J. Wang is a writer, artist, and musician based out of planet earth. Her writings on literature, art, film, music, theory, politics, and culture can be read on her blog Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns. Email her at loneberry (at) gmail (dot) com.
Not White Boy Drag, just a white boy
This is a conversation. It is 1:06am MST. We are both HTML Giant contributors. We are also both Asian. This is happening IRL.
Lily Hoang: So, imagine there’s someone sitting at a café, smoking a cigarette, drinking a fucking Americano, reading David Foster Wallace. What do you think?
Jackie Wang: Who is this wienerschnitzel? Lemme guess. A white boy with lots of feelings.
LH: Haha, no, it’s me: I’m in white boy drag!
JW: White boy drag?! That’s an interesting term. What exactly does that mean? You’re not going to kill yourself and make everyone else feel bad about it, are you? Cause that would be taking the performance a little too far!
LH: Well, it’s hard being a white boy, I gotta admit. Like you don’t know how hard it is. The guilt. The burden of genius. All the privileges. It’s hard to balance, keep the head sane, ya know?
JW: You know what I hate about white boys? They’re always complaining about how they can’t get laid, but it seems obvious to me – like – why they can’t get laid. Should someone tell them? Should I be the one to tell them?
“It’s the morning after I died / it’s the morning after I died” is the refrain from the opening track of a Bones cassette tape my friend Matthew P sent me. It fits the realization I had today—that I must write a simple book that strives for nothing. Tonight the 2am radio plays low as I sit in the backseat of a van I have no right to be riding in. I don’t want to convey anything except a sense of peace with what has happened. I don’t want to amplify it. I would like to state it without judgment, without qualifying it to death despite the fact that it knocked the wind out of me. I would like to let it be small, to protect the quietude from the crowding out effect of inflated emotion. Writer-consciousness is hell but I don’t have to tell you that. It’s like the internet, the way it mediates everything.
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“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” –William Blake
Masochists, manic depressives, suicides, all poets are neurotics of the death instinct, losers and failures who embrace the misery of their wretched trade, who wallow in its servile aura of diminishment and squalor—its paltry practice.
But among poets, those dismal defeated schlemiels and corner-biting cowards lured by vile Virgils into the abyss of verse, a fortunate few manage to inhabit the upper circles, its higher hellblocks—
Even among the damned there are divisions…there are even (and it’s almost unbelievable that they can exist) some poets who want to succeed! Who want their poetry to be read! Who actually try to write poetry that is accessible and can reach an audience!—
What traitors these are to their class—(jeez, if they didn’t want to be failures, why did they become poets!)
(Source)
1-800-MICE
by Matthew Thurber
PictureBox, 2011
176 pages / Buy from PictureBox
There isn’t much crossover between the worlds of experimental comics and small press literature—perhaps some of us literary folk even harbor an unconscious prejudice of the comics form, writing it off as a lowbrow and degraded medium particular to a certain class of socially inept nerds (as if writers possess any kind of social grace…). If we adhere to these arbitrarily demarcated disciplinary boundaries, we will totally miss out on some mind-blowing gems out there, like Matthew Thurber’s hallucinatory and brain-bending epic 1-800-MICE. (Watch the trailer here.)
if i craned my neck i saw them slowly begin to turn away, he said, a dream of course, the scatter of events, the scatter of events is amazing when seen from above, he said, the scatter of events, and how every new day we wash, dress, have washed, have dressed, this torture till we have finished washing, dressing, and how we can’t bear being talked to in the morning, he said, could this not go so far, he said, that we’d no longer want to set foot into the morning, he said, at least from my post of observation, he said.
