June 27, 2013
Image: Falling by Tatiana Cordoba
I had this crazy idea. Actually, I had it about two years ago when I fell in love with a Berlin building that had a tree growing out of the back of it. In my research about the abandoned building, I discovered that it had originally been built in the 19th century as a mortuary for the nearby hospital. Then the Nazis took it over and used it for storage. Then the East Germans took it over and used it for a bureaucratic office. I decided I had to buy this building and open the Bookslut Literaturhaus of Sex and Death. (Don't worry, we would burn some sage in there. Maybe bring in a priest.)
After reading Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind, and watching Berlin turn into Brooklyn, I've become more determined to open the Bookslut Literaturhaus of Sex and Death, although Charles, our managing editor, insists it should exist in Chicago so he can go, too. (Maybe we will open Literaturhaus Zwei.) Schulman writes about the need for radical spaces, for the mixing of people from all nationalities and economic backgrounds, for places to perform and fuck up and converse, and not just recreate the socioeconomic climates of our childhoods in our social circles.
So I've decided my demented little building is not big enough, but perhaps the abandoned 19th c. hospital next door would be for what I want. (And really, someone should take it over before it's turned into luxury condos.) I want: low rent apartments for writers and artists, who can teach or mentor or help rehab the building in exchange for rent. A performance space/reading hall. An extensive library. Classrooms, not for MFA-style workshops but for classes on history, international literature, art, etc. There'd be rooms to stay in for traveling writers and bourgeois people who just want to look in on the action and they would be charged more. There'd be a bar and cafe, of course, because it's going to be a steady diet of Hungarian rose wine and goulash. And of course a large section will house Bookslut/Spolia offices and inevitably a publishing company/bookstore. I'll do the tarot readings in the library.
I will of course live in the mortuary.
I am five seconds from Kickstarting this fucker, although then all of the money would go to Paypal, and yuck. But rewards would be like, we'll name a barstool after you. Or, a couple nights for free. From there I can raise my enlightened crones-in-training army, and we can have our little radical space within the workings of capitalism. Who is with me? You'd be a fool not to run away and join our circus.
June 26, 2013
Image: Ivan Bilibin
The Bibliomancer
The Greeks believed that libraries were places of great healing, and that poetry and literature revealed deep spiritual truths. I still believe that today, that seeing alternatives played out in a novel can give you an idea of what to do in your own life, and that sometimes a made up story has more insight into heartbreak, despair, loss, frustration, and failure (and joy, and hope, and love) than any life coach-supplied affirmation or self-help to do list. Every other Wednesday, I will be answering questions about life's quandaries with a little bookish insight. This is an extension of my Kind Reader column, and you can find past entries here. You can submit your own questions by emailing me.
I am a 27 year old South Asian women who hasn't quite managed to do anything my in my last 27 years. Suffering from chronic illness (crippling anxiety to be specific) I haven't quite managed to attain a career or get married or have kids. On optimistic days I tend to shrug of the last past 27 years, and look to the future, planning further education, and travel. This morning, however, as I sat in a train reading Lolly Willowes, I was overcome with dread as I realized that I would probably never marry or have kids.
I am not particularly attractive, or charming or accomplished. In all honesty, I have never really pursued either. I just thought that it would happen naturally. That as I progressed through the course of life, I would find myself with a career, a husband and kids. Although a life partner would be nice, I am not particularly interested in children. Though I have a nasty feeling that all these things I claim not to be interested in, I will develop a sudden interest in, both once it is far, far too late as opposed to just moderately too late. What is one supposed to do when one cannot realistically measure up to society's barometer of success/happiness and is not really sure if one's own barometer of success/happiness is realistic or will lead one where one wants to go?
Well, of course you had this response while reading Lolly Willowes. Fine book, that. Old woman moves out to the edge of society and decides to take up with the Devil himself. But there's a huge difference between establishing yourself on the margins because you reject the center, and being forced out there because of your sex, your appearance, your class, your religion, your circumstances, what have you.
The truth is, though: there is power in both situations. In one, it's obvious. It's the power that comes naturally when you are able to declare the center unsatisfactory, it is the power of rejection. In the other, that power must be, and can be, claimed, it's just that the process is more difficult. It requires a mourning process for the invitation to the ball that never arrived.
You're in the weeds, girl. The question is, are you going to spend your time trying desperately to find your way back to the main road? Or are you going to look around and see the value of the things that grow only in the wilder places?
You are right that those attributes you were hoping would be bestowed upon you like fairy tale blessings at your birth, attractiveness, charm, and accomplishments, must be cultivated. The fun of being off on the margins is that you get to redefine those qualities, what success is, what beauty is. You do not have to go by the definitions written out by those within the safety of the palace gates. That is incredibly freeing. The slog part of it is that it is exhausting work. It's more important for those unprotected on the margins, exposed to the elements, to find their communities. But first, before you can lay claim to your territory, you need to have a conversation with the Queen of the Marginalized, Baba Yaga.
