#this is so Gertrude stein in energy also
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The Waves - Virginia Woolf
#this is so Gertrude stein in energy also#once again the waves is about writing the waves#without context this may not be obvious but if you can’t tell Neville is speaking about the ‘poetry’ of sitting in a public place and#listening to all the conversations happening around him#which is very thematically relevant (and resonates purposefully with the reader of the waves) as the book is about reading a series of#highly poetic and occasionally borderline nonsensical soliloquies from six speakers#so like Neville sitting and listening in and creating poetry directly mirrors the reader sitting in the midst of the poetry of the books#speakers but also Virginia Woolf is pretty clearly directly communicating what this book is meant to emulate in part in case the reader#hasn’t caught on yet. but it also resonates with the general experience of reading modernist & experimental (and now postmodern) work and#the choice one must make to either reject in out of fear of difference or embrace the beauty of it#so just a bit a literary analysis for you all this Friday afternoon#Virginia Woolf#the waves
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I walk past the vape shop.
At the bar, I have only a cup of mulled cider; it doesn't taste like alcohol.
Walking up the bend in the street out from the train station I think of K and that sense of throwing caution to the wind that is running graff and realise that times like these what I miss is that, the expenditure of energy on something that you feel invincible about, the running, the laughing afterwards, the having gotten away with it, tripwire high.
All that energy that has to go somewhere.
I think of Anne Carson's The Glass Essay and that line - You remember too much. / Where do I put it down?
I tell a client today to put all of her stuff down in a box and give it to me, and I'll keep it in a corner of the room until I see her next, a room she doesn't know is borrowed today, that isn't my usual regular room. This is a space for you, I say; collect these things all day. And then passing under a bleak tree the words 'Leave it at the door' but I think it's followed me home, or that's my own stuff. I had supervision today, but stepping out of the train I think, it's like mutual aid where the same few dollars get passed around by the same people. Where do they put it down? The client passes it to me who passes it to my supervisor who passes it to their supervisor who passes it to their therapist who passes it— The Ring or that in It Follows. We just keep passing it on. Where do I put it down? Does it get put down?
I take my clothes off at the door. Siken: I take my hands off and offer them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them back on, the wrong way, the wrong wrists. A man goes down to the river and throws away his sadness but then he's still left with his hands. I take my hands off. I peel my skin off. I scoop my eyes out of their sockets and put them in a glass of water next to the bed for the night and go to sleep in utter dark. I take my hands off and put them down. I take my hands off and put them back on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.
Where do we put it down?
Picture someone running purposefully neck-first right into someone else's arm held out horizontal, like a garrote, the flop backwards, like a Tiktok prank or something. Run straight into it, flop.
ADHD Venn diagram with something else, maybe OCD: Intrusive thoughts. Dig your eyes out take your hands off some thought always a little but not too loud sounding in my brain. And I think — is that me or them? Aren't I just reading about me, looking at me? Reflect the client but so they reflect me too we reflect each other. Is it you or me? Is it you or is it (also) me?
Why am I saying this I am taking my hands off and putting them somewhere I am taking my tongue off cut neatly cleanly and putting it here, here are all my words, stuttering. The words or the tongue. The words and the tongue. The tongue that is still saying the words. Oh but the mouth it's in that it needs to make the words so the tongue is still in my mouth but we are talking here we are hello we are, as we say, or as they say, the they who is also the we the we who is part of they (oh I sound like Gertrude Stein) putting it out there. Hello my tongue says I am putting myself out there. Stretches itself out onto the plate. Hello.
Attaches back into my mouth. And the hands screw themselves back on the right way onto the right hands and the eyes can be taken out of the glass of water washed like dentures or maybe just contact lenses in sterile solution and go back in their sockets just pop right back in and swivel round looking and I am whole the clothes come back on like the teacup in Hannibal NBC coming back together again in reverse the teacup is put back together like a video in reverse the skin comes back on everything comes
back
on
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Eisenstein in Guanajuato
Whether or not it’s good history, Peter Greenaway’s EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO (2015, Tubi) is an explosion of a film — at times hilarious, at others maddening — that reflects not just the great director’s use of montage in filmmaking but also the early work in montage he did in the theatre (yes, you filmsplainers, like most so-called cinematic innovations, the theatre invented montage first). The picture follows Eisenstein (Elmer Back) as he arrives in Mexico to make a film for Upton Sinclair. The director is all boundless energy, non sequiturs and echolalia. He’s like a combination of Larry Fine and Gertrude Stein. And the filmmaking reflects this as Greenway uses split screens, sometimes to show the same image three times and at others to show the real-life people flanking their dramatized counterparts. As in Eisenstein’s stage work, Greenaway also presents each scene in its own style, creating a montage of effects that frequently works, and when it does, it’s something glorious. Greenaway’s film is less about how Eisenstein attempted to make QUE VIVA, MEXICO! than it is about the emotional impact of his Mexican pilgrimage, the collision of old and new worlds. The Russian director has a guide (Luis Alberti) who also teaches comparative religion, and the two compare notes on their countries’ different cultures, particularly their approaches to the contradictory (or are they?) forces of eros and thantos. Sensing his charge’s repressed homosexuality, Alberti initiates him in a scene that manages to be sexy, gross and hilarious all at once, with the guide lecturing Eisenstein on colonialism as he’s planting his own flag in, shall we say, virgin territory. There are marvelous touches throughout: animated versions of Eisenstein’s homo-erotic drawings, clips from his movies that comment on the action, scenes scored to his frequent collaborator Sergei Prokofiev, a persistent banging on pipes that anticipates the man’s death (after his second heart attack, he banged on the radiator pipes, a pre-arranged signal to alert his neighbors, who never heard him). But there are also scenes that go on too long, and the endless talk becomes almost oppressive. Sinclair’s wife and brother-in-law, who was appointed to manage QUE VIVA, MEXICO!, are turned into two-dimensional villains, which feels like something out of the kind of film Eisenstein refused to make in Hollywood. But there are an awful lot of good things in the movie, not the least among them Back and Alberti’s performances, which perfectly capture the contrast between wild child Eisenstein and his more sophisticated guide.
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“BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.”
Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit — like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”
What does owning it look like? Decades before genderless fashion became its own style, butches were wearing denim and white tees, leather jackets and work boots, wallet chains and gold necklaces. It isn’t just about what you’re wearing, though, but how: Butchness embodies a certain swagger, a 1950s-inspired “Rebel Without a Cause” confidence. In doing so, these women — and butches who don’t identify as women — created something new and distinct, an identity you could recognize even if you didn’t know what to call it.
By refuting conventionally gendered aesthetics, butchness expands the possibilities for women of all sizes, races, ethnicities and abilities. “I always think of the first butch lesbian I ever saw,” says the 33-year-old actor Roberta Colindrez. “This beautiful butch came into the grocery store and she was built like a brick house. Short hair, polo shirt, cargo pants and that ring of keys … It was the first time I saw the possibility of who I was.” And yet, to many people, “butch style” remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.
ETYMOLOGICALLY, “butch” is believed to be an abbreviation of “butcher,” American slang for “tough kid” in the early 20th century and likely inspired by the outlaw Butch Cassidy. By the early 1940s, the word was used as a pejorative to describe “aggressive” or “macho” women, but lesbians reclaimed it almost immediately, using it with pride at 1950s-era bars such as Manhattan’s Pony Stable Inn and Peg’s Place in San Francisco. At these spots, where cocktails cost 10 cents and police raids were a regular occurrence, identifying yourself as either butch or femme was a prerequisite for participating in the scene.
These butches were, in part, inspired by 19th-century cross-dressers — then called male impersonators or transvestites — who presented and lived fully as men in an era when passing was a crucial survival tactic. We can also trace butchness back to the androgynous female artists of early 20th-century Paris, including the writer Gertrude Stein and the painter Romaine Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches, themselves at the intersection of the burgeoning civil, gay and women’s rights movements, became a more visible and viable community.
From their earliest incarnations, butches faced brutal discrimination and oppression, not only from outside their community but also from within. A certain brand of (mostly white) lesbian feminism dominant in the late ’70s and early ’80s marginalized certain sorts of “otherness” — working-class lesbians, lesbians of color and masculine-of-center women. They pilloried butchness as inextricably misogynist and butch-femme relationships as dangerous replications of heteronormative roles. (Such rhetoric has resurfaced, as trans men are regularly accused of being anti-feminist in their desire to become the so-called enemy.) Challenged yet again to defend their existence and further define themselves, butches emerged from this debate emboldened, thriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s as women’s studies programs — and, later, gender and queer studies departments — gained traction on North American and European college campuses.
The ’90s were in fact a transformative decade for the butch community. In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler published her groundbreaking “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” and her theories about gender were soon translated and popularized for the masses. In her academic work, Butler argues that gender and sexuality are both constructed and performative; butch identity, as female masculinity, subverts the notion that masculinity is the natural and exclusive purview of the male body. Soon after, butch imagery infiltrated the culture at large. The August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair featured the straight supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a black maillot, straddling and shaving the butch icon K.D. Lang. That same year, the writer Leslie Feinberg published “Stone Butch Blues,” a now classic novel about butch life in 1970s-era New York. In Manhattan, comedians such as Lea DeLaria and drag kings such as Murray Hill took to the stage; it was also the heyday of Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the serialized comic strip she started in 1983. In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres, still the most famous of butches, came out. Two years later, Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano published “The Drag King Book” and the director Kimberly Peirce released her breakthrough film, “Boys Don’t Cry”; its straight cisgender star, Hilary Swank, went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a role that still incites contentious debates about the nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity. These artists and their legacies are the cornerstones of our community. As Legler says, “This is where we’ve come from, and the folks we look back to. If you identify with that lineage, then we’d love to have you.”
LIKE ANY QUEER subculture, butchness is vastly different now than it was three decades ago — though the codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation. There are “stone butches,” a label that doesn’t refer to coldness, as is often assumed, but to a desire to touch rather than to be touched — to give rather than receive — and is considered slightly more masculine than “soft butch” on the Futch Scale, a meme born in 2018 that attempted to parse the gradations from “high femme” to “stone butch.” (“Futch,” for “femme/butch,” is square in the middle.) And while there remains some truth to butch stereotypes — give us a plaid flannel shirt any day of the week — that once-static portrait falls apart under scrutiny and reflection. Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.
Different bodies own their butchness differently, but even a singular body might do or be butch differently over time. We move between poles as our feelings about — and language for — ourselves change. “In my early 20s, I identified as a stone butch,” says the 45-year-old writer Roxane Gay. “In adulthood, I’ve come back to butch in terms of how I see myself in the world and in my relationship, so I think of myself as soft butch now.” Peirce, 52, adds that this continuum is as much an internal as an external sliding scale: “I’ve never aspired to a binary,” she says. “From day one, the idea of being a boy or a girl never made sense. The ever-shifting signifiers of neither or both are what create meaning and complexity.”
Indeed, butch fluidity is especially resonant in our era of widespread transphobia. Legler, who uses they/them pronouns, is a “trans-butch identified person — no surgery, no hormones.” Today, the interconnected spectrums of gender and queerness are as vibrant and diverse in language as they are in expression — genderqueer, transmasc, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming. Yet butches have always called themselves and been called by many names: bull dyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger, boi, daddy and so on. Language evolves, “flowing in time and changing constantly as new generations come along and social structures shift,” Bechdel says.
If it’s necessary to think historically, it’s also imperative to think contextually. Compounding the usual homophobia and misogyny, black and brown butches must contend with racist assumptions: “Black women often get read as butch whether they are butch or not,” Gay says. “Black women in general are not seen, so black butchness tends to be doubly invisible. Except for studs: They’re very visible,” she adds, referring to a separate but related term used predominantly by black or Latinx butches (though, unsurprisingly, white butches have appropriated it) who are seen as “harder” in their heightened masculinity and attitude. Gay notes that “people tend to assume if you’re a black butch, you’re a stud and that’s it,” which is ultimately untrue. Still, butch legibility remains a paradox: As the most identifiable of lesbians — femmes often “pass” as straight, whether they want to or not — we are nonetheless maligned and erased for our failure of femininity, our refusal to be the right kind of woman.
ANOTHER LINGERING stereotype, one born from “Stone Butch Blues” and its more coded literary forebears, particularly Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928), is the butch as a tragic and isolated figure. She is either cast out by a dominant society that does not — will not — ever see her or accept her, or she self-isolates as a protective response to a world that continually and unrelentingly disparages her.
When a butch woman does appear in mainstream culture, it’s usually alongside her other: the femme lesbian. Without the femme and the contrast she underscores, the butch is “inherently uncommodifiable,” Bechdel says, since two butches together is just a step “too queer.” We rarely see butches depicted in or as community, an especially sobering observation given the closure of so many lesbian bars over the past two decades. But when you talk to butches, a more nuanced story emerges, one of deep and abiding camaraderie and connection. Despite the dearth of representation, butch love thrives — in the anonymous, knowing glances across the subway platform when we recognize someone like us, and in the bedroom, too. “Many of my longest friendships are with people who register somewhere on the butch scale,” Peirce says. “We’re like married couples who fell in love with each other as friends.”
