they’re being childish.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Sanctimonious inquisitors like Savonarola, Joe McCarthy, Tipper Gore, and the rest of them…oh, and also, Hitler.

Your favorite names.
Do I have a favorite name? I’m not convinced I do.

What do you hate the most?
Mediocrity and those who strive for it.

What military event do you admire the most?
The Long March, the Storming of the Bastille…but of course, I’m not thrilled by the events that followed either of these great irruptions of idealism.

What reform do you admire the most?
I’m not sure I understand the question. You mean like the Emancipation Proclamation? If so, I’ll take that one, and you should too. But in general, I’m more inclined toward revolt than reform.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
A lack of self-consciousness.

How do you wish to die?
Having done something meaningful.

What is your present state of mind?
Despairing.

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

Your favorite motto.
The Lord said to Joshua, be bold, be brave, for I the Lord, your God, am with you always… not really a motto, but words to live by…

Feed Us

2010-05-10T20:15:00.007-04:00

A Triptych of Small but Nice Info Re This Journal, Terminally Featuring Big News Re Same
The journal being Correspondence.

Re no. 3

The biannual journal of The Corresponding Society, Correspondence, is sort of biannual, it really is, and will be even closer continuing; issue no. 3 is newly released (well, March, it’s still fresh) and deftly represents a delicious flux of communities and conversations amongst writers… writers who are kind of sometimes home in Brooklyn, but found maybe also in Berlin, Cambridge, Fife, Portland, Quebec, elsewhere (depending on the season). The editorial intention is to collect works of formal intelligence that spell out a section of the rough and rapturous psychogeography being written through today; the complete diversity of everything else about it, outside craft, has been remarked upon elsewhere. There is no theme bridging our pages except the euphony of poetics in conversation. no. 3 is aware, it is sentient, it will kill again if left alone: Correspondence no. 3 is still available for purchase! right here through our Online Store (or at a hard-to-remember select number of booksellers sprinkled bashfully around North America). We just thought we would remember you this because we like the issue so much so much.

If you are familiar with what we’re up to here…

If you are familiar with what we’re up to here with our sort-of-nominally-sort-of-really punctually released biannual literary journal (bi-ish?), you then know about the balance of community and discovery we try to achieve in every issue. We publish ourselves (we’re participants, not arbiters, in this adventure); also writers who have been involved in our various machinations localized and abroad (from whom we desire badly to see new work, maybe those whom we want to represent in installments over time and issues); unfamiliar voices, recent friends too… reaching us through various channels, networks, parlors, bookstores, and literary instances; a few established writers, the kind you already like like we do, admire, copy, and argue over, the kind we want operating in our architecture; not least, we are found by perfect strangers, wanting their work to flutter into the maw of our open submissions period (a pile of text accumulates thus, from which we are apt to discover surprises and excitements unearthed from the monster heap, de profundis). The editorial process --- featuring a slightly changing group of about seven equally ranked writers of almost violently unique temperaments and textual interests, plus a remotely communicating international editor located in another country (for whatever reason, maybe custom by now) --- is drawn out, articulate, weird, passionate, dramatic, and exhausting. Each editor reads every single submission and the arguments, debates, and compromises over the content continue for weeks. Injury is constant. We don’t visit the hospital: we just put some gauze on it, a wound, and throw ourselves back into the fray. Anyway, the open submissions aspect is very important to the eclectic, happy discursive depth we try for in a total issue. An importance is placed on giving each contributor enough space to actually present a representative selection of work, rather than allowing many many names but a few pages, so we’re able to publish some importantly unruly things, unfit for skinnier periodicals, and this practice withal lets even unfamiliar writers we want with us, maybe a find via unsolicited submission, the serious real estate to smash some brains open on the sharp corner of the alphabet.

Now for no. 4

If you did not read the middle part, it was a friendly warm-up for this announcement, in case some readers like a paragraph or so of related but kind of unnecessary content before the big news. Here is the announcement tucked in the third paragraph instead of just listed large and boring upfront or advertised in the back of Poets & Writers. Anyway, this is important, we feel, for you to know: The Corresponding Society is now accepting submissions for issue no. 4 of Correspondence; the deadline is August 15, 2010. This might mean no. 4 is going to arrive on schedule, sans major delay, barring crisis. All the instructions you might require to send work for consideration in no. 4 are on the related Submissions Webpage. What we want, how we want it, all of that is there. Any additional questions can be directed to our general email address. We look forward to finding some work we would never have otherwise run into but that fits perfectly into our evil plan (as outlined above and elsewhere). We are especially looking for more submissions of fiction, hybrid things, critical essays, and shorter dramatic texts. We are always a hungry throat for poetry. Ok, so we’ve said it.

Into the Document

2010-05-05T21:50:00.004-04:00

Into Was to Begin
by Lonely Christopher

NOTE: Into is a new volume of four long-form poems from three poets: “Face” by Christopher Sweeney, “The Mountain” by Robert Snyderman, “The House of There Is” & “The Great Bird Will Take the Universe” by Lonely Christopher. Into is a Seven CirclePress release and features a critical introduction by Greg Afinogenov. More details available here. Here below, contributor LC remarks personally on the project…

Into was assembled erratically, the process spontaneously providential. It’s a thematic confluence of a triad of inextricably related unrelated young poets. We three went into Into out of a consanguinity architected from poets’ communities’ conversations that branch and blossom with weird resonance. No genesis in commissioned project frames the textual narrative full enough here: the editorial anti-process, an amalgamation of intuits and accidents, really groped into being as the conspiracy of a loose association of writers/critics/friends who read and reshaped the cause. The germ was planted by publisher Seth Jani: he requested a document from Robert Snyderman. Snyderman, opaque and gnostic, brought instead, eventually, a giant messy mountain.

The triad of Into went advertising the object upon its release at the end of April; we growled about in a smelly car, highways between locations --- our manuscript tucked in dizzy grasps --- and incited conversations with unfamiliar communities as the word spilled, shared, out with theirs. That we three would publish ourselves thus and in said manner describe our poetics together pushing the tangle through but-discovered contexts… that this would be feels as apposite to our story as it does tending to unruly gurgles. How it speaks in funny gestures: those of all who navigate the slough with us, searching for the mountain, hear.

Principal in Into’s allowance must be Seth; his Seven CirclePress enabled the text and bravely faced it when it came delivered in monstrous shape. The form of this mutated from the promise of a title, for release, from Robert alone, the self-confessed vagabond newly escaped from an undergraduate writing program (where his thesis was a poem cycle, Cloth, terminating in an early iteration of “The Mountain”), thence stalked off to roam North America. Robert had importantly studied poetry closely with fellow Pratt poet Sweeney, he writing “Face” concurrently and at length, in the institutionalized place, the same school where Lonely Christopher was and won the thesis prize for fiction that annum. The relationship of their individual fixtures, and consequent rude and awesome branching, has been treated by Greg Afinogenov, historian and conspirator, who interpreted/linked the valences gauzed round their poetics and those of proxy corresponding kids. His extensive attention, plus critical documenting, authorized him in introducing Into by way of setting the stage for its unfolding. This here rant hints nothing at the helpful clarity and skill in that intro essay in Into.

Christian Hawkey, poet/translator who Sweeney and Rob studied Celan under (who we all withal sat with in a tutorial called “Writing Machines”), became Into’s shepherd. He advised vast aspects of the editorial process, conversing re and critiquing generously/thoroughly the matter’s gamut. When he held the glossy final object in standing for its introduction, at our Brooklyn release, he evinced his mentorish skepticism (+ wisdom) in admitting he didn’t initially like our title. (The title was the subject of heaps of authorial dread, nothing being resolved, until Into sensibly materialized, only later revealing its resonance.) Christian took the singular preposition as positing a movement toward an interior, a delving into, initially. His eventual conclusion, jumpy doubt becalmed, changed agreeably: Into is not an inward direction, a lunge profundis --- it is not movement into enclosing… rather an indication of contact and division. If that is, then “into” is more lateral, even centrifugal, than inwardly plunging. Thus the “into” of Into was located.

The four poems in Into are all treatments of existential problems; that’s my fuzzy conclusion, anyway. We weren’t writing together, or even always talking to each other, when separately suffering the shapes of these things to final form. The poems weren’t written into this book, but drawn, magnetized, thither as an aftermath. Greg reads the results as poetic constructs gaping asunder, wound-like, sans significant bridges between weeping elements. How identify these retarded “bridges” absent over each yawning problematic? My summary following is probably weakly facile, but a trace of the argument at least… Sweeney’s mythological stance mourns threadbare truth, existence diluting faith, finally to be salvaged or sunk in muddy drapes of temporality; Rob’s ecstatic mountain explodes definition, writing itself obliterated by experience as its actualization; my work might be like the pathetic song puked down the echo chamber of vacancy where subject and text fail each other. Maybe.

In Sweeney’s deftly composed, formal miracle of a poem, “Face,” there is a romance of attempting to distinguish values of experience, hold something --- what is being (a kind of awe) in the searing brightness of its uncertainty? The drama unfurls jerkily, language carried at a staggered clip, words floating insolent in a puddle of the page “into time, / looming.” The holiness of place warps, scarefully, and the threat of the wrong place curdles the verse: “place constricts / obliquely[.]” Sweeney fights, implores --- whatever you have, hold, even if what’s held is pain… it is owned pain then. Is the singularity of place possible? will shapes resolve around poetry or will a cruel existential wave make scud of this desire?

Robert’s work has always been more impervious to description than Sweeney’s mannered verse or my own conceptual operating. Greg has it his poetry wakes you hurried in the night, confused of/in place. Christian posits the mountain from “The Mountain” as Into’s central metaphor. The Mountain is a part of the whole and the hole within the parts. “The mountain is an annex,” Rob writes; he writes, “The Mountain must be confronted.” The device is unstable --- the metaphors, mixed (The Mountain is: monolithic and shattered; figurative and a reachable; there, a generic noun, here, a specific name), constitution scrambled --- but, whatever/however this Mountain reads it must be confronted. It is written. “Time writes.” This poem is a confrontation of the mountain that is the Mountain: the contradiction of the idea is the brain of its poetry. Is the Mountain magisterial and/or sinister, what funds its power, is it a consequence and/or an action, does it keep place or eat place, are we going into it or departing? The declarations of this impossible journey spell how, says Greg, “the way in is also the way out.” The document changes into the Mountain.

What place is there then for my terminal poems, lastly drafted into Into and compositionally technically divorced from the formalism of “Face” and, differently, the prophetic depravity of “The Mountain”? This pair of procedural works came from a period of appropriation as textual (re)negotiating. In both, a found source (a sermon and Freud, respectively) are split open, through erasure, letting out a rhetorical demon ever before dormant in the ideological subconscious of the text. The sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” minus the morality, is left its stark spinal secret, turning into an existential harassment of place. Sinners’ hell turns into texts’ hell: insignificance (“to be gone / is”). The final poem, “The Great Bird Will Take the Universe” (from Freud), queers the normative code of the source, problematizes its pulsing rhetoric, thereby opens into allowance to be destroyed by the machine of its title, our great bird, another mountain, a metaphor for the unrecoverable singularity, the place achieved --- and the way the great bird swallows meaning celebrates itself as a suicide bomber inside identity’s fabric. “The universe forces her way into experience.” Boom.

Taking Into out into the little world was scary for this poet. The ghost-thread hung around the four entities inside seemingly so fragile as to read tenuously by a frustrated audience. We’re going on about a year since the poems in Into were being drafted as uncommon projects by three peers --- close, we, but nevertheless absorbed fully in our own creative idioms. The thematic positions and formal mechanisms demonstrated by each member of this published triad are so dense we haven’t done with interrogating each other re the other poems --- my reading of “The Mountain” particularly unfinished, my view of Sweeney’s belief systems always shifting. We packed a lot of study into these poems; the seriousness rattling around in our skulls after four years of vocational development is plain in it all, an over-ever-obvious symptom; they’re not, these, always the friendliest, poem-wise in approach. They are the charts of our obsessions, overlapping as they have despite our refusals of correlative pursuits, artistically. Maybe this all reads unforgivably pretentious, and then I am daft, and this is all a receipt for postured embarrassments. I worry how publishable the triad is, if we can walk into a situation prepared to take the time to hear us at any volume. Yet, on the road (two weeks past at time of writing), beset as I was with doubt compounding with sickness of traveling daily through those states… even though I was moodily cynical then, when Robert got and stood in front of whoever was generously assembled for the reading, and when he began not to repeat but perform the text, act out The Mountain reading “The Mountain,” newly each time too --- the animation of the poem came flickering out of him so, it put back in me the amazed way I read my friends’ verse; it reminded me of where we came from and why we did this like this.

Chapbook Festival

2010-05-01T16:58:00.002-04:00

The Annual Chapbook Festival is upon us, taking place May 3 and 4 at the CUNY Graduate Center, and this year The Corresponding Society is pleased to announce our participation in the festivities.

Firstly, The Corresponding Society will have a table at the book fair, which runs both days from 11:30am to 7pm. We will be displaying titles from our first chapbook series, “No Know,” discussing the soon-to-be-released new series, “What Where,” and promoting Correspondence and related titles. Also, Robert Snyderman will be on hand with his popular Poem Shop project.

Monday morning Lonely Christopher, “What Where” series curator, will present a workshop titled “Producing Chapbooks for Poets”; he will be joined by Rachel Levitsky, of Belladonna, and Brenda Iijima, of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The workshop will occur at the Graduate Center from 10am-11:30am; it is free, but registration is required (see official site).

Finally, David Swensen, co-editor of Correspondence and author of the “No Know” series chapbook Elegies for A.R. Ammons will make an appearance during the marathon reading of chapbook poets. That’s happening on the second day of the marathon, Tuesday, during the 4pm-5pm set.

The marathon reading is free and open to the public. The full calendar is available for download on the official website, but here are a few highlights (or at least the readers we’re really excited about):

May 3

3-4pm
H_NGM_N: Ben Mirov
5-6pm
Forklift, Ohio: Amy King
6-7pm
Ugly Duckling Presse: Dorothea Lasky

May 4

2-3pm
Flying Guillotine Press: Steven Karl & Angela Veronica Wong
4-5pm
Small Anchor Press: Joseph Mcelroy
5-6pm
Poets Wear Prada: Austin Alexis & Michael Montlack

The Corresponding Society is very happy to be so involved in the Chapbook Festival this year. We hope to see you there!

Proust/Hannaham

2010-04-26T17:58:00.001-04:00

This week’s Proust Questionnaire contestant is an author who has been previously interviewed by The Corresponding Society. See below,

Introduction to James Hannaham

James Hannaham, writer. Of what? Well, his stories have appeared in The Literary Review, Open City and Nerve, and one has shown up in One Story. He has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Blue Mountain Center, Chateau de Lavigny, and Fundacion Valparaiso. He teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and lives near there. His first novel, God Says No came out through McSweeney's Books in late May of 2009. An excerpt from the book appears in McSweeney’s 31, which looks a lot like a yearbook, binding-wise.

He has also written reviews and profiles for The Village Voice, Spin, Blender, Out, Us, New York, The Barnes & Noble Review, and once, circa 1997, a tiny sidebar in the front section of The New York Times Magazine. He was on staff in the culture department of Salon for most of 2008. Then the crash came, and with it, layoffs. He's been okay since then--thanks for asking. Starting work on several new projects, applying for grants and fellowships and jobs, etc.

He is a founder and former member of Elevator Repair Service.

James Hannaham Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Of my own: Patience. Of others: Compassion.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Bashfulness. Flirtatiousness.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Wit. Forthrightness.

Your chief characteristic.
Mysteriousness. Inscrutability.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Open-mindedness.

Your main fault.
I often think I’m probably right. Though I’m willing to believe I’m full of shit.

Your favorite occupation.
Does novelist still count as an occupation?

Your idea of happiness.
Time to write plus financial support.

Your idea of misery.
Being stuck under a corporate glass ceiling at an unethical, creepy organization.

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

Where would you like to live?
Earth, please. Other planets seem so inhospitable!

Your favorite prose authors.
Halldór Laxness, Lydia Millet, Yukio Mishima, Richard Wright, etc etc etc.

Your favorite poets.
Ron Padgett, Marianne Moore, Emily D., Robinson Jeffers, Stephen Dunn, Sylvia Plath, Susan Briante, Patricia Smith, Jackson Mac Low, etc etc etc

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Portnoy, Charles Kinbote, Ferdinand the Bull, Don Quixote

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Lily Bart, Sethe, Portia (I know it’s drama), Mitsuko (from Masumura’s film Manji), Kazu (from Mishima’s After the Banquet)

Your favorite painters and composers.
Kara Walker, Larry Walker, James Rosenquist, Marcel Duchamp, Gary Hill, Caravaggio, Vija Celmins, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Adrian Piper, Beethoven, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Andrew May, etc etc etc

Your heroes in “real life.”
Brendan Moran, my mother, Kara Walker, Larry Walker, Daniel Clymer, Shaffiq Essajee, Eric Sawyer.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Anyone who has killed a lot of people. Whether or not they regret it.

Your favorite names.
Lloyd. Floyd. Kyle. Lyle. Anything Italian: Artemesia Gentilleschi, Fra Fillipo Lippi, Mariangela Melato, Giancarlo Gianinni—heck, even Silvio Berlusconi, though I despise the guy himself.

What do you hate the most?
Cruelty mixed with indifference.

What military event do you admire the most?
The US Army going to Haiti to help earthquake victims.

What reform do you admire the most?
The New Deal or The Great Society. Or reform school.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
I wish I could shit legal tender. Is that natural?

How do you wish to die?
I don’t wish to die. You needn’t beg the question.

What is your present state of mind?
Relatively calm. Normal.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Snobbery. Love me some snobs. Where my snobs at? Holla!

Your favorite motto.
Do unto others—then split!

Play Records

2010-04-18T20:26:00.000-04:00

We have discovered some new media related to recent dramatic endeavors of two familiar poet-dramatists, viz. Robert Snyderman and Lonely Christopher, who have both collaborated with others for productions of their own scenarios for the stage.
The first item is an audio recording of an event put on at Philadelphia’s Mostly Books. Robert Snyderman had previously presented the play he created --- with Lisandre Whitty, Gabrielle Doyon-Hanson, Chanelle Bergeron, and Christopher Sweeney --- as part of “The Institutionalized Theater presents a Night of Superstition and Intellect,” a run of three short plays at Red Hook’s Jalopy Theatre. Shortly thereafter The Fingertips of the Vital Blackbirds: A Ballad traveled to Philadelphia for a challenging performance in a bookstore (much different, logistically, from the theater it premiered in). The event also featured a reading by Ish Klein, author of Union!. The recording of this entire event can be found here!

Secondly, a video recording of the latest play by Lonely Christopher is now online; the play was given two performances in Alphabet City as part of the “Way of the Word: Poems to Plays” program, a collaboration between Republic Worldwide and Everywhere Theater. The play is titled Pages from a Course in General Linguistics; it was directed by Teddy Nicholas; the sound design was by Brendan Byrne; and the cast included T. Ramon Campbell (A), Tricia Cramer (B), and Kristopher W. Imperati (Z). To watch the videotaped version of the encore presentation, find it here!

Into is Out!

2010-04-13T17:35:00.005-04:00

My, my: are those of The Corresponding Society ever busy these days! We officially launched issue 3 of Correspondence, magnificent journal that, early March (at the KGB Bar)… and have been running around ever since, distract with projects of all sorts. Richard Loranger and Lonely Christopher celebrated the issue three release with a reading in San Francisco’s Mission; we hosted a queer birthday party, moderated by the wonderful Rachel Levistky, at Unnameable Books; our associates from The Institutionalized Theater put on a run of plays, in Red Hook, from Correspondence contributors; Robert Snyderman took his collaborative play to Philadelphia; our friends at Republic Worldwide produced another run of one-acts featuring dramatic work from two members of TCS; Lonely Christopher went to Denver with Ryan Doyle May to represent The Corresponding Society at the annual AWP conference and book fair (sharing a table with our compatriots from Small Anchor and Flying Guillotine presses); and now comes even more giant news!

Seven CirclePress is proud to announce the publication of a new collection of long form poems from three of the founding members of The Corresponding Society: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, and Lonely Christopher. The collection, Into, brings together four poems by these three young writers; four poems related in enigmatic and resonant ways, thematically and emotionally, while remaining utterly different and illustrative of the unique approaches of each poet. Together this triad have forged a wild, esoteric, deconstructionist, archetypal dream-rant that simultaneously evokes and destroys, embraces and rejects, the root forces of our Western literary tradition. It is a book of deepening, each page representing a further step into the spaces of the world. Featuring a thorough and thoughtful introduction by scholar and comrade Greg Afinogenov.

Christian Hakwey (Citizen Of, VENTRAKL) says of this project: “INTO is a book of three first books, each composed by three authors, and it constitutes a travelogue and trialogue of possible approaches, paths, procedures, all to discover the mountain, and how it takes—to do this—the place of a poem. it is also a book about place: the place of the page, one's place in the history of pages, and the absence of place that defines poetry's essential openness. jabès called this absence love. snyderman calls it the mountain. sweeney, face. and lonely christopher: earth trembles / destroy nothing /hold it back // place is the sentence."