Baba Yaga is the wild hag who lives in a house on chicken legs that, when you approach it, can suddenly get up and turn its back on you. Baba Yaga has stringy hair, breasts that dangle down to her knees, and a crazy nose, and yet she remains sexually voracious, particularly for strapping young men. She flies around in a mortar, using a pestle as an oar, and speaks mostly in riddles. She is inappropriate, unwelcoming, and totally happy in her isolation.
In Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, she tells the story of those off in Baba Yaga's territory, but it's not a Lolly Willowes-type voluntary estrangement. Few of us actually choose a life of being ignored and disdained. Her Baba Yagas are the widows who find themselves invisible to a society that prizes youth and beauty above all else. They are the ugly, the infirm, the poor, the unwillingly celibate, the mentally ill. They are prostitutes and abused wives and spinsters. All of those women know what it's like to be sidelined and to be denied those comforts, those markers of acceptance. What most of them do not know is the power they hold in their situation. Ugresic writes, "Let's imagine a million-strong army of 'madwomen,' homeless women, beggar women, women with faces scorched by acid, because self-styled righteous men took offense at the expression on a bare female face... Let's now imagine all those women lifting their robes and drawing their swords." Because who knows the weaknesses of the center, its corruptions and its limitations, better than those forced to look at it from afar for their whole lives?
To claim your power, first you need to be able to name yourself. You need to admit there is a part of you that is wild, that is inappropriate and dark. A part of you who does not want to play by rules you didn't write. In that space, you'll find Baba Yaga, and if you come across her and use your wits and your imagination, she'll let you in her door. There you'll find the power of rejecting rather than being rejected, the power of being a member of a potential wildwoman all-girl army.
Submit your own questions for the Bibliomancer column to jessa@bookslut.com.
June 24, 2013
Image: Candy Jernigan
Here is why we are all reading Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind this week (have you started yours yet? or are you still waiting for it to come in to the bookstore?):
- This FT article on how even the upper middle class are being priced out of Paris, and why our cities are turning into the homogeneous playgrounds of our super wealthy (who will hopefully get bored having no one to talk to but each other? I mean, it's pathetic to long for a New York that is more After Hours than it is now, but you cannot be blamed for it if you do.)
- Particularly this article about artists fighting being priced out of Bushwick. Particularly this one because the apathy is apparent. They don't really want to rally together to fight the overtaking of their neighborhood. They just want someone to solve the problem so that they, particular individuals, don't have to pay so much for rent. They are not thinking inventively, about changing the nature of the neighborhood or politically organizing. It is "how do we keep things the same as they have been?" and it is depressing. You cannot play by capitalism's rules and expect it play fair with you.
They want their art and low rent studios, but they want their gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, too.
But who doesn't like gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches? Who doesn't like apartments that have central heating rather than a coal stove in the corner and wearing blankets and gloves indoors despite them? Who doesn't like a boozy brunch after yoga class and gossiping about your friends? But then who is not absolutely positive that that way of life kills off creativity and advancement, that surrounding yourself with people who are exactly like you doesn't shut down large sections of your brain? It's complicated, sorting out one's desires. Time for more Schulman:
"There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free...Ignoring the reality that our cities cannot produce liberating ideas for the future from a place of homogeneity keeps us from being truthful about our inherent responsibilities to each other. For in the end, all this self-deception and replacing, this prioritizing and marginalizing, this smoothing over and pushing out, all of this profoundly affects how we think. That then creates what we think we feel.
"For a while I was very invested in astrology as a way of guiding my actions. I still think it’s a wonderful system for creating meaning and drawing patterns out of conscious and unconscious human behaviour but I guess my life has been so chaotic in recent years that I’ve learnt to just go with things as they happen. I think human beings are addicted to finding patterns and meaning (or maybe that’s just me!) in what is ultimately an uncontrollable universe. Superstitions, like any belief system, give people the sense that there is something they can control. I think that as I’ve got older I’m learning (a little) to relinquish control. At this stage superstitions or any meaning-creating system seem lovely and interesting to me, something to explore rather than something to depend on."
We have a Q&A with Mia Gallagher about black magic and ghosts and superstitions over at Spolia. Her ghost story, "Mermaid," is a little gem in our Black Magic issue.
And don't forget, if you need a little astro or tarot realm to explore with your own writing, you can get your Creative Flow reading done with me, complete with recommended reading list. This week is full, but I have spots available starting on Monday.