(Friederike Mayröcker, with each clouded peak)
i can’t stop thinking about this sentence. i can’t help but think this sentence is perfect. i was drawn to it because the day before i read it i had the same revelation about not wanting to set foot into the morning, about the torture of beginning, what it means to enter the day, and what is left behind when you enter. what is that moment? the one where you choose to step into the morning even though you know that the choice to begin is also a turning away from your dreams. the scatter of events. rhythm and repetition; ritual and repetition. the sentence lit up when i wrote it down. the scatter recurs in the sentence; the sentence accumulates and places you in time in all these different ways. not a straight path from one point to another, but a cluster of rivulets that flow in all directions. you are watching. you wait, have waited. you move between states of anticipation and retrospective contemplation, between the diurnal ritual of dressing and washing, the impending task before us (till we have), the moments after the dispersal, when the sediments have settled, when we have finished…have washed, have dressed. the appearance of simplicity. sentence is movement, an unfolding in time. yet while my eyes move from the first word to the last, something is happening in between. a temporal upheaval under the guise of linearity (the guise being the sentence itself), perhaps. a gesture toward a different way of entering the sentence.
several days ago i stayed up all night watching the ocean and telling myself that i will never go back. i felt that after that moment, everything would have to be different. i finally get it. i finally understand what it’s all about. i see everything now and i know what decisions must be made. what have i got to do to not forget this lesson? to not lose contact. in a few hours i will be zipped across this very sky on a plane en route to baltimore. i will ride it for free using the complimentary ticket i got when i wrote and faxed a four page complaint to american airlines—faxed so i could bypass the word limit on the website form (who said writing skillz aren’t practical?). i am afraid. i know that in baltimore i will not have the psychic or physical space to really sink into it and i’m wondering—does being around people desensitize you, force you onto a different wavelength, flatten your really intense visions and impulses? BECAUSE IF I AM TO WRITE I CANNOT BE DESENSITIZED. how am i going to write these books? to think, several days ago i was at the end of my life laughing, watching the waves crash into the rocks as the world expanded in every directions all around me. i was on this extremely long and lonely journey just to figure out that everything would be okay, and when i came to this realization everything suddenly opened up. i was inside my life in this totally different way—for the first time i wasn’t wishing i were somewhere else; wasn’t wishing i were smarter, better or more like this or that. mid-revelation a cop pulled up, parked his car, and stared me down. he wouldn’t leave. fuck that cop. and all other cops. you’re cramping my style. i stumbled away from the cop and into the gaze of a pack of drunk guys. they started yelling sexual comments at me and began to walk toward me. i was preparing myself to fight and was convinced i could take all of them down. just then my little brother and his friend showed up.
Kate Zambreno will be doing a reading tour to support her new book, Green Girl (Emergency Press). In a recent review of Green Girl Lightsey Darst of Bookslut wrote, ”reading this book is like eating Oreos, if Oreos could be filled with spiders and simultaneously retain their addictive power.” Many of the dates will be with authors from the anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience (OV Books). Also note, there is a reading with Laurie Weeks in NY on Oct 18–Laurie’s new book Zipper Mouth (Feminist Press) is explosive. Don’t even think about missing it.
October 6 – Seattle, Vermillion, 1508 11th Avenue between Pike and Pine, 7pm-10pm, with Litsa Dremousis and Kristen Thiel (of Men Undressed)
October 7 – Portland, Powell’s City of Books on Burnside, 1005 Burnside, 7:30pm, with Lidia Yuknavitch and Kristen Thiel (of Men Undressed)
October 14 – San Diego, &Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever
Two panels: “What’s that Mess? It’s Excess!” on Friday at 10am-11:15am with Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Bhanu Kapil and Johannes Goransson (reading from forthcomingHeroines) and “Seeing Stars,” with Tisa Bryant, Roxanne Carter, Masha Tupitsyn and Ronaldo Wilson (I will read from Green Girl) on Friday from 6-7:15pm.