Legler, for their part, recognizes a “lone wolf” effect, one in which some young queers initially love “being the only butch in the room.” In organizing the group portrait that accompanies this essay over the past months, Legler was curious “what it would be like for butches to just show up together and to be able to display all of their power, all of their sexiness, all of their charisma, without having it be mitigated in some way.” And not only for butches of an older generation, but for those still figuring things out, transforming the scene in ways that both defy and inspire their elders. “It’s been centuries in the making, the fact that we are all O.K.,” Legler adds. “That our bodies get to exist: We have to celebrate that. You can do more than just survive. You can contribute.”
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Hey pet (lmao) can I get a general school/career type reading thing? thanks and ily 💗
lmao of course pet!! 💚💚
Tarot: Queen of Cups, King of Cups, Death, 7 of Pentacles, 10 of Wands, 2 of Pentacles, 2 of Swords
The Queen of Cups is an interesting card to start with. She’s generally a symbol of compassion and comfort and in this particular deck is depicted as a stewardess of the sea, guardian of the shore. In relation to your studies she may indicate someone taking on a caring role within your environment – either someone else looking out for you or you looking out for someone else. Here she’s being clarified by the 7 of pentacles and the 10 of wands. The 7 of pents is about perseverance, hard work, and diligence, while the 10 of wands is related to burdens and responsibility. In the context of all three cards together, the Queen may be a reminder that what you are doing, the goals you’re working towards, should be a source of emotional fulfilment for you rather than something you do to keep busy or for financial gain, so that the hard work involved is worthwhile. The 10 of wands indicates a period of feeling overworked and stressed is approaching so it could also be that the Queen represents somebody you can seek advice or help from. Either way, the 7 of pents suggests that progress is being made, even if you can’t exactly see the results. It may be a good time to examine your overall situation and your achievements to figure out what is and isn’t working. That can help you know where to focus your energy in the coming months and create strategies to better deal with the burdens you’ll likely soon be carrying.
Next we have the King of Cups being clarified by the 2 of Pentacles. Interestingly both of these cards relate to balance. The King of Cups represents a balance of emotional, practical, and logical needs whereas the 2 of pents is more about juggling projects and being resourceful to keep everything moving along as it should. This suggests that whatever busy period is approaching, you will need to keep on top of a number of different things for school as well as making time for yourself to rest and recharge. Because you got both the queen and king of cups, the king may represent a mentor for you (the queen) or someone you perceive as wise or authoritative who may be able to assist you in some way or with whom you could work closely. Also I know this isn’t a love reading but it’s worth noting that, since the suit of cups is related to the heart and relationships, this appearance of the queen and king beside each other could also potentially be alluding to some sort of romantic entanglement.
Finally we have Death and the 2 of Swords. I don’t know how well you can see it in the photo but the bottom of the Death card is lines with ears of corn which, combined with the scythe death herself carries, brings to mind a time of harvest. Of course, Death is also related to change and transformation (as seen with the depiction of the moth). The 2 of Swords is about decision making, weighing up options. The blindfold over the woman’s eyes may indicate that you don’t yet have all the information required to make a choice. Together these cards suggest that some sort of decision will need to be made and in due course you will have to reap the results, good or bad. For example the decision may come in the form of choosing to focus on one piece of work over another or taking sides in a conflict. Whatever it is, it’s likely to bring about a change.
And now for your oracle cards
Your Cat Guru is Bastet who’s career related advice is: Don’t be afraid to use your claws to get to the top of the pyramid. It isn’t strictly related but I’ll give you her other two bits of wisdom as well, just in case they’re applicable for your school sitch. The first is technically related to relationships but it says: Demand to be worshipped and you will be. The second is advice for general life and it says: The afterlife is now. Very clear messages about seizing opportunities as they present themselves and not to shy away from the work required.
You got 2 Literary Witches. The first is Alejandra Pizarnik, a poet from Argentina. She represents solitude, silence, interiority and space, suggesting a period of reflection or perhaps that though things will become chaotic, peace and quiet will follow. The other is Gertrude Stein, a poet who was inspired by the Cubism movement in art and endeavoured to create cubism in her writing. She represents perspective, and seeing things in new ways. This could tie in with the reflective qualities Pizarnik suggests as well as the messages of the Queen of Cups in conjunction with the 7 of pents. Perhaps there is something you could improve on or give attention to that requires a shift of perspective.
I’m going to talk about the Spellcasting oracle and Elemental oracle cards together since they’re both quite similar. From these decks you got Passion and Fire: Ignition. Both cards speak of casting aside fears and reigniting your passions. It’s a good time to take action and make any decisions you’ve been weighing up. The guidebook for the Elemental oracle also says “Be a lighthouse for others or find yourself a mentor” which definitely connects with the energy we got with your tarot cards. As an aside, passion can also relate to romantic or physical attraction which the Spellcasting guidebook alludes to as a possible interpretation for this card. But I think the overall message is about harnessing that fiery energy and use it to further yourself and achieve your goals.
Finally we have 3 of the Language of Flowers oracle cards: Peony: Health – Focus on all parts to make the whole / Sweet Alyssum: Clarity – Bright paths of understanding will open / Everlasting Daisy: Fortitude – Be brave and dig deep. Whatever work and stress the 7 of pents and 10 of wands were referring to will require resilience and determination to get through. Dig deep from every ounce of energy you can muster. The promise of Clarity may be related to the decision implied by the 2 of swords and/or the self-reflection that keep cropping up. The Health of the Peony may be a reminder to not get bogged down in one small part but to keep in mind the whole task/big picture as you work and as you decide where to focus your energies.
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ATAK
In this post, ATAK talks about his fascinating creation process and he shares illustrations and development work from some of his wonderful books – including sketchbook pages for his forthcoming picturebook ‘Piraten im Garten’, which is due to be published in 2020.
Visit ATAK’s website
ATAK: My process is like hip-hop. Mixing and sampling.
I have a big box where I put material that I’ve found on the street or in magazines. Then in the summer, when I’m sitting in the summer house, I stick everything into sketchbooks.
These are important books for me. I often use them when I’m looking for an idea. I like to make connections between this and that.
Sometimes I steal things. Here’s an example of where I used a painting by Caspar David Friedrich in one of my images. This is a very important painting for the German culture; it’s romantic. It’s the first painting that’s like a window. You see with him and you’re led into the picture.
‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.
When I take something to use in my own work, it’s more about the idea of composition and atmosphere. It’s not just a reference that people will know.
This is the sketchbook for my picturebook ‘Topsy Turvy World’. The publisher asked me for a book for children, and as I was tired of working with long texts, I thought this one should be a wordless book, where the images tell the whole story.
We have a German tradition from the 18th century of ‘bilderbogen’. This is like the origin of comics. They’re one-page stories. I was looking at some of these and I found some interesting ideas for ‘Topsy Turvy World’.
Here are some pages from the sketchbook.
Not everything made it into the final book; some of it was too heavy for my publisher, so he kicked it out. The smoking people had to go, otherwise we couldn’t have sold the rights in America.
Then there was a problem... My sketches had a lot of life and were fully-worked, so to transform them into the final artwork was very hard. After the rough version, I had this feeling that I was already finished with the book. Making the final ‘clean’ artwork felt like a kind of discipline.
My original paintings are always much bigger than they appear in the books. I never work to the correct size or format.
I often sell my paintings, but here is one I’ll never sell. It was done for the first children’s book I made, called ‘Comment la mort est revenue à la vie’ (How death came back to life), written by Muriel Bloch and published by Thierry Magnier.
It’s an important painting for me. I came from the comic world – black and white graphics – where I would draw out the whole scenes with all the details. In the middle of working on this painting, I had to go out to buy some food, and then I came back and thought, “Oh, it’s enough.” There’s a big difference when you work with colour. It’s like a sound, like a kind of music. This painting was very important for me in understanding colour.
Before I start working on an image, I often have a rough idea of what’s going to happen in the scene, but I leave a lot of space for other things to come in... And when I’ve started to work, I might see something in my studio or in a book, and it goes into the image.
I like this open process. And I like to be surprised. It’s very important for me that I don’t know in the beginning exactly what’s going to happen.
My way of painting is very old school. Traditional. Sometimes I paint over the top of something and you can see the trace of it behind. You can’t really fake things like this on the computer. For me, my original artwork is more important than the finished book. I once had an interesting discussion about this with Blexbolex. It’s completely the opposite for him: he sees his books as being the original artwork.
After ‘Topsy Turvy World’, I made a book called ‘The Garden’.
The original German edition was almost like a book for bourgeoise women... But for the French edition, they reimagined it for kids. It’s much bigger; you can really go inside. And the French publisher asked me to make some flaps to open up on the pages, which were not there in the original edition.
The sketches for ‘The Garden’ are almost nothing. It was very important that I didn’t repeat the process of ‘Topsy Turvy World’, where the sketches were very close to the finished artwork. I couldn’t work like this again. So the sketches here are very loose, but I knew exactly what was supposed to be in the pictures.
Working like this, you must have a very strong relationship with the publisher – one of absolute trust. I also have big problems with deadlines; I’m always late. With this book, my publisher Antje Kunstmann was so good. She phoned me every morning: “Hallo, here is Antje!” It was so important to know she was there, almost like a mother. It was a similar story with Wolf Erlbruch and his book ‘Duck, Death and the Tulip’. He was working for four years on this book. In the end, Antje came to his home and was waiting on his sofa for two days to take the last drawing!
The latest children’s book I made is called ‘Martha’.
I started working on it after reading an article in National Geographic about the passenger pigeon. I was fascinated. Because it’s a real story, it was not easy for me to make this book. It’s easier when I’m given a text because I have more distance.
Again, I worked very loosely in my sketchbook. These sketches are just indications – so I know something is here or somebody is there. It does help me that things are more open.
I don’t have sketchbooks where I draw from reality. I’m not good at this. You’ll never find me sitting in a crowd, making sketches. I watch and I observe instead. And I have books where I write ideas or note down interesting forms and shapes that I see.
Here are some pictures from ‘Martha’.
And here’s an idea for the dust jacket, where the kids could cut and draw on the paper, and make origami out of it to give a kind of rebirth. Martha is gone, but maybe she’s not gone if the kids could bring her back. The publisher didn’t go for this idea.
I went to art school but never finished. Just after the Berlin Wall came down, I was studying visual communication. There wasn’t a good atmosphere at my art school. I wanted to find like-minded people and work as a team, but it felt like most of the students were only interested in being artists, but not in working together. Then my daughter was born, and I never finished art school.
I’m now teaching art as a professor. The other teachers have diplomas, and I feel like I’ve come from the working class. I do like intellectual work, but when I work with students, I want to see something. I can only talk about what I see. I need it very visual. It has to catch me.
From when I was nine years old, I wanted to be an illustrator. In east Germany, illustration was a part of publishing. All the novels had illustration. It’s still unique now to see this, but in east Germany it was normal... So my plan was always to be an illustrator. This way I could wake up when I wanted, have no boss, listen to my music all day, and make my own work.
Speaking of music... The type of music I listen to when I work depends on the specifics of the book. For example, I made a book for Nobrow called ‘Ada’ (from a word portrait by Gertrude Stein). The idea for the artwork was to make handmade pixels, so I listened to a lot of electronic music; ping–ping–ping! It’s about energies. And for me, the music is also very important because I travel a lot and it can be hard to come back to your work – but when I listen to the music, immediately I’m back in the project, in the zone. It’s all connected – the music with the book.
Here’s my playlist for ‘Martha’.
Distortions – Clinic
Go – Sparklehorse & The Flaming Lips
VCR – The XX
Song For A Warrior – Swans
Avril 14th – Aphex Twin
Quiet Music – Nico Muhly
First Song For B – Devendra Banhart
Last Song For B – Devendra Banhart
How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? – Al Green
Ash Black Veil – Apparat
I Know They Say – Spectrum
Opus 55 – Dustin O’Halloran
Lost Fur – Karen O & The Kids
Unfinished Business – The Go-Betweens
Sometimes – My Bloody Valentine
Lies – Sin Fang Bous
Debussy: Suite Bergamasque, L 75 - Clair De Lune – Alexis Weissenberg
Nimrod (Adagio) – David Hirschfelder
Atmosphere – Joy Division
Still Life – Elliot Goldenthal
The Lake – Antony & The Jonhsons
Flying Birds – RZA
I used to make hardcore comics with friends. This was our first, which we made before the wall came down. My work has changed completely. I can’t understand this now; it’s like another man made it! And they are not funny. It’s a very small humour; you really have to look for it.
Then, after my daughter was born, I did my own comic series called ‘Wondertüte’. In the comic scene, everybody told me that this wasn’t a comic. But for me, it was totally a comic. I liked the comic medium, but I didn’t see why there had to be only one way. From all my old comics, this is the one I like the most.
The idea comes from the ‘learn English’ books we had in school. It’s a bit like a poem, but with a more open structure. I think my older work was very closed, and this comic is where it really started to open up. I made it for me, not for the mainstream. I got no money for it. But you could find it in kiosks. Somebody told me he saw it in a kiosk in a very small village. He said it was very important to see this comic displayed in-between all the nice, fancy stuff... My audience is not many people, but they are passionate.
I don’t really consider myself as a children’s book illustrator; it’s not like this. But it gives me a lot more freedom. Some of my friends find themselves working on one comic for years! I respect this, but for me that’s like a jail. With comics, you have to take such care with narration. You go from one panel to the next panel to the next... The comic medium is a question of time. In a children’s book, the reader looks at one page for perhaps two minutes or ten minutes. They go deep inside. It’s a completely different work. Also in a children’s book you have a stage; it’s really like theatre.
