#Caren Beilin
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Books 83-92 of the year 📖!
#talks#read in 2022#john waters#tove jansson#bohumil hrabal#harry crews#italo svevo#j g ballard#domenico starnone#natsume sōseki#natsume soseki#caren beilin#j. g. ballard#mona awad
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It's not going to sting me, is what I was thinking. Because it doesn't want to die. A hive is not around. A bee doesn't develop a personal vendetta. Even if I upset it quite a lot. A bee is only a terrorist. It would never kill itself without a politics backing it up, and the hive is political and there's no hive in any of these trees near here. I've looked up. I've checked it out. And I feel more comfortable around bees, around women, and all kinds of terrorism than around many many many men. Men are terrorists, fine, they are, but men are authors, too, lots of those, but not all men are writers. You don't want to be with a man in a house. I'd rather be in a school than a house in terms of abuse. I'd rather be killed outside, on a stage, than beaten indoors for more than five years.
Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat
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Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin - 3/5
A review on the front of this book reads, “Revenge of the Scapegoat made me bounce-laugh so hard my cheeks and belly kept jiggling while reading the pains.” I’m not quite sure I read the same book as you, Steven Dunn! Not that it wasn’t funny, but it was much more of an exhale-through-your-nose-slightly-louder-than-usual book than whatever that guy was going through. The closest comparison I can make is The Crying of Lot 49, though I find that book a lot funnier. Caren Beilin plots her book the same way Pynchon opens his: something mundane leading to a chain of increasingly surreal events, though it’s much less intricately crafted than the conspiracy theories that Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas endures.
In Revenge of the Scapegoat, a creative writing professor undergoes a mental breakdown after receiving a packet of letters her father wrote her when she was a teenager. What follows is a plausible adventure tinged with the surreal: a foray with an artist who is raising cows bred by the Nazis to stomp on peoples’ hearts. There’s obviously a lot of metaphor at play, with irreverent references to concentration camps (Beilin’s likely autobiographical protagonist is the descendant of Holocaust survivors) but ultimately without a central idea to link the story together.
I expect Beilin’s style to be polarizing, but I found it refreshing when I was in the right state of mind. She will drop you in the middle of a paragraph with no context about who is talking, leaving the reader to form their own assumptions about a character or scene, and then clarify much, much later. I found this technique revelatory. Other things I didn’t like so much: her arthritic feet’s extended dialogue, uninteresting philosophical tangents, and frankly bizarre word choice (“Twomblish”). Beilin is a professor of creative writing, like her protagonist (you know how much I loooove it when authors have zero distance from their characters!!!) and what annoyed me the most is she would do something with her narration and then immediately say “I’d told my students looong ago, ‘Don’t make adult women reconcile or admit anything in your writing.’” The irony is almost too pronounced to be clever. I bought this book knowing nothing about it, solely because it had my favorite painting (a Kirchner!) on the cover, but it pretty much exemplified why we don’t judge books by their cover.
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“And whenever he left, my dad, storming clothes into a bag and getting ready to initiate Abandon, it was said: I am leaving because of Iris. And then Kenneth, my brother, shook me like shaking me down and begging, ‘Just make him stay, we don’t know how to give Mom her medicine. Just tell him to stay here.’ The scapegoat is so weird. Hated but like, so revered, I’m this wizard. Ten years old, but I’m like packed with power.”
Excerpt from:
Revenge of the Scapegoat
Caren Beilin
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Caren Beilin's Revenge of the Scapegoat is a funny, ludic novel about trauma and art
Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat is a funny, ludic novel about trauma and art
A book should be like a lot of spit. But who would publish me? Who publishes a person who’s sort of soaking in pain, who can’t always walk, employed only pretty much in name?
Did writing exist in books anyway these days? I thought perhaps defensively. Maybe it didn’t.
Writing does exist in books these days, despite what Iris, the narrator of a book of writing that exists, a book by Caren Beilin…
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A scapegoat is, if anything, super grateful. Everything feels so nice and great. You want to do all kinds of things. You're a very eager girl.
Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat
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"The documentary Blackfish, made in 2013, made it impossible for SeaWorld to exist, because you couldn’t see it right anymore. Instead you saw its whale, Tinnicum, with his truly sad bent fin. Who had been in captivity for too long... A documentary like that cuts a taut, stressed chord in the eyeball. Once it’s snapped, you see the whales and what they are. Whales want seas, and what is copper? Should it be inserted inside of a woman? It obviously caused my disease, and I’m going to tell you how."
Read the rest of this excerpt from BLACKFISHING THE IUD by Caren Beilin (Wolfman Books) at Los Angeles Review of Books!
#Caren Beilin#wolfman#e.m. wolfman#los angeles review of books#blarb#blackfishing the iud#excerpt#seaworld#tinnicum
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our pleasure is out of order with capital.
Q&A with Caren Beilin, author of “Nina’s Alcoholism”, for @theoffingmag
#the offing#caren beilin#fiction#women in fiction#prose#writing#women writers#sexuality#feminism#lit#quotes
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my (ongoing) tbr list:
Ghost Boys* // Jewel Parker Rhodes
Good Morning, Midnight // Jean Rhys
The Street // Ann Petry
Tentacle // Rita Indiana
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins // Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
On a Sunbeam (comic) // Tillie Walden
The Grotesque // Patrick McGrath
The Night Ocean // Paul La Farge
The Seventh Day // Yu Hua
The City & the City // Chine Miéville
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration // David Wojnarowicz
Spain // Caren Beilin
Stoner // John Williams
The Stories of Alice Adams // Alice Adams
The Moviegoer // Walker Percy
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth // Warsan Shire
Men Without Women // Haruki Murakami
The Strange Library // Haruki Murakami
Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the Edge of the World // Haruki Murakami
In Cold Blood // Truman Capote
I’ll be Gone in the Dark // Michelle Menamara
Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI // David Grann
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks // ˆRebecca Skloot
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women // Kate Moore
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History // Tori Telfer
Orlando // Virginia Woolf
to whoever may or may not see this, send me some book res!
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769. Caren Beilen
Caren Beilen is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, available from Dorothy.
Beilin's other books are Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Shorter prose appears in Fence, Territory, Dreginald, and The Offing. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont.
***
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We have had to become so crucial, so cutting. To cut our own work! I, personally, have had to become impregnated with a grown man in the publishing industry and birth him through the cunt of my burning writing so that he cuts it up and kills it, on the birthing butcher table, on my writing desk in the American hospital, so that I could at least publish some pure blue laminates—clearer than all this—of night with no sunset.
Caren Beilin, Spain
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https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/author-caren-beilin-on-finding-inspiration-in-your-pain-and-illness/
I liked this.. :)
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Tales of Medical Gaslighting: Chronic Pain, Sexism, and More Caren Beilin’s new book, Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), is a memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community. Beilin considers the copper IUD’s role in triggering her sudden onset rheumatoid arthritis. She shares her own research and patient testimonies that suggest the copper IUD… https://hosperity.com/tales-of-medical-gaslighting-chronic-pain-sexism-and-more/
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Giado Scodellaro's Some of Them Will Carry Me/Amina Cain's A Horse at Night (Books acquired, 7 June 2022)
Giado Scodellaro’s Some of Them Will Carry Me/Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night (Books acquired, 7 June 2022)
Two forthcoming titles from Dorothy both look promising.
(Parenthetically–I finished Dorothy’s recent publication, Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat the other night and found it confounding, upsetting, engaging, and very, very funny. Should have a proper review in the next few days, if I can commit to writing about a novel that zapped and perplexed me.)
Here’s the blurb for Giada…
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