Into is now available to preorder through the Seven CirclePress website; it will officially be released on April 30. In the meantime, to celebrate and promote this volume, authors Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, and Lonely Christopher are hitting the road with a carful of advance copies of Into; beginning on the 14th, they embark on a reading tour that will bring together this current poetic undertaking, the machinations of The Corresponding Society, and communities of poets across the East and into the North! The poets kick this thing off in Brooklyn, returning to Unnameable Books (the best bookstore in NYC, incidentally), before running into a gaggle of New Philadelphia poets in Fishtown, taking on Providence, tearing it up at Harvard, enjoying the hospitality of Nathanial Otting in Massachusetts (in a joint launch featuring Brian Foley), before finally headed up to Canada to finish in Montreal! Below are the details of the tour, insofar as they have been able to be assembled, in case you or somebody you know is in the vicinity of one of these not-to-miss happenings:

Seven CirclePress, in Association with The Corresponding Society, presents “Into is Out!” an adventure in poetics and independent publishing!

Venue: Unnameable Books
Location: 600 Vanderbilt, Brooklyn
Date: 14 April
Time: 8pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, Adam Tobin

Venue: BookSpace
Location: 1113 Frankford Avenue, Fishtown (Philadelphia)
Date: 15 April
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, Adrian Shirk, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Jamie Townsend, Marion Bell, Gregory Bem, Carlos Soto Roman, Sarah Heady, Brandon Holmquest, & Hailey Higdon

Venue: Ada Books
Location: 717 Westminster St (Providence, RI)
Date: 16 April
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher

Venue: Gato Rojo Coffee Shop (Lehman Hall)
Location: Harvard University
Date: 17 April
Time: 5:30-7:30pm
Featured Readers: Gregory Afinogenov, Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher, special guests

Venue: The Red & White House
Location: 39 West St (Northampton, MA)
Date: 18 April
Time: 3-4pm
Featured Readers: Brian Foley, Christopher Sweeney, Robert Snyderman, Lonely Christopher

Special Note: The final stop on the Into tour will be Montreal, on Tuesday the 20th --- featured readers will include Robert and Sweeney (Lonely doesn’t have a passport) and possible special guests; details on this exciting extra-national reading will be made available presently on our events page!

Proust/Afinogenov

2010-04-12T03:02:00.002-04:00

This week the enigmatic Greg Afinogenov discloses his innermost by answering our version of the Proust Questionnaire. See,

Briefly Introducing Greg Afinogenov

Greg Afinogenov is a graduate student in an unknown discipline at an undisclosed location [history, Harvard ---ed.]. He is an editor of Correspondence and has published translations and essays

Greg Afinogenov Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Perspective.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Subtlety.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Precision.

Your chief characteristic.
Uncertainty.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Sangfroid.

Your main fault.
Self-delusion.

Your favorite occupation.
Omphaloskepsis.

Your idea of happiness.
Progress.

Your idea of misery.
Stagnation.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Peter the Great.

Where would you like to live?
Wherever you go, there you are.

Your favorite prose authors.
Musil, Sterne, Cortazar, Dovlatov.

Your favorite poets.
Tu Fu, Alexander Pope, John Ashbery (?).

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Fabrizio from The Charterhouse of Parma, but I don't remember why. Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities. Zhuge Liang from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Ayn Rand.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Hubert Robert, not applicable.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Peter the Great (?), Georges Brassens.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
John Locke.

Your favorite names.
Helmut, Elodie.

What do you hate the most?
Self-delusion.

What military event do you admire the most?
Jan Zizka's campaigns against the Holy Roman Empire (15th century).

What reform do you admire the most?
The American Revolution.

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

How do you wish to die?
Quickly.

What is your present state of mind?
Anxious.

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

Your favorite motto.
"inter faeces et urinam nascimur" or "parturient montes, nascitur riduculus mus"

Poems to Plays

2010-04-03T14:06:00.002-04:00

from our friends at Republic Worldwide:

Way of the Word: Poems to Plays

April 5th, 2010
@ Bar On A
170 Avenue A, NYC

The first installment of REPUBLIC Worldwide presents: Way of the Word featured readings by poets inspired by timeless thinkers such as Saussure, Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. In an attempt to expound on the creative vision and unique interpretations of these renown masters of language, three of those original poems from Way of the Word have been transformed into three one act plays by the of the original authors.

Produced by Marissa Forbes and directed by the founding members of Everywhere Theatre Group, Way of the Word: Poems to Plays, promises to be a unique and entertaining evening of poetic theater beginning with Lonely Christopher's adaptation of "For Example" into "Pages from a Course in General Linguistics" directed by Teddy Nicholas, performed by T. Ramon Campbell, Tricia Cramer, and Kristopher W. Imperati, with sound by Brendan Bryne; followed by Marissa Forbes' "Scrabble (or Nietzsche)", directed by Chase Voorhees, performed by Dan Whalen and Mary Hynes, concluding with "Big Talk" by Katie Przybylski, directed by Leah Winkler, performed by David Wienhiemer, Nikki Dillion, Rachel Pearl, and Gary Ferrer.

Doors open at 8pm, performances begin at 8:30. The evening will conclude with a meet and greet with REPUBLIC Worldwide, the playwrights/poets, performers, and directors.

Way of the Word's first poetry anthology, featuring the poems transformed into plays and poems from around the nation will be available for purchase online and at the door for $10. Portions of the proceeds will be donated to Reading Excellence and Discovery (READ), a foundation that promotes literacy by pairing qualified high school tutors with elementary students who demonstrate below grade level reading skills.

Drink specials are provided by Bar On A from 8pm until 9pm. Bar On A (or B.O.A.) is located at 170 Avenue A, between 10th and 11th Streets, NYC.

For more information about Way of the Word, Everywhere Theatre Group, READ or Republic Worldwide please contact Jason Voegele or Marissa Forbes at info@republicworldwide.com, or call 443-528-6761.

Proust/May

2010-03-31T18:31:00.003-04:00

This week’s Proust Questionnaire contestant is a new member of the Corresponding Society, Ryan Doyle May, who just read with us last week and has a chapbook forthcoming from our What Where series. Answers below!

Meet Ryan Doyle May

Ryan Doyle May's work has appeared in Almagre Literary Journal, Guilty As Charged, Bombay Gin, and Ganymede. His chapbook, The Anatomy of Gray is forthcoming on Corresponding Society Press. He has MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and blogs at thereckoningroom.blogspot.com.

Ryan Doyle May Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Humility.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Weakness.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Violence.

Your chief characteristic.
Bangs.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Loyalty.

Your main fault.
Procrastination.

Your favorite occupation.
The business of words.

Your idea of happiness.
Depends on how much I have written.

Your idea of misery
Creative impotence

If not yourself, who would you be?
I have never been myself.

Where would you like to live?
In a pillow book

Your favorite prose authors.
Bhanu Kapil, Margaurite Duras, Milan Kundera, Anais Nin

Your favorite poets.
Anne Sexton, Federico Garcia Lorca, Akilah Oliver, Anne Carson

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Odysseus, Humbert Humbert, The Little Prince

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Ava, Anna Karina, Sabina (Nin’s Sabina)

Your favorite painters and composers.
Andrew Wyeth, Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eric Satie

Your heroes in “real life.”
Bhanu Kapil

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Hitler and Dale Peck.

Your favorite names.
Symphony.

What do you hate the most?
Indifference.

What military event do you admire the most?
I wouldn’t call it admiration.

What reform do you admire the most?
Reform is another word for stagnation. Revolt!

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
I would like the ability to switch gender at will.

How do you wish to die?
I wish to die like the sun.

What is your present state of mind?
Red.

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

Your favorite motto.
“Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.”

Two Happenings

2010-03-25T20:36:00.001-04:00

The following two events are not to miss:

The Corresponding Society Presents a Birthday Party

Saturday, March 27
7-9pm
at Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave (at St. Marks), Brooklyn

This is a birthday party. There will be cake; the cake might be an inedible metaphor. There will be a triad of queer writers. There will be a confusion of forms, a conversation in problems, a bunch of shapes with sharp edges but lacking boundaries. The Corresponding Society presents a fun time in the basement of a bookstore, a queer party of documents on Lonely Christopher’s birthday, a parade of monsters and glamour galore. Let them eat the alphabet.

Featured Readers:

Marc Andreottola has been published in Lifted Brow, Ganymede, Killing the Buddha, 2010 Wilde Stories, K48, Dennis Cooper’s anthology of new writers, Userlands, and elsewhere. He had a play in the 2008 NY Fringe Festival that Time Out NY called “sick and bizarre”. He has an CDR of his electronic music being released by the Houston label, Disaro, under the name, Fostercare. He also does occult video art, which has been shown in Brooklyn, France and Minneapolis.

Ryan Doyle May's work has appeared in Almagre Literary Journal, Guilty As Charged, Bombay Gin, and Ganymede. His chapbook, The Anatomy of Gray is forthcoming on Corresponding Society Press. He has MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and blogs at thereckoningroom.blogspot.com.

Lonely Christopher is the birthday boy.

With! Master of ceremonies Rachel Levitsky (Under the Sun, Neighbor) and other birthday surprises!

The Institutionalized Theater Presents an Evening of Superstition and Intellect

3 New Plays! 3 Nights only!

The Jalopy Theater
315 Columbia Street
Brooklyn

"Reverie of the Succubus" by Jody Buchman
"Endymion Dreams the Moon" by Lonely Christopher
"Fingertips of the Vital Blackbirds: A Ballad" by Robert Snyderman et al.

March 28, 8pm
March 29, 7pm
March 30, 8pm
$5

Three new plays by the founding members of The Institutionalized Theater. The works share a commonality in the exploration of poetics, consciousness, superstition and intellect, but differ greatly in aesthetic and function.

The first, "Reverie of a Succubus," by Jody Buchman stars a castrated witch doctor. Passion, delirium and magic are confronted in this hallucinated poem. This play stars Jody Buchman as Pretty, and Lauren Buxten as the Succubus.

"Endymion Dreams the Moon" by Lonely Christopher is the second play. In this play some winsome teen poet insomniac (Andy Egelhoff) likes writing verse in the margin of wakefulness and dreams but lately can’t get a grasp on his surroundings as a pushy stranger (Simon Dooley) arrives memorializing his good looks and refusing to leave him alone. The stranger pronounces on matters of temporality, love, youth, and beauty, but might be a stalker obsessed with the confused kid. The truth threatens to emerge in unlikely places: a dream, outer space, and a hospital room in New Jersey.

Lisandre Whitty and Robert Snyderman wrote and will direct "Fingertips of the Vital Blackbirds: A Ballad" The Vital Blackbirds will be a drawing and a map of notes. Noisy souls within mute consciousness. Will take place within a traveler’s satchel. Will be the worn of the travel-worn satchel. Tales told from first-hand and second-hand experience. Will be a resistance to patience and to impatience. Will be North American. Will tell of a journey that did not end. The play features Actors/Musicians: Gabrielle Doyon-Hanson, Fareed Sajan, Chanelle Bergeron, Lisandre Whitty and Robert Snyderman

The Institutionalized Theater was founded in the year 2007 by Jody Buchman, Lonely Christopher, and Robert Snyderman. The concept behind the project was to provide a venue for young creative writers to explore a theatrical grammar developed from their emerging poetics and formal perspectives. The company was born at the Pratt Institute and operated turbulently under that academic rubric through several on-campus productions that became instant scandals and celebrations. Institutionalized programs have also appeared at the Bowery Poetry Club (including Today’s Vengeance by Robert Snyderman; Slump Boat Sway by A.E. Wilson; Retardo and Gay Play 1 by Lonely Christopher), the Ontological-Hysteric (Sleep Shit by Robert Snyderman), and other venues (I Am Happy and Gay Play 2 by Lonely Christopher). This evening of superstition and intellect marks the first time all three founding members have directed plays for the same event.

More info here.

Writing After Jameson

2010-03-21T18:31:00.004-04:00

Mae Saslaw is a contributor to and friend of The Corresponding Society.

“An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spacial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”
-Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism

What I love about Jameson’s writing is the way his logic carries and keeps momentum. For Jameson, every argument deserves space to match its complexity; it is not worthwhile to begin an exploration, discover that it takes you someplace mired and unpleasant, and then back out of the fight. The paragraph quoted above could not abide any part of it replaced with ellipses, and I regret not having the patience nor real estate to post a full two pages of his text. That said, this paragraph describes a compelling challenge, and it’s one that I have decided to take on. I’m currently in the very (very) early stages of my first novel after writing short fiction for several years. As I start the project, I’m taking as much time as I need to think about what I’m doing and why, less in the sense of plot and more in the sense of politics. Writing after Jameson requires at least two objectives:
1)Regarding content, of course I must produce something that answers his questions: Is the new political art possible? And, how does one achieve a “breakthrough” beyond postmodernism without resorting to futile hybridization or, worst of all, pastiche?
2)Aesthetically, it is not an option to be anything other than exhaustive. We have seen before what exhaustive fiction looks like—and it can be incredibly beautiful in the right hands—but what do I mean by “exhaustive”? The purpose of describing, to the last, every chink in the wall is a transparent one; the critical reader immediately recognizes the familiar tack and takes the cue to start reading for line work and watching out for the buried, devastating clauses. But what I am talking about is something else. The details are allowed to get exhausted, drawn out, perhaps boring at times, but what is vital is that the story itself, its characters, leave out nothing. This is a fine line. The added difficulty here is to stay clear and concise at the same time. Perhaps the breakthrough we seek has something to do with an abandonment of writerly distance.

But the goals themselves are not yet clear. It may be obvious that the duty of a certain kind of writer is to be ambitious beyond one’s influences, to attempt a dreadful and (I imagine) totally unsatisfying form of transcendence in which one kills one’s heroes and teachers. I don’t believe that is the best approach, and it is not entirely mine. My own duty, as I see it, is to answer for my particular historical moment, to bring to light its products and lay bare its every intricacy. (I’ve been thinking a lot about generational issues, how one generation unfailingly criticizes its successors for their ignorance, their lack of taste, etc. Perhaps a side effect of this age-old social phenomenon is that it fuels the art of the so-called ignorant, who, for their own self-centered psychological reasons, must prove their parents wrong. I mean, duh?) That said, Jameson’s articulations of exactly what my particular historical moment entails and implies about my country’s chronic amnesia and about our cultural future provide a compelling set of questions that can only be answered in art. Criticism has great potential, and I practice it just as much as fiction, but at a certain point, someone must make something to be criticized. Perhaps this is the breakthrough, the direction in which art must go.

It’s almost easier to think of beginning a novel in the shadow of theory, as opposed to the shadow of my favorite authors. It’s easier because I don’t have to worry as much about imitating voice, about coming off as derivative, about “paling in comparison” if that means anything. It’s harder because the framework is far boggier: I don’t know what Jameson wants in a protagonist, or a plot line, or how heavy-handed he wants his politics. I know that I don’t want to write science fiction for my own personal, admittedly snobbish reasons, though most non-writers I talk to express some confusion as to why I don’t write science fiction (to which I have been known to take vocal offense). The last question is the hardest to answer: Jameson points out, time and again, that postmodern art fails (and this is, sometimes, one if its defining characteristics) when it becomes somehow politically apolitical, meaning that the argument we see on the surface goes no further, addresses no problems beyond itself. This is the “tampon in the teacup” category of artwork, which so many people think about first when they consider art today, and which us intellectual wankers complain about because such bad art ruins our reputation. (What we deserve to acknowledge at such times is that we are, on some level, concerned for our reputation; we long for an aesthetic universality that a few artists actively work against, and perhaps we deserve to be commended for that. Of course, who would care enough to commend us? Poor us.) I recognize immediately artwork from the above category, which may be called political art for the sake of political art, as opposed to art for the sake of politics. Who among us (I’m still talking about intellectual wankers) didn’t get aroused—perhaps even physically—the first time we heard the Godard bit about “The point was not to make political films, but to make films politically”?

Writers today simply don’t get to make books politically, at least not in the sense Godard meant. For Godard, the political film was one that explicated its means of production, that worked against Hollywood glamor, that exposed Hollywood fantasy for its expensive and deceptive escapism. As for myself, I have spent the past several years considering the ways in which means of production and distribution of fiction intersect with its political goals, but I have not yet understood what it means to write politically. It is important to acknowledge the origins and presentation of a work of fiction—who brought it to the public and why—especially given the recent state of the publishing industry and the work that has been done by so many to circumvent the challenges of publishing new and challenging works to a wide audience. Ultimately, though, we are all going to sit at our keyboards and write, and the political difference between writing a novel in a public library and on one’s own expensive laptop does not quite compare to what Godard was after with political film. In other words, fiction is not capable of exposing its material means of production in the same ways. So, if I wish to be a political writer, then the fiction itself must contain its own politics. This is the problem.

If Jameson has taught me anything so far (disclosure: I have not yet finished his book), it’s that the problem must be allowed its space to breathe, to mutate and grow branches, to loom overwhelmingly. He acknowledges the potential for critical theory to drive its practitioners to dead ends, namely in his description of Adorno’s ultimate “winner loses” paradox, in which he who comprehends the problem must also comprehend the fact that it is hopelessly unsolvable. (An analogue in common adage: “If you’re worried, it’s already too late.”) But what would it look like to consider, and to attempt to overcome, such a paradox in fiction?

Proust/Zultanski

2010-03-17T20:47:00.001-04:00

This week’s installment of our ongoing, slightly modified, Proust Questionnaire project features poet Steven Zultanski. He is wonderful.

Introduction to Steven Zultanski

Steven Zultanski is the author of Pad (Make Now, 2010) and Cop Kisser (BookThug, forthcoming 2010). He edits President's Choice magazine, a Lil' Norton publication. You can watch his YouTube videos here.

Steven Zultanski Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Friendship.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Genius.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Genius.

Your chief characteristic.
You tell me!
What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Wit, thought, solidarity with a common cause, the fact that they are brilliant and make brilliant things and/or otherwise engage the world in a brilliant way which changes it, the world, slightly but decidedly for the better, IMO.

Your main fault.
The tendency to hold an occasional petty grudge.

Your favorite occupation.
Teacher.

Your idea of happiness.
Working on a poem, and then eating a delicious meal with a friend, preferably with beer involved. Oh, and being in love is pretty great when it happens and isn’t terrible.

Your idea of misery.
The idea of ever returning to Buffalo.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Myself.

Where would you like to live?
NYC.

Your favorite prose authors.
Beckett, Marx, Lacan. (I’m in grad school).

Your favorite poets.
I unapologetically love my friends’ poetry more than I love anyone else’s poetry, and their work inspires me: Lawrence Giffin, Marie Buck, Brad Flis, Rob Fitterman, Kim Rosenfield, Patrick Lovelace, Eric Baus, Divya Victor, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Chris Sylvester, many many more.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
N/A

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
N/A

Your favorite painters and composers.
Painters: I don’t think about painting that much, but I like a lot of paintings very much.
Composers: I think about music more than I think about painting: Morton Feldman, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Scott Walker, Mrs. Miller, Chris Cooper / Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase, Autechre, Eliane Radigue, Kate Bush, François Bayle, Tony Conrad, Merzbow, many more.

Your heroes in “real life.”
N/A

Your favorite names.
Dr. X, Mr. X, Mrs. X, Ms. X, Señor X.

What do you hate the most?
Politically: Exploitation and imperialism. Culturally: Middlebrow and indie cultural products. Personally: The self-help-styled myth of individuality or autonomy. All these things are related, I suppose.

What military event do you admire the most?
N/A

What reform do you admire the most?
Killing this shitty health care bill and then passing a universal health care bill.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Musical ability. Though maybe that’s not so much a natural talent.

How do you wish to die?
Old and before my companion has died and after I’ve created many things and worked hard.

What is your present state of mind?
Tired. Hopeful. Self-reflexive.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Rudeness when accompanied by an opinionated arrogance when accompanied by thought.

Your favorite motto.
Just do it.

Hooray!

2010-03-14T17:21:00.001-04:00

Brick is Red

Hey, thanks everybody who made it out to the KGB Bar on Wednesday for our issue three launch reading! We had a blast, as was expected. If you missed out (where were you!?), there’s some pictorial evidence of the event, in the form of a few snapshots, available on our website. Also, Justin Taylor was nice enough to provide a little write-up of the event on HTMLGIANT. Take it from Mr. Taylor: “You heard it here first, kids: these guys are onto something.” Remember, even if you didn’t catch the reading --- you can still bask in the splendor of Correspondence No. 3 by purchasing it (ten dollars, cheap!) from our Online Store! It’s out and awesome: more details re its contents available in this previous post.

No. 3 Takes San Francisco

And for any Bay Area residents who might be reading this --- take heed: Correspondence is set to hit California next week… with a West Coast launch reading at Adobe Books. Here’s the press release:

Please join us for an evening of ecstatic riddles, laughter, innuendo, and just plan kickass work by three outstanding writers, who celebrate the release of Correspondence #3, a new journal of poetry, prose, and critique hailing from Brooklyn.

Nona Caspers, levitational SF fictioneer and light of your evening, author of Little Book of Days and Heavier Than Air, will appear to neurally enchant. Lonely Christopher, enigma and co-editor of Correspondence, is in from New York for this one reading only – don’t miss his swanky and dangerous verbiage! Richard Loranger, unrepentant squeaky wheel and poeticist hunter, will swim in from Oakland to ignite a chunk of his life.

And once the wonder has worn off (if indeed it does), you can pick up your copy of Correspondence and browse the terrific selection at Adobe Books.