June 23, 2013
Image: Jeanne Mammen's Fasching Berlin N III
This week we are all going to read Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination because we have to. Yes? Get your copies.
We have to because the way we live is broken, and eventually we are going to have to come to grips with that. And Schulman's account of not only how our cities have become homogenized and gentrified (and wildly expensive) but also our wants and desires and imaginations have become homogenized is voicing something critical. From her book:
"The difference between the refusenik Americans of the past, and the ones who created gentrification culture is that in the past young whites came to New York to become New Yorkers. They became citified and adjusted to the differences and dynamics they craved. This new crew, the professionalized children of the suburbs, were different. They came not to join or to blend in or to learn and evolve, but to homogenize. They brought the values of the gated community and a willingness to trade freedom for security. For example, neighborhoods became defined as 'good' because they were moving towards homogeneity. Or 'safe' because they became dangerous to the original inhabitants. Fearful of other people who did not have the privileges that they enjoyed, gentrifiers -- without awareness of what they were doing -- sought a comfort in overpowering the natives, rather than becoming them. From Penny Arcade: 'I often hear yuppies say that I and other artists were the ones who initially gentrified our neighborhood. But the truth is that we moved into these slums without ever having the need to desire to open a cute cafe or boutique. We lived among our neighbors as they did.'"
I have watched this process happen to Berlin. Certainly it started long before I arrived, but I got there in time to be able to miss what is being lost. It's why I'm rarely in Berlin anymore, it's just where I house my books.
I'm becoming increasingly eccentric in my old age. At a party in the cleanest fucking city I have ever been in the other night, surrounded by suburbanites and bourgeois old ladies, I stood on a chair and called for a crone's revolution. (There had been wine.) But I also want everyone to live radical, exciting, David Bowie kinds of lives. (Not so much the drug addled state, more to do with the philosophical embodiments of his outfits.) And as Schulman states in her introduction, part of that process is listening to voices that have not been gentrified, who have experiences and hopes and dreams that are not your own, and have not been shaped by endless viewing of Girls episodes. So reading Schulman's book is a good place to start.
June 21, 2013
Kati Nolfi writes a great introduction to Riot Grrrl in her review of The Riot Grrrl Collection, “a must-have for those of us too isolated, young, or uncool to participate in Grrrl zine culture the first time around.” For those of you looking for more clickable information on the nineties feminist punk movement, here’s a Riot Grrl link roundup:
From Henry and Bicephaly Pictures, a video of Riot Grrrl superstar Kathleen Hanna reading the 1991 Riot Grrrl Manifesto:
Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna : The Riot Grrrl Manifesto from Bicephaly Pictures on Vimeo.
Read the text of the manifesto here: http://onewarart.org/riot_grrrl_manifesto.htm
Courtesy of Paper, Johanna Fateman’s introductory essay to the collection, in full:
“Reading through this collection, though, I'm brought back to the time when each girl's photocopied missive was a revelation, and much of riot grrrl's meaning was derived from the simple fact of its existence. As a teen, it astounded me to discover that girls were organizing to fight their exclusion and silencing, and that they were doing it with intoxicating subcultural style.”
-- Johanna Fateman, My Riot Grrl
From the Jigsaw archives, here’s Tobi Vail looking back on Riot Grrrl with the release of Sara Marcus’ 2010 book:
“I was ready to give it up and start something new! I wanted to move things forward. I thought that it had become meaningless and that we needed to start the next era. It had seemed miraculously easy to make riot grrl happen, so why couldn't we just re-invent punk rock feminism again and again and again?”
Tobi Vail, Jigsaw | In The Beginning There Was Rhythm!
For a scholarly perspective on POC visibility and the meaning of an archive, check out Mimi Thi Nguyen’s statement on her donation to the Fales Library (from which the collection is gathered):
“The problem is this: Through what stories do absences become visible, and manageable? And does filling up that absence somehow hide the important stories that absence might tell us – about history-making, knowledge-making, movement-making?”
Mimi Thi Nguyen, Thread & Circuits | Fales Library Donation and Collaboration Statement
Looking to put faces to some of the names you’re reading? This series of videos from the EMP Riot Grrrl Retrospective compiles clips of interviews with several key members of the movement:
EMP Riot Grrl Retrospective: Riot Grrrl Is...?And of course, no understanding of Riot Grrrl is complete without listening to the music of the Riot Grrl bands, whose boisterous, infectious riffs and defiant lyrics provided the soundtrack to the movement: Bratmobile, Gimme Brains
June 19, 2013
Image: Sirens by Jeanne Mammen
Over at Spolia, we're running excerpts from our Black Magic issue this week, with Megan Abbott's essay about a 17th century witch trial and Mia Gallagher's ghost story coming up first.