October 15 - San Francisco, LitCrawl, Sub/Mission Art Space, 2183 Mission Street, 7:15-8:15, with Aimee Parkison, Christine Zilka, Vicki Hendricks, and Vanessa Carlisle of Men Undressed
October 16 - Santa Cruz, New Cadence Poetry Series, Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, 7:30pm, with Aimee Parkison and Vanessa Carlisle of Men Undressed
October 18 -New York, Dixon Place, 161a Chrystie Street on LES, 7-9pm with Laurie Weeks
October 28 - Chicago, Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark Street, at 7pm, with Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza, and Susan Solomon of Men Undressed
October 30 - Chicago, The Nervous Breakdown Sunday Salon, Katerina’s, 1920 W. Irving Park, 8pm, with Joshua Mohr, Susan Solomon, and Richard Thomas
November 3 – Valencia, CA Visiting Writer at CalArts (reading from Green Girl and Heroines)
November 5 - Los Angeles, Skylight Books, with Kate Durbin
November 18 – Philadelphia, Moles not Molar reading series
November 20 - New York, Sunday Salon, with Men Undressed
When I first read Masha Tupitsyn’s hybrid-genre book Beauty Talk and Monsters (Semiotexte), I was completely floored by it. So I was excited to read her new book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (Zero Books)—a book of aphoristic film and media commentary written in the spirit of cultural observers like Chris Marker. There is something beautiful about Masha’s way of “reading” culture, how she honors the connections and resonances of the media she encounters, the way it is processed, assimilated and re-invented when it is filtered through her perception; intermingling with specific memories and preoccupations. Masha integrates the subjective and the critical in a way that demonstrates the specificity of our encounters with media. Both Beauty Talk and LACONIA could be described as a literary approach to film criticism, but it’s also fitting to describe the works as a cinematic approach to literary writing. In Beauty Talk, narrative and a criticism are tightly interwoven. As stories, the essays are stunning; as critical analysis, sharp. Masha’s recent book LACONIA reminds me of the ways in which the viewer is also a meaning-maker, a participant critic.
#481. IN AMERICA, WHEN YOU ATTACK THE CULTURE INDUSTRY, YOU ARE CALLED CYNICAL. BUT IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. *
“Postmodern irony means never having to say you are sorry. Or that you are serious.”
–Suzanne Moore, Looking for Trouble
Cultural studies is on the rise. The canon is dying, or at least is seriously ill. Critics are now turning their attention to the media that surrounds them—sitcoms, Hollywood films, magazines, pop music, kitsch, reality TV, fashion trends, internet memes. Repulsed by the academic elitism of cultural criticism as well as the notion that there are certain texts that are unworthy of the critic’s attention, the proponents of cultural studies have launched a vitriolic attack on the hierarchical distinction between high culture and low culture. The exclusion of “low” and popular culture and the privileging of refined culture and art that caters to a specialized/trained audience has its problems: it reinforces the idea that art is an “autonomous” institution while implicitly promoting classism, eliminating the perspective of lower class folk and ignoring subaltern cultural production and engagement (Adorno famously denounced jazz music).
THE BIRTH OF THE CAT POET’S CAPACITY FOR PASSION
OR, THE MAKING OF A MAN CAT OF LETTERS
Witness my house’s cat George Jackson pen his magnum opus. Below are some notes provided by Susan Sontag from her essay on Marina Tsvetaeva titled “A Poet’s Prose.”
*
Being a poet is to define oneself as, to persist (against odds) in being, only a poet.
//
Actually, the frontier between prose and poetry has become more and more permeable — unified by the ethos of maximalism characteristic of the modern artist: to create work that goes as far as it can go.
[GEORGE SAYS: "NO. POETRY IS THE HIGHEST FORM. I REFUSED TO ADMIT THE UNREFINED SCRIBBLINGS OF A NON-POET."]
//
Homage to others is the complement to accounts of oneself: the poet is saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of his or her admirations.
//
Poet’s prose is mostly about being a poet. And to write such autobiography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) is often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person cat dies. (To have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate.) Much of the prose of poets—particularly in the memoiristic form—is devoted to chronicling the triumphant emergence of the poet self. (In the journal or diary, the other major genre of poet’s prose, the focus is on the gap between the poet and the daily self, and the often untriumphant transactions between the two. The diaries—for example, Baudelaire’s or Blok’s—abound with rules for protecting the poet self; desperate maxims of encouragement; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.)
//
In prose the poet is always mourning a lost Eden; asking memory to speak, or sob.
//
All of Tsvetaeva’s George’s work is an argument for rapture; and for genius, that is, for hierarchy: a poetics of the Promethean.
//
To be a poet is a state of being, elevated being: Tsvetaeva George speaks of her his love for “what is highest.”
//
There is the same quality of emotional soaring in her his prose as in her his poetry: no modern writer takes one as close to an experience of sublimity.