CORRESPONDENCE #3 RELEASE PARTY

a reading by
Nona Caspers
Lonely Christopher
and Richard Loranger

Tuesday, March 16, 2010
8 pm
free of charge
Adobe Bookshop
3166 – 16th Street
(between Valencia and Guererro)
San Francisco

PERFORMER BIOS

Nona Caspers is the author of LITTLE BOOK OF DAYS (2009) and Heavier Than Air (2007), which received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has received a 2008 NEA Fellowship and an Iowa Review Fiction Award, among others. Her stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, Ontario Review, and Women on Women. She teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Find out more at her website.

Lonely Christopher is a founding member of The Corresponding Society and an editor for its lit journal Correspondence. He is the author of the poetry volume Into (Seven CirclePress, with Robert Snyderman and Christopher Sweeney), the forthcoming short fiction collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (Akashic, early 2011), and several chapbooks: Satan; Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?; and Gay Plays. His plays have been directed internationally and published in Mandarin translation. His new plays Endymion Dreams the Moon and Pages from a Course in General Linguistics will be staged in New York City this March and April.

Richard Loranger is a writer, performer, visual artist, and all around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, CA. He is the author of Poems for Teeth (We Press, 2005), as well as The Orange Book and eight chapbooks, including Hello Poems and The Day Was Warm and Blue. Recent work can be found in Correspondence 1, 2 & 3 and CLWN WR 42& 45, and the Uphook Press anthology you say. say. He wants only a calm moment.

Hooray!

Questions/Examples

2010-03-07T16:51:00.001-05:00

Queer Paragraphs
questions and examples in poetics
by Lonely Christopher

William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon… No/Yes

The Ambiguities. What is a queer poetics? Alice Toklas does not answer. “In that case, what is the question?” That is queer poetics. This paradigm is architected on a foundational ambiguity. Example: Amy King writes herself out of taxonomy as introduction to her queer poetics. She begins, “I do not…” A negative impulse pushes the question farther and further: outside. This is an adventure in negotiating away from taxonomy. The engine of negative capability. Amy King writes about what doesn’t define her: “Such frames, these houses, do not hold, do not truly shelter nor constrain, do not even do good work as metaphor for the storehouse of my body, my language as system.” The sign vehicle crashes into a telephone pole. Ryan Doyle May promises: “We will burn definition’s home.” Queer poetics is a measurement of measurement’s failures, the unanswered question: a messy celebration of the unanswerable. Where do we put this? Gertrude Stein: “Next to vast which is which it is.” Is it? No/yes --- it is and isn’t.

A Thematic. Queer poetics doesn’t mean entirely in earnest, it’s an amorphous rubric, no incumbent constitutionality. That is, it is not shaped by a coherent/canonized value system that’s purposed ideologically against a heteronormative poetic tradition. A queer poetics isn’t implicitly correlative to any particular politics and/or politic responsibilities and/or praxis. It should exist outside the power structure that contains that discourse, but become accessible by readerly politicized positions. Example: a queer poetry is not the gay poetry. And yes it can be, but the latter has to solicit the former and only borrow it like a costume. That’s why there’s a lack of representative anthologies of queer writing: editors grasp out for queer and sculpt the material snatched from the far corners of definition into a shape conditioned by hegemonic discourses. This problem is recognized by CAConrad thus: “How queer was the poet?” The queerness isn’t in the poetry, the poetry’s in the queerness. And furthermore: “Queer poets are poets who need to create the best possible poems they have to offer, and need to do so without the policing of how many queer items appear in a poem to be considered queer. The fact that you are a poet who is queer is enough. The experience your body has carried into time will create the poem. And the experience of being queer WILL be in the poem, whether it's automatically recognizable or not.”

The Complications. Restatement: queer poetics is not predicated upon a culture; culture is differently articulated through the processes of a (descriptive) queer grammar. Amy King, here again, posits a behavior: “In its mercurial condition, queer poetry may throw a wrench in the cogs of the white male heterosexual default setting.” This, however, arrives with the caveat: “A queer poetry may offer a few common features [but] there is no single identifiable trait that enables the culture-at-large to recognize, absorb, contain, and imprison it.” Stein instructs us: the change of color likely, the difference prepared, and sugar is not a vegetable. Queerness haunts the machine, articulating differences. We don’t know what it means totally but we think it’s without totality. Stein: “Do you know by what means rockets signal pleasure pain and noise and union, do you know by what means a rock is freed when it is not held too tightly held in the hand.” The value generation of normative poetics functions like a statement with an empty subject: It is.. In this example, the verb is linguistically considered “avalent,” but that’s a misnomer insofar as the directness of the statement operates as the valent curtain over a surface of its essential problem (“it” also isn’t); a valence, in other words, is a length of decorative drapery attached to a frame in order to screen the structure or space beneath it. Queerness introduces existential arguments that complicate the conceptual valency of the definable/singular --- queerness pushes the structure centrifugally in other territories.

A Form. How do queer “values” form and operate? An opera: “He asked as if that made a difference.” Burroughs wanted to discover what was not human, instead of asking after definition, in his treatment of what we are and why we do what we do to each other. The monster tells the truth because of the difference, the difference makes it monstrous. The operational form of queerness works as difference, as a difference engine, processing values analytically, chewing up judgments. That’s an asking of questions as if that makes a difference. The grammar of a queer poetics is an anti-lesson in morphology. The site of an application of queer grammar becomes a living difference. When a queer poetics, in its liquidity, pours into an ideological shape --- the result doesn’t re-form queerness, it queers the form. Amy King writes: “A queer poetics is not only about what is but is equally about what is not. We live in relation to each other, regardless of our best efforts to divorce and secede. The human species is a community that communes even beyond its species. We do so violently, sometimes kindly and in multiple capacities.” The form isn’t divorced from the relationship --- the relationship as a question of differences. Photographer Richard Avedon’s motto: The No forces me into the Yes. “I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and what happens between us.” Queerness reads the naked surface of form, what’s underneath the drape of it is, and examples the structures that define by negative process. Andy Warhol isn’t dead.

The Distinctions. Bourdieu: “I believe it is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions.” Queer poetry is the rhizome lurking within the normative order. The monster attacking an institutional address, &c. The outlaw mode troubling the dominant definition: quietly infecting the postures of the cultural logic that states “it is” --- with problems, multiplicities of “it is this and it is not and/or this is not this this and/or it is this and this is not not this and/or it is not this not this and this is this and not it and/or this is it… not…” The value will explode and flower. Queerness hacks the cultural code with difference. “Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make[.]” Queer poetry happens in the negative space of the distinctions. Queer poetry is not verse by heterosexuals. Nor is it fundamentally verse by homosexuals, its chief practitioners. Its subject is subjectivity; its author is a performance artist and a scientist writing out emotional math in the theater of meaning. “There is no there there,” an absent voice rises. Amy King responds the we know “that there is no there there, there is only now and then now, there is no permanence, and that knowledge encourages the exploration of what now really is beyond the false fences of security, of a center, a normal, for higher dreams and greater privileges that can be shared between us, among us, in our constant becoming, however fleeting, however impossible […]” Queer poetry is questions and examples, is a problematic’s florescence. There: there is a question/problem floating in space, waiting to become what isn’t what is, waiting to grow into a black hole of others’ actualization[s]. “The result is that they know the difference between instead and instead and made and made and said and said. / The result is that they might be as very well two and as soon three and to be sure, four and which is why they might not be,” quoth Stein again. There is no queer history that’s not the history of disturbing our convenient and singular drapes. The anachronistic possibilities of queer poetics are hidden like land minds across our retrospection: ahistorical resonances waiting to blow up the surface area of meaning’s government. We attempt to write/inscribe queer poetry onto the ideological domain of a systemic totalization --- regardless of normative context, which we understand as a suppressive agent, we interrupt again and again the scripted conversation and hold up a dark funhouse mirror to institutionalized perspectives. A sonnet by Shakespeare is a queer threat if the reader makes the distinctions. The queer library hasn’t been written yet, happens everywhere, and is not going to be finished, ever.

A Love.
“I do love roses and carnations. / A mistake […] / I call it something religious. You mean beautiful. I do not know that […]” All of this is a neologism meaning and not meaning love; love becoming its other, poetry’s description[s] blurring, this the flow of argot pushing and shoving the way “it is” out of itself, this a version of how queerness means not finally but now: when we pull back the decorative drapery obscuring this subject, this essay, and this terminally unfinished sentence […]

The Sources. The Ambiguities: Gertrude Stein’s last conversation reconfigured; “The What Else of Queer Poetry” by Amy King (Text); The Anatomy of Gray by Ryan Doyle May; “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein. A Thematic: “What’s a Queer Poem?” by CAConrad (Text). The Complications: Ibid by Amy King; paraphrased from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein; “An Instant Answer” by Gertrude Stein; “Valence” definition paraphrased from the Oxford American Dictionary. A Form: “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Gertrude Stein; Ibid. by Amy King; Richard Avedon interview, source unidentified (found here). The Distinctions: “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste” by Pierre Bourdieu; Ibid by Bourdieu; Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein; Ibid by Amy King; “Patriarchal Poetry” (again) by Gertrude Stein. A Love: quote re-contextualized from “Lifting Belly” by Gertrude Stein. Further Reading: Amy King’s essay (online) “The What Else of Queer Poetry,” excerpted here generously and probably beyond recognized allowance, is an intelligent treatment of the liberatory indeterminacy of queer poetics qua general term (the above was fully inspired/provoked by her text); see also: “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein.

KGB Launch No. 3

2010-03-04T18:29:00.000-05:00

Adrian Shirk at the KGB Bar

Correspondence No. 3 will be released on March 10! To celebrate, please join us for our third launch reading at the KGB Bar!

Featured readers, contributors to issue three all, include:
Christian Hawkey
Sonia Farmer
A.E. Wilson
Jody Buchman
Ben Fama
& Adrian Shirk
with introductions by Lonely Christopher.

Bios and more information available on the KGB Website.

Copies of No. 3 will be available for a tidy discount, drinks will be strong, walls will be red, you will be expected!

The Corresponding Society at the KGB Bar
March 10, 7pm-9pm
85 East 4th St.
Manhattan, New York

Proust/Tobin

2010-02-27T19:23:00.001-05:00

The time has come for the latest installment of our ongoing, and ripped off, Proust Questionnaire project. This week bookseller and writer Adam Tobin spills his guts.

Introduction to Adam Tobin

Adam Tobin owns and operates Unnameable Books, a new & used bookstore in Brooklyn. His poems and stories have appeared in various places, under a variety of names and pseudonyms. Any Group Can Claim Responsibility And Other Poems is forthcoming from Mondo Bummer.

Adam Tobin Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Empathy.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Sincerity, intelligence, imagination, tenderness.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Sincerity, intelligence, imagination, machismo.

Your chief characteristic.
I have hair.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Their radicalism.

Your main fault.
I don't always do what I say, nor say what I'm doing.

Your favorite occupation.
Buying and selling books while listening to music.

Your idea of happiness.
Good food, good sex, good shelter, good company.

Your idea of misery.
Bad art.

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

Where would you like to live?
I've always fantasized about living in Indianapolis, but I expect the real thing is pretty boring.

Your favorite prose authors.
Cortazar, Queneau, G. Stein, L. Davis.

Your favorite poets.
Right now I am reading Judith Goldman, Leslie Scalapino, Rachel Levitsky and Rachel Zolf. I also love William Shakespeare. I never tire of Zukofsky or Oppen, Creeley, Ashbery or Spicer.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Edgar (son of Gloucester). Valentin Bru. Doctor Faustroll. You.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Rose Tyler. Alette. Nadja. Krazy Kat.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Morton Feldman, Roscoe Mitchell, Arnold Schoenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Pauline Oliveros, J.S. Bach, Meredith Monk, Anthony Braxton.

Your heroes in “real life.”
See above.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Ezra Pound.

Your favorite names.
After much deliberation, we named our cats Ignatz and Hepzibah.

What do you hate the most?
Power.

What military event do you admire the most?
Riding elephants over the alps.

What reform do you admire the most?
Free verse.

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

How do you wish to die?
Old.

What is your present state of mind?
Hungry.

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

Your favorite motto.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

3 Is a Magic Number

2010-02-23T18:23:00.001-05:00

Of making many books there is no end. The Corresponding Society is hysterically pleased to announce Correspondence No. 3 is now available for pre-order! (The official release date is March 10.) This thrice-valiant journal of letters continues our project of publishing a paradigmatic document of some of the outstanding creative writing right now emerging from a giant array of young/different perspectives. This edition houses a rainbow of poetics from the writerly community surrounding The Corresponding Society and well beyond.

Details! Prepare thyself for the strongest fund of letters we have yet managed. For example: Richard Loranger (Poems for Teeth) returns to our pages with more shiny human epiphanies; Christopher Sweeney (Into) presents a selection from his complex and arresting long-form project “Face”; Julien Poirier (founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse) speculates that if Abraham Lincoln was gay, then George McGovern is not George McGovern; Sonia Farmer offers lyrical excerpts from a collection that won the 2009 Pratt Institute’s Poetry Thesis Award; there’s a generous portion of a new project, a scriptible collaboration with the work of Georg Trakl (Gesang des Abgeschiedenen), from Christian Hawkey (Citizen Of); Ben Fama (founder of Supermachine Poetry) gives us some enchanted verse, declaring: “Women of Odessa/I come bearing .gifs”; and Lonely Christopher (Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?) finishes the volume with an invisible period in the form of a long ode to the aspirations and failures of young writers. Regulars to The Corresponding Society with real estate in this issue include: Jody Buchman (fiction), Robert Snyderman, Chanelle Bergeron, Greg Afinogenov (translations), Matthew Daniel, Adrian Shirk (fiction), Jenny Stohlmann, Katie Przybylski, and an illustrated story by Ray-Ray Mitrano (he also did the cover). This issue also features important new work from writers scattered all over, proudly uncovered and presented by the editorial brain, including: A.E. Wilson, Christopher Brean Murray, Lily Herman, Lewis Freedman, and Chanice Greenberg, Wow, wow, wow.

We published it, now we would like you to read it. Toward that end: to pre-order No. 3 directly from us, please follow the link to our Online Store. This issue will also presently become available in select finer bookstores nationally. If you want to catch some of us on tour, you can keep track of our schedule on the Events Page.

Sentimentalist's Complaint

2010-02-15T15:59:00.008-05:00

Adventures in Subway Reading
The Nostalgia of Printed Matter vs. the Ambiguity of Digitized Text
by Lonely Christopher

Here follows an anecdotal observation from a member of Gotham’s minor literati. I, amateur book detective (or snoop), am noticing more commuters cradling an ebook reader, usually the Kindle, on the subway. It’s obvious the format of digital readers (ereaders? whatever) is insidiously, for us who can’t sleep of nights over it, maturing out of a novelty stage and entering the general usage. This is confusing and scary for most writers and many readers for a rainbow of silly and serious reasons. The immediate loss I notice here has to do with my own intrusive spying on the leisure activities of strangers. Who doesn’t enjoy scoping out what a fellow passenger is reading on the train? Today, on a platform, I caught a malnourished brain in possession of a hardcover copy of one of the books Chuck Palahniuk wrote after I fully stopped paying attention to what he publishes every year. Yesterday, a twee, graying man was perusing a Modern Library edition I went to comic lengths to identify while hanging over him on the 1 Uptown (I blame my eyesight for the failure). These little invasions are a dynamic element of traveling with fellow readers; they’re causes for casual judgments and unrealized communions.

In remembrance of recently deceased champion of messianic neurotics, Mr. Salinger, I recently returned to a volume of his for comfort and enrichment (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction); reading the famous little white book, with is rainbow band in the upper left corner of the cover, caused me to become extremely self-aware on the subway. His books all look alike, which recalls the ereader problem, but at least the title is printed clearly on cover and spine --- preventing the mistaken assumption that I was actually reading, god forbid, Catcher in the Rye. Still, was somebody judging me from a casual remove? Should I have rather kept my guiltily sentimental choice in reading material safely concealed in the privacy of my room? I worried anxiously some grad student was frowning at the superficiality, the downright phoniness, of picking up an author in the wake of his death --- let alone one so accessible and beloved by uncritical teenagers. I would faint, nay die, from embarrassment if I saw her, my auditor, sternly grasping an edition of Being and Time, peering over the margins and tsking me. I made sure the next tome I brandished publically in transit was Faust. Instead of anxiety I felt a certain elitist pride (which almost distracted me from my dislike of Walter Arndt’s limp translation).

Regardless! this experience was and remains a precious one, in my “book,” no matter the circumstance. It’s frustrating to witness a fellow rider openly reading some text when the nature of said text is rendered unrecognizable from being presented in the uniformly drab format of an ereader --- that is, printed, in self-erasing digital ink, across the pale face of a tablet’s screen (so that woman over there might be reading Dan Brown or Proust, for all I know). There are some, certainly, who must find it convenient to dock a library within a lightweight plastic container; undoubtedly, the girth of plenty books prevents easy subway perusal. It’s less of a strain to bring with you this week’s New Yorker than The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. (Withal, I admit, there’s a sound argument against the efficacy of trying to concentrate on serious literature in the screechy, bumpy environment of a train barreling though a tunnel --- but I’ve certainly tried lugging giant collected editions of difficult or subtle writers on subterranean trips, sans regret. I read most of Moby-Dick underground, actually.) The fact is: weighing your bag with unwieldy books for a literary schlep remains, more than an impractical failure of the form/function model, a sentimental matter of tradition threatened by new technology.

Every once in a while I spot a hipster fifteen pages into Infinite Jest (another hefty but rewarding lump to transport); an unlikely subject, say a security guard, reading Flaubert in the original; once even, at Carroll Street, I cringed at a man in a hunting jacket with his face smashed into that memoir Sarah Palin did with a ghostwriter. Noticing these things becomes a sort of hobby, vacation, or at least a diversion from the torturous conditions of the metropolitan subway system. It doesn’t mean anything, and nothing comes of it, but it’ll be missed when it’s gone. Anyway, I will miss it already, mourn it. It’s a dynamic aspect of the otherwise overwhelmingly unpleasant (not mention potentially dangerous) experience of riding with the MTA.

While mostly a passive activity, the potential for accidental interaction or exchange lurks like a quiet promise. I read in public as frequently as I watch public readers; the idea that this might provoke a conversation with a stranger is a small amusement. I’m afraid in my experience this almost never happens, though. The major exception was, once on the Chinatown bus to Philadelphia, I noticed the passenger seated next to me had a highlighted coursepack, with copied pages from Gender Trouble, open in her lap. “Ah!” I noted, pleased, “Butler!” She was a grad student at U Penn, it turned out. We proceeded to have a conversation about theory, with little asides gossiping about academia, which made the bus trip pass much quicker than usual. The other examples I can think of weren’t as significant, but here they are. Once, in a public space, a portly man with a cane interrupted a friend and me, busy studying copies of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, to tell us that we ought not over-analyze that classic work of modernism --- in fact, he informed us, we needn’t read the novel at all: a long walk on a foggy June morning produces the same result. The final episode actually happened on the subway and is again related to Joyce. I was traveling on the G to Greenpoint, drunk as hell to meet some friends, and becoming extremely excited while rereading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In my glee, I turned to the elderly Polish lady sitting next to me --- and slurred something at her that I’m sure I thought was entirely profound re Joyce’s story. The woman reacted with alarm and changed seats. I’m not sure if that counts.

I’m usually too much a coward to yell across the car at somebody interesting reading something I recognize and am enthusiastic about. Maybe that’s a socialized behavior that keeps me from the misconduct of, for recent instance, the toothless man I gravely witnessed making single female passengers on the F train maximally uncomfortable by swaying directly over them and pointing a lecherous grin into their laps. Generally, fellow passengers revert to the survival mechanism of outwardly ignoring their surroundings while remaining surreptitiously vigilant. This retards possible interaction between an unrecognized fellowship of readers, it’s true. I have a particular, wholly unrealized, fantasy about bonding with a stranger over subway reading material that I’ll share forthwith. I daydream about noticing, on the Manhattan-bound C, a cute boy my age totally engrossed in a dog-eared copy of something by Gertrude Stein (Three Lives, sure, but I would go gaga if it were The Making of Americans). It would remind me of how I years ago discovered Stein while standing in the C train on my way to the Museum of Natural History. I opened a library copy of Tender Buttons and presently missed my stop, such was my amazement at her language. In this boy-watching scenario, I’m also reading something intelligent --- perhaps re-familiarizing myself Barthes’ S/Z, say. The coincidence would be too attractive to shrug off. I would boldly approach the boy with Stein in his lap and, cradling my own book like a purse, inform him how dearly I love Gertrude. He’d respond in kind and supplement his appreciation with an insightful mini-lecture on repetition and substance. We’d forget our initial destinations and disembark around Central Park. After a long, engaging colloquy we’d decide to move to Paris and get married. Only I hear the trains don’t run all night there.

I suspect I am of the final generation that shall retain any nostalgia for the book as singular object. When negotiating a publishing contract recently, I had to parse the implications of “digital rights” vis-à-vis the distribution of my own book. My message to the publisher was that there is no problem with selling my title in digital form (not that I had a choice) --- but, as far as the author is concerned, the book should fundamentally be defined by its physical incarnation. Maybe that’s old fashioned. There’s just something too suspiciously amorphous about digital reading at the moment --- as if a book, once digitized, disappears ghost-like into its technology. For a reader, especially a techno-savvy one, the idea that a digital book never goes out of print is a revelation: permanent access to texts in a state of de-commoditized anti-materiality! Reconciling that formlessness for authors is a different story. Plus, who will ever catch somebody on the subway smiling down into a book you wrote when it’s reconfigured as a bunch of constantly-erased letters washing over a little gray screen? The personality of the book as object is being replaced by the utilitarian absence of the digital situation. This is not a polemic on the subject, but a stupid sentimentalist’s complaint. I’ve tried to divine the title of a text being read by a commuter holding a Nook or Kindle: it’s nearly impossible without mutant eyesight, which I lack, or ingloriously huffing down the reader’s neck and squinting invasively at her device --- and that probably constitutes sexual assault, which is a serious crime.