I also think it’s very important in children’s books that you read the book again and again. You read a comic maybe once and then you kick it out or you give it to somebody. But a children’s book is like a ritual between parents and kids.
This is a cover version of the German classic book ‘Der Struwwelpeter’.
The stories here are new and full of humour. I made this book with Fil (Philip Tägert). It was after ‘Topsy Turvy World’, and for me it was so important that I could be free with the pictures. The publisher said make what you want. And it felt so good.
There are hundreds of different versions of ‘Der Struwwelpeter’. As with the ‘bilderbogen’, this was like the beginning of comic stories.
I once found an old version of the book from Denmark with an extra chapter. They didn’t trust all that dark stuff and they made up new stories. So in our cover version, we had this idea to make one chapter where literally nothing happens! We tried to make it as boring as possible, with the pictures saying exactly the same thing as the words. It was so hard to make a boring illustration! It’s really not easy!
My new book will be published next year. It’s for my little son; he’s three years old. You could see it as a connection between ‘Topsy Turvy World’ and ‘The Garden’. It’s called ‘Pirates in the Garden’. The German title is ‘Piraten im Garten’, so the title is like a poem; you hear it and you don’t forget it. I like this title very much.
This book will will be very simple, a bit like Sesame Street. One word on each page, so you make associations between the word and the image, and the parents can talk about it with their kids.
I’m working in the sketchbook at the moment, and I want to make the sketches really good. For ‘The Garden’ and ‘Martha’, I kept the sketches really open. But for this one, no. I know this is going to be my last book for children. And it’s for my son, so I’m going to make it special. In the future, perhaps I’ll make art books in small editions, more paintings, stuff like this, but not books in a commercial way again.
When I made ‘Martha’, I was thinking, “who needs this?” It wasn’t mainstream and I was so confused. It’s different from when someone asks me to make a cover or a painting; I’m never thinking about who needs this. But this was different. Sometimes you just don’t know if what you’re doing is important or not. So I was kind of depressed working on that book. This is the main reason it took me such a long time.
I sometimes feel very alone working as a children’s book illustrator in Germany. My style is not at all mainstream and I always just made my books for fun. It was never a big passion of mine to make children’s books for my whole life. But I always liked the roots.
So for my final children’s book, ‘Piraten im Garten’, I will make it for myself and for my son.
Illustrations © ATAK. Post edited by dPICTUS.
Buy this picturebook
Verrueckte Welt / Topsy Turvy World
ATAK
Jacoby & Stuart, Germany, 2009
A fantastical picturebook where mice chase cats, penguins live in the jungle, and cars fly! There’s few things that children enjoy more than catching grown-ups telling fibs. Discarding what’s obviously wrong is how they find out what’s right.
It’s a time-honoured children’s game; ATAK’s just given it a new twist, using lots of classic tall stories, and adding a few new ones as well.
German: Jacoby & Stuart
English: Flying Eye Books
French: Editions Thierry Magnier
Spanish: Fulgencio Pimentel
Italian: Orecchio Acerbo
Norwegian: Magikon
Slovak & Czech: Baobab
Portuguese: Planeta Tangerina (Portugal)
Portuguese: Companhia das Letras (Brazil)
Dutch: Boycott Books
Chinese (Simplified): TB Publishing Ltd (Everafter Books)
Buy this picturebook
Der Struwwelpeter
FIL & ATAK
Kein & Aber, Switzerland, 2009
Like a rock band covering their favourite songs, ATAK and FIL tackle the classic stories of Zappelphilipp, Hans-guck-in-die-Luft & Co.
And just as a Heavy Metal cover might sound harder than the original, you’ll also find tighter morals, harsher imagery, politically incorrect humour, and that ever-so-subtle touch of evil that has been pervading this book for more than 160 years.
German: Kein & Aber
French: Fremok Editions
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Der Garten / The Garden
ATAK
Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Germany, 2013
In silence, the garden wakes up. Thus opens this picturebook by ATAK, as an invitation to walk in a garden with a thousand surprises – a haven of peace, populated with animals and strange characters.
You’ll discover with wonder, the treasures and the tranquility of the garden, and you’ll observe the seasons and the passing of time.
German: Verlag Antje Kunstmann
French: Editions Thierry Magnier
Spanish: Niño Editor
Portuguese: Companhia das Letras (Brazil)
Korean: Bear & Cat
Buy this picturebook
Martha
ATAK
Aladin Verlag, Germany, 2016
Martha tells the tale of the extinction of North America’s native Passenger Pigeon – its shockingly rapid decline caused directly by humans – and is told from the perspective of ‘Martha’, the last of the species who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The story begins with a feeling of greatness and awe, describing flocks of birds that were once so numerous that they would darken the skies for days, their beating wings as loud as motors.
German: Aladin Verlag
French: Les Fourmis Rouges
Korean: Sanha
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Chapter 27 and 28
When I first started this class, I remember we had to share our experience with art. The only time I had ever been in an area with artwork was when I went to the Chicago Art Museum for my senior class trip. After reading chapters 27 and 28, I can relate the pictures and art I see in these chapters to what I saw in Chicago. It’s modern art that I am more aware of than the previous chapters. I will be talking about the styles of art and some of the artists that spark my interest.
In chapter 27, Cubism was known for its built-up images from constructions of color. Cubism gave European artists, non-Classical ways to represent the human figure. The first type of Cubism artwork that I came across was Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. He uses an emphasis on color that is consistent with contemporary Fauve interests. In this piece of art, Cubism comes into play when there are new spatial and planar shifts. Picasso also started nude artworks. The faces of this artwork disrupts nature and defies the Classical ideal and it is influenced by the contemporary vogue for primitivism.
Collage is another style talked about in chapter 27. It is a “logical outgrowth of Analytic Cubism and marked the beginning of the shift to Synthetic Cubism.” (p.483) An example of this type of art is Picasso’s Man with a Hat which is pieces of colored paper and newspaper that are on a paper forming a geometric representation of a head and neck. Collage deals with disassembling aspects, and this artwork describes that perfectly. It is made up of pieces of paper that can also be disassembled.
Futurism is inspired by “the dynamic energy of industry and the machine age.” (p.487) This style of art, in 1913, came in plastic form. It was done by Umberto Boccioni and was called Unique Forms of Community in Space. This piece of art represents a man that is striding as if he is reaching a definitely goal he has. Boccioni states that the artwork must “make objects live by showing their extensions in space.” (p.487) So, this piece of art has multiple layers of surface plane that portray a flapping material.
Architecture was becoming popular in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It was popular in the United States, because that’s where it was taking the most developmental strides. Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were two big architects during this time. Frank Lloyd Wright was known for his style of Prairie. An artwork that demonstrates this is the Robie House of 1909 in South Chicago. He represents the flat prairie landscape of America by creating low-pitched roofs with large overhang, and low boundary walls.
There was a new style of art that got produced by the end of World War I. It is called the International Style. It was brought to the United States by Bauhaus artists that were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s. These styles of art in the United States inspired many similar skyscrapers all across America’s large cities.
In chapter 28, Surrealism got my attention. This style of art is representing a higher reality that is higher than the average appearance. The artists that did Surrealism work were interested in the unconscious phenomena. This phenomena led to images that were portrayed as unreal or unlikely.
American Abstraction is an interesting topic, because it was the start of “modern” art in that time era. The first artist that dealt with this was Alfred Stieglitz and he was a photographer who manipulated his photos with negatives and chemicals and didn’t enjoy unusual visual effects. Another artist is Georgia O’Keeffe, who is also a photographer. She was influenced by the landscape of America, so her artwork uses black and white to accentuate on that.
After reading these two chapters, and looking at the artwork from someone who doesn’t take a fancy on this topic (like me), I would think to myself that it doesn’t even seem that hard to do. After watching the video, I’m not familiar with styles of colors and everything that goes into the works of art. My understanding that these artworks are a lot harder than they look is more aware now.
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“There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we start to recognize that we are making choices, that we are determining who we are by the actions that we make,” poet, educator and activist Amy King stated in a 2015 speech at SUNY Nassau Community College, where she is a professor of English and creative writing. “What we do says a lot about who we are, not just what we say.”
As a young child growing up in the Bible Belt, King remembers going to the grocery store with her grandfather—her one source of stability, love and unconditional support at that time who, “everyday,” made comments that she was learning to understand were racist. She recalls watching her grandfather flirt with a Black woman who was checking out their groceries. “I was very young,” she told students about that day. “I didn’t even have the vocabulary at that point to recognize this feeling or to articulate what this feeling was, but it was the feeling that something hypocritical was going on.”
That was when King, who identifies as queer, began trying to figure out how to address those moments in her family. “A story begins when a protagonist recognizes a conflict and begins to address how to correct that conflict,” she shared, “and some of us choose not to address that conflict—and that is a story too.”
After growing up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, King lived with her father in Baltimore, Maryland. As a teenager, she worked for the National Security Agency after testing high for analytical skills, but says she felt “uncomfortable” there, even just at 17, and “didn’t like the way the institution was run.”
Two consistent themes throughout King’s life are “social justice and story.” Her latest book, The Missing Museum, is described as “a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.” Publishing it won her the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and vaulted her to the ranks of legends like Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Carson and Pearl Buck when she received the 2015 Women’s National Book Association Award. (Named one of “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees by the Feminist Press, King also received the 2012 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.)
King is co-editor of the anthology Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change and the anthology series Bettering American Poetry; her other books include I Want to Make You Safe, one of Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. Much of her prose, activism and other projects focus on exploring and supporting the work of other women writers, especially writers of color. King is a founding member of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and former Editor-in-Chief of VIDA Review.
During a 2014 interview King gave for Houston’s Public Poetry Reading Series, she spoke on the subject of trying to understand poetry by asking a pivotal question: “What is ‘understanding’ and what is an ‘experience’ with a piece of art?” She went on to say poetry should “jostle” us out of our regular ways of thinking—it should “undo” us in ways that are both good and uncomfortable.
For this installment of Ms. Muse, King opens up about learning to speak up and step up—and shares three new poems with Ms. readers. Here’s to hoping that they “undo” you.
THE POEMS
Selling Short
I cannot afford to live in the city I teach in,
& the number of people sleeping in cars has grown,
indivisibly. This is not a dream of guarantees
but the pursuit of handwritten freedoms that night the sting away.
Demons of clinics devise distribution mechanics
based on who you were born to & who you might know.
The 2 a.m. quiet promises no solace or silence when days
are hobbled & taken. Soon, light will be privately owned.
I’m Building a Body to Burn My Effigy In
I will not mention stars Today. They have been used
for purposes not their own. Listen to them. Give them space.
Observe but leave them distant. If you think you know everything
about them now, you have outgrown yourself.
In the south we say bigger than your britches burns,
but I do not wish to confuse. I want to learn.
Joy Even
The denim and calico patchwork
of my childhood. Mothballs in a little black box,
felt lining each crevice. Michael Jackson
on a hobbled turntable someone left
at the apartment complex curb.
Costwald Village. Regal.
British. Anything but.
The dislocation of Backwoods, Georgia.
The first time a man touched me,
his semen glistening my inner thighs.
“Thriller” and the plywood coffee table.
The hoarder grocery bag maze
and Childcraft Encyclopedias flayed across the shag.
My 12-year-old amazement.
My 12-year-old embryo.
The fact of a body electric, searing for days.
Turning that birthed another world with a song and dance.
So many ways to joy. Some to death.
My anything. Me, anything. Joy even.
THE INTERVIEW
Can you tell me about your process of writing “I’m Building a Body to Burn My Effigy In,” “Joy Even” and “Selling Short”?
I don’t have one process. Sometimes compiled notes take shape. Or a poem just falls out of me as if, gored, the liver drops from my body. The heart seeping sounds more fitting, but a liver plop fits better.
“I’m Building a Body…” comes from an interest in physics and mortality.
“Joy Even” is part of the slow-burn of outlining a memoir.
“Selling Short” emerges as predictive dream, touching on issues that have recently led me to Rosi Braidotti’s “The Posthuman.”
What childhood experiences with language informed your relationship with poetry?
When I first moved to live with my father in Baltimore at 15, I spoke slowly and heard the same. I often said “What?” in a deep southern drawl, uncertain of my own ears, which was probably also testament to a deeper uncertainty too. My father was my only safety line in a house full of strangers and with a stepmother who, quite quickly, began to play her own uncertainties out on me.
One day, as usual, I asked “What?” and my dad, no longer riding the romance of his daughter’s betrayal of her mother to be with him, the winner, suddenly shouted at me, “DO YOU REALLY NOT KNOW WHAT WE’RE SAYING?” It shocked the shit out of me. I made adjustments over time to alter the way I spoke, how I heard, to absorb unknown word usages and infer what I could. And to recover from what that moment meant.
You might prefer the story of how I used to read Gertrude Stein to friends over the phone to annoy them until I realized I had tricked myself as I was enjoying sounding her poetry aloud. Or how I grew up reading Nancy Drew and science fiction late into the wee hours and then woke up and watched Saturday morning cartoons in black and white. But this moment with my father shattered something. Luckily, the cracks are often where we make things and the broken pieces what we make things with.
