TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice

This new series of talks by major poets, titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the intersection of contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory and pedagogy.The second event features talks by: Amy King, Wayne Koestenbaum, & R. Erica Doyle …followed by a discussion/Q&A session.   on Tuesday, November 17 at 6:30 PM FREE at CUNY Graduate Center (in the Skylight Room) 365 Fifth Avenue, NYC Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press).  She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.  For information on the reading series Amy co-curates in Brooklyn, NY, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.com) and http://amyking.org for more. Wayne Koestenbaum has published twelve books, which include five works of nonfiction prose (Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat, Double Talk), five collections of poetry (Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems), one novel (Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes), and one deliberate hybrid of fiction and nonfiction (Hotel Theory).  The Queen’s Throat was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.  He wrote the libretto for the opera Jackie O (music by Michael Daughterty).  Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art’s painting department. R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, Callaloo, and many other places.  She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. She is also a fellow of Cave Canem and her manuscript, proxy, was a finalist for the 2007 Cave Cavem Poetry Prize. Erica teaches in the NYC public schools and is the facilitator of Tongues Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color. *  *  * TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice is curated by Tim Peterson (Trace). For additional information, visit theTendencies blog. All events are co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, CLAGS (the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies), The Graduate Center PhD Program in English, and the GC Poetics Group.

upcoming TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice events:Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and Kevin Killian on April 9 at 6:30 PM in the Martin Segal Theater at CUNY Graduate Center

Why Weren’t Any Women Invited To Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?

Why Weren’t Any Women Invited To Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?

Publishers Weekly recently announced their Best Books Of 2009 list. Of their top ten, chosen by editorial staff, no books written by women were included. Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW confidently admitted that they’re “not the most politically correct” choices. This statement comes in a year in which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker.

“The absence made me nearly speechless.” said writer Cate Marvin, cofounder of the newly launched national literary organization WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts), which, since August, has attracted close to 5400 members on their Facebook web page, including many major and emerging women writers. “It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.”

WILLA’s other cofounder, Erin Belieu, Director Of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, asked, “So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—writers and readers–who don’t feel good about it at all.”

PW also did a Top 100 list and, of the authors included, only 29 were women. The WILLA Advisory Board is in the process of putting together a list titled “Great Books Published By Women In 2009.” This will be posted to the organization’s Facebook page and website. A WILLA Wiki has also been started for people to share their nominations for Great Books By Women in 2009. Press release to follow.

WILLA was founded to bring increased attention to women’s literary accomplishments and to question the American literary establishment’s historical slow-footedness in recognizing and rewarding women writer’s achievements. WILLA is about to launch their website and is in the process of planning their first national conference to be held next year.

(Note: until recently, WILLA went under the acronym WILA, with one “L.” If you’re interested in the organization, please Google WILA with one “L” to see background on how this group was originally formed.)

For more information contact:

Erin Belieu – ebelieu@fsu.edu

Cate Marvin – catemarvin@gmail.com

THE CONTENT

Man Made of Books – Books Made of Men

Spent some time checking out the general content of the books that made the list – the summaries are all taken from the Publisher’s Weekly website below.  Simple to observe that the content that “stood out from the rest,” according to PW, is all about mostly male protagonists and their realities: war, adventure, science, boyhood adventures, taming the wilderness, the male writer’s life, etc.  In other words, the novels that deal with women’s realities simply “don’t stand out” – check Publishers Weekly TOP TEN:

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

[PRIMARILY ABOUT MALE PROTAGONISTS FOCUSED ON MOSTLY MALE SCIENTISTS]

Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes’s biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy’s self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge.

~

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

[AGAIN, MOSTLY MALE PROTAGONISTS]

Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who’s been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle.

~

Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

[AGAIN, THE MALE REALITY WINS]

Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter.

~

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey (Knopf)

[ALL ABOUT A MAN]

In this overlong but always entertaining biography, composed with a novelist’s eye, Bailey, biographer of Richard Yates and editor of two volumes of Cheever’s work for Library of America (also due in March), was given access to unpublished portions of Cheever’s famous journals and to family members and friends.

~

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan (Random House)

[AHEM, SERIOUS MALE REALITIES, WAR AND "REAL WORLD" SHIT]

The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky individualism in this history of the men who built America’s intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and ‘60s. Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs.