Proust/Shirk

2010-02-10T07:10:00.002-05:00

This week Adrian Shirk confesses everything to the document as part of our ongoing Proust Questionnaire project. See for yourself,

Meet Adrian Shirk

Adrian Shirk is a founding member of, and fiction editor for, The Corresponding Society. In the past her prose has appeared in Broad, Slouch, Look-Look, and Spork Magazine, as well as previous volumes of Correspondence. Her work is also available as an audiobook, Stories w/Snacks, which she recorded with a Portland, Oregon musician in 2008. She maintains a literary food blog, at What I Ate Where, and is currently enrolled in the Writing Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Adrian Shirk Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Fortitude [faith].

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Memory, quickness, surrender.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Verve, intuition, camaraderie.

Your chief characteristic.
Conscientiousness.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Willingness, late nights, long rides.

Your main fault.
Defeat.

Your favorite occupation.
Story telling.

Your idea of happiness.
A tall chair on a wide front porch with a bucket of cathead oysters, pen and paper.

Your idea of misery.
Psychosis.

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

Where would you like to live?
Pittsburgh. Savannah. Silver City, New Mexico.

Your favorite prose authors.
Flannery O’Connor, Richard Brautigan, Shirley Jackson, Raymond Carver, JD Salinger, Ian Frazier, MFK Fisher, C.S. Lewis, Sharon Creech, Tennessee Williams, Checkov.

Your favorite poets.
Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Sappho.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
The Glass family.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Salamanca Tree Hiddle.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Francis Bacon, Gershwin, Debussy.

Your heroes in “real life.”
My mother’s parents, honey bees, the guy who drives the night soil cart.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Ted Hughes.

Your favorite names.
Mae, June, Ramona, Kate, Field, Milo, Julius, the names of the United States.

What do you hate the most?
Waste.

What military event do you admire the most?
Little Big Horn.

What reform do you admire the most?
The Bacchae.

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

How do you wish to die?
Tall chair, wide porch, oysters, pen, paper &c. And old.

What is your present state of mind?
Rhizomatic.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Self-destruction.

Your favorite motto.
When in Rome do as in Midgeville.

Love Is the Answer

2010-02-06T12:42:00.005-05:00

Announcing:

Dreamscape 03
An ambient night with experimental electronic music and improvised instruments; live glitch video projections; installation art; and performances!
Celebrating the Day of Love + Chinese New Year of the Tiger + the artist Katja Loher’s birthday.

Hosted by Redpanda Village.
Complimentary food and surprises. Donation suggested.

14 February 2010
Sunday 8 to 11 PM
@ The Suffolk
107 Suffolk
Lower East Side, NYC

Music: Grains of Sound (ambient electronic); Motmot (improvised experimental soundscapes)
Visuals: Jack Kubizne (live glitch projections)
Installations: Nicholas Hall; Kelly Sturhahn; Katja Loher
Performances: Lonely Christopher; Michael DiPietro; Kristin Reger

Proust/Lonely

2010-02-01T00:26:00.003-05:00

Lonely Christopher below responds to our slightly redacted version of the Proust Questionnaire.

Summary of Contestant “Lonely Christopher”

Lonely Christopher has been described as “an emerging queer writer and playwright” who tries establishing that, in his words, “human drama and the poetics of structural signification are kind of the same thing.” He is a founding member of The Corresponding Society (soon to release issue three of Correspondence); co-director of the Institutionalized Theatre (reuniting to stage a new production in March); a regular featured reader for diverse crowds; plus his poetry chapbooks have become staples of the Small Anchor Press catalog (Satan and two editions of Gay Plays). His plays have been translated into Mandarin and produced internationally. Most recently, his shared long-form verse collection Into (with Robert Snyderman and Christopher Sweeney) has been announced for the 2010 publication schedule of Seven Circles Press. His collection of short stories, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, will be released by Akashic in 2011. His future projects include libretti and fiction. Lonely lives in Brooklyn.

Lonely Christopher Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Intelligence.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Femininity.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Generosity.

Your chief characteristic.
Existential embarrassment.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
My best friends are those I can sit silently in a room with as we read books for hours.

Your main fault.
My personality.

Your favorite occupation.
Something useful with words.

Your idea of happiness.
Daydreaming and listening to Mozart or late Beethoven (or Ravel).

Your idea of misery.
A very long car ride.

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

Where would you like to live?
In Brooklyn, but in a more gentrified neighborhood. (Honesty is ugly.)

Your favorite prose authors.
Herman Melville, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett.

Your favorite poets.
Gertrude Stein, William Shakespeare, John Ashbery.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Dracula, Hamlet, Jesus Christ.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Catherine Earnshaw, Agave, Lolita.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Henry Darger, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon. Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, Benjamin Britten.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Any artist (writer, actor, musician, &c.) who dies from an overdose of pills before the age of forty.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Joe McCarthy, Charles J. Guiteau (and anyone else who ever assassinated a prominent personality for idiot reasons), God.

Your favorite names.
I know of a kid named Lancelot Runge but we aren’t friends.

What do you hate the most?
Existence and death.

What military event do you admire the most?
The Stonewall Riots. I wrote an explanation then deleted it.

What reform do you admire the most?
All nonviolent civil/human rights reform.

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

How do you wish to die?
Misadventure.

What is your present state of mind?
Neurotic. Also, worried how nationalistic and phallocentric these my answers are.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
The unjustified privilege of physical beauty.

Your favorite motto.
We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire.

Girl Trouble

2010-01-27T19:30:00.001-05:00

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.

Proust/Fama

2010-01-23T19:06:00.002-05:00

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

Sweet Tomb

2010-01-19T16:29:00.003-05:00

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.

Proust/Levitsky

2010-01-16T16:25:00.001-05:00

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.

Scotch Slam

2010-01-09T14:42:00.002-05:00

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.

Talent Circus

2010-01-06T16:09:00.000-05:00

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

Proust/Fitterman

2009-12-28T04:33:00.001-05:00

The Corresponding Society will be starting off the new year with a monolithic reading featuring some of today’s most incredible poets, assembled by Master of Ceremonies Lonely Christopher. The event shall be staged 7 January at 7pm at Chelsea’s P.P.O.W. Gallery under the rubric of the Hostess Project. The readers shall be Rachel Zolf, Rob Fitterman, Christian Hawkey, Rachel Levitsky, and, fuck yes, Richard Loranger. While you anxiously await this happening, please accept the following blog content to hold you over. Rob Fitterman (aka Rob the plagiarist) has generously filled out a loosely interpreted version of the Proust Questionnaire, which you’ll find below. There will be more Proust Questionnaire answers, perhaps from other featured readers and definitely from some members of The Corresponding Society, to follow in the new year.

An Introduction to Robert Fitterman

Robert Fitterman is the author of 10 books of poetry including: The Sun Also Also Rises, war the musical, Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Press), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press), This Window Makes Me Feel (www.ubu.com). Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award (2000)” and Metropolis 16-29 was awarded the Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year Award (2003)”. With novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival (2004) and the Lincoln Center LatinBeat Festival (2004). He has been a full-time faculty member in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program since 1993. He also teaches poetry at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.
(from the NYU website)

Robert Fitterman Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Generosity.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Femininity.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Masculinity.

Your chief characteristic.
Loyalty.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Loyalty.

Your main fault.
Bad with money.

Your favorite occupation.
Poet.

Your idea of happiness.
Lunch in the Italian countryside with friends and Kim and Coco.

Your idea of misery.
Not being able to do the former.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Myself.

Where would you like to live?
In NYC.

Your favorite prose authors.
My favorite authors blur this genre distinction.

Your favorite poets.
What day is it today?

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Not much, thanks.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
These are the pants I was telling you about.

Your favorite painters and composers.
OK, great to see you too.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Call me when you get in, OK?

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Sure, but please don't worry.

Your favorite names.
Hector & Tula.

What do you hate the most?
Badly prepared or presented or cared for or corrupted food.

Poetry Project

2009-12-07T18:59:00.002-05:00

Lonely Christopher and Rebecca Nagle will be reading this Friday at the Poetry Project. Here's more information:

The Poetry Project
131 E. 10th Street, Manhattan
LC & RN 11 Dec @ 10pm!

LONELY CHRISTOPHER writes across forms; he is a poet, playwright, director, editor, and unpublished novelist. His poetry has been collected in the chapbooks Satan (Small Anchor) and Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? (No Know) and the first two installments of his Gay Plays, a trilogy of dramatic explorations into the queer situation, have been released together by Small Anchor. Withal, the Gay Plays have been staged internationally and published in China in a Mandarin translation. He is a founding member of the Corresponding Society, the manager of its blog, and an editor of its biannual literary journal Correspondence; he is the curator of the press’ second series of poetry chapbooks What Where (forthcoming in winter). He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

REBECCA NAGLE is a performance, new media and community artist. She grew up in Kansas. After attending Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is an internationally exhibited and collected artist with works in the New Museum, NY and Ssamzie Art Warehouse, South Korea. Nagle has shown at Current Gallery, Art in General, Site Santa Fe, Artscape, and Conflux Festival. She was hailed by Baltimore City’s Paper’s senior arts editor Bret McCabe as “Baltimore’s very own life-is-art-is-life performance maven…mingling the internet and performance into a fresh and vital new thing”. Rebecca’s performative, interative and community art projects challenge people around issues of intimacy, the body, power, boundaries and efficacy. She is currently trying to make the world a more open, equitable and creative place through community organizing and radical performance art.

THE FRIDAY NIGHT SERIES was born in 1991 & raised by poet/author Gillian McCain (Tilt, Religion, & co-author of Please Kill Me with Leggs McNeil); it been a bi-monthly forum for multi-media events & other “untraditional” literary going-ons. The Friday Night Series varies its programming with a combination of readings, presentations, performances, screenings & installations – theatrical, visual, textual, musical or otherwise. All events start at 10PM & end at/around MIDNIGHT, unless otherwise noted. The Fall 2009 - Spring 2010 season will be co-curated by Edward Hopely and Nicole Wallace.

Brother Lover

2009-12-01T16:08:00.004-05:00

The new installment of Robert Smith's queer reading series featuring Damien Luxe, Devon Gallegos, Ryan May, Daniel McKernan, and Lonely Christopher! This Thursday at Envoy Enterprises! Read an interview with Robert Smith here.

Revenge Hamlet!

2009-11-24T17:11:00.000-05:00

Hamlet’s Dad from Hell
a terrific misreading
by Lonely Christopher

The villain of Hamlet is the ghost: a spectral dad beckoning his entire family to murder. Hamlet basically: a supernatural revenge thriller where some fancy-costumed royalty frown and yell in a haunted castle before they all kill each other. Every bad thing happens in the play because of the ghost, who is already menacing some poor sentinels at the very outset. Admittedly, the ghost (who undeniably exists, that is he’s not hallucinated, according to the play’s dramatic logic) happened to become so phantomy because he was murdered. Withal, the regicidal villain (his bro, ouch) forthwith assumed his victim’s crown and wife. Unfortunately for undead Old Hamlet, he was a prayer shy of heaven thus imprisoned as a disappointed wraith. Still, to apply a worn axiom, two wrongs don’t make a right. Demanding his melancholy son to perform unspecified revenge (hint: probably stabbing) has no nutritional value outside restoring nominal moral order to the court. (Restoring morality when nobody realizes the crime even happened would mean, for most involved, having to create the problem in order to solve it.) The ghost doesn’t think about the consequences and doesn’t want Hamlet to tarry either. His spooky instructions aren’t very helpful (not to mention delivered with Satanic theatrics that end up traumatizing his son) --- and even if Hamlet had immediately followed through in deposing Claudius (in such a way that was recognized as just by all), the political result would probably include being conquered by Norway. Claudius had to poison his own brother to achieve the crown, but he was diplomatically competent enough to do so in such a way that nobody suspected his crime; he also seemed to be expertly managing/resolving the threat of foreign invasion --- Hamlet doesn’t have very mature problem solving skills and, considering his mental illness withal (that is, melancholia not his fake antic disposition), his future as a leader is suspect. We know Old Hamlet was brave in combat, but if he was as reckless alive as dead, maybe Denmark ended up better off with Claudius. After “stealing” the vacant throne from Hamlet by being elected, Claudius is a little worried about further hurting his sensitive nephew’s feelings (hence telling him to drop out of school the better to be monitored at home), but otherwise he treats Hamlet like a stepfather who just wants to be liked. Meanwhile, Hamlet’s real dad is back from hell (okay, purgatory), lurking around battlements, and haunting his son screeching terrible, unfounded accusations and demands for revenge. Horatio warns that the ghost might be a disguised devil --- the kind that has fun driving melancholiacs to madness before pushing them off cliffs (it was a different time). Even if the ghost is honest that doesn’t stop him from causing a far bloodier end than a crazy leap off a cliff. Some claim that this is a play about skepticism. Olivier famously introduced his film version as a story about a man who couldn’t make up his mind. The thematic scope is larger, though, because Hamlet agonizes over more than critical indecision. The problem is so much more enormous than helping a ghost --- the problem is the nature of the ghost attack itself. When dad visits him from his nether-universe of negation, Hamlet’s brain comes unstuck from the dramatic context of this royal thriller and everything problematizes doing anything (he’s dissociated). Hamlet dearly hopes, once shuffled off this mortal coil, the rest is silence --- after his transfiguration into a failure hero, all the mental torture, and having caused the death of almost everybody around him (including two women he loved), there better be a universe of nothing but silence waiting because the joke just keeps getting worse if he ends up burning with dad in purgatory. We’ve Old Hamlet’s posthumous bad parenting to thank for the mess that makes up the play (without the ghost the action would be limited to Hamlet moping around Elsinore whining about how slutty his mom is); the revenge hungry spook is the foundational conceit of the narrative progression. Hamlet goes kind of crazy (offstage and hatless) over the problem of the ghost’s nature and purpose. He wonders if the figure of his father is a spirit of health or goblin damned. The former doesn’t really fit, considering the suicide mission the ghost pushes Hamlet into; whether demon or dead king the apparition has no concern for Hamlet’s wellbeing --- he wants to be remembered, damn it, and avenged! --- and only pokes his floaty head into the action once more to threaten to spank Hamlet for wasting time in killing more of the court (he’s not too happy about the boy slapping his mother around, either, more evidence of his selective morality). If he just slept on it another night maybe the ghost would have given Hamlet different advice: “I’m upset your uncle killed me for my wife and crown --- not to mention before my sins were forgiven, so I’m a damn ghost purging my misdeeds in flame most of the day --- but since we didn’t get to talk before brain-melting distilment was poured in my ear porches, I just want you to know I love ya. I realize you expected to be my heir when I died, but don’t let it get you down; first of all, the king is elected by popular vote, so you would have had to campaign (no fun), and also you’re still a teenager and way more interested in demonology and theater than international politics --- maybe one day, kid. And hey: I know she let us down, but take care of your mom, that slut, and be nice to your girlfriend because she’s fragile --- oh, and stay in school. Also, no big deal, but please at some point kill your uncle. Eye for an eye, right? But only when you feel ready.” Oh well! Old Hamlet wasn’t the only problem father of the play. Fortinbras’ dad was irresponsible enough to get killed (by Old Hamlet no less) in a macho land gamble and Polonius messed his daughter the fuck up and paid a spy to follow his son while spreading rumors he likes prostitutes. These hapless children, following Hamlet’s example, idolized their fathers even when doing so played directly into harm that the fathers were usually responsible for. Polonius is a real jerk to Ophelia (at least way overprotective), but she continues to love him so much that when he’s killed she goes crazy, falls out of a tree, and drowns. Fittingly, the bloodbath finale begins with a showdown between two kids with dead dads, both after bloody revenge. At that point Hamlet’s heart isn’t even in it anymore; he just wants to get it over with already. And: everyone dies. Except Horatio, he survives everybody and, coincidentally, never mentions his father the whole play.

Video Sample

2009-11-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

Correspondence No. 3 shall arrive around the end of the year according to best estimates. Wise literates would do well to prepare for the delirious pleasure this document will bring. Really, it’s dangerous. Because we’re responsible please find below a sort of preview, which the reader might use as a patient does a flu shot to protect her body against a virus. In this example, the virus is words and also it’s a good virus. It’s just a little much and we don’t want readers to get hurt. Well, yes, emotionally we want to damage readers. We just don’t want to permanently injure them with the majuscule poetic force contained within this forthcoming volume/weapon. So here is a taste, which is a video record of Ray Ray Mitrano performing something to be found in the pages of No. 3. It is called “Italy When Three.”

Italy When Three from RAY RAY MITRANO on Vimeo.

Wide Eyes

2009-11-09T07:58:00.001-05:00

Negative Nice
Trinie Dalton’s short fiction is darling and traumatic
by Lonely Christopher

The cover art of Trinie Dalton’s book Wide Eyed, put out aught-five by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series from Akashic, features author-drawn illustrations of flowers, rainbows, unicorns, and a bigfoot type creature. I remembered the cover from seeing it at a bookstore a while ago; when I asked a friend about it he told me the cover was a good indication of the content and now I agree. What’s funny is that the collection is so magnificent. It has so many conceptual strikes against it, worst of all being creative writing, viz. fiction, published this decade. The persistence of kitsch (unicorns, for a start), the clever randomness (whimsical unpredictability!), and the ironic cultural references (the Flaming Lips, 80’s slasher flicks, Disney) are techniques shared with hipster fiction of the most abhorrent variety (unimportantly plaguing the aughts, hipster fiction is something we’re going to have to go back in a time machine to prevent). Dalton proves the same things that we’ve seen so abused by a whole youth culture can be used without guilt with delightfully winning results. She’s too mature to ruin the form like younger kids are and too clever to ruin the form like writers her age are. This is a compliment and a joy.

Anyway, if the stories were all sugar, narrated as they are by a very similar voice and personality that’s almost a sort of Amelie from a negative dimension, this writing would be impossible to stomach. What makes it work is how a Cooper-like disgust or anxiety spoons in a frilly bed with the ingenuous cuteness. This is a pretty fucked-up book --- plus it’s adorable. The Ben Marcus blurb on the back, which only praises aspects of innocence, love, and wonder, makes me suspect either Ben Marcus didn’t read Wide Eyed or else he’s a pretty disturbed person. These stories are ugly/pretty: a sinister violence becomes the undertow in a sparkling sun-kissed lazy river. The quality of this sentence is representative: “When I was in elementary school and first learned about the realities of rape, I remember riding home on the bus from a field trip to Disneyland and wishing I had been dragged into Adventureland, then raped behind Thunder Mountain.” No other contemporary work I can think of so vividly captures a world where everything being so not okay hurts but can’t murder being a happy person.

Nobody can do anything right and even when that fact is benign it’s still a lurking threat. The obsessions with unicorns, elves, woodland and sea creatures, botany, childhood, and candy only prove the darkness of these stories, which are about the awkward pleasures of aloneness, the façade of normalcy being punctured by humanity’s underlying ugliness, and the pathological failures of people to negotiate each other cleanly. Try writing a story in pen pal letters between a lonely woman-child and an elf from the North Pole without making anybody with halfway-developed critical faculties find you and take some sort of revenge. Well, that’s not the strongest story here, but she pulled off okay the elf thing and I have no clue how (what sounds feasible about “pulling off the elf thing”?). Dalton uses the shorter short fiction form to her advantage. There was no story (most are about five pages in the largest font you can sort of get away with) I wanted to be longer. She knows how long something can go on for; depth accumulates, but each story is a few weirdly shallow gasps. The episode I found most arresting was part of an essayish triptych anecdotally describing how things, blood namely, can come to drool across floor tile. This particular section of the barely six-page piece is less than two pages; it depicts in careful/squirmy portraiture the event of a boy taking a shower in a scummy apartment and a “mutant salamander” emerging from the drain. The result is not hygienic or pleasant, but demonstrating an economy of discomfort and Lilliputian trauma.

The story of an attempt at throwing a house party begins ruined by a guest, missing a shoe, breathlessly approaching the host: “‘Your fucking friend just attacked me,’ she says. She was in my basement music room so no one heard her yelling through the egg-crate covered walls. I’m hosting a Hawaiian-themed party.” The creep who stole the girl’s shoe after harassing her is a total failure who can’t quite fit well enough into the way things go and who suffers from crippling social problems. The narrator, who herself has positive intentions (a nice luau, like what? the details of the music room being pretty heartbreaking, too), tries to understand the creep: “He didn’t seem dangerous, just fetishistic.” Another story begins similarly with the narrator and her boyfriend Matt having a “luxury” pork meal to celebrate his latest painting. The painting is “as long as a Honda, and as tall as our ceiling. Red-barked trees, squirrels, and naked women cover the canvas.” The constant miracle of this book is that it never slouches into lazy Napoleon Dynamite twee/preciousness; despite how close it comes it then swoops back into the realm of literary skill as assuredly as a stunt pilot pulling out of a nosedive right before hitting the water. The turn in this flash-length storylet is when Matt can’t stop himself from doing the “wrong” thing (he eats all the copious pork leftovers cold for breakfast: “I just ate a huge pile of lard, basically”), getting miserably ill as consequence, and the narrator can’t help but desiring him more for his disabled judgment. Elsewhere: the narrator imagining she is Snow White --- with glass coffin, singing chipmunks, and all --- during a sexual encounter in her backyard garden. The scene is tenderly pathetic and, ultimately, emotionally affirmative (hell, wide eyed). “Everything went white as I came, as if the moon suddenly got brighter.” Most of the characters in these stories act like high functioning autistics. When the simplest aspects of getting by in life are rendered as impossibly fraught, the result is highly unnerving as safety divorces from routine. The balance between childish awe and psycho nervousness is the best hit of Wide Eyed. There is no reason this book works more than that Trinie Dalton has a major handle on her craft and knows how to channel her bizarre fixations (is that me projecting?) into the kind of art that you appreciate as it makes you feel uneasy about the world.