I’m stunned by that moment with your father and your struggle to understand what people around you were saying. I’m also struck by the notion of the poet as a young girl not trusting her own ears, as you say. How did you learn to make out the words all around you–and to trust yourself?
I don’t think I ever have really. I just embrace the temporality of life a bit more than usual and go with what comes across. It’s why I am not embarrassed to ask someone to pass the “lotion” for the salad or to verb nouns for decades now. I think subconsciously I suppressed my accent as a response to my father, but that shock taught me that not only is my mother unreliable, but so is the alternative, my father. I had already been disabused of the notion of unconditional love; I was holding out hope in him for at least a lasting, warm embrace. I’ve grown since that bottoming out: DNA is not all, and one can find family—and become family—elsewhere.
This is all linked to the notion that people speak to signal group intimacy; language is shaped by mutual alliances and allegiances. When family rejects your language needs, believe the message it sends and seek anew.
Do you seek out poetry by women and non-binary writers? If so, since when and why? More specifically, how has the work of feminist poets mattered in your childhood and/or your life as an adult?
I won a city-wide fiction contest for Baltimore ArtScape during my senior year of high school. It was judged by Lucille Clifton, which made a lasting impression on me. I was not a writer, but my high school English teacher, Carolyn Benfer, encouraged me tremendously. I was attending a vocational school in the city and, up to that point, was destined to become a CPA.
From there, I attended the University of Maryland at Towson State and had the good fortune to enroll as a double major in English and Women’s Studies. The latter program is especially noteworthy as the program served as the model for many other Women’s Studies programs across the country, as envisioned and spearheaded by Elaine Hedges, who was also an active feminist, affiliated with the Feminist Press. This program led me to numerous marginalized writers back in the early nineties that I likely would not have encountered so early on independently or simply from core English classes.
I cannot speak highly enough about the work that Women’s Studies program did. The short answer is that the program taught me to seek work by marginalized writers as I would be missing out on so much otherwise. I do not seek literature simply to reflect my own experiences—I seek to learn beyond them.
What groundbreaking (or ancient) works, forms, ideas and issues in poetry today interest and concern you?
There is no one work, and as such, I continue to read widely. There are so many books I have not read yet, which is thrilling. Some of my touchstones range from Cesar Vallejo to Leonora Carrington to Audre Lorde to James Baldwin to Lucille Clifton to Gertrude Stein to John Ashbery. There are numerous younger poets I look to for energy, shifts in consciousness and awareness of current cultural concerns and who also signal structural and formal changes. A handful include Billy-Rae Belcourt, Chen Chen, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Vievee Francis, Airea D. Matthews, Raquel Salas Rivera, TC Tolbert, Ocean Vuong and Phillip B. Williams—but this by no means is an exhaustive list. Check out the poets anthologized in the Bettering American Poetry series I am lucky enough to be a part of.
As a woman, and as a woman who writes, what do you need to support your work? What opportunities, support, policies and actions can/could make a direct difference for you—and for other women writers you know?
Besides the room, money and time Virginia Woolf called for, I’m beginning to find that a support network is vital. I don’t think this needs to be formal or a writing collaboration. I simply mean that it is encouraging to have regular check-ins with a small group of writers, as few as two even, where you discuss what you’re each working on, maybe share a small piece/excerpt, get feedback and discuss ideas.
It is often the idea exchange, even with just a friend on the phone, that I find generative. I find myself articulating ideas and vision in a way that is as revealing to myself as to my friend. I leave those conversations with ideas of where to head next with a poem or on what to research to build foundational ideas for a concept.
What’s next? What upcoming plans and projects excite you?
I’m outlining a memoir—fingers crossed—and writing poems. I may birth an essay down the road, but that is gestating for now. And volunteering time and support to a program called La Maison Baldwin Manuscript Mentors, a nonprofit arts and culture association that remembers and celebrates James Baldwin in Saint-Paul de Vence, to save James Baldwin’s house and turn it into a vital residency in France.
How has the current political climate in the U.S. affected you as a woman writer?
I am not so much shocked as often startled. I think we all knew white supremacy, colonialism and toxic masculinity were at the helm, but the built-in invisibilities kept them shrouded in respectability politics and notions of civility, and of course, that begs the question: Whose civility? I also don’t think we are in some unique moment of history where shocking things have taken hold and the end is nigh, but that is how it feels at times. Power and paradigm shifts are often premised on tectonic shifts, and folks have to finally step up, choose sides.
That seems key at the moment: one can no longer pretend to be above the fray. And that may be most painful for those of us with privilege. No one is outside anything after all.
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MS. MAGAZINE FEATURE - CLICK HERE - HTTPS://MSMAGAZINE.COM/2019/02/28/MS-MUSE-AMY-KING-POWER-STORIES-WEIGHT-CURRENT-POLITICAL-MOMENT/
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New for the Holidays
NEW ZINES
All Together: A Primer for Connecting to Place + Cultivating Ecological Citizenship- All Together asks us to think about our relationship with community, place, plants, climate, food, and land, helping us figure out how we can know the place we live more intimately. ($5)
Buried: A Zine About Grief and Digging Out- Both a memoir of losing parents and a guide to dealing with grief, Nicole Worthington's Buried is tender, heartbreaking, and uplifting, all at once. ($5)
Clock Tower Nine #14- In an attempt to figure out the last record he would ever sell, Danny Noonan writes the story of a skittish teenager’s discovery of punk that leads him to house shows and eventually a move across the country. ($2.50)
The Complete Speculative Red Hot Chili Peppers Fan Fiction (Second Edition)- After a long absence, the second edition of Chase Kamp's TCSRHCPFF is finally here—a gloriously odd collection of interlinked short stories based on the lives and careers of past and present members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. ($6)
Drink More Water, Be More Honest: 30 Lessons From My 20s (Second Edition)- A brand new printing of this fabulous zine from the ever-wise Sarah Mirk. A must-read zine for anyone, at any age. ($4)
Fear, Safety, & Femmes- In a series of interviews with queer women and non-binary folks, Fear, Safety, & Femmes examines what safety looks like. ($5)
The Hid Are Out: A Tribute to The Breeders- Told through short personal stories, the zine is a heartfelt tribute to the band and an example of how music can change the course of a person's life. ($3)
Offerings of Grace & Mischief #13- Part of our ongoing effort to stock everything Rachel Lee-Carman. Art studios, nettles, crows, good friends, the year of the horse, folk bands, a survey of winter vegetation, and so much more. ($5)
Proof I Exist #28- Juxtaposing his brother's substance abuse issues with his own aversion to substances, Proof I Exist #28 becomes a short memoir on family and addiction that's heart-felt and curious. ($2)
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Things Men Have Told Me About My Body- A collection of anecdotes and stories from 30+ anonymous contributors who have had men make wildly inappropriate statements about their bodies. ($5)
Tranquility, or The Virtue of Realizing Your Self-Worth- In Tranquility, César Ramirez takes on a wide array of life experiences in a small amount of space. Within: the day John Wayne shot his dad, being a teacher of color, and finding pride in a name that no one can quite say. ($5)
Under Pressure: Herbs For Resilience- Looking at the physiology of stress, the zine is a holistic guide to surviving an unhealthy culture. ($10)
Wanderer, Issue #5: A Perzine About Home, Mental Health, Self Care & DIY Music- Within: road trips, house shows, gender identity, zine mazes, and odes to initiators of fun. As well as finding ways through depression and panic attacks and hard times. ($5)
When Death Knocks- A personal zine written by Death himself. Or, more specifically, written by a lowly "Transition Officer" working for the agency of Death. A morbid and tender piece of writing from the postmortem zine scene. ($3)
Where You From #6: Home Is- Combining her long-running Keep Writing postcard project, a community art grant, and a zine series about the idea of home, Hope Amico asked people in the summer heat of New Orleans to write about how they define home. ($5)
Women in Sound #1- The issue that started it all, in stock here for the very first time. The highlight: a conversation with the legendary home recording artist Linda Smith. ($5)
NEW BOOKS
Everyday Mythologies by Joshua James Amberson- A sideways glance at the mundane myths that make up our lives. Or: three personal essays about collecting, cars, and dads (that are also about gender, masculinity, and strength). ($8)
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Stranger in the Pen by Mohamed Asem- The latest from Perfect Day Publishing, Stranger in the Pen "examines the burden of being disconnected from one's homeland, unpacks the emotional toll of racial profiling, and illuminates the quietly surprising ways in which grief can change one's life." ($10)
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2019 Lunar Phase Calendar Poster- An annual favorite. The lunar phases among night-blooming flowers by Nina and Sonya Montenegro of The Far Woods. ($18)
Curtains Sticker- A cat with a knife, sneaking out from under a curtain of leaves. From Deth P. Sun. ($1)
Metallic Eagle Owl Notepad- The latest from Eberhardt Press' legendary bird pad series: An eagle owl, metallic and properly intimidating. ($4)
NEW MUSIC
Sabriel's Orb & John Atkinson- Split Tape- Two sides of textural ambient synthscapes from some masters of minimalism. Sabriel's Orb is the latest project from Willow Skye-Biggs (Stag Hare, ariel) and John Atkinson is a film composer, formerly of the Brooklyn hypnogogic-pop group Aa. ($7)
The Washboard Abs Tape Pack- All three full-length cassettes (w/ download codes) from The Washboard Abs, for only $10. Part of a month-long benefit for Real Rent Duwamish. ($10)
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eye of the tiger [gert x chase]
Pairing: Gert Yorkes x Chase Stein
Description: Gert has been secretly training with Molly every night. Until one night Molly is just too tired and finally decides to stop training Gert, leaving her on her own... but is she really on her own?
Words: 4.707... holy fuck, oops!
Warnings: a lot of flulff! And bad words of course, cause I´m the queen of cursing.
Note: Slightly cheesy at the end, cause y’all know I die for the gertxchase feels. And I also need more of that content lmao, can Hulu be faster and start doing season 2 already???? I’m dying for them!
By the way this post looks weird af on desktop, but it looks okay in the app!
The gif, I found it on @rowansdagger blog, not sure of who made it! But God bless that soul cause it saved my life!
Also, here is my masterlist! If you’re interested on reading my work.
‘’I think this is dumb as fuck, G.’’ Molly commented as she wrapped her hands on her, now pink colored bends.
‘’What did you just say?’’, Gert asked as she frowned and walked next to her, actually a bit surprised by her choice of words. ‘’Did you just say the word fuck? Since when do you use that word?’’
‘’Ugh, yes I did! Just because it is really stupid!’’, Molly said immediately as she just looked back at Gert. ‘’It’s the 2:00 a.m., in the morning!’’
Gert just smiled at her words:
‘’You know the ‘’a.m.’’ part means morning already, right?’’, she said as she started to wrap her hands on her bends on a soft way. Her hands had some bruises, so it hurt just a little.
‘’Of course I know that, Gert! I was just making emphasis in the fact that I should be sleeping!!’’, Gert just smiled and nodded as she saw how her little sister grew in frustration. She knew it would happen sooner or later, and this time it was sooner than she thought, but right now she just needed half an hour and that would be just fine.
‘’Oh come on Mols, it’s only half an hour.’’
‘’Still G, we could be doing this with the others at normal hours of the morning, you know. Not like if we were vampires or something, and had to do everything in secret.’’
‘’Yeah, you know I can’t do that’’, Gert commented as she blushed slightly.
‘’Yes, you can.’’
‘’Maybe I can… but you know I don’t like to be seen by others. I actually hate it’’
‘’I know’’, Molly said after some minutes of silence. She of course knew about her social anxiety and all her other issues, and she totally understood her. ‘’But still! We could do this earlier in the day, or maybe even at morning and just move to another room, there is plenty of space here. The Hostel is huge!’’
‘’I don’t want them to know either Molly, I want it to be a surprise.’’
Molly just raised her eyebrows and then kind of smiled:
‘’A surprise huh, is it for all of us or for someone in specific?’’
‘’Shut up, Mols’’, Gert said as she rolled her eyes and tried to stop the blush forming on her cheeks.
‘’So, it really is for that someone!’’
‘’No, it’s not, Mols. It’s a surprise for the whole team and for me. Now shut up and let’s start before it gets later, please.’’
‘’Ugh, sometimes I can’t with you’’, Molly commented as her annoyance started to show even more. ‘’I’m too tired.’’
‘’Molly, please!’’, but Molly didn’t say anything as she neither move a single inch. ‘’Molly!’’, but she didn’t answer.
It took just a few seconds for Gert to finally start thinking on something Molly would never say no to:
‘’Molly! I promise to wake you up with waffles… with a lot of chocolate on... even marshmallows!On bed! Only if you help me one more night’’, she commented, and as she did she also saw how Molly’s smile started to get bigger and bigger.
‘’Are you for serious?’’
‘’Have I ever lied to you about waffles?’’, that comment made Molly smile bigger. It seemed impossible, but for Molly nothing was impossible.
‘’You promise?’’, Molly asked really excited, now extending her arm and offering her pinky for Gert to take.‘’Pinky promise?’’
‘’I totally do, I pinky promise Mols’’, Gert said as she took her pinky and twisted it a bit with hers.