~

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

In eight beautifully crafted, interconnected stories, Mueenuddin explores the cutthroat feudal society in which a rich Lahore landowner is entrenched.

~

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

[WHOA, MANLY ADVENTURE]

Two 40-ish men seeking love and existential meaning are the protagonists of these highly imaginative twin novellas, written in sensuous, lyrical prose brimming with colorful detail.

~

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann (Doubleday)

[SURPRISE:  MORE ON MEN AND THEIR ADVENTUROUS NATURES]

In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn’t stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction.

~

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

[WHEW, THIS LIST SHOULD BE CALLED, "HOW MEN LIVE"]

Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence, the ability to work with one’s hands.

~

Stitches by David Small (Norton)

[AND HOW BOYS GROW UP TO BECOME MEN]

In this profound and moving memoir, Small, an award-winning children’s book illustrator, uses his drawings to depict the consciousness of a young boy. The story starts when the narrator is six years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent during his early adolescence.

~

**Why aren’t more people saying something about such blatant hypocrisies?  Publishers Weekly’s lists are likely consulted by librarians for acquisitions purposes – does this mean we are not interested in reading about women’s lives?  Is PW really *that* irresponsible?

Help Us Invade Bob Holman’s Apartment?

Bring your socks and your appetite!

SEGUE READING SERIES @ BOWERY POETRY CLUB

Saturday, Oct 24th — Catherine Wagner & Amy King — this is the event that will be held next door at 310 Bowery (Bob Holman’s apartment) instead:

Catherine Wagner’s new book, My New Job, is forthcoming. She is also the author of Macular Hole and Miss America. Recent chapbooks include Articulate How, Hole in the Ground, and Bornt. She is a faculty member in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University in Ohio.

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi, and The People Instruments. Forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things and I Want to Make You Safe.

All readings* take place at:

Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, New York 10012
Ph: 212-614-0505
Price: 6 dollars
Event days/times: Saturdays, 4-6 pm

*Except for the reading on Saturday, Oct 24, which will take place at 310 Bowery instead.

Verse broadens the mind, scientists find

Verse broadens the mind, scientists find

RICHARD GRAY (rgray@scotlandonsunday.com)

IF LITERATURE is food for the
 mind, then a poem is a banquet, according to research by Scottish scientists
 which shows poetry is better for the brain than prose.

Psychologists at Dundee
and St Andrews universities claim the work of poets such as Lord
Byron exercise the mind more than a novel by Jane Austen. By monitoring the way
different forms of text are read, they found poetry generated far more eye
 movement which is associated with deeper thought.

Subjects were found to read
 poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with 
prose. Preliminary studies using brain-imaging technology also showed greater
 levels of cerebral activity when people listened to poems being read aloud. Dr
Jane Stabler, a literature expert at St Andrews University and a member of the research group, believes poetry 
may stir latent preferences in the brain for rhythm and rhymes that develop
 during childhood. She claims the intense imagery woven through poems, and 
techniques used by poets to unsettle their readers, force them to think more
 carefully about each line. “There seems to be an almost immediate
 recognition that this is a different sort of language that needs to be 
approached in a way that will be more attentive to the density of words in
 poetry,” she said. “It may be because readers are trying to hear the 
words or recreate the imaginary event the poet has provided a script for.
” Also, children seem to be born with a love of rhyme and rhythm. Then
 something happens and by the time we see them in the first year at university
 many of them are almost frightened of poetry and clamouring to study the
 contemporary novel.”
To study readers’ reactions,
 the research group focused an infrared beam on the pupils of their eyes to
 detect minute movements as they read.

They found poetry produced 
all the standard psychological indications associated with intellectual
 difficulty, such as slow deliberate movement, re-reading sections and long
 pauses. Even when they used identical content but displayed it in both a poem
 format and a prose format, they discovered readers found the poem form the more
 difficult to understand. Stabler said: “When readers decide that something
 is a poem, they read in a different way. As literary critics we would like to 
think that this is a more thoughtful way, more receptive to the text’s richness
 and complexity, but in psychological terms it is the same sort of reading
 produced by a dyslexic reader who finds reading difficult. “We focused on
 poetry that disturbs or unsettles readers like the work of Lord Byron. “We
 found that his stanza form in Don Juan does make subjects read more quickly
 than readers focusing on the rhymes of an elegy in a similar metre.”