Word's Way

2009-11-02T07:01:00.002-05:00

From our friends at Republic Brooklyn:

REPUBLIC Worldwide Presents
WAY OF THE WORD

Wednesday November 11, 2009
7 pm-11 pm
Bar On A
170 Avenue A (between 10th St & 11th St)

It is in the spirit of language arts that REPUBLIC presents the first installment of its recurring “Way of the Word” program at Bar On A.

WAY OF THE WORD is a unique evening of art, poetry, performance and music by emerging artists in the New York poetry world.

Visual Poets include: Edward Hopely, Brian VanRemmen and more
Slam poets: Khephran Riddick and Aldrin Valdez
Traditional poets: Davey Vacek, Katie Przybylski, Marissa Forbes, Peter Ford, and three founding members of a Brooklyn based poetry group called The Corresponding Society --- Lonely Christopher, Robert Snyderman, and Jason Tallon.

Doors open at 7pm with a visual and interactive gallery hour for the artists, poets, and guests before the poetry readings begin at 8pm.

Drink specials from 7 to 9pm. Bar On A

“Way of the Word” represents the idea that words take on wills of their own, depending on how they’re put on the page and how a reader perceives them. A short event anthology, featuring poets from the show and around the nation will be available for purchase online and at the door for $15.
Portions of the proceeds will be donated to Reading Excellence and Discovery (READ), a foundation that promotes literacy by pairing qualified high school tutors with elementary students who demonstrate below grade level reading skills.

For more information about “Way of the Word,” READ or REPUBLIC please contact jason@republicbrooklyn.com or call 443. 528. 6761 or 917. 273. 2712

Get Know!

2009-10-18T20:05:00.009-04:00

Know: “No Know” is here --- The Corresponding Society’s premiere line of poetry chapbooks --- representing the following exciting verse collections contained in finely-wrought limited editions: “Elegies for A.R. Ammons” by David Swensen; “This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long” by Caroline Gormley; “Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” by Lonely Christopher. Read more and see withal:

When, Why, How, Who, Know

The Corresponding Society was founded to publish our journal Correspondence, third issue arriving almost-presently, and for some time the moral, mental, and monetary expense of that undertaking alone distracted us from thoughts of multiple directions. Also, at an early meeting, somebody chanced to scream, “There is no way we are doing chapbooks!” and it took a while to schedule a review of that declaration. Around the time we went so far as to release the online chapbook The Gates Salon (Thursday) by (issue three cover artist and contributor) Ray-Ray Mitrano, readable here, the project of a series of single-author poetry chapbooks was being proposed by (one of the founding editors) Robert Snyderman. The chapbook, a sexily intimate object as far as vehicles for poetry go, presents quite a different form than the anthologizing hulk of a literary journal. The latter’s crowded gloriously with a noisy gymfull of different writers, voices rubbing around the pages in discursive concert (the order of the work has to be arranged carefully, like an arty mix-tape); the former’s singular and allows breathing room for a particular voice to stretch --- a single-source poetry architected to have space with itself between the folded cover pages. Also, whereas Correspondence releases in a perfect-bound, professionally printed version, the craft of the chapbook is intensely personal and susceptible to cultish attention. A finely-made chapbook is a fetish object in some literary circles. There was a tremendous argument for embarking on the adventure of a chapbook line and Mr. Snyderman initiated the effort by curating a triad of titles from poets he admired and wanted new published projects from. Almost immediately, Robert fled the country and became an illegal alien roaming Quebec and environs, working as a migrant farmhand and traveling/ditch-sleeping with a French-Canadian painter he met on a beach. Fortunately, Sonia Farmer and Caroline Gormley had accepted duties as the artistic directors of what Robert had named the “No Know” series; thus work was able to continue through the summer. Actually, the two art directors also fled the region presently --- on a protracted homeland visitation to the Bahamas and a relocation to Austin, TX respectively --- but not before covers were produced by letter press process, which makes for fucking handsome chapbook covers. The books came individually from terrifically disparate poetic sensibilities, yet from writers who had been working very closely as peers for many years. When presented all three at readings, the texts play strangely off each other, inciting formal resonances through elegiac examination, across the pages of modernist literature sweeping some words onto new surfaces, and around a legion of social voices stolen into new rhetorical contexts. The pitches of these poems range from conceptually personal, personally textual, and textually sociopolitical. The innocent editors, who volunteered the man-hours required to stitch and otherwise prepare these limited editions, were nearly destroyed by the fairly simple task of sewing paper, but everyone involved argues the sacrifice --- for what “No Know” offers, if the dear reader cares to discover, are important introductions to the writerly projects of three distinct young directions.

Know More No

The three titles are available at select NYC book merchants and, conveniently, here for purchase through our online store. For a limited time, orders placed online will enjoy free shipping.

Each title is published in a limited edition of 50 copies, is pamphlet stitched, and features a letterpress printed cover. Learn about them:

Elegies for A.R. Ammons by David Swensen

These are poems for the late Ammons written as the true elegy must be. They do not lament the lost poet, but attempt to wade into and harvest from his work. They integrate the landscapes of Swensen’s North Carolinian childhood with scenes from his more recent life in Scotland and New York, commemorating Ammons by constantly pressing at his colloquial --- at times ribald --- style, keeping alive Ammons’ work as it is pressed into new and vital forms.

This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long by Caroline Gormley

A personal geography and map of the Texan Gulf Coast viewed through the eyes of youth. The poem strives to recreate that lost landscape by whatever means available --- at once using traditional poetic forms as well as combining the dissolving documents of childhood, with selected erasures of major 20th century American novels.

Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? by Lonely Christopher

With the utmost precision and economy, Lonely Christopher addresses in Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? the contemporary queer political sphere through questions of linguistics, conducting his subjects into a terse, wry, and ultimately operatic chorus of commentary.

"By eloquently rearranging the detritus of our national debate about gay rights, Lonely Christopher’s biting, anti-poetic poetry shows us the heights of pathos and the depths of foolishness around the issue, while delightfully mixing sexuality with textuality."
--- James Hannaham (author of God Says No)

Also know: the entire series is purchasable for fifteen dollars together. Get know.

The Epistemology of Emo

2009-10-09T18:24:00.003-04:00

Mae Saslaw was last month's guest editor. She has just gotten to writing her second post.

Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com.

Some months ago, The Correspondence Society and friends wrote a series of essays on the nature of the hipster and what constitutes hipster culture, if there is such a thing. We overwhelmingly concluded that there is no unified hipster culture, that they produce no unique or identifiable cultural artifacts, and this is one of the primary reasons for their failure—or, since perhaps they weren’t trying in the first place—to form a distinct movement of any kind. I’ve heard arguments along the same lines applied to emo: that there is no identifiable emo music, literature, or art; that emo kids themselves disagree on what aesthetics define emo; that “real” emo was over long before the word/concept ever really took off, and so nothing after maybe 1998 (the year is highly debatable) counts as emo; etc. I have no better working definition of emo than the next emo kid, but I will argue that—unlike hipsters, though the difference between the two is not especially what I mean to emphasize—there are coherent ideas and thought processes running through the whole of the emo movement/scene/what have you, that the lifestyle or, really, epistemology, emerged in the wake of punk rock and still persists in some form. I do not pretend that the authenticity and quality of what is popularly considered emo music has maintained the high standard it once had (you can laugh here), and the degradation and hence bad reputation emo music has endured is in no small part due to the inevitable effects of commercialization. The point I mean to make is one about shared experience: whether your canonical emo band is Sunny Day Real Estate, or Brand New, or Bright Eyes, or Dashboard Confessional, etc., your general worldview has a great deal in common with that of another emo kid from a different time or place, etc. along the emo continuum.

The condition of the emo kid is easy to write off as unfettered vanity and self-indulgence, the case for this view being that emo kids are, in the main, relatively privileged and unaffected by what most people consider to be real traumas of contemporary life, ie, they are situated (usually) well above the poverty line, and have never been exposed to or threatened with extreme violence. We find it hard to sympathize with adolescents and young adults who have grown up sheltered at a time when millions of children have real problems. And, during my own stint as a self-described emo kid, the guilt I felt around feeling dissatisfied with my life (guilt from the knowledge that others had it way worse and yet I found so much about which to complain, or, more accurately, to almost deliberately make myself miserable) was a significant part of the system of malaise I wove in my head.

That said, it’s as hard to convincingly argue that emo kids do have at least a few actual problems, and that these problems are the common threads between different versions or incarnations of emo. And I’ll concede that, even in hindsight, I can’t say that they even were real problems, but it sure as fuck felt like it: the certainty and gravity of the conclusions I drew about myself and other people trumped any remaining capacity I had for objectivity. Everyone really was unendurably vapid and insensitive, and I really was going to maintain my destructive habits unto lifelong loneliness. That’s how it seemed. Part of ceasing to be emo—rather, as emo—was my growing need to apologize for how absurd I sounded in pretty much every communicative act I made, how absurdly I behaved for several solid years. The other part was discovering better art, better music, and most importantly better literature, and realizing that there were far more comprehensive and sustainable ways to deal with the world than the thought processes I mired myself in. And, as has become apparent in this essay, I still continually apologize for emo—to anyone who has been emo, and to anyone who has had any sort of relationship with an emo kid.

With the apology must come the explanation of what it is I am apologizing for. The epistemology of emo, I have decided centers around the following emotional ideology: The emo kid sees in herself some pattern of self-destructive behavior and finds herself both unable to stop and unwilling to continue, but because she is unable to stop, she must continually question whether or not she really is unwilling to continue, and if she is not, she must question what intrinsic flaw makes her weak-minded or truly self-destructive or both. The self-destructive behavior might be a desire for romantic relationships characterized by severe dependence and/or “trust issues,” a desire for meaningless sexual encounters, eating disorders, cutting, repeated alienation of friends, drug and alcohol problems of a fairly minor order, etc. Her ability to question whether or not she wants to stop in the first place leads her to conclude that she is not truly, hopelessly addicted to anything, and indeed she usually is not, but draws her conclusion from an assumption that truly, hopelessly addicted people have already lost the ability to question want vs. need vs. un- or subconscious drive. But, at the same time, the fact that she continues whatever destructive behavior she likely knows she has chosen leads her to further question why she hasn’t totally destroyed herself—ie. she is not dead, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or pregnant. She has never reached and maybe never been close to total destruction, and she sees this as evidence that she is still in control of her actions, and therefore fully capable of “fixing” herself without outside help. Her ultimate self-analysis, and this usually takes at least a year to arrive at, is that she enjoys being somewhat—but, obviously, not entirely—self-destructive, enjoys the level to which she can predict what causes her pain. There’s no real way to tally how many emo kids slowly pulled themselves out of the emo condition vs. how many did go to rehab or join a religious organization or otherwise make some drastic life change that shocked them out of their particular self-destructive behavior more or less overnight. And I am fairly certain that members of the latter category are harsher critics of emo, and those most willing to argue that the emo mentality has no redeeming qualities for anyone. I don’t blame them. I only want to describe, as clearly as possible, the strategies common in every emo kid’s approach to thought and life in general. I call the totality of my conclusions the epistemology of emo because the emo movement, for all its fragmentation, describes a condition of the individual that is all-encompassing. The reason, I think, why former emo kids are so easy to spot, and why they tend to stick together, is that the whole tempest of skewed logic leaves its etchings on the walls of the mind. It’s why someone ten years older than me uses the same word to describe incredibly different artistic periods: ever since punk rock gave us permission to question our role and agency as adolescents, and grunge gave us permission to rage inwardly at whatever we happen to hate about ourselves, emo kids have been inventing and perfecting the cultural artifacts that feed the attitude and vice versa.

No Wave

2009-10-07T19:18:00.002-04:00

What Is Not Post-Feminism?
Some Questions and Problems
by Lonely Christopher

Feminism is a problem of the discursive relationship between theory and praxis. Feminism is simultaneously an academic/theoretical grammar and a sociopolitically applicable ideology. There’s much confusion about what being a feminist means right now; the concept oft languishes as an empty signifier mouthed weirdly by women stuck between third wave and post-feminist perspectives --- those of no wave. Where does the deconstruction of essentialisms become the eschewing or even denial of an affirmative and required praxis of and for contemporary women? Feminism: is institutionalized (theory divorced from praxis in academia), becomes a museum piece (in Brooklyn, where the feminist wing of the museum was founded a year or so back), gets erased by poststructural pluralism, (and/or) just sounds dirty because it can’t cohere as a system sufficiently balancing the pragmatic and existential. What does it mean for a male to identify as feminist or to write about feminism (the latter happening here)? How much room has been made for minority perspectives or is the problem of petit-bourgeois feminism, of a possible feminist hegemony, a bad framing device? Has second wave activism been too eschewed or is it poststructural subjectivities that have been overly ignored? Does a multiplicity of feminisms strengthen feminist thought/praxis conceptually or obliterate all efficacies? How much feminist discourse is today still articulated using the vocabulary of the second wave and does that make such discourse outmoded? bell hooks, decades ago: “Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression.” Where does Butler’s subsequent gender confusion and performative play fit in an oppositional/corrective conception of praxis-based feminism? Where fits art and thought designed to critique and explore rather than directly promote change? What is feminism without the concept of change, without being synonymous with the transformative influence of praxis? Is continued social change resulting in the promotion of women “more feminist” than Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” or isn’t the distinction between activism and art so clear? If, according to the “post” model, feminism is no longer relevant as a contemporary rubric, what now? There probably isn’t more feminism after post-feminism. The problem with post-feminism, its failure, is that is not so contemporary as premature. As a theoretical and socially inapplicable model, post-feminism reads okay as a subset of another post-positioned idiom (postmodernism?), but maybe it negatively closes discourses that should stay available so as to acknowledge the work remaining for change-oriented praxis. Perhaps it’s similar to pushing a post-gay perspective in a sociopolitical context of widespread inequality and subjugation (today, still). When somebody playfully says, “You’re here, you’re queer, get over it!” one wants to tersely respond, “You get over it!” The argument against oppression is declared falsely efficacious, allowing the problem to go on underhandedly. Is this the case with feminism? to what extent? These problems, arising decades ago and remaining unresolved, are some qualities of the no wave that troubles the idea of feminism as a coherent logic. Is this really all just about power or, if not, what else (and how much else)? Christine Wertheim recently writes: “The Subject of History may be dead, but all of the […] others⎯the women, blacks, the queer, and the poor⎯in whom power never resided, still don’t have their share of discursive space.” When does anti-essentialism end up privileging the sneaky normative that refuses being argued out of domination of power relations and ideological discourse? This is nothing more than a recital of problems and questions; unknown is how many questions are rhetorical and how many pertinent but unanswerable. The only likely conclusion in this context is that what and how feminism is represent problems to be addressed, positively, as points of centrifugal departure.

This Is Going To Be Fun

2009-09-20T21:00:00.002-04:00

Here is an announcement about an exciting event coming soon to Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books (one of the city’s best literature merchants, which, incidentally, stocks all three titles of the Corresponding Society’s “No Know” chapbook series, fyi):

Gay Play 3
a new play by Lonely Christopher
presented in a dramatic reading at Unnameable Books
25 September, that is Friday, 8pm, free and one night only!
600 Vanderbilt (at St Marks), Brooklyn

This is going to be fun. Lonely Christopher presents a dramatic reading of the third installment in his internationally produced Gay Play trilogy. Gay Play 3 is something like a closet opera about queer history, shortly before Stonewall, made into a soupy meal using leftovers of Beckett, “The Boys in the Band,” a textbook on structuralism, and Greek tragedy. One day it will be staged entirely in an inflatable pool. Each entry in the trilogy is a standalone piece; familiarity with the previous installments is not required for enjoyment. Gay Play 1 was first staged last summer at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gay Play 2 premiered in dual Mandarin/English productions this August in ChengDu, China, and this event marks the first ever presentation of Gay Play 3.

a dramatic reading featuring:
Jake Abrams
Taylor Derwin
Sam Kline
& Lonely Christopher

Queer Kids!

2009-09-17T18:12:00.002-04:00

Fun:

Glittery! Only slightly misspelled! The event of the season!

A year without David Foster Wallace, a summer with Infinite Jest

2009-09-12T16:24:00.005-04:00

Mae Saslaw is this month's guest editor. Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com. Her next post will be considerably more organized than what follows, and may contain a cogent argument. In the mean time, she will abuse this forum for reasons unapparent.

One year ago tonight, Lonely Christopher called me up to say that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide. I did what any friend would do and started to feed Lonely Christopher alcohol. About twenty minutes after he arrived, he got a call from Greg, whose appendix was near bursting. It was a weird night. But that’s not what this post is about.

I was one of the people who hadn’t actually read any of Wallace’s work—outside of an essay or two for class—prior to his death. I’ve spent the last twelve months catching up, and to date I’ve read Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Girl with Curious Hair, and most recently, Infinite Jest. I started Infinite Jest intending to follow along with the Infinite Summer people and go to their meetings on Thursdays in the Village. That didn’t happen, but I did finish the book. What was extraordinary was the amount of attention I got just for carrying the thing around. One girl approached me on a subway platform and asked if I’d read an essay of Wallace’s that had appeared in the New Yorker at some point, because if I hadn’t, she was going to give me her copy.

Ordinarily, I have a pretty limited amount of patience for the general public and carry an admittedly larger-than-justifiable sense of superiority when it comes to my tastes in fiction. Example: I once saw a boy my age reading Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser on a subway car filled with screaming preteens. I wanted to lean over and tell him, “Don’t even try reading that book now; you won’t understand a damn thing.” I ultimately didn’t say anything, but only because I didn’t want him to think I was coming onto him. I am an asshole. To be fair, I also had the reverse happen to me: Last summer, when I was trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow, a heavily-tattooed gentleman (carrying a copy of The Confessions of St Augustine) interrupted me and asked, first of all, if I could possibly read on a sweltering train with headphones on, and second, if I was trying to read the book without a companion volume. I said something like, “I’m reading it for the sentences,” and then bitched about the heat and how I wanted a cigarette. I must have come off looking pretty fucking cool. That’s not what this post is about, either.

I have a hard time being direct about this, about what reading Infinite Jest this particular summer and finishing up last week was really like. I guess it was something like this:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté…Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool.

So we—myself, plus the people who approached me in the subway or in stores to say that they were reading or had read or had given up reading Infinite Jest—have this passage in common, this pretty profound slap in the face. I could read this as Wallace’s argument against reading his novel, since the act of reading is this same consumption of art that pulls us into anhedonic emptiness, maybe. Or it’s the interruption, the little piece of metafiction that jars us, alerts us to the fact that we’ve been reading for these instructions, and we’re getting what we asked for, and maybe we shouldn’t have asked for it, or maybe we definitely should have because being cultured and hip is the only way out of utter loneliness, unless it isn’t. In any case, he’s called my own personal bluff. Am I cool yet? Because I’m pretty fucking jaded. The point is that I don’t get to discount my fellow readers after this—we all just had our insecurities nailed down. Hard.

And I can’t ignore the shade that Wallace’s suicide paints over the experience of reading Infinite Jest. Wallace becomes even more like J.O. Incandenza, the figure whose ghost haunts the book and all its characters. If you’ve read the book, you know about all the parallels between the novel and Incandenza’s final film, also titled Infinite Jest, so I won’t go into those except to say that everything Wallace tells us about the film is true of the novel. There’s no literary or historical evidence to suggest that Incandenza’s suicide at all prefigures Wallace’s death any more than the deaths of any other of his characters. But still. The similarities are hard to ignore, and I wonder what it might have felt like to read Infinite Jest before Wallace died. One would have had the sense, for instance, that it might be possible to ask him what he meant, if passages like the one above were meant to destroy us in quite the way they did. Or, perhaps, if the side effect of uniting the unbearably cool U.S. youth was the point all along. Or, if we were supposed to realize that anhedonia and inhumanity are too closely linked. I can’t imagine that, if I’d read the book last year, I would have taken any particular solace in knowing that Wallace was, if nothing else, still alive—Infinite Jest leaves so little room for solace. But it hurt (maybe hurt is the wrong word: stung? cut?) more to know that he killed himself, that he couldn’t think or write his way out of a place where, according to him, we all are. (“By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.”)

One last anecdote: Last week, on one of the last days I spent reading Infinite Jest, I stopped at a bodega on my way to work. It was 8am, I was hungover, and I had to wait a couple of minutes for my bagel. A woman and her young daughter were waiting for their sandwiches as well, and after glaring at me for a couple of minutes, the woman noticed I was carrying Infinite Jest. What exactly we said to each other isn’t all that important, but I got the distinct sense that she hadn’t really considered Wallace’s death and what it had done to his readers. As far as she was concerned, he might as well have been dead for decades or more—the conditions of his life had nothing to do with the work. And I guess that’s a certain school of reading, to ignore as much about the author as you can. I disagree in any case, but I don’t see how anyone can exclude an author’s suicide from complete analysis of a work, or from the experience of reading it.