Look at this clutter. Kind of glorious, no?
Is a messy mind the mark of a good writer or is that something dysfunctional people tell themselves in order to find comfort in the heaps of scattered pages? What is your writing space like? I don’t really have one, as I’m always on the move these days. I will say that it’s hard for me to sit at a desk. The closest I ever came to incorporating a desk into my erratic work routine was when I would go to IHOP in the middle of the night and stay until morning downing cup after cup of decaff coffee while scribbling in my notebook all bleary-eyed and delirious. But if it were socially sanctioned, I probably would have sat on the IHOP floor. Mostly I do everything while lying down in my invisible bed or sitting on the floor, perhaps because I am lazy…? I don’t believe in furniture. Probably am just undomesticated, feral. At a writing residency last year I had a normal room with a desk and a bed. And what did I do? Pulled the mattress onto the floor and probably didn’t sit at the desk once.
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“I MUST FORGET EVERYTHING in order to finish this work, you have to get yourself in harness, no enmeshed, once you get involved in a writing project a writing diktat, there is no going back, or everything will be ruined, isn’t that right, maybe it’s getting your claw hooked into the robe of language, you attach yourself, you get snared, you get snagged in language in the MATERIAL in the TEXTURE, etc., and in the same way language seems to get hooked, attached, it hooks its claws into us the moment we acquiesce, so, we lead we guide each other, in equal measure . . .”
–Friederike Mayröcker, brütt, or The Sighing Gardens
Bhanu Kapil writes “I remembers” with fourth graders. These children are brilliant. Magic. Geniuses.
I remember when I would write poetry in elementary school. Every couple months our class would have a showcase. Our parents would come. We would display our talents. I would always read an original poem. They were often about seasons and candy (what else is new)…and the relationship between seasons and candy (candy corn–so autumn). I was proud that I didn’t have to use a rhyming dictionary to write my poems and the kids would say, “One day you’ll be a famous poet. One day you’ll have a huge book of poems!” One time I tried to do a piano recital but got nervous and fucked up. So I thought, I should stick with the poems. And I’ve stuck with words all this time.
Highlights from Bhanu’s trip to Garfield Elementary School: I Remember: [1]
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Illustration by Shaun Tan
“Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.”
–Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer, 1916
He was talking about the Jewish horse and the German horse
(But there is also the Czech horse.)
What horse did Kafka ride?
Where does Kafka belong?
Who owns Kafka? *
These sentences kill me.
Imagine: prostrate on the ground.
That’s what an exilic existence is like
Prostrate on the ground.
Living in the place that is no place
Riding the no horse
Going nowhere, only not-here
With no language
Never quite comfortable in any language. **
When the narrator in the story “My Destination” is asked where he is going
He says,
“I don’t know.”
“Away from here, away from here.”
“Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.”
Always away, never arriving. ***
Butler: “…the monstrous and infinite distance between departure and arrival….”
Kafka: “For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.”
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NOTES
* [I love this essay about Kafka by Judith Butler.]
** [Butler: “We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange. So is there a first language here?”]
*** [Kafka: “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”]
Knowing a woman’s mind & spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs & backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman & as a poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat a perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body & mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life.
– Ntozake Shange
THE FREEDOM TO MOVE IN SPACE IS POEM.
Photo by Viennese artist Eva Schlegel
Sometimes the holy writing spirit possesses you.
There’s no summoning it. I’m beginning to understand that now.
Not like that. Not like: SIT DOWN TO WRITE AND BE INSTANTLY INSPIRED.
There are conditions
There are kinesthetic conditions
There’s running downhill in the park as the rain approaches and the top of your head flies off like a hat getting blown away by a gust of wind.
There is inside the sensation of bodies touching bodies that move toward each other bodies that approach trembling but without fear.
There’s the orange light in the rain-paved streets and the stranger under the bridge.
Hello stranger I am lost.
These are things I cannot generate my own, alone in a room.
There are kinesthetic conditions
Sore muscle conditions
And the understanding that the more I move,
The more I will be able to access the world.
Opening my notebook the morning after a night of woozy ambien scribbling is like opening a present: you never know what’s inside. Today there was a note that said, “Beckett—101-2. Shit genre.”