Molly smiled and then after some seconds she just screamed ‘’watch out!’’ while attacking Gert out of nowhere, that made them both fall on the floor, with Molly above Gert, she was looking at her now totally surprised:
‘’Fuck off, Mols’’, she said, now a bit annoyed. ‘’ What the fuck was that?’’
‘’Always be ready, remember that?’’. She said with the biggest of the smiles now.
And that was just because waffles, they always fixed everything.
‘’Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just don’t do that again.’’
Molly laughed and then just helped her get up, some seconds later both totally ready and starting to combat, this time for real. They both did that every night since the team started to train, even though she didn’t train with them and they didn’t know she was training, but it was the same routine and the same movements.
It felt great.
She always saw them when they were training too, she was always with them but watching from afar, while reading a book or listening to music. Sometimes, she was just pretending to do that while she was actually watching them and their movements.
Even O.L. trained with them, especially with Chase just because they had a crazy bond going on; not even Gert knew how to explain how that was happening.
Anyways, they all decided to start training because they noticed that every time they left the hostel to look for supplies or food, they always encountered a new danger. Like for example a new gang of bad guys or some weird and crazy villain, on a lower scale that didn’t need the help of The Avengers or even the police, of course.
Even if the police was as evil as their parents, but anyways!
After 3 minor incidents happened where at least one of them got out of slightly hurt, they decided that they needed to be a little bit more prepared if they didn’t want to die, or worse, be caught by the police and their parents.
Gert decided that she couldn’t be part of it, but two nights after they started training she couldn’t sleep for some reason, so she decided to go for a walk. She ended up going to that part of the Hostel where they usually trained and after some minutes of just walking around it, she just tried some of the movements she saw them making that same morning.
She felt weird at first because she didn’t have any crazy superpowers like Karo, Molly and Nico had. Neither she was strong or muscled like Chase, nor didn’t she know all the weird but cool tactics Alex knew to fight thanks to his video games.
She felt just... out of place.
That was actually one of the main reasons she didn’t want to train with them, but in those few minutes that she was trying to train by herself she even felt worse than she thought she would, just because she felt that she was doing it wrong.
Until Molly appeared of course, she actually just let herself be seen by Gert because she followed her after she left the room they all were sleeping in after watching a movie some minutes ago, so Molly actually had been seeing her for almost 20 minutes.
Gert wanted to die when she saw her, she felt ashamed and shy of herself. But Molly didn’t let that happen, she actually encouraged her to keep going and at the end she even helped her to train, showing Gert how the movements had to be done.
Since that night they had that little system; while everyone was sleeping she left O.L. with Chase, and after some minutes she just reunited with Molly downstairs and started her training.
It was a good system, until Molly started to feel too tired to even try to function right during the days. Even Gert was starting to feel exhausted, so she knew that it was going to happen pretty soon, and tonight she was sure it was the last night.
But at least she learnt from Molly as much as she could, Gert thought. She also thought that she was getting faster; she could even say that she was feeling stronger and if she was honest, she really liked it. It felt just right.
‘’Alright, we are done’’, Gert said 45 minutes later, as she kept lying on the floor. She had bruises all over her body and right now she was feeling like someone was passing over her with a bus, she was really tired.
She already had thousands of bruises, but tonight the list was going to grow. No one noticed her bruises though, or well, maybe that’s what she thought.
‘’Of course we are’’, Molly said as she got up immediately and then just yawned. ‘’Tomorrow Gertrude Yorkes, remember my waffles. If not, consider yourself done.’’
Gert just smiled as she watched her little sister slowly leave the room, she was noticeably tired:
‘’Don’t worry, goodnight and hope you sleep well bruiser!’’
‘’Don’t call me like that!!’’, she said as she frowned and kept walking away. ‘’You know I hate it’’
‘’Sure, thanks for everything Mols!’’
‘’Yeah, yeah!’’
‘’I love you!’’, Gert just smiled at her response and kept lying there; slowly closing her eyes as she tried to gain some more energies again. Tonight it was the last one, so they trained harder than they ever did before.
She was tired; actually more than tired she was fucking exhausted. She had to pretend everything was normal, so she woke up with them every day at 8:00 am, even though she usually fell asleep at 3:30am every night, so she, of course needed more sleep.
She actually needed some vacations.
And the most important thing now, she needed a warm shower.
But right now she was just laying there, without glasses and with her hair on a high bun, something she never did. Also, she was using the sportiest clothes she could find on her little closet. She didn’t look like her best and she knew it, besides she was all sweaty and feeling dirty, but she didn’t care right now because the only one that saw her like that was Molly.
Or so she thought.
‘’Gert?’’, a really familiar voice suddenly asked.
‘’Fuck’’, she thought just as she opened her eyes and looked at him there, looking at her from above. His hair was messy and the way the light was shining above him made him seem like a literal God. ‘’Fuck, fuck, fuck’’
‘’Are you okay?’’, he asked again.
‘’Hey Chase’’, she slowly blushed as she just kept lying on the floor. She could see him and even if she saw him kind of blurry because of her lack of glasses, she knew he was smiling now. That smile she noticed was reserved only for her. ‘’Yeah! Of course I’m okay, why wouldn’t I be?’’
‘’Well, first… you’re lying on the floor and from there’’, he pointed at the top of the stairs where O.L. was now watching them as he sat like a huge, nice dog, ‘’if I’m honest, it looks like you are dead. It’s also 3:30 am, so... you know.’’
‘’Well, as you can see from the conversation we are both having right now, I’m not dead. So yeah, I’m okay Chase.’’ Gert smiled as she slowly sat on the floor, crossing her legs and trying to not maintain eye contact with him.
‘’Then what’s up, dear?’’, Chase asked as he just sat down in front of her. Gert taking a deep sigh immediately as he did that. He was on his pj’s, just as she left him like an hour ago.
Sometimes... well, most of the time they used to fall asleep together, they were sure no one knew about it. But of course everyone did know about it.
‘’I don’t know, what’s down?’’, that comment made Chase laugh, so he just bit his lip. Gert watched him as he did that, and in that moment she wished she had her glasses just to detail him better.
‘’What are you doing here and… like this?’’, he asked again as Gert just looked at him, she really didn’t know what to say so she just looked at him like she was judging him. ‘’By the way, you look adorable Gert. If I’m honest.’’
‘’God’’, she just thought as she rolled her eyes and looked at him, and then she just smiled a bit just because she couldn’t help it.
‘’Really adorable’’, he added with a little smile.
‘’Well, thanks… and nothing, really nothing Chase, I’m just here… chilling, don’t you see’’, she shrugged as she looked down; some seconds later she just heard him scoff.
‘’You’re never going to tell me, right?’’
‘’Tell you what?’’, she looked at him again.
‘’What you’ve been doing, G’’
‘’And what exactly I’ve been doing, Stein?’’, she asked as she raised an eyebrow.
‘’I notice how many bruises you get every day, you knew that, right?’’, Chase said as he raised his eyebrows. ‘We sleep together, G. I notice.’’
‘’So what?’’, Gert asked again, pretending to not know what he meant as her anxiety was growing inside and not slowly.
‘’Well, if you want an elaborated and detailed inform of what you’ve been doing these past weeks I think that’s going to take me more than a bit. But long story short, I know that today you finally perfected that kick you’ve been dying to do since two weeks ago, darling.’’
Gert’s face went expressionless as she felt how her cheeks started to feel warmer and warmer. Holy shit, that’s all her mind could think on right now as now she knew that he knew and that he has probably been…
‘’I’ve been seeing you, and Mols... every night’’, he just confirmed her. That affirmation made her close her eyes as she felt ashamed, but mostly shy of herself. ‘’I also feel when you leave the bed, you know… I can’t really sleep without you.’’
‘’Well’’, she said as she looked at him again, even more blushed by his second confession. ‘’Today is the last night you will ever see that, cause Molly doesn’t want to help me anymore.’’
‘’Yeah, and it’s a total shame G’’, he said as he just smiled and Gert looked at him confused. ‘’But now it’s going to be so much better, trust me’’
‘’What do you mean?’’, she just asked that, looking at him on a weird way.
‘’Yeah! Great you ask, cause now I’m going to be your trainer!’’, he said now with his biggest smile ever as he then kind of did jazz hands. Gert just looked at him on a weird way as her cheeks started to feel hotter, not even warmer but just hotter. ‘’Yayyy!’’
‘’What?! B-but… I’m not asking you, Chase!’’
‘’I know you’re not! That’s why I’m proposing myself, I’m not asking you either. I’m just saying that I will be your trainer’’
‘’But Chase, what the f…’’
‘’Oh, come on muffin lips…’’
‘’Don’t call me like that’’, she cut his words almost immediately.
‘’Alright, Gertrude’’, Chase said on a funny way as he kept smiling and she just rolled her eyes. ‘’We both know you want to keep training’’
‘’Well, yeah of course I do Chase, b-‘’
‘’But nothing, G! I want to be your trainer’’, he said as he kept looking at her, but now with big puppy eyes.
‘’Chase’’, he knew those eyes never failed with her.
‘’Please, let me be your trainer’’, he said or well, more like he begged her.
‘’Ugh, alright Chase’’, she said after some seconds, rolling her eyes and then just looking at him, trying to hold her smile. ‘’You can be my trainer from now on, are you happy?’’
‘’Great! Of course I’m happy’’, he said as he smiled bigger and bigger. He felt that was his opportunity to get closer to Gert again, he needed it to happen even if she seemed to have gotten over him.
And he also wanted to help her train by the way, because he always saw how happy she was when she was training so he didn’t want that little piece of happiness to stop for her.
‘’But!’’, she quickly added.
‘’Oh my god’’
‘’Yeah, you know there is a but… I only accept if you don’t try to teach me how to kick’’, Gert said now while smiling.
‘’What do you even mean?’’
‘’Oh Chase, I didn’t want to be the one to break the news for you, but you really don’t know how to kick’’
‘’Oh! So now you’re saying you’re better than me, huh!’’, Chase said as he smiled at her.
‘’Well, I didn’t say that but… you’re not lying either…’’ Gert shrugged as she bit her lip on a playful way.
‘’Does this means what I think it does?’’
‘’I don’t know, what’s that?’’
‘’Are you challenging me now?’’
‘’Oh, hell yeah I am’’, she said as she just got up, suddenly feeling all energetic again.
‘’Ohh, alright. Let’s dot this’’ Chase said as he got up, taking his phone from the floor and unlocking it. They all had phones, but none of them worked like they should do, so they were practically just iPods without apps and internet.
Really boring to be honest, but at least they worked for music.
‘’What are you doing… pumpkin eyes?’’, she quickly whispered the nickname she gave him some years ago, just loud enough for him to hear as well.
So when he heard her calling him by his old nickname, his eyes couldn’t get brighter and his heartbeat couldn’t get faster, he just smiled and kept looking for the song:
‘’If we are going to train then it’s gonna be on my rules, muffin lips’’, he smiled as he played the song.
Gert frowned just as soon as she heard the intro. It was Eye Of The Tiger.
‘’Oh my god, what the fuck?’’, and then just laughed. ‘’Are we suddenly inside a Rocky movie, or what?’’
‘’Oh come on! It’s good for training!’’
‘’If we were living on the 80’s, for sure it is!’’, she said, just kidding though.
‘’So what? You love the 80’s!’’ Chase pointed out as he smiled.
‘’Alright, whatever’’, she just rolled her eyes and fixed her bun, all while smiling. Chase couldn’t help but smile like an idiot as well. ‘’I hope the next song after this one gets better, though.’’
‘’It’s the same song.’’
‘’What do you mean by it’s the same song?’’
‘’It’s a playlist, dear’’ he then showed her the phone, scrolling down the playlist as it showed the same song over and over, and over again.
‘’Oh my god, Chase!’’, Gert just laughed as she just kind of leant herself back. ‘’I can’t believe you.’’
‘’Well, you like me like this after all’’, he just shrugged as he left the phone on the floor.
‘’Yep, I do… anyways, let’s start!’’ Gert said quickly again, as she tried to avoid the little affirmation she made after he said that.
This must be Chase’s lucky day… or night, technically. His heart felt like it was filled with emotion as his cheeks got redder. She never admitted it like that; she has actually never said something like that. Ever.
‘’Alright!’’, and then they just got in position.
It seemed like they were actually going to fight, but it was never really close to it. They basically just played with each other as they laughed and playfully bumped each other, they were just having fun and they liked it.
They missed goofing like that.
They all lived under the same roof as a team, it was weird to have those kind of intimate moments with the person you liked, and even trying to make a movement was weird because there was always someone else in the room so you were never really alone.
And the walls were thin, so somehow everyone always knew what was up with the others. Nothing was a secret, and if it was then everyone knew about it but no one talked about it. It was like a non-written rule.
So having moments like those were really appreciated. Chase felt free; doing something he always wanted to do with one of his favorite persons in the whole world was something that made him feel free.
Gert felt completed, for a moment she felt like nothing else but her little game with Chase was what mattered. No anxiety attacks, no panic, no depression pills were even on her mind. She felt good.
Both felt freed and completed, like they finally found the thing that was missing on their lives. The thing that they lost by acting like they never were friends some years ago. But now it was back, and way stronger than before.
‘’Chase! Your phone!’’, Gert said out loud as she kept running. He stopped to look at her as she just hit herself against him just because she didn’t stop, as soon as that happened she fell above him on the floor.