(And there are about 11 days left on the special tarot reading offer for Spolia. I'll still be offering the tarot readings privately, but rates will change and they won't come with the free issue of Spolia. So reserve your spot now.)
We are hard at work on issue three, and this just gets more and more fun. I had a lunch of booze and crepes (fucking love Switzerland) the other day, and we discussed the male/female submission stats that came out after the first VIDA count. As in, women writers don't submit as frequently, don't recover as quickly from rejection, are less likely to follow up on invitations. The Black Magic issue is, I think, something like 70% female contributors? And that is probably due to the fact that we solicit submissions only, and do not have an open submissions policy. That may change in the future, but since there are just three of us, and we're running like 18 websites now between us, dealing with a slush pile on top of everything else we do did not seem plausible. We are behind on our regular duties enough as it is.
And I feel like I have not been blogging enough here about books that I love. So, in honor of our two excerpts at Spolia, I can wholeheartedly recommend the books of our contributors, which is what made me write feverish late night emails asking them for a contribution in the first place.
Megan Abbott: Dare Me
Mia Gallagher: Hellfire (imported from overseas, never released in the US)
June 18, 2013
Image: Monika Schoffmann, "Hochzeit"
In his memoir, Wedlocked (reviewed in this month’s issue), Jay Ponteri turns his gaze to an area often neglected in the many conversations on marriage: the personal, emotional aspects of a sometimes strange, perhaps failing, yet still highly significant institution.
If you’re looking for other perspectives on marriage that might address some of the questions raised by Wedlocked, here’s some recommended reading:
This month, The Atlantic has a fascinating feature on same-sex marriage its influence on modern marriage.
“Marriage, seen this way, is a rigid institution that exists primarily for the rearing of children and that powerfully constrains the behavior of adults (one is tempted to call this the “long slog ’til death” view of marriage), rather than an emotional union entered into for pleasure and companionship between adults. “
-- The Atlantic | The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss
In that it functions as an another way of looking at marriage, same sex unions appear to be changing marriage for the better. By reimagining marriage as a partnership between two people rather than exclusively between a man and a woman, same-sex marriages offer a way to see what “genderless marriage” might look like -- and it looks pretty good. Among the perks are increased communication about responsibilities, since same-sex couples can’t fall back on gender assumptions and stereotypes when it comes down to how they divvy up chores.
But perhaps the problem with marriage isn’t that it’s mostly a gendered institution, but that it’s a monogamous one.
In the 2001 book The Myth of Monogamy, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton turn to the natural world for answers and find that monogamy is an unnatural mode for most of the animal kingdom -- including humans.
“Anthropologists report that the overwhelming majority of human societies either are polygynous or were polygynous prior to the cultural homogenization of recent decades.”
-- David Barash in Salon | The myth of monogamy
And if you’re wondering about what non-monogamous relationships might look like in practice, here are two popular guides for people possibly considering polyamory (and other forms of non-monogamy): Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s The Ethical Slut and Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up.
June 17, 2013
Ann Tyler wrote about my first collection of stories. Ann Tyler, that much loved American writer, who writes about things that would kill me just to think of, never mind to write a book about them. Of the stories in that first book of mine, she said they were—and I suppose I should be flattered that she even took notice—almost “insultingly obscure.” And I wanted to write a review of her books saying “and I think your books are almost insultingly clear.” [Laughs.] I’ve gotten this reception from the beginning, and I never stopped. I’ve never let the criticism deter me.
Jamaica Kincaid is still giving the best interviews in the literary world.
June 13, 2013
Image: Hand des Künstlers mit Farbnapf, Adolph Menzel
My favorite part of doing the tarot readings is the recommended reading list at the end. I don't know why, but I'm really good at assigning reading based on looking at someone's astrological chart or their tarot cards. I can tell when a writer needs to dive into Surrealism, for example, so I make an introduction reading list to Surrealism, and then I get an email back, "Holy shit, you were right." It is my favorite part.
Tarot is telling a story anyway. You start at one spot and then you end up all the way over here, and the trick is to make sense of everything that happens in between. Astrology is storytelling, too. And maybe it's just the story we create with our pasts and our own lives that is the important thing anyway. And if we can nudge those stories along, or bring a hidden part of it into the light, then does it really matter if you think Pluto crashed your car or your Mars in Virgo is holding you back?