Here is the passage I noted. It’s from Samuel Beckett’s first play Eleuthéria, which was disowned by the Beckett Estate.
Dr. Piouk: What does he do?
Mme. Meck: (With pride) He is a man of letters.
Dr. Piouk: You don’t say! (Enter M. Krap. He reaches his armchair and cautiously sits down)
M. Krap: You were saying nice things about me, I feel it.
Mme. Meck: There isn’t anything the matter with her?
M. Krap: She is unharmed.
Mme. Meck: She is coming?
M. Krap: She’s getting ready for that.
Mme. Piouk: There was a time when you were unaffected.
M. Krap: At the cost of what artifice!
Dr. Piouk: You are a writer, Monsieur?
M. Krap: What gives you leave to–
Dr. Piouk: It can be felt in the way you express yourself.
Mme. Piouk: Where has she been?
Mme. Meck: She is going to tell us.
M. Krap: I will be frank with you. I was a writer.
Mme. Meck: He is a member of the Institute!
M. Krap: What did I tell you.
Dr. Piouk: What genre?
M. Krap: I don’t follow you.
Dr. Piouk: I speak of your writings. Your preferences were for what genre?
M. Krap: For the shit genre.
Mme. Piouk: Really.
Dr. Piouk: Poetry or prose?
M. Krap: One day the former, another day the latter.
Dr. Piouk: And you now deem your body of work to be complete?
M. Krap: The lord has flushed me out.
Dr. Piouk: A small book of memoirs does not tempt you?
M. Krap: That would spoil the death throes.
Mme. Meck: Admit that this is a bizarre way to treat guests.
Mlle. Skunk: Extremely odd.
The shit genre. I love that. I’m stealing that. Whenever someone asks me what genre I prefer I will tell them, “The shit genre, of course.” You’ve never heard of it? You must not know much about literature. (Like Beckett’s characters, I sometimes fantasize about getting sassy with “legitimate” types….)
I just logged into the Brown application website to try to view my MFA rejection letter. It’s no longer there. I am wondering where it went. My status is simply “submitted” and no longer rejected. Could my rejection have been revoked? No, probably not. There is probably a demon in their system affording me this glimmer of false hope—like dreaming of your crush putting the moves on you. The first thing I actually thought was, “What am I going to tell my parents?” They are used to me always being “the best” and are far more invested in my success than I am. I told them not to get their hopes up. I put together a typo-filled portfolio the night before it was due because I was visiting my mom who was in the hospital from a suicide attempt and applying to grad school was the last thing on my mind. But I had an application waiver, so I sent it off with a statement that basically said, “I’m sorry this is bad. My life is a wreck right now.”
Luckily, I copy and pasted the rejection letter into my long poem before it disappeared:
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Dear Kevin Smith,
You have a fucking radio show? That’s kind of hilarious because you were always the silent one. You were Silent Bob. You went from being pure body to pure voice. Why’d you do it, man? There was something philosophical about your silence, they way you were so expressive without saying anything. We all liked to imagine what you were thinking, how you were perceiving everything that was going on around you. There was a profound quality to your sparse interjections (because you never spoke, because of the scarcity of your words). The law of economics says that when demand exceeds supply, value increases. Maybe I should shut up. Maybe I should retreat into silence like you once did. Maybe then—only then—will people give a shit about any of this. Any of these words.
When you did speak, we felt lucky to be graced by your wise words. Because you never spoke, we felt like you were enlightened, like you were beyond language, like language was something the petty people did, and you did not need it. You were above all that, the way spiritual gurus are above food, the way they no longer need to satiate those earthly desires. You didn’t need to feed the part of the body that longs for recognition. You were a watcher, an observer. Everyone around you was always blabbering on and on, but you didn’t feel the need to fill up space in the same way. You know, most people feel anxious about silence. It’s the hardest thing, to live in silence. You can’t just “be” next to someone. It makes you totally nuts to feel like you don’t know what they’re thinking. Maybe their silence means hatred. Maybe I’m fucking boring. So we talk on and on because we are afraid, because we need to know where the other person is at, because silence can mean anything and we need our interactions to be anchored in certainty.