‘’Sorry’’, she said as her cheeks got redder than they already were.
‘’Don’t worry’’, Chase answered immediately as he was gasping and looking at her. None of them moved, none of them wanted to move actually, just because they both were waiting for the same.
But, as usual on their weird relationship, none of them did it even if the desire was showing in their eyes.
Suddenly the atmosphere on the room quiet down. The laughter and banter disappeared as there was only a little tension on the air, it neither was uncomfortable nor weird, just the kind of tension they both have been wanting to break since they started to be friends again.
‘’I-‘’, Gert started to say as she slowly moved to get up, but Chase was faster. And even if she was stronger now, she really wanted that too so she didn’t even made an effort on stopping him.
‘’No, don’t leave’’, Chase suddenly said as he made her get closer, taking her by her waist. ‘’Please’’
‘’… make me stay’’, Gert suddenly said. After that, there was definitely nothing that could stop them.
Gert suddenly took Chase by his neck as he pulled her a bit closer to his face, none of them kissed first; it was more like a mutual and non-spoken decision just because they both wanted it. They both needed it.
First it was a really wild kiss, both wanting the most of each other as their hands touched the most that they could. They both were desperate, they both were hungry for each other because they have been trying to hide it for so long but at the end nothing could really stop them from doing that.
They both have been craving it since the last time they touched like that, since that night they boosted their parents. But it was also the night they both touched heaven and hell at the same time, and they will never forget about that.
Chase has been repeating the moment on his mind over and over again; meanwhile Gert has been regretting what she told him after what happened. The anxiety won over her that night, and after some time Chase knew that was what actually happened.
Both seemed to have forgotten about it, both tried to forget about it, but none of them really did it. They wanted to repeat it all over and over again.
In the middle of the kiss, Chase suddenly took over; rolling over the floor and getting above her as now his hands were on her neck, showing a slightly dominance as Gert slowly started to caress his back on a slow way, even almost undressing him.
As Chase took over, the kiss also slowed down; it suddenly got sweeter and even romantic.
They felt like old lovers that were finally reuniting after spending some time separated. They were loving it, Gert couldn’t stop thinking on how much she missed his lips, on how much she was craving his touch and on how much she was in love with him.
Meanwhile Chase only had on his mind how happy he was right now; how nothing or no one could compare to her and her touch, her kisses, and her body. How no one could ever be like her and how no one could ever top the love that he felt for her. He was so in love, and he could finally admit it.
Suddenly Chase’s lips took another direction and he soon started to kiss her neck on a really slow way, making her feel better as she wasn’t able to stop smiling. He stopped on the middle of her neck as he whispered something that was incomprehensible for her.
‘’What?’’, Gert said on a fragile and even sensual voice. That voice made Chase get crazy as he has only heard that voice once.
And oh, he missed it.
‘’God, I fucking love you’’, he said as he went back to her lips and started to kiss her immediately. She was shocked about what he said, she couldn’t believe what he just said but the way her heart was racing couldn’t say it more, she fucking loved him as well.
‘’Oh my god!’’, the sound of Karo’s voice made them both stop as they looked at the top of the stairs. Karolina was there, looking at them in total shock as Old Lace was on her feet, moving her tail as a huge dog. ‘’Get a room you guys, what the hell!’’
And just as soon as she appeared out of nowhere, she just left. Her face said it all, it was a total poem and oh, everybody was going to know about it.
‘’Dammit’’, they both thought.
‘’Huh...’’, Chase finally broke the silence.
‘’I- I think we should go back to sleep’’, Gert said as she looked back at Chase.
His cheeks were as red as a tomato and she couldn’t even stop her smile, just because he looked adorable.
‘’Yeah... yeah. You’re right’’ Chase then looked back at her again and then just smiled. ‘’I’m sorry.’’
‘’It’s totally perfect Chase, you know it’’
Both smiled and then they just got up, Chase finally stopping the playlist as they both started to walk upstairs. They were quiet and noticeably nervous, both of them really were.
Gert couldn’t stop playing with her bracelet, meanwhile Chase was breathing on a really weird way. Their minds were racing because both wanted to say many things, but as always no one said anything first, so no one said a single word about what just happened.
Some seconds later Gert suddenly stopped just as Chase kept walking to their usual room, he then just stopped with a sleepy Old Lace next to him when he noticed that she stopped.
‘’I’ll... I’ll take a shower, you know’’, Gert said as she smiled and he started to walk back to her.
‘’Oh’’
‘’Yeah’’, she nodded.
He smiled and after that they both got quiet, it wasn’t uncomfortable nor weird. It was just the fact that they were just really nervous and didn’t want to leave things hanging on like before, of course.
They actually just wanted to keep going. But again, none of them did nothing.
‘’Oh yeah, shower, sure! I should get going... you know’’, he just smiled and then just started to walk.
‘’Wait, Chase!’’, she suddenly took him by his hand and just pulled him back, making him get closer.
She then just took him by his neck and suddenly kissed him, getting on tiptoes as he just closed his eyes and tried not to smile during the kiss, it was the most sincere and sweet kiss ever, and he wanted it to last as much as it could.
It would never stop feeling as the best thing he has ever done, and it felt the same for her.
‘’You know I hope you really meant that thing you said back there... cause I do too... I love you too, Chase’’, she just smiled and then just went inside the bathroom, leaving a smiley Chase outside of it.
They both immediately laid on the door, closing their eyes as they both felt their hearts racing. Now they knew it and they could declare it, they were really in love and nothing could stop them from feeling that way.
‘’Dammit, I love you so much.’’ They both whispered after some seconds, still laying on the bathroom door. They totally heard each other and nothing could stop them from smiling the way they were.
Just as the way they were feeling.
So freaking cuteeeee jhfksjhf I love them so much, I wanna die byeeeee. So if you wanna read more of my work here is my masterlist! (I have another gert x chase imagine) and also if you wanna follow me, you totally can! Thanks for reading lol. By the way this post looks weird af on desktop, but it looks okay in the app!
#chase stein#gert yorkes#gertrude yorkes#chase x gert#GertChase#gert x chase#the gert x chase feels#Marvel's Runaways#jul talks marvel's runaways#jul talks#jul writes#jul rambles#zpidey-sense#zpidey-sense writes!#zpidey-sense writing#chase#gert#marvel comics#marvel fanfic#fan fiction#marvel#imagines#marvel lover
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How a small African figurine changed art
Folk art from Africa and the Pacific changed the modern world by pushing Western artists to be more confrontational, writes Fisun Güner.
A small seated figurine from the Vili people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo was instrumental in the lives of two of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. The carved figure in wood, with its large upturned face, long torso, disproportionately short legs and tiny feet and hands, was purchased in a curio shop in Paris by Henri Matisse in 1906. The French artist, who liked to fill his studio with exotic trinkets and objets d’art, objects that would then appear in his paintings, paid a pittance for it.
Yet when he showed it to Pablo Picasso at the home of the art patron and avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, its impact on the young Spaniard was profound, just as it was, though to an arguably lesser extent, on Matisse when the compact but powerful figure had fortuitously caught his eye.
For Picasso, his appetite whetted, visits to the African section of the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro inevitably followed. And so precocious was the 24-year-old artist that it seemed that he had already absorbed all that European art had to offer. Hungry for something radically different, something almost entirely new to the Western gaze that might provide fresh and dynamic impetus to his feverish creative energies, Picasso became captivated by the dramatic masks, totems, fetishes and carved figures on display, just as he had with the Iberian stone sculptures of ancient Spain which he also sourced as material. Here, however, was something altogether different, altogether more dynamic and visceral.
When, after hundreds of preparatory paintings and drawings, he finally unveiled his breakthrough proto-Cubist masterpiece, the 8 sq ft Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, even his most avant-garde friends were shocked. Surely he had gone too far. What confronted them in his Montmartre studio, in that late Summer of 1907 (though the painting wasn’t exhibited publicly until 1916) was brutal and disconcerting. Five women, three of whom stare back at the viewer with huge, fierce eyes, were arranged in various confrontational poses and aggressively sexualised attitudes. The three women to the right have the smooth, though now distorted, features he took from Iberian carved heads, while the two ‘Africanised’ women to the left have the dark facial markings that resemble scarified flesh, or perhaps the texture and hue of roughly hacked wood. Their faces are all somewhat mask-like.
But it wasn’t just the small Congolese figure that had provided the spur and turning point for Picasso’s work – and you can see this figure currently in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Matisse in the Studio, along with other objects Matisse kept that informed his painting and sculpture. It was the companionable rivalry provided by this new relationship with the older French artist, for Matisse was, at that point, the far more experimental and radical artist – the leading Fauve, or ‘Wild Beast’.
Matisse had painted his multi-coloured, dream-pastoral Le Bonheur de Vivre in 1906, the year he bought the African figurine and the year the two artists met (and he was soon experimenting with his own ‘Africanised’ nudes), and Les Demoiselles was painted partly in answer to it. Picasso was intent on painting something even more radical and daring, a work that would leave its mark, which, for the last 110 years it certainly has.
But Matisse wasn’t the first artist to appropriate non-Western art. Primitivism, as it came to be known, was beginning to be embraced by artists in France at the end of the 19th Century, though some of its roots go back further, to the pastoral paintings of a golden age of the Neo-Classical period. And although fundamental to it, it wasn’t only non-Western artefacts that were of interest. Children’s art, and later the art of the mentally ill, so-called outsider art and folk art were significant contributions to the evolution of modernism, not just in visual art but in music too.
Back to basics
Matisse himself was always fascinated by the drawings of his own children and saw within them possibilities for the direction of his own work. That interest, too, was followed through by Picasso, who later famously remarked that, “Every childis an artist. The problem is how to remain an artistonce he grows up.”
What was taken from each category of art produced from these non-conventional sources, was a sense of spontaneity, of innocence, of a creative impulse not suffocated by academic fine art training or indeed by Western values, which were beginning to be seen in some intellectual and avant-garde circles as corrupt and decadent or as simply a spent force. The unmediated, the unspoiled and the authentic was what was now prized, and that included art that expressed the artist’s inner world, or what emerged in the 20th Century as the unconscious. Art, in other words, unfettered by the supposed artificial values of bourgeois society.
Though naivety and lack of sophistication was hardly true of either African art or art from other non-Western cultures, artists were struck by a directness, a pared-down simplicity and a non-naturalism that they discovered in these objects. But no thought was given to what these artefacts might actually mean, nor to any understanding of the unique cultures from which they derived. The politics of colonialism was not even in its infancy.
The Trocadéro museum, which had so impressed Picasso, had opened in 1878, with artefacts plundered from the French colonies. Today’s curators, including those of the Royal Academy’s Matisse exhibition in which African masks and figures from the artist’s collection appear, at least seek to acknowledge and redress this to a small extent. A similar effort was made earlier this year for Picasso Primitif at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, an exhibition exploring Picasso’s life-long relationship to African art. The sculptures, from West and Central Africa, were given as much space and importance as Picasso’s own work and one could appreciate at first hand the close correspondence between the works.
Meanwhile, the Art Institute of Chicago has an exhibition that looks at the creative process of an artist who was profoundly influenced by art from French Polynesia and who in turn was a particular influence on Matisse – those colour-saturated dream-like pastoral paintings again, including the early Le Bonheur de Vivre mentioned above. Paul Gauguin, perhaps the quintessential European artist to ‘go native’, first in Martinique, then in Tahiti, where he died in 1903 aged 54, had long felt a disgust at Western civilisation, its perceived inauthenticity and spiritual emptiness.
Even before he left European shores for good he had lived in an artist’s colony in Brittany, painting the deeply religious peasant women in traditional Breton dress. These paintings, such as Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888, possess a rather unsettling and erotic sense of the numinous, as do his Tahiti paintings, with their piquant mix of sex and death. Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist shows us an artist fully immersed in the life from which his art was born.
The significance of non-European art on the avant-garde and on 20th-Century art modernism can’t be overestimated. It goes far beyond these three prominent artists, though all three were particularly instrumental in spreading its impact, from the Surrealists to Jackson Pollock. And even nearer our own time, seemingly long after the fascination with the primitif had been exhausted, the ritualised performance-land art of Ana Mendieta and the energetic postmodern faux-tribal paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat saw that it certainly hadn’t.
~
Fisun Güner · 21st August 2017.
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Writer/Artist Lauren Moya Ford’s essay about my work:
Lauren Moya Ford
Un detalle
Yesterday I entered an old church that happened to be open during the siesta hour. Statues of Mary and Joseph on the altar were surrounded by gilded arabesques and angel heads. Tall white candles flickered soft animation into the carved forms while clusters of chrysanthemums withered below, turning the scene into tableau vivant. Like the altar, Ashley Thomas’ meticulous, large scale drawings are also containers for contemplation and meditation. Made for long views, her works create a space to slow down and hold. And like this scene of slow wax, petals, and shadows, the objects in Thomas’ work are mechanisms of meanings and memories that move and shift.
I remember him... with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, as though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn til that of evening, a whole lifetime...
-Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” 1942
In Spanish, the word detalle means detail, but it can also mean an unexpected gift or thoughtful act. Like so much women’s work, the execution of detail in Thomas’ drawings is both painstaking and generous. Drawn at life size or larger, the works recenter traits that women have been taught to invest in the people and things around them- patience, focus, and care- into the precision of her work. And so the drawings constitute a visual document of her labor, a register of beauty and effort. Representing subjects in this hyper-focused manner reconfigures their function and connotation inside and outside of the picture, what Gabriel Orozco calls “analyzing the economics and politics of the instruments of living” (2003).
