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But What About the Nipples? A Nice Conversation (Pt. 2)

Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had a nice, interesting, and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the second issue of We Are Champion. Over the next three days, I’m going to post that conversation and we all hope you guys join in on our conversation and share your thoughts. You can find Part 1 here.

Amy: We’ve got our rooms and we’re writing – we are no longer invisible, unless editors and prize committees try to render us so. My response was an attempt to point out the other option, which is to be inclusive (which means showcasing possibly disparate work that could be in dialogue), via a new mag, PARROT, that includes work fitting the aforementioned bill:

“PARROT will print the work of Stephanie Rioux’s My Beautiful Beds, Harold Abramowitz’s A House on a Hill (House on a Hill Part 1), Amanda Ackerman’s I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander’s On the Substance of Disorder, Amina Cain’s Tramps Everywhere, Allison Carter’s All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, Joseph Mosconi’s But On Geometric, Amaranth Ravva’s Airline Music, Mathew Timmons’ Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, Allyssa Wolf’s Loquela as well as the work of Michelle Detorie, Vanessa Place, Brian Kim Stefans and others…”

I realize this number counting feels isolated and is usually defended as ‘accidental’. Just see PW’s note on their all male “Top Ten” list for 2009. But what gets lost when we don’t query such disproportionate representation is that the interests and views and styles that men write in are what we all: male, female, and every other gender get conditioned to, starting with child lit on up to college “classics.” Such lack parallels why the Wall Street fuck up might have been prevented, or at least lessened. If variety is the spice of life, shouldn’t that hold true for the literary landscape as well? There should be a symphonic cacophony, no?

Sex and Brevity, Fracture and Complexity

Photo by Gary Glass.

Savannah Scholl Gruz questions if the elements of fiction are obsole te in a really interesting post on her blog. She asks, “But why, too, are stories so often about empty sex and blow jobs? Why are so many of them full of violence and figurative blind corners.” Her discussion expresses a real concern over the highly sexualized, fragmented short story and she also notes that, “Maybe we are the decade of fractured, sexual narratives in the same way that we have, in many ways, become a fractured and highly sexualized culture.”

As a writer who often writes sexual narratives, sometimes fractured in nature, but often times, linear and complex, I’m pretty intrigued by her commentary. Savannah asks if the proliferation of highly sexualized work is a deeper commentary on our culture, a reflection of this moment in time but I would say that literature has always been highly sexualized. It’s only the nature of highly sexualized work that continues to evolve. Similar concerns as the ones Savannah shares in her post were raised at the end of the 19th century, for example. Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy is a great book that looks at the evolving sexual culture of the fin de siecle and how those cultural changes manifested themselves in literature and popular culture.

NYC Area Alert: Don’t Forget about the Chapbook Festival Today!

Hey friends. I’m freshly returned to the CITY THAT NEVER GETS CARBOMBED after a sweet Southern swing through Atlanta, GA and Sarasota, FL. In Atlanta I got to hang with Heather Christle, Chris DeWeese, Blake Butler, Amy McDaniel (who put me up and showed me around) and Casey McKinney. Then Amy and I roadtripped on down to Sarasota for two days of events at New College, where we stayed with Alexis Orgera and rolled deep with Alec Niedenthal. Skol shots with coconut pie chaser! A panel discussion on readings for models! Un-ironic dancing! It was college all right, and I loved it. But I love being back, too, and to prove it I will spend today in a windowless room with nineteen or so other “chapbook” publishers, selling small amounts of paper for small amounts of money. The Chapbook Festival is free and open to the public. It is in the ground floor of CUNY at 365 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 34th street, right by the Empire State Building. The fair opens at 11:30AM and goes all day. There’s also free workshops and a Marathon Reading that will be running all day as a kind of parallel narrative to the rest of the festival. Yesterday I was traveling, but co-Agriculturalist Jeremy Schmall tells me that organizing poet Ana Bozicevic has really outdone herself this year, which must be pretty good since I had so much fun last year that I posted about it twice (2). So I’m pretty pumped that he has to go to work today and I get to go to CUNY and do this. I know Mike Young will be there, and I’m sure that further surprises will abound. If you’re around, you should come see us.

Events / 4 Comments
May 4th, 2010 / 9:24 am

Adam Robinson—

It was my own mother, incidentally, whom I can scarcely recall ever seeing with a book in her hand, who told me one day when I was reading The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World that she had read that book years ago herself–in the toilet. I was flabbergasted. Not that she had admitted to reading in the toilet, but it should have been that book, of all books, which she read there.