Stabler believes those
 reading other poets, such as Robert Burns, would show similar increases in
 brain activity.

The group hopes to use
 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to watch how the brain reacts as people 
listen to poetry and prose. Early results suggest a larger area of the brain
 lights up in the scans upon hearing poetry by Byron than prose by Austen. The 
research has profound implications for the way English literature is taught in
 schools, and Stabler believes they should consider placing greater emphasis on 
teaching youngsters poetry.

Both rhythm and rhyme have been found to be
 intricately linked with making and recalling memories. Stabler asked: “If 
poetry helps to stir memory, might it be useful in the treatment of age-related
 or injury related memory problems?” Dr Martin Fischer, an experimental
 psychologist at Dundee University involved in the project, claims the findings could 
also form the basis for producing new techniques for helping dyslexic children.
 He said: “It certainly has implications for children who have certain
 difficulties, like in dyslexia where a rhyming deficiency could be compensated
 for by exposing them to more poetry.” Members of the literary world have
 welcomed the research and insist it underlines the importance poetry has played 
in literature.

Bestselling crime novelist Ian Rankin said too many people felt
 intimidated by poetry without realising it was designed to be challenging. He
 said: “Novels first began as a form of poetry where story telling was used
 to pass tales from one generation to the next. This was done with rhythm and
 rhyme as it made the stories easier to remember. “We are even seeing that
 today with song lyrics – the only way rap artists can remember all those lyrics
 is because they have rhythm and rhyme. “Not many people pick up books of 
poetry anymore to read. You have to wonder if people find them too hard. “
Edwin Morgan, the nation’s official Makar, the Scottish equivalent of the poet
 laureate, added: “Writing poetry is almost a physical experience as well
 as mental. Children are rarely worried about extracting too much meaning from
 poems, but they seem to get a much deeper experience from it.”

EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts — ISSUE 5

VISIT EOAGH NOW!

A PANEL, READING, & EXHIBITION
CHARLES OLSON: LANGUAGE AS PHYSICAL FACT

Tenney Nathanson
Cole Swensen
Steve McCaffery
Barbara Henning
Anne Waldman

A CHAPBOOK
Nothing is in Here, by Andrew Levy

READINGS/ARTICLES

An Interview with Kevin Killian, by Tony Leuzzi
TEXT FOR A CUL-DE-SAC, by Wystan Curnow & Lawrence Weiner
The Functional Art of Bruce Nauman, by Jessica Hullman
A Topological Memoir by Penelope Bloodworth
Poetic Ecologies in Bruxelles, by Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Composition as Exposition: A Case File, by Bill Marsh
Paradox: The Diminishing Increase of an Author, by Tom Clark
Field Poetics (a compleat history of de-individualizing practices), by Donald Wellman
Raymond Roussel’s (New) Africa, by Louis Bury
Iterative View (of Brent Cunningham’s Bird & Forest), by Jesse Seldess
Double Review of Amy King, by Matthew Rotando
Review of Brenda Iijima’s Rabbit Lesson, by Geoffrey Olsen
Metapoetic Speculation In/On Tom Beckett’s “This Poem,” by Thomas Fink
Reading Julian Poirer’s Poetry, by Filip Marinovich
Review of Joseph Lease’s Broken World, by John Chavez