I think more discussion is called for. I think I failed in making a lot of points, partly because I need to spend more time considering exactly what happens in the thousand pages I spent the summer reading. But in the spirit of the commemorative blog post, here is another of my favorite (if I may express preference for something that leaves me devastated) passages from Infinite Jest. It happens around the middle of a list of things one learns at a halfway house.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold- and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

Fresh Evidence

2009-09-11T19:41:00.001-04:00

We had a fun time at our celebratory chapbook reading at Brooklyn’s Outpost Lounge last week; thanks to Mae Saslaw (who, it is rumored, has agreed to be the blog’s guest editor this month), we also have some fun documentation. If you happened to miss this event, there’s some new pictorial evidence available on our website. Withal, below please find a video sample of the reading in the form of Lonely Christopher reciting his poem “His Lips Were on that Glass”:

his lips were on that glass from mae saslaw on Vimeo.

Chapbook Party!

2009-08-29T14:30:00.001-04:00

The CORRESPONDING SOCIETY hereby invites you to come celebrate with us the launch of a brand new literary venture! The “Know No” chapbook series, months in the making, was curated by Robert Snyderman and designed by art directors Caroline Gormley and Sonia Farmer. The collection includes the following three distinct and exciting texts:

“Elegies for A.R. Ammons” by David Swensen
“Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” by Lonely Christopher
“This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long” by Caroline Gormley

Please join us on 3 September (7pm), at local waterhole (caffeinated/alcoholic) Outpost, for an evening of revelry, libations, and poetry. Plus the chance to win fabulous prizes! Readers will include David Swensen, Lonely Christopher, and Adrian Shirk (satalite-reading for Ms. Gormley, who lives in Austin, Texas).

Venue: Outpost Lounge
Location: 1014 Fulton St (Brooklyn)
Date: 3 September
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: David Swensen, Lonely Christopher, Adrian Shirk

Straight Proust

2009-08-22T18:10:00.004-04:00

Shelf Space
On Qualities and Locations of Queer Literature
by Lonely Christopher

What is queer literature? I think this is an important question and a stupid one. In the “gay fiction/non-fiction shelves at Barnes and Noble” sense, “gay lit” is a minoritizing concept. I have never plucked a title off the “gay fiction” shelf; to do so seems unfortunately tacky (considering my snobby bias re the quality of writing that is typically relegated there, possibly correlative to chick lit). About the only text I’ve taken home from the “gay non-fiction” shelf is Epistemology of the Closet. In that book, Sedgwick discusses “the contradictions […] internal to all the important twentieth-century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition,” which include “the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority […] and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities[.]” But, of course, we have all read Epistemology of the Closet --- which is why I find it so queer the issue of themes of non-normative sexuality in creative writing is treated with a minoritizing disdain, in casual conversation, by my closest friends. I am not arguing against the organization of texts by subject --- without which Mr. Dewey weeps and I get confused at the library --- but it’s undeniable that a social stigma is attached to what is essentially the ghettoization of queer writing. Notably, reputable queer authors do not usually languish in the “gay fiction” section: you’ll probably find City of Night and the oeuvre of Burroughs in regular literature. Although the pessimistic view might be that those guys became institutionalized enough to receive honorary-straight status, which comes with admission to the grown-ups table; just as reasonable, and more positively, it might also be that important literature is important literature. We’d love to claim the latter the case here in our progressive day. So why is it, then, that certain of my peers continually express concern that I am running the risk, in foregrounding queer themes in my own work, of losing their interest by esoterically going gay? I posit the answer relates to a kind of latent homophobia that’s ubiquitous in contemporary literary discourse. Despite familiarity with all the trendy texts of queer theory --- Sedgwick, Butler, Foucault --- straight-identified writers and readers (that I know) can’t help finding queer material in literature kind of boring and gross. Although I don’t feel comfortable organizing myself under the cultural rubric of the “gay” construct, my non-normative sexual identity (or: queerness) still came with implicit subscription to a rich and fascinating gay canon of creative texts and critical perspectives. My interest in certain dimensions of art and theory (that is, the gay dimensions) presupposes my access to queer tradition. I had to struggle out of a stuffy heteronormativity before I learned to love queer culture. This is the result of the minoritizing influence built in to normative discourse, which sets apart anything articulating a strong queer perspective. (Such values also make you straight until proven otherwise, so many queer boys and girls tend to be raised straight, which retards them culturally.) I mean to say: queerness isn’t implicitly just for gays, but cultural hegemony ignores this and enforces ghettoization. So friends squirm when my writing swerves into fag land. Most of what I’ve been doing for about a year results from a project of queer investigation. Previously, the attention of my creative writing has been more scattered. When peers began to notice the unfamiliar direction my work was heading in, the reaction was almost unanimously suspicious (turning negative). There was an audience for my chamber drama Gay Play when I staged it last year --- but when I wrote a sequel, kids started worrying. When I ended up with Gay Play 3, some reactions were outright hostile: I was turning into a “scene queen.” The primary response I’ve been getting is that I shouldn’t write about queer themes all the time because that runs of risk of making me a “special interest” writer. A friend recently complained over the intellectual poverty of art about same sex relationships; I pointed out my unpublished novel focuses on a straight married couple. He said, correction, he didn’t like any art about romantic relationships --- we went home and watched a Woody Allen movie, which we enjoyed. That is an irony of straight discomfort with queer lit --- it doesn’t go both ways: queers don’t seem to have much of a problem with appreciating all the fine heterocentric art in the world. In fact, I quite love Woody Allen, for example, even though I do not relate at all to his hetero treatment of love and sex. Weirdly, a whole bunch (most?) of the heroes of the normative canon, which have become the favorites of my straight peers, are total homos. I have another friend who used to really want to erase that unfortunate detail. When we were young we were crazy about Rimbaud. Despite the whole Verlaine fling --- which, you know, gave us some pretty good poetry --- and the evidence Arthur had a kept boy when he quit the writing game for business, according to this friend Rimbaud wasn’t “technically gay” because he doesn’t fit neatly under the contemporary gay construct; thus, his sexuality is unimportant in the consideration of his work. Next came Proust, which my friend tried to prove was actually straight because he wrote so well about heterosexual relationships and penned a few flowery letters to his women friends. Never mind, you know, the overwhelmingly queer bent of In Search of Lost Time or any of his fancy gay love. It went on like that --- I think Whitman came next --- although this fellow is very intelligent and his attitude might be different now. I think Sedgwick makes an important case for reading literature from a queer perspective, which is a practice often considered useless, extraneous folly by even those straights who’ve read Sedgwick. When arguing defensively against the validity of queer perspectives in art, my straight friends often resort to a few stances exampled in Epistemology of the Closet. The list of possible attacks is sort of lengthy, but it’s worth representing here in full: “1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion --- and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or 2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion --- but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or 3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike now --- so people probably didn’t do anything. Or 4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn’t exist back then, unlike now --- so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or 5. The word 'homosexuality' wasn’t coined until 1869 --- so everyone before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always existed.) Or 6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex --- so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under perhaps somewhat different rules of admissible evidence) 7. There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman --- so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort) 8. The author or the author’s important attachments may very well have been homosexual --- but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought.” To Sedgwick, this puritanical outrage at the canon being reconfigured along queer lines evinces, beyond sheer homophobia, a hegemonic ignorance necessary in sustaining the established order: “Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know.” There is the additional fallacy of misunderstanding the divisions between popular and literary writing when it comes to queer texts (like mine). My treatment of queer themes, its centrality in my recent work, gets conflated by friends with the production of the low paperbacks shoved out of the literary discourse to languish on the dusty “gay fiction” shelf. Thus, writing about queerness at all is the same thing as writing for the supposedly non-critical popular gay audience (and we know they don’t even read, pity). The situation is probably a little different right now in China, where the first two Gay Plays are being published and staged. The communal homophobia doesn’t seem to have been internalized and caked over with organized defenses there as it has here stateside. When casting the English production of Gay Play 2, I’m told it was impossible to convince noncitizens (expatriates and the like) living locally to participate because of the social fear that, I guess, ultimately implies the punishment of deportation for subversive activities. In climates of more direct sociopolitical repression, any conception of queer literature is disallowed from validation or even existence; in cultures of internalized homophobia the dominant critical discourse substitutes in the government’s role in authoritarian censorship. When it comes to the troublesome attitudes of my friends here in the US, I think I should make an important distinction clear because it’s probably not terribly considered from a straight perspective. Straight writers focus on themes of sexuality frequently and sans compunction --- this is because sexuality is fascinating and complex. A straight-identified writer has implicit access to her life of experiences parsing the complications of sexuality from her own vantage. This fundamental catalog of conceptualized sexuality is obviously available to the gay or queer-identified writer as well. There’s something else, though, that influences the queer writer, problematizing and inspiring his work: his subjugated position in a heteronormative social grammar. There is no aspect of the queer subject that’s structurally inherent (thereby inalienable) in our literary or social formations. This is evidenced in how a queer writerly focus is so easily suspect: there is no right to a gay literature within the intellectual framework we operate in as artists. A straight writer writing straight work writes literature; a queer writer writing queer work writes queer literature, which doesn’t exist. Maybe, to restart, the question is, rather: What should queer literature be? Does it belong outside the normative canon, within it qua subspecies, or should there even be a designation distinct for it at all? I know the gay canon did form outside normative discourse --- it had to because of where its subscribers were: the institution of the closet. I suppose I’d like to see something suggested by the “universalizing view” identified in Sedgwick: a queer literature different from the established and ghettoized gay canon, something that’s not as minoritized but in active conversation with our normative canon. When somebody picks up a volume of Proust from the “literature” shelf, for example, she understands the text simultaneously as a great novel and a great queer novel. I like the duality there. A critical engagement with queerness in treatments of literature is undeniably important --- not only from a gay perspective, or from wherever I’m located personally, but for all writers and readers of creative texts (that’s us). Queer has value. As Annamarie Jagose writes, “Queer is not outside the magnetic field of identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally."

Upstate Reading

2009-08-10T11:07:00.001-04:00

If, for whatever reason, you happen to be upstate, or in the mood to travel upstate, this week, please note that some of us of the Corresponding Society are in the same position (for we have a reading). Also note that our chapbooks will be ready and available for the first time that day. Details:

Venue: the Dragonfly Café
Location: 7 Wheeler Ave, Pleasantville, NY
Date: Thurs, August 13
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Christopher Sweeney, Adrian Shirk, Lonely Christopher, David Swensen

All Warhol

2009-08-05T12:46:00.002-04:00

A: a Problem
Warhol Speaks for Himself, Kinda
by Lonely Christopher

Andy Warhol is intellectual property to which we all share the copyright. After staging a play about Andy Warhol in a rural Pennsylvanian town, the local audience approached me with about the same ideas on the subject as articulated by anyone I’ve talked to about it within academia or bohemia. “Andy Warhol’s whole life wassis work, ya’know, so he became some sorta performance, an anti-human er anti-artist, like he turned everything he saw inta art so it done mean nothin. He took th’ image an emptied it all out, so it were just all on th’ surface. Like, he didn’t see no depth in nothin’ --- so his art was turnin’ everything inta culture, inta an empty signifier, doncha know. I’d say, shucks, Warhol has gone the furthest in the annihilation of th’ artistic and th’ creative act; he was uh simulacrum.” Andy Warhol is as egalitarian as Coca-Cola, a soft drink that he appreciated because its popularity meant some bum on the street drank exactly the same Coke as Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol is an American invention. Andy: “That could be […] the best American invention --- to be able to disappear.” A has disappeared into complete ubiquity. We talk about Warhol and mean nothing. I chewed up Baudrillard’s essay on Andy (“Machinic Snobbery,” from The Perfect Crime) and collaged its pulpy guts into my play, along with sources like Kenny Goldsmith’s edition of A’s selected interviews. I interviewed Kenneth once and we talked some about Warhol. LC: “How does that work? When I first started thinking about Warhol I was thinking about him actually in relation to the Situationists because I was studying the Situationists and I saw that they wanted to effect change but they designed their movement in a way where all their ideas were easily colonized and they really quickly failed. That failure made me think of Warhol because he seemed to have designed his work and life in a way where whatever the position it was put in it still retained its integrity.” KG: “You’re very astute; that’s a great point. But the real thing is that the secret of Warhol was he never intended resistance and therefore something that could never offer resistance could never be co-opted. That’s fucking brilliant. He was completely complicit and by being complicit he was subversive. It was a very brilliant strategy of his. He took a lot of shit for it, too. People didn’t understand.” My play, I Am Happy, is about a major problematic in studying Warhol: the man/machine dichotomy, which seems to be unresolved. The premise: an interviewer questions A, vomiting about the artist qua sign system before doubling back and suspiciously interrogating that position (receiving only vaguely bored and clever answers from his subject). He sits frustrated over A (who pushes pills across the surface of a mirror); frowns: “A lot of people are inclined to put you down because you operate at a certain distance --- mechanically, artificially. And yet it is claimed you are not, cannot be, truly a mutant. You are made of the same material as everyone else, you are not yourself a mirror or a machine --- but regular blood and guts (violence being your threatened reminder, ugliness your secret humiliation). Doesn’t this problematize addressing you as some sort of text, sign system, or an object? […] Is [your] mechanic affectation rather an adaptive mythopoetics?” A says, as usual, “I don’t know.” Upon studying Kenny’s collection of documents for the first time, the actual interviews, I learned a valuable lesson re the importance of not knowing (even if you do). I like reading theorists, biographers, and memoirists inscribing Warhol for themselves (and us) in various texts. Baudrillard denies biography, or the very embodiment of the idea of Warhol; Koestenbaum (in a monograph for Penguin) attempts to invoke a tortured and imaginative sexuality for his subject; Coacello often uses Warhol to define and validate his own narrative (Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up); Bockris (The Life and Death of Andy Warhol) constructs A as the classic biographer’s subject, portraying him historically like a dead president. I would love to read a book about Warhol written by a Midwestern housewife. As for Andy: “I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote.” Until I picked up The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back Again (1975, apparently), it had never occurred to me to peruse the material that the artist ostensibly wrote himself. It made more sense to read Warhol through a filter, like staring into the sun directly would burn and permanently damage me somehow. How much of Warhol’s writing is Warhol’s writing isn’t entirely important. He is the author of this book --- although it was ghostwritten (to whatever extent) by Pat Hackett (credited only as a redactor in the dedication) --- for the same reason he is the artist behind work he didn’t complete himself (or the same reason it doesn’t matter many of his movies are slowed down, for length, and looped instead of filmed totally). Andy Warhol is a novelist who wrote a book, A: a novel, that didn’t require him to write anything --- or do more than hand over a tape recorder to his friends and then employ transcribers. Yet in Philosophy a voice, usually absent or reformatted in other texts, distinctly Warholian, or distinctly anchoring the Warholian within a personal mode of expression, haunts the pages here and there. What does poetry written by a machine sound like? This book contains strings of anecdotes and aphorisms --- suggesting a wit akin to Wilde that A probably didn’t demonstrate socially. (It is hard to conceive of Andy awkwardly creeping around a party before suddenly charming a crowd of socialites with a bon mot, delivered with confidence and ease: “I guess that’s what marriage boils down to --- your wife buys your underwear for you.” A here is more articulate and slyer than in interviews. He defines the paradigm of Andy Warhol, which we all swim around in, with a self-awareness that presupposes many of the regurgitated insights of subsequent scholars and commentators. “I have no memory,” he claims. He taunts us: “I have to look into the mirror for some more clues. Nothing is missing. It’s all there. The affectless gaze. The diffracted grace […] the bored languor, the wasted pallor […] the chic freakiness, the basically passive astonishment, the enthralling secret knowledge […] the chintzy joy, the revelatory tropisms, the chalky puckish mask, the slight Slavic look […] the childlike, gum-chewing naiveté, the glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones […] the albino-chalk skin. Parchmentlike. Reptilian. Almost blue […] The knobby knees. The roadmap of scars, The long bony arms, so white they look bleached. The arresting hands. The pinhead eyes. The banana ears […] The graying lips. The shaggy, silver-white hair, soft and metallic. The cords of the neck standing out around the big Adam’s apple. It’s all there […] nothing is missing.” This is one of the book’s most flamboyant and decadent set-pieces; Warhol here offers us the gift of his persona, and then becomes it. The ingenious climax of the book --- a giant set-piece consisting of an exhausting rant performed by a friend over the phone, describing upsettingly obsessive cleaning routines she follows to tidy her apartment (naked and on speed) --- reads as contemporary a literary experiment as the noncreative writing of Kenny G and other conceptual poets. It is boring, artful, out of place in context, and weighs down the end of the text. Warhol sits on the phone and listens indifferently, wordlessly setting the receiver down only to occasionally replace the jam he’s eating with another snack. Warhol was probably a good listener. In this particular passage, he disappears into a frustratingly weird narrative of drug-fueled chores. He plays a trick by fading, chameleon-like, into the wallpaper. His friend has to make sure everything is totally sanitized and clean; he lets her wash him out of his own story. I squint, trying to detect the ego, superego, or id floating around within this Warholian matrix. Who would win in a match between A and Freud? Recent documentaries and studies of Warhol tend to sensationalize the ugliness of the man. Maybe the general public doesn’t know A suffered from tragically bad skin, baldness under his lovely wig --- or that he hardly ever enjoyed a fulfilling sex life, had to assemble himself in front of a mirror, with all sorts of pastes and products, before feeling presentable, or that he was scarred and damaged after being shot, having to wear a corset thereafter. Documentarians, filmmakers, and scholars have been trying to dramatically expose this side of Warhol; thus, I assumed it had always been hidden --- that A couldn’t stand such facts of his bodily failures, his monstrosity, incorporated under the public title of Andy Warhol. I was surprised, then, at what A, as author, was forward about when writing about his body in Philosophy. The angst of not being beautiful is typed across page after page. He wakes up and dials a number; into the phone he sighs, “I wake up every morning. I open my eyes and think: here we go again.” He wanted to look into the mirror and see nothing --- because he desired the erasure of his imperfections. He knew he didn’t really belong in the glossy magazines of the celebrities he adored, but he had to find a way to kidnap that glamour. He posits that addressing what he doesn’t like about himself is a way to erase the impact of those undesirable qualities on his life. So right away he is discussing his pimples and, as evidenced in above set-piece, many other examples of the freakish characteristics that plagued and defined him. It could have come off as a joke contemporaneously, but today we read the seriousness, and tragedy, in his comic remark: “I need about an hour to glue myself together.” Applying his artifice was time consuming. The way his wig was pasted or bound to his bald pate must have been painful; the obviousness of his weirdness and the futility to cake it over with make-up and creams must have been wholly embarrassing. Once, at a book signing, a girl grabbed off his wig and disappeared into a getaway car. Exposed, A was terrified; he later claimed that that event was equally traumatizing as being shot in the gut and almost dying. Yet, in retrospect, the details he waltzes around are telling. Although Warhol refers obliquely to his “wings,” I am unclear if that is even a fuzzy reference to his hairpieces. Anyway, in writing he claims that he has “gone gray” by dying his existing hair; he spends plenty of time turning this excuse into a demonstration of his “philosophy.” (Funny that the implicit intent of this book is to outline/codify a Warholian ideology when that concept, as such, was realized only as a mirroring of other cultural surfaces.) Was his “going gray” claim a joke or was Warhol unprepared to announce in print that the radical style of his platinum wigs was defensive in origin, meant to conceal? Before he switched to his trademark wig style, those who knew him were embarrassed for him because of how phony his more naturally colored hairpieces looked. Often, when somebody was mad at Andy, he attacked his appearance. A detail of Warhol’s biography that is contrastively ignored is his drug use --- it was easy for him to refer to taking his “vitamins” and “diet pills,” but those drugs should now be understood as amphetamines, which he was in habitual practice of swallowing (as far as I understand from my own research). The relationship of amphetamine’s grammar to the Warholian construct could benefit from further study. In Philosophy, he mentions taking pills only in passing, innocently refusing to discuss what they mean to him or his work, and he glosses the drug use that characterized his social milieu via playfully opaque euphemisms. When a “poke” (injection of drugs) is mentioned, it is unclear whether heroin or speed is the substance being abused. A also avoids bringing up his queerness, which I find incongruous considering the explicit (plus implicit) themes of queer sexuality in his art. He portrays himself as having monkish dedication to his career and, almost literally, married to his tape recorder (his “wife”); when the subject of romantic or sexual interaction arises he uses the feminine pronoun when referring to his partner. Although Warhol doesn’t seem to be able to fit within the developing model of postwar male homosexuality, he is definitely queer. He had same sex attractions and relationships, however problematic. Maybe Warhol would have made a profound contribution to queer literature had he addressed the subject in this text --- maybe he felt like he couldn’t (or did not want to). Anyway, A can be just about whatever we want; that’s why we love him so. He just can’t be himself --- not if he’s some form of simulacrum. A human subject can only be thought about in these terms abstractly. An agent like you, dear reader, can’t demonstrate yourself as a copy without an original, not in earnest (so I say, at least). That was Warhol’s project, nonetheless. He wanted to cake simulation in suffocating layers over his agency, thus creating the curtain to disappear behind forever. Advice from A: “If you can’t believe it’s happening, pretend it’s a movie.” I write about A all the time and never get any closer to solving anything; that’s the point. I don’t know, as they say. From I Am Happy: Interviewer, “What does human judgment mean to you?” Andy, “Human judgment doesn’t mean anything to me. Human judgment doesn’t exist for technology. I don’t like problems because you have to find a solution. Without judgment there can be no problems. What I try to do is avoid solving problems. Problems are too hard and too many. I don’t think finding solutions really adds up to anything --- it only creates more problems. Becoming a machine is a way of making things easy. And it gives me something to do. I like that.”

