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."
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
3 Is a Magic Number
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.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sentimentalist's Complaint
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Proust/Shirk
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.
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.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Love Is the Answer
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
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
Monday, February 1, 2010
Proust/Lonely
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Girl Trouble
Feminist Anecdotes from Some Guy
a story about thinking about feminism one day a while ago
by Lonely Christopher
[Editor’s Note: This essay was unearthed from the blog’s unpublished archive, so is a little less than timely, but perhaps thematically pertinent…]
I couldn’t get any of my girlfriends to come with me to the feminism panel; I went alone to the feminism panel. Today I lost the sheet with all the info on it in my room. I looked but only found overdue electricity bills. The panel was moderated, I remember, by the curator of the feminist wing at the Brooklyn Museum. Her name is Catherine Morris and the full name of the feminist wing at the Brooklyn Museum is the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I have seen, I think, everything that has come through the center since it opened. I reacted impatiently to most of the material currently up in the video art exhibit [Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video ran from 1 May 09 to 10 January 10 --- Ed.] . I use being a disinterested male as an excuse to avoid intellectualizing the very idea of the feminist center, its implications and influences. My default opinion is, half-seriously, that the Brooklyn Museum is desperate to be relevant and opening a major feminist wing is a sort of cynical and trendy move. Also, I think it’s a positive idea. The space dedicated to the feminist wing would have otherwise been dedicated to a bunch of white guys, which is the group that makes most of our art. The taxonomical straightjacket implicit in the feminist wing designation must be problematic on some level, and all that “now now now” video art further argues the sardonic intentions of a feminist art ghetto --- but stop squinting, take off the snide white male glasses, and the project looks liberatory again.
There were, I remember, probably seven women on the feminism panel; the room, which was in a Chelsea gallery (P.P.O.W.), was packed. Some of the audience drank all the vodka in a few minutes and left presently. The crowd remained standing room. I feel very delicate around feminism because I am a privileged member of the patriarchy, sort of. Anyway, I’m not female. I don’t really care to list the names of the individual panelists, because it doesn’t suit my brief purposes here, but am scared you’ll think I’m trying to suppress the identity and/or agency of each by forcing upon them anonymity. Okay, the only superlative panelist was Dotty Attie, there. Her art was featured prominently. Two of the panelists were older (the other, Martha Wilson, there) and the rest were much younger. Most of the panelists were artists except for one art historian. Dotty Attie and Martha Wilson talked intelligently, for example, about the different groups of artists and political activists that identified as feminist in, I guess, the 70’s. I think, unless misremembering, Martha Wilson was the first to say post-feminism is a bullshit concept. I think she blamed it on the patriarchy in half-jest. There wasn’t too much talk about the canonized periods of feminism, the waves, even though this progression of eras (each with a broadly definable character) provides the logic for the invention of post-feminism as a historical marker. Neither older panelist cared to define feminism in a totalized way, but the ambiguity didn’t seem to bother them artistically or intellectually, and they knew for certain feminism, in its many shapes, was not today “post” itself. The younger panelists, who I finally decided to ignore, seemed less prepared to be there. One woman didn’t know the name of the panel and another had never heard the term post-feminism before she was invited to the panel. I can’t provide a comprehensive review of the panel because I walked away out of frustration and boredom. I wandered into the other room where the vodka used to be.
I read an article in the New Yorker about feminism on the subway on my way to this panel. I guess I lost that issue somewhere on the street later, it’s not in my bag, but it was one of those New Yorker articles that feels as if it could almost fit in Time magazine. Ariel Levy asks “Why is feminism still so divisive?” which feels at this point like a rhetorical question, or at least not answerable. I guess my answer would be “Because it’s feminism.” Fortunately nobody asks me. Anyway, Levy makes some points about how much feminism changed the paradigm that today won’t acknowledge it, glosses over a whole lot, and ends on lamenting how we never worked anything out about affordable child care. She establishes identity and ideology as opposing engines behind different feminisms. Her worst-case scenario is “feminism without feminists,” which is a “simple insistence on representation.” At the end of the panel, when I wandered back to the audience, the crowd was sort of taking over the Q & A session and mostly sounding like overexcited undergrads in a seminar. They were chiming in rather than querying the panel (never a good choice). One audience member stood up and claimed that feminism isn’t over until the media stops perpetuating unreasonable standards of beauty. I think she was a photographer and she spoke of resisting touching up her portraits because she wanted to represent the “reality” of her subject’s appearance, while feeling a simultaneous urge to alter the image in the interest of formal aesthetics. The commercial manipulation of social values cannot be scoffed away because it is indeed an invidious force working through images. However, the only unproblematic part of her statement was the implication that feminism will never be over. It’s not an endless war because it’s not a war and some endless concepts are good. Now, the politics of aesthetics is a monolithic subject. I thought this chimer-in sounded rather daft, though, as if she wanted to do what was correct more than she had a responsibility to create artwork. Now, morality and art is something I’ll also avoid out of largeness. Anyway, photography is as subjective as anything else: it doesn’t reveal empirical truths any more or less than painting. Truth is a foundation of sand; there I said it.
Earlier in the day I ran into a prof I briefly studied feminism under. I told her about the panel, which was titled “Post-Feminism: Do We Need to Go There?” She guffawed and said, “I thought we already went there and came back.” We talked about the remaining importance of a praxis-based feminist ideology. I know nothing about that side of it --- I keep on theory’s turf out of habit and timidity. Anyway, the male relationship to feminism is a prickly subject. There were about five males there for the panel. One of them had his hand raised to speak at the end and somebody called out from the back that we should hear from the man. He was more tactless and awkward than I feared when he opened his mouth. He said something along the lines of feminism is complicated and we shouldn’t start thinking about post-feminism because “feminism hasn’t fully blossomed yet.” He really said that. At least he didn’t stay quiet because he was nervous about being a jerk, but consequently he was a much larger jerk. Poor guy. After the panel let out I lingered in the other room, next to a male friend, and a random girl came up to us and asked what, as male feminists, we thought about the event. I said I don’t understand the following conflict: is a female implicitly a feminist? Definitional arguments seem to charge feminism more than any other comparable value system (even queer studies, which takes ambiguity in stride). I am not troubled by whether I really am or am not a postmodernist just because I live in late capitalism. Feminism should operate less as a club (I am a feminist, biracial performance artist) and more as a discourse (how do we negotiate as sociopolitical agents ideologically practicing feminism?). So saith the white male blog editor.
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.
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