Today I recommended to one of my clients PL Travers's exquisite What the Bee Knows, particularly this section:
"Thus, wilely, they force him to search himself until he comes to understand -- and our princess is no exception -- that it is not the advent of the Price or the ship coming safely home to port, that brings about the denouement. She had to learn that happiness is not pleasure though pleasure -- and, above all, joy -- are in its warp and woof. Rather it is a moral virtue, come to by grace and discipline and not without suffering, withal. It requires a poignant letting go of what has been most cherished and learning a new vocabulary -- the grammar, as it were, of the heart. The 'I' that knocks upon the door must become, in answer to 'Who is there?' inevitably, 'Thou'. Love, as noun, must become verb and lose itself in Loving; and Passion assume the syllable that makes of it compassion. Only thus, when what was lost has been found, is it possible to enter the city with bliss -- bestowing hands.'It is all very difficult,' she said to the Sun, as the realization worked within her.
'Would you value it if it was easy?' he asked."
If you would like to book your own reading, you can find the information here. I have some availability coming up next week.
June 12, 2013
Image: Jenna Tähtinen
The Bibliomancer
The Greeks believed that libraries were places of great healing, and that poetry and literature revealed deep spiritual truths. I still believe that today, that seeing alternatives played out in a novel can give you an idea of what to do in your own life, and that sometimes a made up story has more insight into heartbreak, despair, loss, frustration, and failure (and joy, and hope, and love) than any life coach-supplied affirmation or self-help to do list. Every other Wednesday, I will be answering questions about life's quandaries with a little bookish insight. This is an extension of my Kind Reader column, and you can find past entries here. You can submit your own questions by emailing me.
For thirteen years I have been married to the great love of my life – he is fascinating, brilliant, loyal, and beautiful as the day. I tell you all this to emphasize that I am not the typical bored housewife, saddled with a stolid spouse slowly succumbing to middle aged spread. Nevertheless, my eye, of late, has been a-roving -- mostly because I have this friend, a member of my social circle, who is strikingly, shockingly handsome. It’s not a matter of comparison – they exist in different realms: where my husband’s beauty is pure and delicate, this other boy’s is stark and savage. Still, I have a weakness for beauty in all its forms, and a part of me feels entitled to add this new breed to my personal collection, even though I know it would devastate my devoted spouse.
For some time, this has not been a serious issue because I myself am not a great beauty, and so this friend had shown no particular interest in me. Lately, however, I find myself flirting more and more strenuously with him, and he, flattered by my excessive attentions, has begun to flirt back in a way that is both dangerous and delirious. I know very well the correct path here – forget about this caddish creature and be grateful for the perfectly delightful lover already in my grasp. But as always in these situations, knowing the path is easier than following it. How can shake off these inconvenient desires and return to my senses?
Oh, when are married people going to understand that they are the ones with all of the power in these triangles? They love to claim things like, I am the one who has the most to lose (meaning their home, their spouse, their family), but really cheaters only get caught if they want to get caught. So at the end of the affair, they get to retreat back to their safe little houses and their safe little marriages, and they leave the third party on the side of the road with a pat on the head and a "take care of yourself, kid."
Regardless. There are many stories I can tell you at this point. Emma Bovary. Anna Karenina. That chick from The Awakening. Lots of women who get in touch with their desire and then instantly must die for it. But it's an outdated story, and I am not a moralist.
But what I am is concerned for all the people you seem prepared to hurt in a very real way just to satisfy a whim. You cannot just drag another person into the empty spaces in your marriage and expect that to be a good fit. And before you insist you are not bored in your marriage, let me just say that every marriage and every relationship has empty spaces. If a relationship really did complete us, we might as well just turn our wedding ceremony into a double suicide -- because without dissatisfaction, what would there be left to live for? What's the point of any of it without something unattainable to strive towards?
I am going to give you the same advice the adventurer Richard Francis Burton gave his friend: "The fact is you are breaking down with regular habits. You want a little gipsying." Because when we sense a gap in our lives, we often times see it as the shape of something convenient or on hand -- a lover, money, that rug that really ties the place together. It is not a new rug you need, or a new lover. I think what you really need is a little gipsying. I think you need a little Pippi Longstocking.
Because Pippi is not in any doubt about who she is or what her motivations are. She wants, she takes. But while still remaining loyal to her father, to her friends (um, that would be a monkey and a horse, but whatever). She has the strength of character that doesn't need to willfully hurt others, unless she's doling out a little karmic retaliation. And when she's bored, or when her dear father is in distress, she goes to sea.
Your own Pippi adventure doesn't have to be a journey to the South Seas, but maybe that would be good for you. And you should find your own adventure, because that would be a first step in admitting there is a gap there, there is some need that your husband is not filling. And it takes enormous strength and trust as a couple to hold that space open and admit to each other there are needs you cannot satisfy with (or even in) each other's presence. There are adventures one must go on alone. Your pet monkey gets a free pass, of course.