POETRY
 BY

Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton, William Allegrezza, Renee Angle, Robyn Art, Ari Banias, Emily Beall, Roberto Bedoya, James Belflower, Graeme Bezanson, Carlos T. Blackburn, Kate Broad, Julian T. Brolaski, Ethan Saul Bull, Tetman Callis, Sean Casey, Stephen Chamberlain, Cheryl Clark, Kate Colby, Thomas Cook, Lisa Cooper, Barbara Cully, Mark Cunningham, Shira Dentz, Amanda Deutch, Michelle Detorie, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Moses Eder, Will Edmiston, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Greg Fuchs, Kristen Gallagher, Lawrence Giffin, Giles Goodland, Noah Eli Gordon, Stephanie Gray, Arpine Grenier, Gabriel Gudding, John Harkey, Jeff Harrison, Nathan Hauke, Stefania Heim, Derek Henderson, Michael S. Hennessey, Chelsea Hodson, N. M. Hoffman, Erika Howsare, Paolo Javier, Adeena Karasick, Michael Kelleher, Vincent Katz, Amy King, Paula Kolek, Mark Lamoureux, Dorothea Lasky, Gregory Laynor, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ruth Lepson, Joel Lewis, Eric Lindley, Hillary Lyon, Kimberly Lyons, Jami Macarty, Majena Mafe, Jill Magi, CJ Martin, Filip Marinovich, Kristi Maxwell, Rachel May & Joshua A. Ware, E.J. McAdams, Pattie McCarthy, Chris McCreary, Nicholas Messenger, Benjamin Miller, Carol Mirakove, Rajiv Mohabir, Emily Moore, Glenn Mott, Uche Nduka, Gale Nelson, Maurice Olivier, Geoffrey Olsen, Monica Peck, Jennifer Petersen, Lance Phillips, Siri Phillips, Nick Piombino, Lanny Quarles, Jessy Randall & Daniel M. Shapiro, Karin Randolph, Karen Randall & Ross, Priddle, Michael Rerick, Christie Ann Reynolds, James Sanders, Sam Schild, Kyle Schlesinger, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Paul Siegell, Sandra Simonds, Joel Sloman, Rick Snyder, Alan Sondheim, Leah Souffrant, Sparrow, Christopher Stackhouse, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Eileen Tabios, Paige Taggart, Anne Tardos, Jeremy James Thompson, Elizabeth Treadwell, Matt Turner, Mara Vahratian, Nico Vassilakis, Andi Werblin, Sara Wintz, and Deborah Wood

VISIT EOAGH NOW!

Two this Saturday, October 3rd

The New York Public Library: Grand Central Branch – 135 East 46th Street NY, NY

October 3rd @ 2 PM– Shanna Compton, Nada Gordon and Amy King

Shanna Compton is the author of For Girls (& Others) (Bloof Books, 2008), Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), GAMERS (Soft Skull, 2004), and several chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared widely, including Best American Poetry 2005, McSweeney’s, the Poetry Foundation website, and the forthcoming Flarf anthology. Recent poems and an essay may be found in the tenth anniversary issue of LIT. She blogs desultorily at shannacompton.com.

Nada Gordon’s books include V. Imp., Are Not Your Lowing Heifers Sleeker Than Night-Swollen Mushrooms, Swoon (with Gary Sullivan) and Foriegn Bodi, and Folly (2007). Visit her blog at http://ululate.blogspot.com

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe and Slaves to Do These Things. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College and curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. For more information, please visit amyking.org

~~~

EOAGH Issue 5 First Launch Event

SATURDAY, OCT 3rd @8 PM Unnameable Books 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn This event is co-sponsored by Chax Press 8:00 Amy King 8:15 Jeremy James Thompson 8:30 Mark Lamoureux 8:45 Christie Ann Reynolds 9:00 Eric Lindley 9:15 Bill Marsh 9:30 Adeena Karasick 9:45 Matthew Rotando Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and, and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe and Slaves to do These Things. She curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. For more information, please visit amyking.org. Jeremy James Thompson is an instructor at New York’s Center for Book Arts, as well as curator of the reading series TEXTFORM. His work focuses on the process of collaboration, the reinvention of propaganda, and the defining of a practical avant-garde. Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY. He is the author of Astronomy Organon (Blazevox) and 5 chapbooks. In 2006 he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry. Christie Ann Reynolds is a native New Yorker. She is the 2009 winner of The New School Chapbook Contest, chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy. Her first full-length manuscript will be published by Black Maze Books in the summer of 2010. She lives on the undetermined border of Queens and Brooklyn. Eric Lindley loves language like a baby loves life; that is, fearfully, perversely, inscrutably, and currently working as a robot-builder, electro-folk musician, and psycholinguist. Bill Marsh co-directs Factory School and edits the Heretical Texts series. He also curates NoDiff.com, a social networking site for his students at Queensborough Community College. Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of six books of poetry and poetic theory, most recently Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009). Matthew Rotando’s first book of poems, The Comeback’s Exoskeleton, (with a foreward by Tim Peterson) is available from Upset Press. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona.

Book & Band

BOOK

STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE by ANA BOZICEVIC

Stars of the Night Commute haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams. Many of the poems carry a shamanistic, elemental quality, as if real matter were articulating out of word-fragments. Božičević writes, “At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote.” If this is “the end of poetry,” perhaps poetry is, after all, reaching forward back to its beginning.

—Annie Finch

Ana Božičević’s poetry has everything–a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound. The words bristle with life, and they command the deepest reverence for the Ineffable, for pure Being. This poetry is clever without being shallow, and this is truly rare. Silence is my most honest response to her work, but a silence rooted in respect and awe for that which is truly great art.

—Noelle Kocot

Ana Božičević’s work is sort of animist—it’s either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it’s silent & it’s happening then on a distant tiny stage. She’s muttering, and then it’s a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch “it” vanish (all the time)  & I trust it.

—Eileen Myles

Ana Božičević’s work is filled with a wild freedom, and reading it often reminds me of reading Wallace Stevens, in that you know absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect. In her poems she expresses an attitude of solemn responsibility to history, both the world’s and her own, yet there is often a marvelous lightness, even playfulness about them. She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial. These are not just technical matters. An émigré from reality (in the form of one of modern time’s most monstrously and moronically cruel wars) and a Cassandra, she is able to perceive with the eyes of language–then render with lyrical immediacy–the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream.

—Franz Wright

–PRE-ORDER @ TARPAULIN SKY PRESS