The objects that Thomas portrays are carefully chosen, and the artist’s hand and attention lends them new meaning. As Thomas’ subjects cross from materiality to two dimensions, they also cross conceptual, geographic, and temporal borders. In several pieces, monarch butterflies appear. This endangered insect’s annual immigration from the United States to Michoacán, Mexico remains unobstructed despite ongoing border control debates. In other works, a single rose may signal a number of Mexican American tropes, from Juan Diego’s rose-filled tilma in the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to Selena Quintanilla Pérez (1971-1995), a fellow Corpus Christi native who continues to play a fundamental role in tejan@ identity, to popular tattoos and others. Femmy and firm, natural and man-made, here and there, Thomas’ subjects function as beautiful objects while they also link to a specific place and experience- the narratives that propel environmental, personal, and political lives between the US and Mexico.
A fringed leather cowboy vest, a pumice molcajete, and votive candles are all familiar objects to those from Texas, especially to those who grew up in Mexican American families. The objects are proofs of the female labor that we have observed in the daily lives of our mothers and grandmothers, but may not repeat faithfully in our own. Still, we hold onto these relics (clothing, utensils, and candles) and rituals (dressing, cooking, and praying) as talismans of something close, like a ring that we don't wear but will not allow ourselves to lose. We grow up hearing stories about our mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives, lives that were harder and more Mexican than our own. But memories are shapeshifters. The stories become so ingrained in us that they begin to blur. Which of us didn’t go to the dance because we knew we wouldn’t be allowed in? Which of us ate rose petals out of hunger? Which of us was hit by that hand? Thomas mines the memories that exist between our female antecedents and our own present realities. These stories form a personal archive that she translates onto the subjects of her drawings. Her gracefully drawn arrangements evoke an empowered imaginary space where meaning is opened, events can shift, but remembrance remains a strength.
Where do my artists go
with the beautiful treasure
of the Aztec monarchy?
You all have the sap
so that immense knowledge
does not rust.
-from Consuelo González Amezcúa, Artistas de Talento (Artists of Talent), date unknown
Votive candles are found in the grocery stores, botánicas, and altars of Texas. The candles exist in a loose relationship to the Catholic faith, but they increasingly function beyond the bounds of dogma. Unlike the unmarked candles found in churches, these votives’ glass exteriors display saints, good luck charms, and other iconography, along with Spanish and English prayers. The images show the candles’ intended purpose- bestowing positive energies (blessing, protection, peace), attracting material entities (new lovers, jobs, money), or even inflicting revenge or malice on others. Regardless of their aim, these candles serve as containers for and executors of the holder’s wishes. As time passes, their disappearing wax marks the increment of the votive’s operation and the stamina of the holder’s devotion.
It is fitting that Thomas depicts the candles in triptych, a format tied to the material shifts between god, flesh, and spirit. Produced by bees and ignited by fire, candles embody the natural and the corporeal as they mark the passage of time. Wax has long been a sacred stand in for the human body. Indeed, at a church in the Portuguese countryside I saw a cabinet full of life-sized wax body parts, and another time I found a Spanish cave with wax figurines of body parts hanging from the ceiling. Like the votives in Texas, these wax figures represent human afflictions that require or have been granted divine intercession. And since the votives depict holy figures and prayers, their proper disposal, like a human body, is by burning or burial.
The votives in Thomas’ drawings belong to the domestic sphere, where memories are kept, things are made, and prayers are said. Lighting these candles is an act of faith that puts the holder in direct engagement with the power of objects. To light a candle for someone or something is to keep it in your thoughts, to hope or wish for it, or to simply show that you remember it. Thomas’ votives are body-sized, a scale at which their life spans would far surpass hours, days, and even weeks. As long as the candle is lit it’s alive and working. We see that Thomas’ candles will protect for a long time.
There are many that I knew and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it... This is now a history of the way I love it.
-from Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1925
Thomas’ practice is based in a lineage of women- makers, mothers, writers, thinkers, sisters, and singers- who act as catalysts in her work. Consuelo “Chelo” González Amezcúa (1903-1975) is one of these women. She and Thomas share a geography- the South Texas Borderlands- and a fascination with the layers of identity they experience as women, artists, and tejanas. Like Thomas, Amezcúa was a maker of detailed drawings. She was also a poet. Thomas treats one of Amezcúa’s poems as the subject of her recent work, Consuelo González Amezcúa's Handwriting (2017). In the 1965 poem, Amezcúa proclaims herself to be a “Mexico Texan / Raised in the city / of Del Rio Texas / Citizen of the U.S.A.” This first line evidences the confluence of identities that Amezcúa and so many others like her continue to navigate in today’s fierce and uncertain political climate. Later on, Amezcúa credits a list of encouraging teachers who are mostly Anglo, something my grandmother also did when asked about her too-brief encounter with institutional education. This recognition parallels the tribute that Thomas pays in her 2017 drawing by placing another woman’s words and life story at the center of her own work. Thomas’ piece amplifies Amezcúa’s poem to body-size, so that the words hang like the text of a banner or flag. As an additional offering, Thomas has drawn daisies and roses around the edges of the poem, a nod to the flowers that one leaves at an altar.
Amezcúa has been labeled as an outsider artist, and her artwork and especially her poetry is not widely seen. Thomas discovered Amezcúa’s work in a book at an antique mall, and then investigated further at the Special Collections of the University of Texas Benson Library. The artist excavates Amezcúa’s text from the archive and re-presents it at a large scale, re-figuring it in the context of a visual artwork in which Amezcúa’s handwriting is a disembodied stand in for the poet herself. By making Amezcúa’s words a pictorial subject, Thomas foregrounds Amezcúa’s writing practice and autobiographical voice, returning agency to this lesser-known figure of Texan art history. And so there is a continuity in this work, not only because both women are meticulous drawers from South Texas, but also because one woman’s experience and outlook is grafted onto another through the creative works that Thomas and Amezcúa produce decades apart. A dialog is transmitted back and forth between past and present, between drawing and writing, and between Thomas’ and Amezcúa’s hands.
The artist’s relationship to antepasadas (female antecedents) like Amezcúa is a close one- she engages their ideas and personae through research, reexamination, and commemoration in her work. For Thomas, memory is an ongoing, ever-widening site. She keeps vigil for the women who came before. She does not forget. She lights a candle for them and keeps it burning.
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Every Possible Landform and Weather Condition and Natural Disaster: An Interview with Matthew Baker https://ift.tt/3j3hMzr
Matthew Baker’s second collection of short stories, Why Visit America (out now from Henry Holt), takes ambitious aim at this country’s societal and political systems. Each story arrives through some manner of warped lens—a lens in which America, at first, appears very unfamiliar. New technologies, new borders, new pandemics. But the deeper into these stories you read, the more you recognize similar dangers at play in our own United States. The stories quickly cohere into a comprehensive map of current anxieties and existential interrogations. And that’s where the collection’s genius becomes most apparent: when you suddenly realize your expectations and assumptions about core American values have been constructively turned upside-down. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew Baker about his new collection over email in July.
Alexander Lumans: Let’s start with the collection’s title, Why Visit America. Since it shares titles with one of your stories, I’m curious as to when and how you arrived at this particular title. What kind of mood or impression do you hope it casts over the entire book? Does this intention reflect any of your current feelings about our country and its fractured state?
Matthew Baker: The concept for the title story came to me in 2012. At the time, I had recently moved to Ireland; I had never lived in another country before, and the subtle cultural differences between the United States and Ireland illuminated certain characteristics of the United States for me with sudden clarity. At that point I’d already written “Fighting Words” and “Appearance” and “To Be Read Backward” and had been thinking about the possibility of assembling a collection of speculative fiction. And then one night the premise for “Why Visit America” came to me. I didn’t actually write the story until years later, but to me that title seemed like the perfect organizing principle for the collection. I realized that the collection itself could function as a guidebook.
AL: Can you talk a little bit more about this notion of the collection as a “guidebook”?
MB: Each of the stories in the book is set in a different parallel-universe United States. I loved the idea, though, that over the course of the book the stories could form a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.
AL: Your stories contain many elements that feel perfectly prophetic, as if they came from a more speculative-natured DeLillo. For example, in “Lost Souls,” there’s a worldwide pandemic of infants born without souls (which causes them to die), and right now our world is living through a life-threatening viral pandemic. While writing these stories, how much were you imagining the probability of these fictions becoming reality?
MB: Zero, honestly. I wasn’t trying to write prophetic fiction. Then again, I was born on an election day—maybe that gives me some seer-like ability to peer into the future of the nation.
AL: When you write, what are you searching for? Or another way to put it: from which anxieties, observations, and/or experiences did these stories rise?
MB: For this book, although all of the stories are speculative, I was specifically looking for concepts that would give me a way to write about the social and political systems of the real world. I wanted to examine the fundamental assumptions underlying the structures of American society. Take “Life Sentence,” for example. That story didn’t start with the question, “What would be an interesting way to use a technology that can erase memories?” The story started with the question, “What’s an alternative system of punishment that could be used to replace prisons?”
AL: When I first talked to you about this collection a year ago, you mentioned that one of the “rules” you gave yourself was that you had to name all fifty states somewhere in the book, and (if I remember correctly) you wanted to name them only one time. Are there other easter eggs we should look for or “rules” you worked within for the collection?
MB: Yeah, because the collection is meant to function as a guidebook of sorts, I’d decided that all fifty states needed to be included, and also that each of the stories should be set in a different city or region of the country (although there is some overlap, for instance in that “The Sponsor” begins in Massachusetts but ends in DC and “One Big Happy Family” begins in DC and ends in Florida). But that was only the beginning. I’d also decided that the collection should include as many native species of flora and fauna as possible. As many classic American foods, American sports, American styles of clothing, American genres of music. Every possible landform and weather condition and natural disaster that one can encounter in the continental United States. I had a lot of fun with that detail work. But there are some things I never found a way to include—mountain goats, or chowder, or dodgeball, for example—which haunts me.
AL: It’s immensely clear from the work how much fun you must’ve had creating these stories. When you’re writing, how do you best encourage or create the space for fun to become part of the storytelling process?
MB: It’s not always fun, to be honest. Some days—many days—are just grinding. I’ve found that reading for a while before writing can help spark that playful spirit, though. Like how watching somebody else doing tricks on a skateboard can make you want to hop onto a skateboard and try to do some tricks too.
AL: This collection absolutely demonstrates your love of lists (and I love your lists so much!). Some of them are prodigious in size (“The Tour,” “Lost Souls,” “One Big Happy Family”) while others are small and spare but then accumulate over the course of a single story (“To Be Read Backward,” “Rites,” “Life Sentence”). What is it about lists that excites you?
MB: For better or worse, I think that’s just the way that my brain operates. I love programming languages, and when I first began to code, I was amazed to discover that every programming language has a fundamental data structure—what in many programming languages is called an “array”—whose sole purpose is to store lists of information. I was so excited by that—I felt an immediate affinity—I think because lists are so fundamental to how my brain organizes and processes information about the world around me. I can’t possibly express how much that lists delight me. In prose, I especially love when a list somehow builds to a climax or a sudden subversion of expectations, like a sequence of music notes building to a finale or a sudden change of key.
AL: In many of your stories, the point of view was one step removed from the character that other writers might choose as their storytelling lens. For example, there’s the large cast of POVs (most inhabited only once) in “One Big Happy Family”; yet, even though the detective appears in essentially every scene, we inhabit his POV for only a small part of the story. What is it about these “once-removed” POVs that appeals to you? What do they allow for?
MB: That’s thanks to Gabriel García Márquez. I first read his stories at the age of twenty, and was immediately fascinated by what to me was an entirely new genre of storytelling—not the genre of “magical realism,” although that’s the category that his stories are often assigned to, but instead the genre of the “community spectacle.” Maybe the quintessential example is “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” Initially the most interesting character in that story might seem to be the very old man with enormous wings, and yet it’s not a story about him at all—instead it’s the story of the community in which he suddenly appears, and the various ways that the community reacts to and is changed by the spectacle of his appearance. I noticed García Márquez returning to that narrative formula again and again and again—the story of a community reacting to and being changed by some spectacle—and eventually came to realize that there was something about that setup that was profoundly compelling to me. For Why Visit America in particular, I found that “community spectacle” setup to be the perfect angle for exploring the conflict between individualism and collectivism in the United States, and the self-declared American POV of “We the People.”
AL: Gertrude Stein said that “A sentence isn’t emotional, a paragraph is,” which has intrigued me in terms of a paragraph’s various potentials. Furthermore, I’m always interested in how a writer uses their paragraphs; and I don’t think I’ve read a collection that employs paragraphs to the wild range that your collection does. You have a lot of single-line paragraphs throughout “Life Sentence,” and then you have stories with multi-page paragraphs (“The Tour,” “One Big Happy Family,” “Testimony of Your Majesty”). How exactly do paragraphs function in these stories—do you find any overlap with Stein’s quote? To you, what can a very long paragraph achieve?
