Mike Kelley at UBUWeb

What makes you laugh? There was a book reviewed recently in the NYTimes that dealt with the science of revulsion; do you think there is a science to what ignites our different senses of humor? Do you think it could be chromosomal or is it strictly learned? Does anyone else feel sad or depressed when they watch Seinfeld? When Kramer enters a room and everyone laughs, doesn’t it just make you want to cry? Why don’t you find the same things funny as many of your friends? When a fat kid falls down and someone gets it on video and puts it on youtube, is that funny to you? How much of what we deem funny is enmeshed in some idea of power? Of (first) relief at not being the one laughed at, and then a growing delight in the privilege? Are we so lonely that when Kramer walks into the room we feel less alone and so we sigh with relief, the sigh which can be a kind of laughter? Or is Kramer walking into a room somehow “legitimately” (scientifically?) funny? Is slapstick funny to you? What is slapstick? Falling down? Is falling down funny when it’s on purpose? Are the Marx Brothers funny to you but not the Three Stooges, or are they they same? My parents are immigrants, sometimes I need help with American funny. When Ricky Gervais as David Brent insists he’s the world’s funniest and greatest boss, is this funny strictly because we know it’s untrue? This brand of comedy, when the sad-bastard-who-doesn’t-acknowledge-s/he’s-(mostly he on television it seems, no?)-sad makes (racist, etc.) hapless jokes, uses words incorrectly, postures, proselytizes, is this funny because it’s sad, or funny because it “emits laughter,” where laughter can be a bodily emission like drool or semen, uncontrollable under certain stimuli, the body’s response to emotional distress? Like when you accidentally laugh at a funeral? Are comedians funny when they describe something painful that we recognize all too well, so laughter then is a kind of agreement-soundrack, a noise, like a word, like the word yes, to acknowledge that we’ve been there or we get it? Can “liking” something on Facebook be a laughter surrogate? Are we nervous that other people won’t laugh, so we laugh, or nervous that other people won’t laugh, so we don’t laugh? Is the laughter of others a cue to laugh, or a cue that something is funny? Is there a history of laughter? Is there a history of clowns? A history of pies-in-the-face? Of the reasons why misfortune or “freakishness” are favorite realms for comedy? Is it the power thing, again? Or is it the human thing, the freak in me acknowledges the freak in you via the universal tongue of freak, which is the laugh, the chortle, the guffaw, the silent convulsive hysterics that from a distance look like crying?

“When I was around [Ice-T] for a couple weeks, I gathered all the facts of what he liked and what he didn’t like, and I just shape-shifted into that woman for him.”

“If you saw my boobs before I got them done, they were actually a nice size; nice and squishy, waterly [sic], flip em’ around, you know…”

“My hips were always a little bit bigger than the top half of me and I wanted to even it out.”

“It’s too time consuming, and honestly, people with lives don’t really have the time to make comments at all. I don’t even have the time to go on the Internet anymore. Who has the time to actually log in, put your email address in, put if you’re female or male and all of that good stuff, and then make a comment…”

“Even if I put a turtleneck on with some leggings, it doesn’t look like the normal turtleneck. People will say, ‘Oh, that’s skanky.’ How is a turtleneck skanky?”

“I’m a perfectionist I know at the end of the day it will come out beautiful!”

“I love when I wear shorts sometimes because I can really get my groove on without having to worry about me showing my Coco stuff to the world…”

“I’m not sure if you all are aware but I have my own magazine called ‘The official Coco Mag’.”

“What inspired me for these pics is when I got home from the gym I wanted to tan so I took pics in my at-home tanning machine…”

“For me the higher the better and I love the pain because it brings out sexy legs and completes the outfit.”

“Tip 34#: Build a butt by using heavy weights.No sissy weight!! (Like w/squats.) Stay away from butt surgery. Hips should have a little jiggle.”

“All my computers at once have been trippin and its been very hard to work on them..I’m finally fed up so I’m taking both computers in to have them checked out…This is so bad for me because I have 6 websites and I can’t work on any of them, hardly.”

There’s a scene in that movie High Fidelity (based on the Nick Hornby book, I guess, which I didn’t read) where John Cusack’s character reveals to Dick, his record store employee (played quite brilliantly by Todd Louiso), that he (Cusack) was in the midst of reorganizing his record collection–in autobiographical order.

I’ve always loved that idea.

I have boxes of books still waiting to be unpacked and I’m taking my time because a.) I need more shelves and b.) I want to be deliberate with my organizational system. In the past, I’ve gone alphabetical. But the alphabet is boring, strictly utilitarian–it doesn’t really tell a story. Like songs on an album or stories in a collection, sequencing can become its own narrative, and I figure if I’m so consumed with form in most other areas, why ignore an opportunity. My plan is to reserve one small bookcase for my “currently reading” or “to-read” books–I used to keep these on an end table that constantly threatened to tip over–and to arrange the rest autobiographically.

My top shelf, then, would probably be the books I was reading when I first figured out how I felt about books. I only have in my possession a few of the ones I read as a kid or early teenager–they won’t take up much room. Then came the high school era of reading: Fitzgerald, Salinger, Hawthorne, James. The white American dudes who wrote a lot about white American dudes and gave me the durable-though-not-permanent impression that novels were linear and “realistic” and somehow all brethren. Some anthologies belong in there. A pretty sizable stint of Shakespeare, which won’t take up much room since it’s one big book. A few shelves later would be more old poetry and then an onslaught of women and women poets (Austen! Bronte! Rich! Woolf! Dickinson! Loy! etc.!) and a brief but intense sojourn with the Beats. The Nabokov period. Also there would have to be space for the Boyfriend Books–ones given to me and ones I read in order to feel given-to–probably immediately followed by the French Women. Between college and grad school I was mostly in New York, so there would be the New York shelves. The gardening books, when I left the city for the country and the novelty of a little yard made me think I liked to garden. And so on, through grad school and beyond.