But most of all, you need to follow Pippi Longstocking in her knowledge of who she is. If you are going to cheat, then cheat. But do it with a little dignity and self-awareness, of who as a person that action makes you. Also, you have to be aware of what the consequences of this action can be, and not just your own personal ramifications. This is a question of desire, but it doesn't sound like it's a desire to possess this person, or even a desire to ask your husband for a little sexual openness. It's uncharted territory, it's the forbidden, that are calling to you. There are ways to satisfy that without pushing your loved ones into heavy traffic. Pippi knows how to name what she wants. Your best bet is to follow her lead.
Submit your own questions for the Bibliomancer column to jessa@bookslut.com.
June 11, 2013
The first issue of our sister publication Spolia has been reviewed, and given four stars. Singled out for loving attention is "Bess," a show-stopper of a short story by Daphne Gottlieb:
“Bess,” leads off the issue, with its footnotes and its layering of voices, and the other comes near the end. “Bess” sets the tone with its marriage of formal ambition and social concern. I’m hesitant to call the piece “innovative,” a word that can easily be cheapened—what is important here is how Gottlieb bends the form to express her narrator’s difficult position stuck between official duties and personal compassion, between being a part of the social services system and despairing at the possibility of any meaningful services being given.
The reviewer calls us cosmopolitan and a little closed off. ("What I take the Ballets Russes to represent in this context is not a broad, all-inclusive generalism but a curated cosmopolitanism. Spolia is currently not accepting unsolicited submissions, which means it is operating a little like Diaghilev’s company: you might get invited to participate if you have already published some work that catches an editor’s eye.") So at least she gets what we are trying to do.
Image by Umberto Veruda
I've read a couple pieces about the state of women's fiction lately. Nothing revelatory -- it is the same stuff about their books not getting enough respect or review attention or whatever. And that work, I think, has to be done (or maybe it is off-putting and scolding and doesn't actually engage the mind of the male critic because by the time you're done with your second sentence he is off refilling his scotch and thinking dark thoughts about menstrual cycles and their attachment to the emotional expression of the female human), but I don't want to read it anymore. I mean, I read that totally depressing Dwight Garner review of the Edna O'Brien memoir (which is great), and he praised her for all of her groundbreaking, scandalous work that she did, and it is very clear to anyone who reads Garner's (or, god, Ron Charles's) reviews that the only time they can recognize groundbreaking work by women is when it was all done 40 years ago and that ground that Edna O'Brien broke and was ostracized and shamed and critically destroyed for doing by critics a lot like Garner has now been rebuilt with memoirs by 20-somethings confessing their sexual urges and thinking that makes them really edgy.
God, I got off track, what the fuck was it I wanted to talk about? "It’s as if our citizenry is so overburdened with debt, war, and weather-related disasters that it prefers its pop culture to be delivered in easy bites that indulge our nostalgia and don’t require us to think." Right. M Magazine has a great piece about how so many of our male singers and artists and so on are stuck in perpetual boyhood. I'm tired of these "what is the state of women's writing?" pieces. When are we going to get at the real story: Where are the men of American novelists?
I don't mean the decrepit old men like Philip Roth who still has his hands down his pants even after all of these years. I mean the male writers my age, who still seem stuck in adolescence. Writing boyish books about boyish things, who can't seem to engage with the darkness of these Times We Live In, who still get all ewww and gross when it comes to women, who are totally showy instead of emotional or knowledgeable. I am aware I am speaking in generalities here. But I see more sophistication, and more worldliness, in the writing of women (also a lot of drippy bullshit about feelings and love and dreams and how expectations don't match up with reality wah-fests, but let's focus on the high end here) than I do in American men. When it's not boyishness, it's that Hemingway-infected strain of bombast, somehow without noticing that it was all a pose. Not even Hemingway was Hemingway.
I don't see many male writers engaging with the changing forms of masculinity, or offering challenges. There are exceptions. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's The End of San Francisco is devastating on that level. Sycamore: "How can we remain accountable while assimilating into male privilege? And this would challenge my own assumptions about masculinity as something to be avoided: what would it mean to create a masculinity that was chosen, negotiated, and transformed?" The man with whom I am in love writes beautiful books about what seem to be boyish things, but are really about rewriting the expectations of adulthood, particularly male adulthood. But most of what comes across my doorstep is dreck. I just fling them over my shoulder now, with only the quickest of glances.
I would really like to publish an issue of Spolia with the theme of The Man. God, I should really do that, and tell my editors. Because I want the Man, particularly the American Man, to rewrite itself. Not just dress itself up in its grandfather's suits and swagger around.
June 10, 2013
Irish author Kevin Barry has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his wonderfully rowdy novel City of Bohane.
There's a great recent interview with Barry over at Omnivoracious:
Who did you write this book for?
For people who look around the bookstore sometimes and think--now how am I going to find a truly lurid good time in here? What I wanted to make was a really serious piece of literature, and an extravagant language experiment, but one that would also be a grand, high-octane, visceral entertainment. So I wrote it in technicolour, essentially.