~~~

BAND

Samantha Farrell
Strand of Oaks
Karisa Wilson
Amir Darzi
Michael Tyrell
Amy King
Judson Claiborne

Sunday, September 13th @ 9 PM
The Living Room NYC : TICKETS

All the world’s a stage…

Why do children play with dolls? One reason is that they like to make up stories and act them out. Dolls serve as permissible figures that allow children to become comfortable with who they, and others, are and to explore what this humanity might mean in an attempt to figure out how to inhabit it. They have not yet learned to hide their imaginations in some secret pocket or channel their speculative natures into a grown-up medium that could prove lucrative in the future such as writing novels or painting. Dolls are simply used for play and promise no other endgame.

Enter “Lars and the Real Girl.” The story begins when we meet one man packed full of neuroses – not by any fault of his own – and his adult doll. Lar’s mother died while giving birth to him, and his father presumably withdrew, as implied by his older brother, Gus, who notes that dad was “too sad.” On their first visit to Dr. Dagmar’s office, Gus unwittingly determines exactly why Lars is suddenly “delusional” when he proclaims that the only things that have changed in the past year are that “Karin is pregnant and Lars has gone crazy!” We later learn that Karin’s pregnancy frightens Lars immensely, and the appearance of a new woman at work who seems to be interested in him probably compounds the situation. Life is changing around the protagonist, who, not-so-incidentally, cannot tolerate being touched. It is also becoming clear that manhood is expected of him — and that, increasingly, he expects it of himself. So we reach a breaking point: Bianca, a blow up sex doll debuts in the Lindstrom’s life as Lars’ new girlfriend.

When I first heard about this film, I thought it would be yet another cheap attempt at a humorous “dude” film that uses a sex prop for laughs. With the odds stacked against them, all five main actors do genius work in overcoming the obvious joke by treating the object sex doll as an extension of, indeed, as a surrogate Lars. Lars allows himself to be psychologically seduced into speaking of his own issues to the doctor as though he were discussing Bianca’s life and concerns. And through a series of caring acts, friends and family finally give Lars the chance to become a real person. He is made to feel safe and loved in a world that neglected the boy whose mother died at his birth. I imagine there are a few young men out there who have suffered from similar emotional neglect common to the rearing process of “turning boys into men.” This film should certainly resonate with them and the rest of us who harbor at least one bone of empathy. It is Ryan Gosling who truly delivers us a Lars we begin to understand, a man who is not weak or truly crazy but copes using the only tools he likely developed as an “independent” child. Gosling’s character is, additionally, kind and generous to his doll and his friends alike, even while feeling frustrated and conflicted over his own evolution as a person and all that that requires. Incidentally, the filmmaker weaves some great double entendres through a lovely scene involving a teddy bear, another when Bianca doubles as a “live” mannequin, and at the end when the real girl notes that “there will never be anyone like her,” which spins out at least four different meanings at once.

