http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.
Danielle Dutton is the author of S P R A W L (shortlisted for the 2010 Believer Book Award) and Attempts at a Life. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press; teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa; and runs Dorothy, a publishing project.
Bhanu Kapil teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and at God(d)ard College. She has a blog with a loyal following in Croatia, Mongolia, and Pakistan: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor].” She has written four books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat.)
Starting tomorrow, I will begin a month-long series I’ve blandly entitled “Five Questions About Experimental Literature,” which will showcase responses from ten contemporary innovators in the field: Bhanu Kapil, Miranda Mellis, Debra Di Blasi, Tantra Bensko, Susan Steinberg, Kate Zambreno, Amelia Gray, Danielle Dutton, Alexandra Chasin, and Lidia Yuknavitch.
The goal is to continue the exploration of this topic by opening the conversation to other perspectives.
I’m super excited to share with you the amazing responses the writers have given. The range is staggering. The insights are enlightening. I can’t thank the writers enough for all of the time and energy they’ve offered to this project, which promises to be very rewarding.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s series. If all goes well and it seems like people are into it, I plan to continue the series by creating five new questions for the month of April and inviting ten new writers to participate.
It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating to some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given.
(from Gender Trouble, pages xix-xx)
Read more about him @ Senses of Cinema
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pib9zv1dHcE
L’Age d’Or (1930)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5pTjZ2ld5o
Because Roxane’s recent post on Davis Schneiderman’s novel Blank engaged so thoughtfully with my ongoing “What is Experimental Literature” series (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3), I decided to postpone my previously planned posting (which deals with the critical theory of Roland Barthes), and instead directly address Schneiderman’s novel and what I perceive to be Roxane’s basic concern about it: namely, what to do with it.
Unfortunately, my series on experimental literature offered Roxane no help in dealing with Schneiderman’s novel. The reason, I would argue, is that Blank moves out of the boundary zone of experimental literature and into the boundary zone of conceptual literature. The difference between those categories seems just as significant as the distinctions between experimental and conventional literature, and therefore require yet another set of heuristics.
I must say, I love the problems that conceptual literature presents to my attempts at understanding experimental literature. For one thing, it works to disrupt any notion of binary opposition: no longer can anyone mistakenly assume that I’m presenting an either/or when I discuss the relationship between experimental and conventional literature — the spectre of conceptual literature invalidates any such assumption by demonstrating the possibility of other potential categories. For another thing, I think conceptual literature can help to recalibrate our expectations and assumptions about experimental literature.
What follows is my attempt at answering what I perceive to be Roxane’s query regarding Schneiderman’s novel, as well as an attempt to grapple with the differences between conceptual and experimental works.
Yesterday morning, the multi-talented Molly Gaudry announced that she was making herself available for hire as an independent publicist. Within no time, she found herself in business. So much business, in fact, that she had to issue this press release:
Due to a shockingly overwhelming demand, I am at this time only considering authors with books that have been or will be published by the presses listed here. Please know that I am only going to take on 2-4 individual titles for the next six months, and I will have to make a lot of difficult decisions as the queries keep coming. Thank you for considering me, though, and for your support and encouragement as this company continues to grow.
For anyone lucky enough to fit her criteria, I highly recommend inquiring about her services. Molly is awesome. This idea is awesome. Cheers to her, and good luck!
They are to each other after and on the flower near the crackling fire next to each other but when she looks she’s no longer looks at him. Looks at him. She’s not there looks at him. No longer on, she’s not there, the lone floor of Freeman’s living room and/or the opera stage where the deafening noise, rather, from our crowd’s spoke-woken her. She must have passed, missed, slipped out, slipped, must have hurled herself in the path of a hurled pointy hat. The crowd’s on their endingly feet singing neverendingly songs over and over, the song Cassandra beguttoned a day or so ago.
Oh Reuben, oh Reuben, offstage jumping: keep it going, yes yes, keep singing, keep it going. But she’s jumped and banged and heaven’s sake and sang enough for heaven’s sake, was just pointed-hat-hurled on stage for heaven’s sake, hurled in the pointed hurled hat with a head.
The crowd sobers when the loss of their leader is lost from the strange of the onstage. They file, the crowd, out of our theater seats whistling like a bird-caller army in their cars, near their dinners, at their desserts, within dreams, out from deserts, under oceans, sleepwalking-whistling to kitchens preparing two egg in the morning salad sandwiches.
Freeman prepares himself and his components, the components of the egg salad sandwich at two in the morning with his kitchen around him, tea kettle whistling. Whistling.
No longer whistling. Can you barely? You’ll need to look closer: Cassandra fashioning at Freeman’s kitchen table, the square one, eyes open, a mug of tea, ghost roses parading and the donkey playing a cello.
A D Jameson, lost and innocent, narcissistic and corrupted, has been dreaming his way through the past thirty years, the dying breaths of the fictional 20th century. In his dreams he made many friends: the alien puppet ALF, cantankerous, theadbare, and living in a casket; Luke Skywalker, middle-aged, mustachioed, and hateful; and Bonnie Raitt, the ceramicist, shining spotlights onto sand and cancer.
He invites you now to join both him and them; his lips shape your name. For his dreams have also been about you; he’s been searching for you for a long time. Lie down beside him; allow him to drape his glittery silver fur coat across your shoulders. He’ll fold his hands and bow and whisper. He’ll hand you a gumball that’s grown stale inside a locket. He’ll hand you a gem that fell down from the moon. Together, you’ll sail across the ocean on his wok rat; nibbling his tree pig. Together, you’ll enter these fantastical tombs.