Learning

2009-07-21T01:28:00.002-04:00

Did You Know: The late submission deadline for Correspondence No. 3 has been extended indefinitely. We remain very welcoming of your work, please understand. Interested parties are invited to peruse the submission guidelines available on our (minimally designed) website for more details about what we’re looking for. Also, copies of Correspondence No. 2 are still available for purchase. Please consider spending a little of your milk money on this affordable collection of sophisticated new works of poetry, critical writing, fiction, and hybrid material (including a Möbius strip, don’t you know). This deal can be got through our online store. The Corresponding Society relies on earning enough money from the current issue to publish the next book. Helping us is a sexy way to support new writing and includes the bonus of an attractive perfectbound volume filled with uses of language better than a trip to Disneyland. We are beginning editorial work on issue 3 --- and are very confident in our ability to architect an even more engaging collection of letters --- but we feel slightly starved for different kinds of support from interested readers, writers, and correspondents beyond the team that manages and assembles the journal (and our immediate friends). We require activity from around places to eat like a meal. This is so because we undertake our labors to always expand creative discourse, rather than wallow in some private grumpiness. We want attention and money (read “want” as “need to continue this project”) but, more importantly, we want to expand the edges of our discourse through more participation, more conversation, more art. That is a lofty goal, but we try anyway. Beyond the publication of our journal, our public events, and website features such as the author catalog and library (not to mention the blog) we are developing in new ways --- including the release of our first chapbooks, from the No Know series curated by Robert Snyderman and built by a group of dedicated bookmakers. Please look forward to the birth, in the coming weeks, of three superbly designed collections of poetry by individual authors: “Elegies for A.R. Ammons” by David Swensen, “Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” by Lonely Christopher, and “This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long” by Caroline Gormley. The Corresponding Society looks forward to developing and growing when we can. You learn something every day.

James Hannaham interviewed by Lonely Christopher

2009-07-11T02:48:00.004-04:00

James Hannaham (Culture Guy)

Gary Gray has a problem. The narrator of James Hannaham’s debut novel, God Says No, newly released from McSweeney’s Rectangulars, loves God and Disney World. The story opens in the late eighties --- Gary is a married, black, overweight Floridian student at a Christian college. Mostly, he gets on normally (even boringly), but, as his long-suffering wife tells him, “Sometimes one problem’s all you need, honey.” The book is defined by this central defect that plagues the protagonist: same sex attraction. Hannaham eschews the blasé implicitness of homosexual desire popularly demonstrated in contemporary media --- invoking something of the erstwhile pathology that characterized works like The Boys in the Band and City of Night --- and in doing so exposes something important about our present national perspectives on sexual identity: being gay remains a struggle. This is especially so for Gary, who is inundated by a fundamentalist Christian morality that portrays queerness as a hell-worthy trespass. The novel describes Gary’s tortured efforts to suppress his attractions, his failures, his desperate schemes to simultaneously maintain a secret sexual life and a family existence, his complete lapse into the “gay lifestyle,” and his complicated admittance into a religious recovery and reform program. As a paradigmatic shift disrupts our national value systems (possibly in ways as upturning as the post-Stonewall development of the gay rights movement) and a postmodern identity politics creeps into the general discourse --- sexuality is fluid and not totalizingly definitional --- Hannaham reminds us of the climate we are growing out of and how much complication we still face. God Says No provides likely one of the most vivid engagements, in recent fiction, with the personal turmoil experienced by subjects with sexual identities and/or attractions incongruous within a heteronormative patriarchy of lingering puritanical mores. As Jim Lewis (The King is Dead, &c.) suggests: Gary isn’t just gay, he’s “profoundly gay.” Withal, the book entertainingly introduces a narratorial voice so strikingly crafted the reader might feel she’s made an unlikely friend in Gary Gray. God Says No is perhaps a surprising release for the twee McSweeney’s brand; it’s a welcome one. Some more front-flap blurb copy, from Jennifer Egan: “God Says No is everything a person could ask of a first novel --- and twice that much.” James Hannaham has written for the likes of Salon.com and The Village Voice; he was a founding member of the downtown theater company Elevator Repair Service, he’s also collaborated with artists such as David Levine (recently in the show Venice Saved: a Seminar at PS 122); he lives in Brooklyn where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute. He was my thesis advisor during my senior year in the writing program, guiding me through my first novel, which subsequently won the annual thesis award for fiction. Busied by the release of God Says No and the requisite national book tour, he nevertheless agreed to let me record him in conversation.
--- Lonely Christopher

Lonely Christopher: I went to a bar on Gay Day, after the parade, and made some friends; eventually this Hasidic Jew, in full regalia, waddled in. He sat down alone and was looking really nervous. Immediately my night was ruined, he was giving off such terrible vibes. He seemed so full of fear, shame, self-disgust, and desire --- he was leering at the boys. And somehow he ended up very close to us. I don’t know, he just kept moving closer until he was sitting with us. And we were talking about literature. I felt bad.

James Hannaham: He was obviously religious.

LC: Yeah --- and he seemed so repressed. You could tell it took him a really long time to work up the nerve to come into a gay bar; now he didn’t know what to do. So I felt like I should try to include him in the conversation. We were talking about Shakespeare; I turned to him and asked if he liked Shakespeare. He looked as if I had just insulted him or something. So I asked if he had ever read Shakespeare. He mumbled he didn’t know --- and he pointed to my drink and asked if I was talking about the name of my beer. It was weird. I left around three am and he was still there. I don’t know if he picked up a boy that night or not.

JH: Maybe he was working his way up to that.

LC: It reminded me of your novel.

JH: Uh… thanks?

LC: Let’s start broad. What is your novel?

JH: I think this book is a little bit 19th Century. It’s just that --- when the major plot point happens --- that, to me, is the moment when, in a 19th Century novel or an early 20th Century novel, everybody goes to Europe. I’m thinking of maybe The Custom of the Country. I was in graduate school when I started this and I was reading a lot of late 19th and early 20th Century books. One could make the argument that my book is like a 19th Century novel about a 21st Century person.

LC: How does being a novelist relate to your role as a creative writing instructor?

JH: As an instructor, I tried to stay out of everybody’s projects to some degree, right? I feel like the way to get it done is to get it done. Whatever process you use to get from nothing to a novel --- that is your thing. All I can do is really tell you, “Well this is what has worked for me.” And sometimes I can look at somebody’s work, and hear about their process, and say, “Well, this seems to be what works for you, so why don’t you do X, Y, or Z?” But I really don’t believe in trying to teach fiction as a craft. I’m really suspicious of this sort of drift toward turning fiction into something that’s more like screenwriting. One of the things that I kept beating myself up about, while I was writing this book, was: “Well, it doesn’t really have a hook.” There’s nothing, in the conception of it, that I can describe to somebody who would immediately say it sounds like a great story that they want to read or it sounds like a great thing to make a movie out of. I think I kept resisting that because I was chaffing against the idea that it would have to be this packaged thing, this thing I would have to sell to people. I was much more of the opinion, when I started writing and thinking about what novels are good for, that they were just about people’s lives.

LC: God Says No is very well structured. I’d like to describe it as a triptych because its three parts are separate but very balanced, in a painterly way. How did that develop?

JH: Gosh! That is such a formalist question. I haven’t thought about it so much in terms of form. The form develops very slowly --- what I try to do is write the whole thing and then figure out what I’ve done and what it’s telling me. I think at a certain moment I realized it could be divided into these three sections pretty neatly. And then I was messing around with the chapters a lot: by the very end, the chapters changed. What I ended up with, I felt pretty good about.

LC: Can you talk about the voice of Gary Gray? It’s so successful to me --- maybe the most important aspect in committing the reader to the story. I am reminded of the ingenuous and unwittingly euphemistic voice of the narrator from Lydia Millet’s novel My Happy Life, which you taught in class.

JH: Oh, yeah!

LC: The idiomatic US plain-speak of Gary’s tone was, I suspect, crafted with a lot of intention to particulars of ordinary communication.

JH: Yeah. And My Happy Life was a pretty big influence on me. I wasn’t really trying to copy it, but I wanted something of that sense of cluelessness. I think at a certain point I thought that, because I’ve written so much nonfiction and I have all this specialized knowledge in cultural stuff, I thought that as a fiction writer I would be the sort who would write from a position of profound knowledge of the way the world works --- but I realized that it was more fun for me, and it felt more organic (I used the word “organic,” didn’t I?), more natural to me to write from a sense of complete confusion and wonder. I feel like I still don’t know what any of this is: life, why anything happens, why people behave the way they do. I mean, that’s a big one. There are some things you can know empirically, but you can only just guess at other people’s emotional states. My Happy Life was pretty important. I mean, the voice developed out of that feeling. Also, I wrote this book which made the rounds and never got published; several people commented that they really didn’t like the narrator. So I decided to invent this narrator whose big flaw, or one of his big flaws, is that he’s pretty desperate to be liked. And then I started noticing people that I felt fit that description. There is a poet, who will remain nameless, who I met at a residency --- he was just very sweet and obviously wanted to be liked, really friendly, but he was friendly to the point of being a little repulsive. I found that fascinating and tragic.

LC: Jim Lewis compares your protagonist to Candide. I agree, in the way that Gary Gray is propelled through social misadventure in an uncomprehending manner that, for the reader, ironically critiques the circumstances of the character’s plight.

JH: That’s a great observation. You learned well.

LC: You’ve stated that you didn’t have a religious childhood. The book is so drenched in a specific Christian culture that I guessed you had history with some churchy mores. I’m the opposite, actually --- brought up socialized religiously, but totally uninterested in addressing related themes as a writer.

JH: Yeah. Actually, the thing is: a lot of people in my family were reverends and teachers. My generation shifted to writers, artists, journalists. Because of that there’s been this sort of veil over the religious part of it. My parents were not religious. Although both of my parents, in very different ways, came to something that I would call Christian mysticism. My mother thought we were all telepathic; my father joined this science of mind group (kind of like Christian Science, with some eastern thought).

LC: Why were you drawn to centralizing a particular fundamentalist perspective?

JH: Do you mean why did I make Gary Gray religious?

LC: It’s such an important part of the novel.

JH: Yeah. Well, it’s because I’ve been fascinated with religious people --- it’s kind of in my blood. When I was on tour, just now, I was paying a visit to a church where my great grandfather was an itinerant minister in 1911. They were telling me that I might actually have to lead a prayer and that they would ask me what church I was with. I was asked, “Is it in your blood?” And I said, “Well, when I think about it, it kind of is.” I mean, there are a lot of transferable skills between doing a book tour and being an itinerant minister --- and also teaching and being in an experimental theater company. I feel like I’ve preached the gospel of art. The other thing is that I wanted to understand people who were that religious. Although, I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that there’s not all that much to understand. I’ve had a correspondence with this sort of odd Christian woman who got in touch with me through a listserv. She would send me these four-thousand-word emails. I couldn’t respond to all her points. I stopped responding to her because there was just too much and I got too busy. I couldn’t devote half my day to responding to her. I wanted to have a rational discussion, but at a certain point the discussion does not become rational for people who have that much faith. They are convinced. She wanted me to read some book that proved that Christianity was the only way. I was like: “No.” There isn’t a book that’s going to do that for me. This is the way that Muslim fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists end up killing each other. There is just no common ground. They refuse to admit any common ground. So the only thing you can do, short of reforming somebody, is just kill them.

LC: The anti-gay and/or homophobic stances inundating the world Gary has to negotiate left me really nonplussed. I’m relatively unfamiliar with examples of foundational guilt, shame, fear, and furtiveness that terrorize your protagonist.

JH: You found them surprising?

LC: Yeah!

JH: Have you seen that video from that Connecticut church?

LC: Oh, you know, I did.

JH: Oh my god! Who dramatized a portion of my book?

LC: I don’t have a lot of experience with that kind of anti-gay ideology. Although a lot of weird stuff has been going down during pride month this year. You know, even on the day of the parade and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall: gay bashings in Manhattan and that bar raid with police brutality in Texas. For me, such things have been kind of fictionalized. I’m exposed to those situations mostly through art. At the same time I realize, maybe a little too abstractly, that these problems remain unresolved for queer individuals.

JH: That’s the reason why I wanted to write the book. I thought, “Jesus!” I kept hearing things like that. A lot of the events that happen in the book are sort of based on things that I heard or experiences that friends of mine, or ex-boyfriends, or my current boyfriend have told me about. I said to myself, “Aren’t we done with this? Didn’t we do this already? Why are we still dealing with these kinds of things?” I felt like it was a little unfashionable and therefore perhaps a little interesting. Sometimes unfashionable just means we haven’t dealt with it properly (not just that it’s tacky).

LC: I read an interview where you were asked if you did any research for the novel --- you replied saying you didn’t do any research and then you began to immediately describe doing a bunch of research. Anyway, your portrayal of the whole ex-gay ministry was very vivid; the creepy illogic of the recovery model that suppresses instead of curing, and the way the men struggle with that, was very convincing and pathetic. Maybe do you think a lobotomy would be more effectual to make ex-gays?

JH: Um… actually, I don’t know. Doesn’t a lobotomy sort of remove your ability to control your emotions? That would make you gayer, wouldn’t it? You’d be totally a needy homo all the time. I mean, I don’t advocate lobotomies. I don’t advocate pathologizing sexuality. That’s what I think is the bigger danger. “Let’s get everything that’s unusual about human beings and turn it into an illness.” I think that’s a larger problem than people trying to get rid of homosexuality through these ex-gay things. You know, anything that seems a little wrong with somebody --- like restless leg syndrome --- let’s turn that into a disease so that someone can make a pill. Isn’t that kind of where things always seem to be going with these people who want to know, “How does sexuality happen? What causes it?” As if, because it happens to only the lucky few, it is something to be gotten rid of --- because it’s not the norm. If you’re looking at somebody who’s different and saying because they’re different they’re inferior and how do we get rid of them --- it seems like there are all these steps that will lead you down a genocidal path.

LC: Can you talk about your use of the physical act of sex in the book? You don’t write terribly explicit sex scenes --- but the episodes are important and completely devastating in their stilted desperation.

JH: Well there are a couple of good sex scenes, scenes of good sex, in the book. But I think I kind of added those to balance out some of the awkward scenes. I feel to avoid writing pornography --- it always sounded more interesting to write about bad sex. Which is not to say that I think it’s better to have bad sex; it’s just more interesting to write about. It becomes dramatic in a way that good sex doesn’t always.

LC: About the only mistake I think you made in the novel is giving your protagonist a few religious epiphanies, including a vision of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, the story is very distinctly characterized by a giant lack of God. The novel is more defined by God’s silence or absence than by his judgment. You write about the subject’s conflict with a social system that upholds specific values, not about a direct struggle with God. It’s like in Angels in America, how God just up and left. What were your intentions here?

JH: One of the larger conceptual ideas was --- I was inspired by the testimonials of ex-gays. Have you ever gone to one of those ex-gay websites and read anything there? They’re like two-page biographies, basically, that are written in an incredibly plain, clumsy, layperson language. And you get the sense also that they have had the crap edited out of them --- by somebody who has an agenda. I found them really fascinating because these really odd things would happen in them: visions of Christ. There’s this really great moment in one of them where this woman was in a dance club, and everybody’s faces melted, and Jesus came off the dance floor and was like, “My child, I don’t want you to be a lesbian.” I thought, well, what if you took these two-page biographies and tried to connect all the dots and fill in the emotional interiority you would need in order to turn it into a novel? That was one of the major conceptual ideas I had when I was starting it. So I felt like the vision of Christ is kind of a nod to that, but it’s also sort of an odd vision of Christ --- and Gary interprets Christ’s message in a really bizarre way. “Yes, you should be gay. Go out and have a year of having sex and relationships with men.” I mean, it’s pretty odd that he sees it that way. I also thought it was kind of funny that he doesn’t recognize Christ when he sees him. So, I don’t know if that justifies it to you, but it’s ambiguous even though it’s a vision of Christ. It’s not like your average vision of Christ. He also kind of qualifies it right after it happens. He says some skeptical person later told him he was having a vision of Christ because of head trauma.

LC: God Says No is pretty newly out in the world. Do you have any sense of how it’s been received, critically or by a general readership, already?

JH: The reviews have largely been positive, which is great. Of course, as I think it was actually Sarah Manguso reportedly said, “It’s never enough!” I’m feeling that right now. What I would really like (and I think this is what a lot of authors want) is some high profile good review or something that will save the book from falling into obscurity too fast. But I’m pretty happy. As I was saying to you, it seems like people are interviewing me more often than reviewing the book --- but when it’s been reviewed it’s been pretty positive. There was one guy recently who gave us the option of not having him run a negative review, which was interesting because I thought: “Hell yeah! I don’t want you to run it.” I mean, when does that ever happen? It’s certainly not my way of doing things.

LC: You were talking to me earlier about the queer response and the religious response to your book.

JH: Right. I think that people who hate the book fall into several categories. One is extremely religious Christians and on the other extreme are gay people who have no sense of humor and believe that there should be lots and lots of positive images, whatever that means, of gay people in whatever one does. As a gay person you’re politically obligated to show the wonderful side of being homosexual and none of the angst. I feel like those are the two poles. I was trying to figure out if maybe this person who wrote the negative review was a crazy Christian with an agenda, because that would be fun to read, but instead I think he was of the opposite… camp.

LC: Finally, can you relate to me the story of how you were briefly a cast member on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Do you think you’d still have written this debut novel if you were busy giving style and culture tips to straight fashion victims?

JH: At the time, I had already started the novel. Queer Eye filmed in the summer of 2002 and I had started working on the book in 2001. Whether or not it would have gotten finished is a little bit up for grabs. But I was pretty determined this was something I wanted to do so I would have probably found the time --- and I wouldn’t have had to find the money if I was doing Queer Eye. Of course, I was a little worried that the show was going to be a hit, and that it would suddenly become my life, and that I wouldn’t be able to get away from being defined by it. Occasionally I would see posters of all the guys, sitting around in white suits on a set, and I would think: “There but for the grace of god go I!” I mean it was kind of a fun time. I took the job mostly because I needed some money and I thought it would be kind of a fun thing. It kind of fit a lot of my job skills, frankly. What they wanted from the “culture guy,” which was my role, was somebody who told the straight guy what to read and what music to listen to. But it’s hard to give somebody a CD and say they “have” culture. So they were having trouble with that idea. I also think it’s a little bit troublesome for television executives, except for Oprah, to tell people to go read books. There may have been a little bit of an issue with that. So they totally revamped the role after the pilot and I didn’t make it.

LC: Did you have a slogan?

JH: They all had slogans?

LC: I’ve never actually seen the show.

JH: It was sort of fun --- and I’m glad I’m not doing it.

Why Meadow?

2009-07-06T15:35:00.002-04:00

This Is Me There Not an Earth
On Robert Samuel Snyderman’s Poem “Meadow and Torrent”
by Lonely Christopher

“Why Meadow?” Robert Snyderman writes closer to the far edge of intelligibility than is comfortable for some who’ve read him. There have been problems approaching his work with usual instruments of critical analysis. So what can be said about how this operates? Is it, perhaps, a text of figurative decomposition? What can mean in this poem? There is definitely something of this text that’s not as opaque as all that. It’s an obvious personal history --- a history of no history. “You want a history of the meadow. What / is history?” The Meadow is the unanswered question; the poet’s vehicle through the chaotic outbursts of his subjectivity is also the unanswered question. “For each word that mentions her. I will ask who she is? / She might be more than one. / Like the meadow.” There is an “I,” very centralized --- and there is a “you,” who is slightly inconstant but often referring plainly to the reader. The poem takes place across the totality of the poet’s experience. “I have memorized all instances.” The poem is the poet embodying the mythopoetics of Robert Samuel Snyderman. The work opens with “I” --- without irony --- “I am.” He asserts himself boldly: “I am introducing a sequence / to you who would not have advertised me.” The reader enters a hostage situation. Does the poet want to recast the reader as the mirror for his mythologized self? “All poets should horrify themselves and enjoy mirrors.” This text is an emotional autobiography framed within an abstract crisis of determination. The content is not organized with much deliberation, but personal details about the poet’s family, friends, life in Brooklyn, travels out of the city and into nature, and &c. squish around with sexual hang-ups, the historical weight of religiosity, crises of meaning, literary references, and solipsistic obsession (plus more). The poem is an erratic piece of free verse; the only formal tool importantly at work seems to be repetition and variation --- most pages fall under the rubric of “Meadow and Torrent” or “Salvation Limbs,” while other phrases reoccur elsewhere. This doesn’t lend the whole much structural integrity, but keeps some of the slippery text a little moored. Despite authorial claims, “Meadow and Torrent” is not a sequence --- but the declarative statements that the poet uses throughout sometimes undermine the efficacy of signification. “Love does not exist.” “Women do not exist.” He says, “I am not a poet.” He asks, “What is not a poet?” There’s not much internal logic available, and craft is pretty ignored, but the text isn’t impossible --- just feral. Snyderman could be describing himself when he mentions the concept of a “coherent anarchist.” He also describes his writing as “automatic contemplation.” It has always seemed like Snyderman relied heavily on a stream-of-consciousness method of writing; what he presents as finished work often has a first-draft sort of coarseness to it (even with spelling, though he might be retaining those errors now). He types up about two pages a day, most days, on his manual typewriter. Maybe he is afraid of not writing, of there being no writing. “The chore is not the content, The pain is no content.” His constant assertion of the “I,” the self-reference threatening to overwhelm all reference, reads occasionally as insecurity. Maybe he is worried about being erased by silence. He mentions “the terrorism of objectivity.” Perhaps the “I” is an attempt at being a constant subject, disallowing the assault of inscription. The reader will be made to advertise him; everything will be made to advertise him. Objectivity’s erasure will be erased. The poet will incorporate “nihilistic silence” and in doing so bury the threat of that silence. He swallows negation, becomes it all, so the “I” perseveres despite the collapse of signification. “Am I not silence? I am not a poet. Love does not exist.” This poet (who is not a poet) can abuse meaning to the brink of the void. He writes: “I am introducing an oblivion.” The poet’s will to determination endures because no matter what’s around it, the “I” remains, profoundly. “I want to be an enormous gasp.” It is as if he wants to be the last gasp. Is that how the salvation is reached? The poem is, perhaps, a celebration of solipsism as “unconscious joy.”