Over at Spolia, for the rest of the month, we'll be offering book recommendations for your new Black Magic library. (Saturn is in Scorpio, so you know you want to build this library.)
First up is Algernon Blackwood, member of the Golden Dawn and writer of some of the creepiest stories ever. You are best off downloading his books from Gutenberg for free, as, in general, horror writers and ghost story writers from old are either treasured in fetished-up limited editions or they are distributed with covers that look like your mom just discovered clip art and threw something together with Print Shop. I don't know why this is, but this is the truth.
(Although this looks pretty good, if you are a physical object kind of person, like I am.)
June 7, 2013
Let's talk about copyright, shall we?
Because I read this article a while ago, and it was unbearably depressing. And I can barely get through a comic book movie these days without vomiting anyway (Did you see The Avengers? And get through the whole thing without wanting to tear your own eyes out? Who are you, anyway, it's like I don't even know you anymore.) without factoring in who is getting rich from the audience's contributions and who is dying penniless and without even an authorship credit.
In 1940, the Saturday Evening Post reported that while the still new Superman was making millions, his creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, were paid just $130 for Superman himself, and $210 per issue thereafter (the original cheque itself sold for $160,000 last year). The pair sued National Allied Publications (the predecessor of DC Comics) for ownership of Superman and Superboy, who was obviously a spin-off of their own character, but both were paid to drop all subsequent claims and their bylines were removed. In 1973 Siegel and Shuster again took up their case to claim ownership of Superman, and the battle rages to this day.Both men died without ever reclaiming their creation, while DC continues to make millions from the superhero’s image. It was only in 1975, when Superman first hit the cinema screen, that a public outcry began. Joe Shuster was then blind, living in a shabby apartment and dependent on his brother; Jerry Siegel was recovering from a heart attack and working in a mail room. Their medical bills had driven them further into destitution. The pair, living in complete poverty despite several previous lawsuit payments, were awarded a small pension and health care from their previous employers. Their credit line on each appearance of Superman was restored, but any ownership of the hero was still denied.
And of course, Siegel and Shuster were hardly alone in their making comic book publishers and movie studios billions of dollars while they themselves slipped into poverty. And just read any interview with Alan Moore that has been published in the last 10 years if you think those fuckers have gotten any more civilized.
But perhaps the best response is to pretend that Rufus Wainwright's song "Release the Stars" is actually directed towards comic book publishers.
June 6, 2013
A.M. Homes (not, as I thought up until this year, A.M. Holmes) has won the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. With a novel about - scream! - a man, May We Be Forgiven.
Book of the Week: The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom by Antony Eastmond
Antony Eastmond's The Glory of Byzantium is a monster of a book, heavy and weighted and gilded, part blunt weapon and part sacred icon. Eastmond gives a smart but never too academic tour of Byzantium paintings, icons, sculpture, relics, and architecture, leaving the book heavy on the beautiful images and light on the technical details. It serves as an introduction to the glorious world of Medieval art, and focuses on regions that tend to be neglected in discussions of Medieval art, like Georgia, Turkey, and Egypt.
He also gives a more fuller view of what the Medieval world was like, expanding from the traditional religious imagery and bringing in their scientific interest and work, and the secular art from the time period as well. I spoke with Eastmond on the phone about the book, and why there seems to be a resurgence in interest about the era.
It seems like there has been a great deal more interest in Medieval art lately. I've seen many more general interest titles on the subject, non-academic scholarly titles. Is that something you've seen as well?
I think you're right, I think there has been more interest, particularly in Byzantium, the sort of Eastern Mediterranean. I think it's largely due to the fact that in the last 15 - 20 years there's been a series of new exhibitions about the art. It's an area where people are still discovering new things. It's new harder and harder to find new things about Picasso or Monet or something, but you find places like St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt. No one knew about that collection of icons 50 years ago. Twenty years ago is the first time they allowed them out of the monastery to travel. People were so wowed by them.
And one thing I've found an interesting parallel, you talk about the use of icons and the controversy against icons, and that is something that still seems to come up, in the Islamic world and with the destruction of other religious iconography like the Buddhas in Afghanistan. Were you conscious of that as you were writing the book?
It's something that you're always aware of, as it goes back a thousand years. In some ways, the situation in England with the iconoclasm here in the 16th century has a kind of parallel, because actually the destruction of images in this country did a lot to formulate the way the country is now, in that it has a greater interest in literature than in art. So there's a positive side to iconoclasm that we are all reluctant to acknowledge. No one wants to... and I don't either, don't get me wrong. You don't want to promote what the Taliban did. But there's a way of understanding it. And when you look back at the Byzantium world and the debates they had and how long it went on for, you really appreciate just how important it is to think really is for a people to destroy pictures.
