Travel Residue

From a recent journey west. Here today...

Best Books of 2015

Reading Lynne Tillman at Jellystone

Justin and I eat dinner in the car in a downpour and he curses and bashes dishes around because we've aligned each other in two different camps:
Indoor Kid//Outdoor Kid
This Is A False Dichotomy, I think, as I plug in the pot of coffee (outside) the next morning and in a nylon chair I read a non-linear novel while tents unzip around me.
It's early.
An attendant rolls past in a golf cart festooned with a giant tinsel spider. It's Halloween weekend in July at Jellystone, and as I walk to the bathrooms I step over plastic fangs and packs of Sweet Tarts.
I watch a bee build something in the bathroom then I return to my book.
It's called "Haunted Houses!"
The air grows humid as the rain dries on the fiberglass sculpture of Yogi Bear.

Extreme Guest Appearances: Laura A. Warman

I read a lot of good stuff this year, but Pittsburgh-based poet Laura Warman's book is the only one I read TWICE!



How Much does It Cost? nestles in the murky terrain between Spam email and memoir, and has the alarming directness of address of some wrong number phone calls. (Is this for me??)
Laura generously listed some of her best things and moments of 2013 below.

SOME TOP THINGS OF 2013 BY LAURA A WARMAN

BEST ART

ZEE by Kurt Hentschlager

I have never felt all the cliches of Art Experience until I witnessed ZEE at the Wood Street Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA, an installation piece taking up a large room. Before entering the artwork I was warned multiple times that I shouldn’t enter if I was afraid, I shouldn’t enter if I had epilepsy, and I shouldn’t enter if I was pregnant. When I entered the piece, with a group of ten individuals, I was shocked. The piece was about 15 minutes long and for the entirety I wasn’t sure if I was dying/living, seeing/blinded, hearing/ deaf. It was a complete sensory experience. We were allowed to wander around the room but I was so afraid I could only hold onto a rope and go in circles around the perimeter of the piece. I saw light in new ways, I heard sound/ absence of sound. Each individual I talked to who saw the piece felt alone, like the experience was defined by how they alone processed light. Many felt like they were dying. It is hard for me to imagine how the piece was even created. There was heavy strobe, fog, and a soundtrack, but I couldn’t see anything. (It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.) Sadly, after three seizures occurred in the piece in three days, the City of Pittsburgh shut the artwork down. I hope ZEE can occur in other cities because it is something I will NEVER FORGET. It is every cliche.

BEST BOOK OF POETRY I READ

Rachel Zucker “Museum of Accidents”

It wasn’t published this year. But, this is the year I bought it. I remember sitting at a coffee shop in Squirrel Hill with the intention of chugging my coffee and continuing on with my day. I picked up this book and didn’t leave the coffee shop til the sun set and was faint with hunger. I cried and laughed at the same time, my nose filling with enough snot to drip down onto the page. Once I reached the middle of the book I found the poem Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group. It so perfectly mixes the trauma of a miscarriage with the dis/connectedness of internet message boards. IT’S A BOOK OF POETRY THAT’S A PAGE TURNER.


BEST PROFESSIONAL POETRY READING

I may think this because it happened recently. I may think this because it was snowing, lightly. I may think this because I was wearing my fur coat, sipping black tea, and eating cut fruit off a platter when I had ten dollars in my bank account. The best professional poetry reading I saw was not Anne Carson at AWP (but you need to know I was there) the best poetry reading I saw was Patricia Smith!!!!!! She instantly warmed up the room. She read many poems from memory and read one of my favorite poems from her beautiful book, “Blood Dazzler”, titled ETHEL’S SESTINA. As she read the last lines, “I can't wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can't wait. /Don't cry, boy, I ain't in that chair no more.” I felt my emotions leave my body and float a little towards Ethel. (I’m trying to say I cried.)

BEST POETRY DRAMA

“KILL LIST” by Josef Kaplan. Did you make the list? Did you feel threatened? Were you part of a joke? Was this a hoax? Did Kaplan make money? WHO REALLY KNOWS?


BEST JOLLY RANCHER FLAVOR

STILL CHERRY.

Innernette

Protracted preaching to the converted:
In an impulsive spot of "guerilla advertising" I left a business card with my blog address and credentials(visual artist/mental titan) in a Chris Kraus book at the Big Idea (presumptuous, right?), only to have it discovered days later by internet poetess and performance artist, Laura A. Warman, somebody I already know and like. So much for slow media expanding social circles.

Laura, Stephanie Dax (filmmaker/well-dressed elf), Zoe McCloskey (interplanetary travel theoretician), and Gunner (comedian/playwright/author of Galloping Mountain) will be performing alongside me Saturday night at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse Writer's Showcase.

***
More favorite writers/favorite formats: Eileen Myles has created an online gallery of blurbs she has supplied for the backs of book jackets. As proven by the success of twitter poets, limited word count produces some of the best writing. Blurbs are dense nuggets of goodness, like sparkling geodes or some shit.

Apocalypse Party

I wanted to get cornered at Friday night's party so I sidled up to the girl in the hat who said she was an "oversharer." I said "Tell me all your problems, spare me no details." Delineate the intricacies of your OK Cupid profile. I would have loved to listen to that kid explicate the plot of Red Dawn all night, in real time, give me a grueling play by play. I just felt desperate not to indulge myself in interiority.

There were still solo minutes spent staring at a blackened hog's head. I touched its eyelid. It was rock hard and crispy. Punks in pelts and fur hats with markered knuckles farting around a tiny fire, pumping the keg in the garage. Hesher guys with doofus glasses crouching around the coffee table. Staring at the wet black floor, at the couple making out against the wall, in the kitchen a guy slurping a long loose noodle of meat. "Dude, let's Lady-and-the-Tramp that!" Earlier the boy I was kissing with rolled off the floor mattress to go to Food Not Bombs so I was already feeling awkward.

What did that hatted girl mean? "Oversharing's" the only thing that's interesting, the only thing worth doing, making misery malleable, transforming Abjection into content, turning anger inside out. It's all adding up: Glob as an unfixed, messy mass, abjection as radical subject matter, writing the body. Everything I've read lately has discussed and/or colluded with this point: Kate Zambreno's "Heroines," Megan Milks' essay in Mildred Pierce #4 on Dodie Bellamy, Barf Manifesto, and the Bulimic text, Lies journal, "Zippermouth," "Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices."

I wrote my outline for my Glob talk ("Fake Danger") last night and it looks totally insane.

If you want a tightly organized essay on T.S. Eliot's use of Greek mythical symbolism in the Waste Land, click here to unsubscribe.

"Bookslut"

On vacation, reading for pleasure.

(Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism," 2012)

Stuck in the Stacks

But without the likes of Edgar Froese.


Blog density due to a day spent shluffing in the library.
(pictured above, circa 2009)

Still my most popular picture on Flickr.

Thanks again to model Katie Lyn Coles.

Traversing the spectrum w/ Violette n Susan

Red and purple. The feminist theorist color scheme, circa '70.

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays." Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.


"La Batarde," Violette Leduc. Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
Designer / Illustrator: Jacqueline Schuman



Ex-Boyfriend: "Move your book. It looks French and farty."