[Note: “Meadow and Torrent” appeared in Correspondence #2, was published as a chapbook by Beginners Press, and is included in his forthcoming book CLOTH]

Out of the Way Readings

2009-06-25T05:34:00.000-04:00

Coming Soon to Jim Thorpe. Did you know of such a place as the distinctly christened town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania? It exists. We hear tell it’s called thus in honor of an Olympian of much praise; before he took the world by storm the town was considered Mauch Chunk, which is differently delightful. A place with such unique nominal history sounds like the perfect destination for the Corresponding Society; indeed! a carful of members from this very group’ll be arriving in Jim Thorpe this weekend for a trans-modal happening in a local bookstore --- hosted by the auspicious resident of nearby Bucky Mountain, Mr. Jody Buchman (dear associate). There will be amazing guitar picking, poetry reciting, a one-act play about Andy Warhol, probably some treats and libations, plus a much-anticipated drunken campfire! So, if you have a car, or something, and are within traveling distance of this sure-to-be-charming destination, you’re totally encouraged to join us for a rowdy and wonderful time! Here are details for you:

Venue: Sellers Bookstore
Location: 62 W. Broadway, Jim Thorpe, PA
Date: June 27
Time: 7pm
Featured Readers: Jody Buchman, special guests from the Corresponding Society
Featured Plays: “I Am Happy” by Lonely Christopher
Featured Music: Jeff Regina

The Very Same Day in Seattle. Meanwhile, some other members of the Corresponding Society will be visiting Seattle for a reading. Here is some official copy re that event: A hoard of young people will descend on our store [Pilot Books --- ed.] to read out loud the things they’ve written. They come to us from the Corresponding Society as part of their nation-wide hitchhiking tour [no such tour exists to my knowledge ---ed.]. Authors include but are not limited to: Christopher Sweeney, editor-in-chief of Correspondence [we’ve basically done away with the title of editor-in-chief, though --- ed.], a biannual literary journal distributed by The Corresponding Society; Adrian Shirk, a short fiction, long poem, family mythology, literature-to-be-read-aloud, and how-to writer from Portland; Robert Snyderman, roving poet and experimental theater writer/director/designer.

Venue: Pilot Books
Location: 219 Broadway E, Seattle, Wa
Date: June 27
Time: 5pm
Featured Readers: Bob Snyderman, C. Sweeney, Adrian Shirk, possible special guests

Like Rain on Your Wedding Day

2009-06-09T17:59:00.001-04:00

Irony’s Poetics
by Lonely Christopher

Irony! There is a catalog of ironies, popular and defunct, but, being specific, a pair (for parameter’s purposes) will here wrestle around some: dramatic and literary ironies (situational irony not included, though, let’s posit, notably that’s the hallmark irony of hipster culture; elaboration unforthcoming). The function of dramatic irony is easily differentiated (as an enemy, even) from how a contemporary ironic modality operates. The former, ancient, belonging to, I guess, the Greeks, is a rhetorical device; the later, ironie nouveau maybe, is a literary trope --- the difference: rhetorical purposes are pathetic, re the invocation and valuation of emotional response; today irony is a common pattern of contractual/consensual implication (the formal conceit being that writer and reader both recognize how this instrument frames meaning within a creative idiom). Irony is a lazily broad rubric, but certainly irony comes from εἰρωνεία, meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance (according to Wikipedia). The irony available in that statement is new irony because the extratextual signification requires an equality of collaboration between the two agents involved in the generation of meaning and the interface between them. In the dramatic model, contrastively, the subject is not in on the game (thus the writer delivers the reader special information, designed to manipulate, and the definition is in this imbalance); in the non-pathetic model, the one recognizable above, the special information connotes across the agents and the subject all the same. This means, maybe, that the fact that Wikipedia, a non-academic reference, is cited in the manner of established institutions of reliable/acceptable etymological details (like the OED), presupposes the conflict between the canonized procedures of academia, re research practices, and the open-source (comparatively egalitarian, anti-academic) wiki reference made available only recently through new technology; this happens in such a way that the withholding of extratextual qualities isn’t foundational to ironic function (is eschewed, characteristically), the operations of ironic signification are complicatedly engaged with a broad cultural grammar (so much so that subtle meaning, undetectable semantically, is instantly obvious through the perspective of the disclosure’s mode of reference), the functionality does not resemble an incorrect math equation (rather is balanced), and what is generated through this process is not a dramatic narrative designed to inflict pathos upon the receptive agent alone --- it’s a mutually connoted signification wherein the hermetic structure (the formal platform for the extratextual meaning) undergoes a subversion of signification legible through each available perspective (writer/subject/reader). The text is encoded, but it’s not the butt of the joke; it’s a condition and accomplice in tracing a new and clever meaning over the page’s semantics. This is enrichment. Contrastively, dramatic irony is about as enriching as pouring blood all over the telekinetic prom queen. This is not, “Don’t go up the stairs, the killer is waiting for you!” where the dumb bitch slinking to her horror-show death can’t hear the impassioned cries of the enraptured audience as the filmmaker grins smugly somewhere at such profitable deceit. Here, where we live in our house of today’s irony, everybody must grin smugly, even the text --- the way the text signifies must somehow be grinning (it’s a joyless grin), and there’s absolutely no emphasis placed on tricking the receptive agent into feeling anything because of a dramatic parlor trick. This is not the cheap horror-show scenario, not, “Don’t cite that user-authored open-source database, the misinformation and amateur scholarship isn’t very regulated compared to an academically recognized reference tool edited by professionals and intelligent computers!” This is a tectonics of meaning (tectonic, from the Greek for builder), or, anyway, this means layers of signification that shift and interact with causation (dramatic irony presents an improbable and inequitable situation, for difference). Semantically, there is the statement, which signifies a primary meaning supported by its mechanics --- this source states “irony” is from the Ancient Greek “εἰρωνεία,” meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance --- then there are layers of extratextual meaning that interact with and mutate the central semantic statement, extending the sentence’s reach outside itself --- mainly, cockily incongruous in a telling way, that a non-academic website is used in an attempt to establish the intellectual authority implied by the elevated tone of this writing (read: the author is a lazy bullshitter who uses big words defensively). Irony is no longer purposed toward dramatic achievement through the simple manipulation of slighting an equation; our ironic idiom is an ubiquitous and fundamentally recognizable process we use to posit that meaning doesn’t fit in its own container and, thus, is subject to constant and unfolding play (all play, though, becomes serious, then very dull, and so irony is not a joy, but closer to ennui). Rhetorical irony attempts to dupe the reader into artificial reactions; contemporary irony is transparent and non-hysterical --- it’s a sort of malaise everybody and everything (writer, subject, text, context, reader, you name it) learns implicitly and reads/articulates effortlessly. Maybe because today’s irony is anti-formalist in its egalitarian properties, it is considered guilty and base. Rhetoric functions within the same grammar of valuation as morality, let’s just go ahead and claim, and that’s coincidentally the grammar we use to understand distinctions between high and low art. Dramatic irony presents a fiction wherein ideals like innocence, beauty, and love can exist --- the trick becomes honorable when the scam is withheld and the artifice misjudged by the receptive agent as mimetically superlative. There are a bunch of problems with this, some: singular representation is reductive not epiphanic, totalized paragons in the shape of love, or whatever, are dangerous fictions when the manipulation processes are withheld, and, basically, the quality of such an operation is on par with getting on a ride at Disneyland and ignoring the gross pageantry, rather embracing the malevolent spectacle as incorruptible experience, duh. Anyway, stupid as that is, maybe that’s what’s behind declarations of “the death of irony,” especially subsequent to disruptive human tragedy. When something violently outside of the established limits of general comprehension senselessly occurs, maybe that startles awake the self-destructive desire to wish for a cultural logic wherein signification wasn’t capable of such plurality as is implied by contemporary irony. A retreat is desired back into the reductive regime of silly tricks, where one can be a child again and blanketed withal by comforting social fictions of truth and justice. It doesn’t even have to be as severe as massive tragedy, but possibly a particular annoyance re the dismissal of sincerity in the generation of meaning, which is characteristic (a side effect?) of a general postmodern grammar. The way we constitute at all, the way we just do that verb, is mutating slowly --- one day we woke up and the mythopoetics of modernity was gone without so much as a note --- the centrality of totalization as the process of constitution grew outmoded (maybe the model even inverted and is now centrifugal). “The critical function of the subject has given way to the ironic function of the object.” That’s also from Wikipedia --- no, I admit I read it in a book. The irony dichotomy is, as aforesaid, rhetorical device versus literary trope. The ancient irony requires convincing somebody that the imbalanced equation of a dramatic fiction resembles experience enough to persuade pathos out in reaction to a clever argument (artifice); the mutated irony, ours, discloses itself as a technical conceit, always is transparently a literary trope applied to various systems of signification --- that is, it works as patterns of renegotiation within the generation of meaning according to a popular/legible cultural logic. Meaning used to mean singularly, now we don’t know what it means, exactly, but that it can generate a lot more than we previously suspected it could support. The authorities on the matter are afraid this contemporariness is intractable and will presently metastasize: “There is no point in taking refuge in the defense of values, even critical ones […] The same acts, the same thoughts, and the same hopes which brought us nearer to that finality we so longed for now take us away from it, since it is behind us” (ibid). A text can semantically develop a straightforward position and simultaneously mean exactly the opposite connotatively, plus other incongruous things; this happens all the time. It’s scary. It means I get to use the word “problematize” even though I know it’s unattractively ostentatious (in an immature way) when bandied so. I love you. It’s like rain on your wedding day.

Westerly Readings

2009-06-07T19:50:00.000-04:00

Corresponding Society members Adrian Shirk, Bob Snyderman, and Sweeney have all headed westward for the summer and shall be making some appearances in bookstores and sundry other venues around California, Oregon, and &c. They will be joined by friends. Below, please find some information about two such events.

Venue: Books and Bookshelves
Location: 99 Sanchez (at 14th St), San Francisco, CA
Date: June 15
Time: 7:30pm
Featured Readers: Julien Poirier, Robert Snyderman, Chris Sweeney, Adrian Shirk

Venue: Reading Frenzy
Location: 921 SW Oak Street, Portland, Oregon
Date: June 17
Time: 6pm
Featured Readers: Chris Sweeney, Adrian Shirk, Robert Snyderman, Scott Poole, Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Music: Joe Batt

Here’s biographical data on the exciting (very) special guests:

Julien Poirier was born in San Francisco in 1970. As well as writing poems, he has done time as an editor (Ugly Duckling Presse, Gneiss Press) and as a public school poetry teacher in New York City. He prefers to work to a captive audience of 5th-graders in the outer boroughs of that city. Books include Absurd Good News (Insert Press, 2006) and Living! Go and Dream (UDP, 2005).

Joe Batt is a singer-songwriter from Olympia, Washington. He started performing as a college student in the Midwest and Montana, and he played in various rock groups. He continues to write songs about food, religion, relationships, and cows, when not busy with his day job as an art professor. He will travel, with his guitar and banjo, to any art event, farmer’s market, or poetry reading, if there is an audience willing to listen to his original tunes and reinterpretations of Elvis, Charlie Pride, or Holy Model Rounders numbers.

Scott Poole is the author of two books for poetry, The Cheap Seats and Hiding from Salesmen. He is also the "house poet" for Oregon Public Broadcasting's Live Wire! radio show. He lives in Vancouver, Washington and is a software developer.

Christopher Brean Murray was born New Jersey. His poems have appeared in Jubilat, Cutbank, Hoboeye, and Fou Magazine. Recently, he was a featured reader at the Hoboeye Poetry Palooza. He teaches writing at Mount Hood Community College and Portland Community College.

Something Happening in Bushwick

2009-06-03T15:12:00.002-04:00

Brooklynites! Bushwickians! You are invited to the following event this Saturday:

It'll be fun.

New Online Material!

2009-05-25T18:42:00.001-04:00

Summary: The Corresponding Society hereby announces the introduction of a new resource on our website, the library page. This section will house downloadable and online texts, including an archive of de-commoditized out of print texts. We have prepared two inaugural releases for this project:

Correspondence Issue 1, digital edition
Read it: downloadable PDF

The Gates Salon (Thursday) drawings by Ray Ray Mitrano
Read it: online table of contents

Long version (Disney is the enemy): We don’t particularly like keeping things to ourselves. Young writers that we are, we find the validity of this whole American capitalistic experiment a little embarrassing. The Corresponding Society has always had a foundational interest in reserving as few rights as possible in the distribution of our work, hoping that a model like the Creative Commons (with the slogan “share, remix, reuse”) supplants the tacky paranoia of intellectual property. We are a nonprofit press and we sell (cheaply priced) copies of our print journal exclusively to support further publication. Because of this, we have discussed the idea of online projects that would help shift the focus, as a publisher, toward distributing more divorced from marketing. Anyway, when we accepted our vocations as poets, we ostensibly took vows of poverty --- so let’s try to figure out small ways to unsubscribe to the nutritionless economics that implicitly inform how we think about making and sharing art. Obviously, the Internet presents a much different mode of distribution than print --- and we publish our journal as a physical object because we want to continue operating, to our small extent, in the established non-digital format of booksellers, but we simultaneously want to expand our vocabulary to be able to use the qualities of the Internet to broaden our engagements (instead of ignoring technology, as the established publishing industry has been trying to). We aren’t suggesting that these are original or untried inclinations since, firstly, many small presses, especially those under the direction of younger writers, are effectually involved in innovative practices --- also, as a Pulitzer winner once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Anyway, here: we built a little library stuck in the notional landscape of the Internet. This came consequent an agreement that, instead of allowing our journal to disappear after being retired from print, we should make issue the first of Correspondence available as a downloadable PDF, no charge and archived on our website. We sold out our print run of no. 1 and put its monies directly into the publication of no. 2 --- its exchange value has played out financially, but it remains a sample of cultural capital we don’t want to horde just because we can’t generate funds with it (considering the extremely low budget we operate with, usually broke even, reprinting or similar options aren’t considerations). So we established an online archive for the journal, which for now (and the foreseeable future, with the difficulties we’re facing distributing the print run of no. 2) features a link to Correspondence 1 in PDF format. We like this idea and want to do other things with it, so we’re pleased to announce plans to develop a collection of online chapbooks and artists’ books --- texts designed expressly for distribution in free digital formats. Our first release is now available through the “library”: The Gates Salon (Thursday), a suite of fourteen portraits in graphite by Ray Ray Mitrano, accompanied by a contextualizing essay. If this interests you, dear reader, or if you have any opinions about or suggestions for this undertaking, please send us a little note (gmail: thecorrespondingsociety) if you like. Oh and, more or less unrelatedly, read this (if you haven’t).

For Immediate Release

2009-05-22T16:49:00.003-04:00

Californians!
Please join us for an evening of kickass and beautiful work by three outstanding poets, who celebrate the release of *Correspondence #2*, a new journal of poetry and critique hailing from Brooklyn. Robert Snyderman, co-editor of *Correspondence*, is in from New York for this one reading only --- don’t miss his hirsute verbiage! Carlos Ramirez, poet and song-spinner with a voice from heaven, ducks in from across the Mission for a rare performance. Richard Loranger, unrepentant squeaky wheel and poet redux, arrives from his new home Across the Great Water (Oakland) to wind you in infinite loops. And once the wonder has worn off (if indeed it does), you can pick up your copy of *Correspondence* and browse the terrific selection at Dog Eared Books.

*Correspondence #2* Release party

a reading by

Robert Snyderman

Carlos Ramirez

and Richard Loranger

Monday, May 25, 2009

8 pm sharp

free of charge

Dog Eared Books

900 Valencia Street

(at the corner of 20th Street)

San Francisco

PERFORMER BIOS

*Robert Snyderman* was born in Pennsylvania. He is a young poet, who sometimes paints, or sometimes directs dramatic productions, and who has just put together his second book. He is interested in learning how to live in a new way. His memory is in Brooklyn, New York, where brave friends run a small press and journal. They call themselves The Corresponding Society.

*Carlos Ramirez* was born in San Francisco in 1938. Raised there and in El Salvador, where his parents came from. Hated/loved and conformed to the city’s schools where he presently works as a substitute teacher, K-12 grades. Is often called Santa Claus by the children who befriend him.

*Richard Loranger* is a writer, performer, visual artist, all around squeaky wheel, and the most recent *bon vivant* to flee San Francisco for the financially milder climes of the East Bay. He is the author of *Poems for Teeth* (We Press, 2005), as well as *The Orange Book* and eight chapbooks, including *Hello Poems* and *The Day Was Warm and Blue*. Recent work can be found in *Correspondence 1 & 2* and *CLWN WR 42 & 45*, and the upcoming *Uphook Press Anthology #2.* He wants only a calm moment.

Here Come the Consequences

2009-05-15T21:53:00.001-04:00

Vacuum Poetics, a comedy
by Lonely Christopher

The poet’s problem is meaning. Poetry doesn’t mean anything. How does poetry happen anyway and what function does the poet serve therefore? The definition of creative writing, the taxonomical poetics determining species of creative writing, is the engine of subterfuge that maintains the myth of significance --- poetry is because of what it is not and means because of what it doesn’t. Anyway, all poetry is acceptable. Most of it is actively directed against engagement with the poet’s problem of meaning. The poetics that allows for the influence of the vacuum is terrifying. Think of Beckett: was he stupefied in retrospect by the absurdity of his project, as he neared death, asking, “What is the word?” And Stein’s last words: “What is the question?” There is nothing but the question, the question of meaning. Meaningless, poetry has no history; it never began and won’t terminate. Buadrillard writes, “There will be no end, because things have always already happened. Neither resolution nor absolution, but inevitable unfolding of the consequences.” Constant determination, all the binarisms enabling such sloppiness as this very misguided theme, obscure the irresolution of every argument with the promise of differentiated architectures of ultimate meaning. Meaning isn’t coming for us, not ever. What is the word? Most people think poetry is about the autumn leaves and the delicacy of love. The page erases the guts out of love and leaves a wordy, husk-shaped signifier. Meaning’s blessing is in never reaching creative writing, no matter how resolute the disbelief foundational to students of the writerly pursuit. Poets & Writers is a sad, false church like, you know, those mutants that worshipped the Bomb in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” Everything is like that. How does poetry happen anyway and what function does the poet serve therefore?

Poetry is lucky because it has no place in the idiom of mainstream capitalism, as far as this kid can discern. Poetry is bargain bin specials for alcoholic sentimentalists. The great poets don’t matter (so thus with the retards); this must be allowed before they become readable --- this must be a required education in said valueless accomplishments. The creative text we stereotypically most adore, in the canon, Hamlet, is an engine for its own negation --- redeeming nothing, refusing to validate signification or modalities of humanistic connotation, the play chews itself up on the page until there’s just nothing left of it (having become a black hole that ate itself). Creative writing denotes structurally, this is relative, but the honesty of Hamlet is how it realizes the futility of this pageant of textuality (dressed up as objective confidence, or the possibility thereof) and rudely sabotages the formal system supporting its sick game. The great works of art are those with enough awareness to struggle with the vapidity of their formal logic --- or to know well enough to accept it, anyway. Warhol turned everything into surface. He defeated the orotund puffiness of hegemony’s artifice by living there, at its location, like a house, blurting the infuriating slogan, “I don’t know.” Most poetry is but an effigy, assuming poetry doesn’t become until it develops some position on its fundamental unbecoming. What is known as a poetry is more like a symptom of the poetry that has yet to be rendered legible for the subject (reader/writer). An aware poetics dares asking, “What is the word?” and withstands the injurious humiliation of finally getting the universe is a thing of no agency and answers are impossible. Would that were to settle anything! All poetry fails to cease: tough luck.

All this jargon is fake, callow. Institutionalization posits opacity and neologisms qua fucking rampaging Godzilla. A poet is ruined by the wrong education. Since we’re already at the tea party, let’s wallow in absolutes. The most successful artist in history, that we know of, is Henry Darger. When his life’s work was discovered, near his death, he stoically remarked that it didn’t matter what happened to any of it because, “It’s too late.” What does this mean? That’s not the question, sorry. What is the question? The question is what the poet has to work with. Poetry doesn’t mean anything. The poet’s problem is meaning. “There will be no end.” Thus, it’s never too late for it to be too late. There will be poetry as long as there are consequences. Here come the consequences.