And is the argument basically the same, as it was back in Byzantium, against the use of images?
Yes, the argument never really changes. It's about what it is you think you're worshipping in the end. Whether you think you're worshipping a god or a bit of stone or a bit of wood covered in plaster and paint. And where the Byzantines solved the problem was by saying you never were just worshipping a bit of wood, which would be idolatry, the fact that that painting became a window onto another world, the fineness of that definition is what really matters. Whether you're prepared to accept what they say is really the way it works. Clearly, if you're Orthodox you are. For other religious groups, it's much harder to accept. In Islam in particular, they've never accepted that. Or in Protestant countries, although that has all changed now.
Whenever I talk to Medieval art scholars and for some reason I talk to a lot of them, there's always one region that really sets them on fire, whether that be the Russians or the Greeks or the Germans. So what is your particular fetish?
Mine is Georgia, in the Caucasus. That was the first region that I started studying for my Ph.D. in the '90s, so kind of the remotest corner of the Medieval Christian world, mostly surrounded by mountains or Muslims on one side or the other. It's a precarious history they've had, and yet when you go there, they've got all these churches and they've got icons and paintings that go back to the 4th, 5th century AD. You know what Northern Europe was like in that period and then you go and see these huge, really well built stone churches in stunning locations, with snow-capped mountains behind. It's really spectacular. That's what caught my imagination, it was largely through these buildings that Christianity has managed to survive in these regions. I think that's an impressive thing, why should art have that power to keep a country together despite everything that it's faced.
What took you to that region in the first place?
A real mixture of serendipity and doing a lot of research to find out what there was in the world. There were these churches in what was the Soviet Union still, and hadn't been studied much outside the country. And then you get there and discover how good the food is, it gets even better.
You give a good amount of attention in the book to the scientific and secular art that was going on at the time. We still have this idea that the Medieval age was ignorance and nonstop superstition. Is that difficult to counter? And how do you see the mix of science and religion of that age?
The trouble is that what survives are churches. Things that aren't, don't. It's that one aspect of the Byzantine life that kept going. Everything else, particularly in Greece and what's now Turkey, the secular side of life is what was taken over by the Islamic empire. So you look at the science and the amount of astronomy they were doing. We only know about Euclid and all these aspects of ancient science because they were still interested in it in the Medieval period. The ancient texts still survive because they were interested in the Medieval world. It's a huge error. In some ways, it's not so different from today. Why are people so interested in astronomy? It's about plotting the stars and that fits into astrology and horoscopes. You look at any paper and you've got exactly the same. We like to think that we're much more rational, but you just think back to Ronald Reagan and everything being plotted by his astrologer, telling him when to do certain things. It's not that different today.
June 4, 2013
Image: The Chase by Lauren Archer
Let's do a little housekeeping, shall we?
We have two wonderful things for you to read. One would be the new issue of Bookslut. I feel a little bad that we have been featuring so few male authors. And by feeling bad I mean when I do up the tally each month and see it's another gyno-centric features section, I think, "oh," and then forget about it for another month. But I swear to you, men, that that "oh" is weighted and fraught and rolls down the mountain with its heavy regrets.
The other wonderful thing is the Black Magic issue of Spolia is now up and available for download. In this month's issue we have Megan Abbott writing about witchcraft; the work of Hilma af Klint, mystic painter and seance enthusiast; Mia Gallagher (tremendous Irish writer, I can't wait for the US to discover her) giving us a ghost tale; and Upendranath Ashk writing about the darkest and most frightening topic of all: the mother complex. We're proud as fuck, and we hope you like it.
I am still offering my tarot and astro readings special for Black Magic. I am booked through this week, but have availabilities starting again on Monday. Email me if you're interested.
And my next stop in the travel for the book is St. Petersburg, Russia. If anyone there reads this blog and wants to grab a drink, or could answer a few questions I have in advance, get in touch?
Also, can I just restate how good of a book Rollo May's The Meaning of Anxiety is? I haven't stopped thinking about it since I finished reading it. Everyone should have this fucking thing.
June 3, 2013
Enjoy the florid descriptions of the longlisted titles in the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books official press release:
"A live wire account of the body electric."
"Imagine how birds hear, taste and feel."
"Delights in dust and scent and all that fills the air around us."
"Takes you back to what it is like to be a child looking at the world of plants.".
The Women's Prize for Fiction now has a new sponsor: Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur. Your correspondent goes through a minimum of three bottles of the stuff every Christmas which makes it just as literary as Hemingway's daiquiris or the vile Pink Lady cocktails Zelda and what's his chops Fitzgerald used to drink.