However idealistic, this film reminds us that people still commit acts of kindness in the “real” world despite what the nightly news would have us believe. They bring over casseroles and “sit” when tragedy strikes, they have been known to forgive seemingly inexplicable weirdnesses, and they even give up their own pride of appearance to help someone who may or may not successfully work through whatever emotional crisis has befallen them. I realize the likelihood of an entire town enabling Lars’ delusion as a source of healing is nearly nonexistent; however, I don’t imagine that the director and screenwriter are delusional in depicting such optimism. To ask if they intended a realistic situation would be to ask if all cinema, and every narrative, is supposed to merely mirror what’s actually happening in the world. The fact that we get a happy ending is the transparent answer to such queries and does not detract from the event of the film and its implications for people who suffer and actually receive help and support. If anything, “Lars and the Real Girl” is subtly and encouragingly prescriptive. If you want real outcomes and reactions to people who struggle with long-term emotional issues and some of what that entails, rent a prison documentary. But if you want to avoid one more “he shot the school up with guns” story for an evening, try something as breathtaking as Lars, who quietly asks for help and, in the end, gets much more than a real girl.

Today’s My Birthday and There’s a Fog…

FOGGED CLARITY

FICTION

Caitlin Horrocks
Dylan Brock

POETRY

Scott Hightower
Howie Good
Ana Bozicevic
Amy King
Niels Hav
Thax Douglas
Dawn Schout

VISUAL

Patrick Gunderson
Alexey Mamochkin
Dominik Kruger

POLEMICS

Ryan McCarl

AURAL

White Pines

INTERVIEWS

Danielle Evans
Amy King & Michael Tyrell
Joseph Scott

–For the entire issue, go to Fogged Clarity!

~~~~

ALSO,

I’m at The Living Room soon but seating is limited!

Five sets of music & two readings:

Samantha Farrell
Strand of Oaks
Karisa Wilson
Amir Darzi
Michael Tyrell
Amy King
Judson Claiborne

Sunday, September 13, 2009 @ 9 pm

The Living Room
154 Ludlow St.
New York, NY 10002

Click here for INFO
Click here for TICKETS

~~~~

“Poetry remains an interesting and pleasurable vehicle because it offers almost infinite formal freedom and flexibility. Poetry’s culturally marginal position is perversely advantageous I think. It’s a largely invisible agent.” –Lisa Robertson

Grandmas’ Wisdom Worth Lots

Grandmas have generally outgrown trying to impress their pals and peers.  They often ‘tell it like it is’, or at least, speak their minds freely–minds that are vested with many years of experience-gleaned wisdom and invested with hope that the world they’ve endured and added to will be a better place for their children’s children.  At least, that’s what I think Margaret and Helen are trying to do if their blog posts are any proof:

“She mixes religion and politics like I mix gin and tonic but then calls for less government involvement.  Freedom from government is her battle cry until a vagina gets involved and then watch how much involvement she wants.  Show me a woman who is making a private medical decision to end a pregnancy and I’ll show you a Palin screaming for more government involvement.”

• You can’t deny the right to marry to some and then cheat on your spouse.   The right to happily marry belongs to all no matter how unhappy it makes you.
• You can’t tolerate the atrocities of one President for eight years and then assign the consequences to one who follows.  From this day forward everything was Reagan’s fault.
• The Christian Right should be forced to spend a week in Iran.  May the best radicals win.
• The Real Housewives should actually be housewives.

“No.  It’s called the Fox News Channel.  So someone explain to me where exactly is the news or even the journalists.   Anytime you try to pin someone down over at Fox for irresponsible journalism they claim that they are news commentators and not journalists.  You’re  on a news channel you moron so if you are going to be a commentator then you should be commenting on the news and not your misinformed opinion about the private medical decisions made between a woman and her doctor.”

AND so on… get there now. Enrich yourselves and delight.

“There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in…”

–from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

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A different kind of blog of sorts, more like news format a la Slate or Huffington Post, recently created by poet/writer, Meghan O’Rourke, that’s got it going on is Double X. The contributors are all younger feminists (mostly women), though I don’t know if they would each call themselves such.  Anyway, they’re actively writing daily about issues applicable to both men, women, and children with a progressive “sometimes we don’t know the answers” eye.  Have fun exploring and asserting!

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