Mostly, then, this type of organizing relies on a chronology of reading. If I can remember the book, I can remember the time/place/event, and vice versa. I wonder where those books will go that I’ve returned to and keep returning to–Beckett, Davis, Faulkner, many others. Do I shelve them where I first read them, or do I allow for some “perennial” shelves?

It’s going to take a while. But I’m excited to shrug off the alphabet. And to revisit my life with all of its embarrassments–because with remembering always comes embarrassment–and obsessions.

What might your shelves look like?

Above is video of the reaction of José Saramago to the filmed version of his book Blindness.

Said film got mixed, but mostly negative, reviews. Saramago reacts to it by wiping away tears.

“Didn’t he notice? Couldn’t he see what all the folks on Rotten Tomatoes saw? Did he have a blind spot for his own work? Did his ego throw a towel over the bad and only give him the ability to see the big budget, the marketing campaign, the big stars, the ‘serious Hollywood business’ that his book became?”

This feels cynical. Feels to me like the thing that is there in the greatest of artists is a surplus of gratitude. Like maybe we should all acknowledge all engagement made by anybody with the sort of gratitude that makes one tear up like that.

Like maybe when someone takes the time to make a movie of our work, good or bad or whatever, all we should feel is gratitude.

Like maybe when someone reviews our work, good or bad or whatever, all we should feel is gratitude.

Maybe if we were better people, we’d feel nothing but gratitude. Maybe if I was a better person, I’d feel nothing but gratitude.

I wish I was a better person. Youtube makes me wish I was a better person. I might be a better writer then, too.

– Errol Morris on anosognosia and much much more, in five parts. Starts here.

This is your brain on fear. As it turns out, Hippocampus isn't fat camp for Latin nerds.

Dear People,

I’m the pain in the ass who makes deciding on a movie en masse impossible. But is it violent? How violent is it, if it is? Do animals get murdered? Do children get murdered? Eventually we’ll decide on a bonehead comedy or a beautifully shot Icelandic film about rafts in the gloaming.

Fact: I was never desensitized to violence. I will flinch during commercials or crime shows that your grandmother watches. Is a fascination with or threshold for violence a thing like so many other things that can be traced to what we were exposed to as children? Are some people immune to desensitization? Because I read Less Than Zero once as a late adolescent, and then again, after some years had passed, and the second time around was more difficult than the first. And worse, I felt manipulated by it, cheated, and I don’t think I would have known to feel that way the first time, being young and quick to believe in authorial godliness. (I never bothered with American Psycho.)

But then, desensitization probably isn’t the point, is it? The point is to feel it, I’m guessing? In a safe way? Like the death-thrill of the roller coaster, maybe.

I wish I could borrow the mind of a horror/gore aficionado for one day.

Another fact: in 11th grade we were made to watch the “Miracle of Life” video. I spent the period in the library doing homework. A couple years ago, when I was pregnant and enrolled in a childbirth class, the nurse cheerfully announced that we’d be watching a labor and delivery video. It might’ve been the same one. I spent those 25 minutes wandering around the hospital eating a Skor bar. I was okay with what was going to happen, come go time. I just didn’t want to see it, or watch it happen to someone else.

My experience with and reaction to violence, on the page and on the screen, is multi-layered. First, I feel shock. No matter how far ahead I see it coming–and I usually see it from quite a distance, a time during which I feel genuine fear–I still feel at the very least surprised; at most, all-out assaulted. Then I feel puzzled–why did I need to see/read that? Was it essential? Was its gratuitousness essential? Then I feel mad, cheated (see above), by what seems to be a strenuous lack of imagination–well, couldn’t anyone dream up the ghastliest, bloodiest, most disturbing nightmare imaginable, and then describe it and call it a scene? Are people vying for the Gross Out Prize? And then I feel quiet, a little willing to believe that I’m missing something massive, a little foolish for not being able to distance myself from the thing, to recognize it as artifice or performance or–how embarrassing for me–art.

Mostly, I get scared, way deep in my body. I don’t like being scared. In the words of Zachary Schomburg, “No scary.”

I don’t believe that art is or “should be” devoid of violence. And I’m aware that the terms in this post probably should be qualified a dozen times over–there are so many small, even imperceptible violences. Form can be violence. Syntax can be violence. Many of my favorite writers have written violence in a way that inspires only my awe and admiration. And on the whole, I’m much more willing to read it than I am to watch it, although reading it can be more excruciating because I’m unable to skip ahead–in fact, I will read and re-read the scene until I have almost memorized it. I will force myself to plunge on, keep going, but invariably, I get stuck going back a second and third time, visualizing each detail as though I will be responsible for filming it afterward. It’s a trauma-response. With film or television, the details have already been realized by someone else–close my eyes and they’re gone. Well, not immediately, but a lot sooner.

So, to clarify, what I’m thinking about here is gore/horror/psychotic violence, let’s say. Don’t talk to me about Rimbaud and Faulkner and Hitchcock–I’m good with all that.  But you who read and watch the gruesome stuff, and you who write it–the stuff that goes beyond intimation, the stuff that perverts subtlety, slits it throat–talk to me. What does it feel like to enjoy it?

Hugz,

Kristen