That’s Henry Miller, in his fantastic nonfic, The Books in My Life.

Shome Dasgupta has a similar thing going on over at his blog, The Laughing Yeti. A bunch of people talking about their reading habits, including Mike Young, Roxane Gay, Stephen Eliot (oh, and me).

Blake Butler

Bill Murray Poetry in a Hard Hat

On the occasion of the building of Poet’s House in Manhattan:

Web Hype / 37 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 6:39 pm

Ken Baumann

Fifth Mess Section

1. The point is that, if we think literature is still worth talking about, every book is part of that debate, which is why reviews of non-blockbuster books should do one of two things: either convincingly shout to the hilltops, “Read this book!” or, in explaining why there’s no shouting, try to find larger truths about literature in a book’s strengths and flaws. … Literature is not about the writer. It’s about the book, it’s about art, it’s about life. … in the madding crowd of narrative, it turns out the big world doesn’t really need a book if it’s not great enough to be truly important, specialized enough to find its niche, or equipped with a secret weapon. When that happens—and it happens far more often than not—it is time for writers to think about what we want out of writing, out of publishing, out of their lives, and make our decisions accordingly. –from a blurb by Eric B. Martin

2. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.” –the problems with Chinglish

3. The room thus becomes a counterpunctual archive of heart rates in space, throbbing like a chandelier in front of you. –about Pulse Room

4. But I think caught in that way they are too weak to convey anything. I think that great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way. Why, after all the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. –a great interview of Francis Bacon

5. You can write & draw on shit.

Random / 8 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 4:39 pm

Sean Lovelace

5 larksons of elly yo

1. Cleaned out under my fridge today and found a fillet knife, dust-gorillas, and a chapbook. It is called “thunderstorms as familial convulsion.” Ryan Call as good as any at using weather as something more than weather.

2. Made me think of this sonnet by Kathleen Kirk. It is “Roof Leaks, Mimi Calls.”

All across the city the tyrant ice
pries up the tar and flashing, disturbs the peace
of shingles, their social order. It’s not the freeze
but the thaw that ruins us, the sudden spies
wiring the closet walls with new secrets,
the trickle-down effect in our kitchens,
cups and buckets competing for attention,
disintegration: sheetrock into dust.

The phone rings, your mother with the news.
The ceiling shifts, sure it wants to open.
Nothing falls, not even the sky.
Your voice is like a level, its yellow tube
tipping the bubble of air toward hope
and back. Cancer—just another tyrant.

3. Tumbling Old Women.

4. I have decided those who get bothered about quotation marks bother me. Dialogue isn’t about those little cheese curls. Do it right and you won’t have to do it right anymore.

5. Hold up. Tao Lin (actually Kacper Jarecki) wants your money. Wants your money. And then they ate whale.

Roundup / 18 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 4:19 pm

Roxane Gay

But What About the Nipples? A Nice Conversation (Pt. 1)

Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had an interesting and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the second issue of We Are Champion. Over the next three days, I’m going to post that conversation and we all hope you guys join in on our conversation and share your thoughts.

Amy: I don’t know if you’ll be pleased to know that conjured your name today, Kate, over at Roxane’s gig, HTMLGIANT. A post pimping the second issue of a new mag, “We Are Champion,” doesn’t note that it’s an all-male issue or that the first one included the work of only three women. Just one tiny example of a recurring indicator that women writers still aren’t taken seriously, actively sought out, promoted, etc.

Kate: I actually thought the great majority of the conversation that went around this issue on HTML Giant seemed considered and thoughtful, both the idea of “counting” as seeming problematic, and shouldn’t it just be about the writing, and the other side problematizing how when such an inequity occurs it’s just dismissed as “this is just the best writing out there,” etc. I think it’s a worthwhile issue to explore, if there is still such an inequity in terms of numbers of women published in literary journals (or anyone not straight, white, men). I’m thinking of Juliana Spahr/Stephanie Young’s Number Trouble piece that was published in Chicago Review. I agree with Roxane that this We Are Champion that didn’t feature any women writers is a symptom of a gender inequity that might be still there in terms of innovative writing, but is not the disease itself. And that zeroing in on this one issue is not really getting at the larger context (although perhaps opening the discussion?)

Roxane: I’m a Libra so I often have many and conflicting opinions about things. I do think the all-male issue of We Are Champion is problematic but I also know that there are many factors involved in how a given issue of a magazine is assembled. While there are many, many problems with how women writers are treated, regarded, and promoted within the publishing community, I am not convinced that the second issue of a small online magazine is an indicator of a problem that is systemic, pervasive, and ongoing.