MB: Maybe I do have a philosophy similar to Stein’s. I think of storytelling in terms of “units.” To me, a sentence is a unit comparable to a comic book panel and a paragraph is a unit comparable to a comic book page. In comics, as a creator, you want every panel to contain a certain amount of narrative energy, but what’s crucial is the page: you need every page to end on a panel that somehow provokes an emotional response in the reader—curiosity, fear, anger, joy, arousal, whatever—in order to entice the reader to turn to the next page to continue reading. I think about paragraphs like that: a paragraph should have a narrative arc that concludes on a sentence that provokes an emotional response in the reader, propelling the reader into the next paragraph at maximum velocity. And for that sometimes what you need is a small paragraph—even a one-liner, like a comic book splash page with a single image—but sometimes what you need is a long paragraph. There are situations in prose storytelling where that much space is required. When an editor tries to chop up a long paragraph into a bunch of smaller paragraphs simply because of some eldritch publishing superstition—“long paragraphs are bad”—it’s horrifying to me. You can kill a story that way. All of the narrative energy will bleed out through those breaks.
AL: You’ve mentioned programming languages, Gabriel Garćia Marquez, and comic books as meaningful influences on this collection. I’m curious as to what other spheres might have left their impressions here. Are there other writers or texts that, in a sense, gave you the permission to write Why Visit America?
MB: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go both had a tremendous influence on the stories in this book, along with Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Honestly, though, maybe the biggest influence was American Short Fiction. Of the thirteen stories in the collection, “To Be Read Backward” was the first to be written, and was the first to be published in a literary magazine. I was at AWP when I got the acceptance email from American Short Fiction—I remember standing there in the middle of the book fair, staring down at the email with a sense of astonishment. I was stunned that a literary journal of that stature would be willing to publish this weird sci-fi story that I’d written—an overtly political speculative fiction that devotes entire pages to conjecture about the nature of the spacetime continuum. I’d thought of the story as an experiment, as a risk, and so the enthusiasm of the editors was profoundly encouraging. Getting to do this interview with you is special to me for that reason. In a sense, American Short Fiction was what first gave me permission to write this book.
Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.
Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Grant in Fiction. He also received a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. He teaches at University of Colorado Denver and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. He’s currently at work on a novel set in the Arctic.
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Stuff I’ve been reading in 2017
The third annual reading list! (Here’s 2015 in two parts, and 2016.) School was killing my love of reading but I refused to let it. And so here we are, three years and 280 books later.
I’ve taken the liberty of bolding my favourite reads this year, and including some background about how I came to read what I did. Here we go:
I pseudo-resolved to read slower this year, and savour books that need time to seep in. Longer books tend to fit that profile for me, so I went and read the longest book in my home library.
1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Rosemary Edmonds (reflections here)
Don’t know how I zeroed in on this gem in a Kinokuniya bookstore, but I love it and you should definitely read it. Go. Go now. I was two years slow on the uptake for Pulley’s debut, but when her second novel came out this year, I literally ordered it online in 0.0002 seconds. It’s number 51 on this list.
2. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
I can’t summarise how I feel about this next one. It just gets to me. After reading it, I went on to watch the film as well as its 20-years-later sequel. I might read some more by Welsh, but gosh the Scottish accent is hard to decipher.
3. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Perfect for bringing along on my first semester studying overseas.
4. Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord
And then the school texts start! As does leisure/procrastination reading: all the Neruda and Sexton poetry, plus Dostoevsky. Only novels, novellas, plays, and anthologies are listed here; this semester I studied many isolated short stories and poems. Books I read twice are the ones I happened to write essays on – it doesn’t necessarily mean I liked them a lot. (In fact, if I really like a book, sometimes I deliberately avoid writing about it, because analysing something too much can ruin it.) I read all the poetry aloud, because poetry, but I worry also in part because the silence in my room was getting oppressively lonely.
5. Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner
6. Bereft by Chris Womersley (twice, actually)
7. Melanctha by Gertrude Stein
8. Breath by Tim Winton (twice, actually)
9. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
10. Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems edited by Nathaniel Tarn, translated from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, and Nathaniel Tarn
11. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
12. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (out loud just because)
13. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
14. To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton
15. All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton
16. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (twice, actually; pseudo-thrice)
17. Live Or Die by Anne Sexton
18. Love Poems by Anne Sexton
19. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
20. Transformations by Anne Sexton
21. The Book of Folly by Anne Sexton
22. Sorry by Gail Jones
23. The Death Notebooks by Anne Sexton
24. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (her second novel is number 79)
25. The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton
26. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
27. 45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton
28. Words for Dr. Y. by Anne Sexton
In the break between semesters, I marathoned several TV shows (oops) and revisited a book series from my childhood. (Which, incidentally, ends in a greatly upsetting way?) That series is bookended by two novels which are companions to each other.
29. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
30. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
31. Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer
32. Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer
33. Artemis Fowl and the Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer
34. Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer
35. Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer
36. Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer
37. Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer
38. The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce
Back to school! Again, quite a few short stories and poems not reflected here. 42, 48, 49, 51, and 57 for leisure; the rest were for my courses.
39. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (twice, actually; making it thrice in two years, dammit)
40. The Hunter by Julia Leigh (twice, actually)
41. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
42. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
43. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
44. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
45. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (twice, actually)
46. Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz
47. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
48. My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin
49. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
50. Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill
51. The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley
52. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
53. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
54. Simulations by Jean Baudrillard, translated from the French by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman
55. Frisk by Dennis Cooper
56. Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (twice, actually)
57.《边城》沈从文 著
58. Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman
59. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (twice, actually)
60. Affinity by Sarah Waters
61. The Lost Stradivarius by John Meade Falkner
62. The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White (twice, actually)
The school year concluded, while still in Australia I read books I’d been given or chose on whims. I bought number 65 in Cairns Airport because I had nothing to read for the rest of a five-day trip; I’d started and finished number 63 during my domestic flight on day one. Clearly I’d underestimated how much I still wanted to read, having overloaded during the semester.
63. Mãn by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman
64. The Arrival by Shaun Tan (no words, only illustrations; please, please experience it for yourself)
65. And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave (it’s a Bible reference; think Southern Gothic)
Back home once more, I had access to my personal library, as well our national libraries! Although I’d embarked on a big crochet project as a Christmas present for some close family friends, I went pretty hard in the rest of my free time, which was abundant, because unemployment.
Some of these books just caught my eye on the shelf. Some have been on my To Read list for ages, because of friends’ recommendations (76 and 77, for instance) or because I figured I needed to see what the hype was all about (81 through 83, and 85 through 87). On the subject of YA fiction: no offence if you’re a fan of the genre, or indeed of these two series in particular, but to me it tends to feel like the literary equivalent of empty calories — easy reading that makes for a change of pace from books like 79, or 76. I read each trilogy in a day. Also, yes I realise I’m very late to the party; I haven’t watched the movies, either. Heh.
66. The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms by Ian Thornton
67. The Borrowers by Mary Norton (on which Studio Ghibli’s The Borrower Arrietty is based)
68. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (before I went to watch the movie)
69. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
70. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (on which Studio Ghibli’s film of the same name is based)
71. Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Sylvia Maizell, and Mariya Bashkatova
72. The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe
73. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
74. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
75. The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
76. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
77. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
78. How To Be Both by Ali Smith
79. The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (her first novel is number 24; I’ll read her third in the new year, as it demands slow enjoyment)
80. The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
81. The Maze Runner by James Dashner
82. The Scorch Trials by James Dashner
83. The Death Cure by James Dasher
84. Jip by Katherine Paterson
85. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
86. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
87. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
88. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
And that’s it: another year in books! Do note that thanks to my new theme, I now put updates in the sidebar about what I’m currently reading and watching, respectively. So if you’re ever curious, mosey on over, I guess.
In the new year, I’ll be creating a Goodreads account specially to complement my (admittedly infrequent) postings here. I haven’t gotten an account there previously because the star rating system seemed so reductive, but I have since realised that if professional movie critics can do it, I ought to stop being so high and mighty. Besides, I’m curious about the Goodreads community, and might want to try my hand at writing a couple of reviews, if I find the time and energy.
See you in 2018, everyone!
(Update: here is my Goodreads profile!)
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TO ONE A CENTURY HENCE
I wrote this essay some years ago, but today - in a chaotic state - I find myself returning to the work that it is about. Standing on a landing, I turn my body to read illuminated sentences. It is surprisingly quiet here.
For Comrades and Lovers (2015) is artist Glenn Ligon’s largest neon installation to date. Two lines of illuminated text trace the perimeter of a two-story mezzanine area in the main building of the New School in New York City. Ligon’s hand-blown glass tubes are filled with argon, which burns a striking shade of blue violet. Positioned just below the ceiling, the piece requires you to look up and to turn in a full circle to read it. It is is at once discrete and monumental: each individual letter would fit into the palm of your hand, yet cumulatively the words stretch over four hundred feet.
The words that make up the work are passages that Ligon selected from the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. They include the passage that gives this installation its title:
No labor-saving machine, Nor discovery have I made; Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found a hospital or library, Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage, for America, Nor literary success, nor intellect—nor book for the book-shelf; Only a few carols, vibrating through the air, I leave, For comrades and lovers. [1]
Here Whitman juxtaposes his poetry with material indicators of success. In fact, perhaps ironically, Whitman has left millions of books for the bookshelf; Leaves of Grass is a classic of American literature. Now this passage drawn from it, which disavows material and institutional success, is a permanent fixture on the walls of a university. The segments of Whitman’s poetry that Ligon included in this work are celebratory and sensual. Ligon includes passages in which Whitman described himself as ‘the poet of the body’ and he revels in that body: ‘my respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs’. Whitman’s claim that he leaves only a ‘few carols vibrating through the air’ is contradicted by the corporeality of his own poetry, which is so much about the body. And in Ligon’s rendition of it, these poems have a distinctive material presence. This materialization is a form of homage that this artist, living and working in 21st century New York, pays to a long dead poet of his city.
Ligon’s work is political. An African American man, his paintings and light installations borrow from historical texts, re-situating historical voices to draw a line between the past and the present that traces the historical structures of racism. From his early text paintings Untitled (I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background) (1990) to his most recent video installation We need to wake up because that’s what time it is (2015). Ligon’s works address complicated and painful histories of race relations in America. While For Comrades and Lovers is less overtly political, it is imbued with political significance because of Whitman’s relationship to broad egalitarian ideals.
Ligon’s appropriation of historical texts augments their meaning with the materials that he chooses to render them in. Some of his best-known works are often barely legible: he has layered literary texts over themselves until they become impossible to read. More recent works have remained decipherable; in these works he has often whittled historical texts down to a single evocative sentence. Untitled (Negro Sunshine) (2005) is drawn from Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novella Three Lives. The phrase references problematic representations of African Americans as happy simpletons. It is written in typewriter font and glows a soft yellow, a warm color that sits uncomfortably alongside the dark historical connotations of the phrase itself. Other neon pieces such as Untitled (If I Can’t Have Love, I’ll Take Sunshine) (2006) are rendered in handwritten rather than typed font, linking the phrase more closely to the unique signature of a body. Ligon’s ongoing use of text since the 1980s is more than appropriation for the purposes of critique; it is also born out of a profound respect for language. He says that his works "make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it". [2]
As though acknowledging the temporal gaps that his works try to cross by appropriating historical texts, Ligon told those attending the unveiling of Comrades and Lovers that “You never know what the future will make of your work […] You don’t even know if your work will survive you.”[3]
One of Ligon’s best-known pieces, Untitled (I am an invisible man) (1991), hangs in the same room as For Comrades and Lovers. It consists of the first page of Ralph W. Ellison’s novel of the same title printed in black ink on a black page – a visual pun on the social invisibility that the text addresses. [4] Part of the page reads: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”. The work brings the voice of a key African American writer into play and this voice bleeds into the reading of For Comrades and Lovers.
It gives insight into the nature of Ligon’s relationship to Whitman. Ellison wrote an essay titled Hidden Name and Complex Fate [5] which describes the kind of oblique but powerful relationship that a black man living now might have to a white man from centuries past. The story of this writer’s name – Ralph Waldo Ellison after the poet, philosopher and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson – is a personal meditation upon the dual themes of suppression of, and at the same time responsibility to, our intellectual and political forebears. Emerson was a white man of a very different era, who spoke out against slavery and yet, like all white men who have spoken for this cause, had a historically specific approach to the concept of race; it is important to remember the space of privilege from which Emerson spoke.
Ligon never directly references Ellison’s essay. The proximity of Ligon’s Invisible Man and For Comrades and Lovers engages a proliferating set of historical connections. Ligon tugs on many historical threads, the entanglement of which enrich the present moment. The essay offers, by way of analogy, a possible reading of his relationship with Whitman, a white American man who lived in the time of slavery. It is difficult to clearly position Whitman in regard to race: he wrote his great poem to Lincoln; his poetry in general exudes a kind of radical, inclusive empathy; he recounted how he sheltered an escaped slave in his house for a week (a story that resonates with Ligon’s print portfolio The Runaways (1993) which mimics bulletins describing escaped slaves). Yet Whitman’s commitment to the American union was such that he would have tolerated slavery rather than see the country broken in two. He was not pro-slavery but neither can he be called an abolitionist, at least not an unconditional one. [6] While, as Ligon himself reflects, “Whitman wasn’t bound by the prejudices of his day” [7] he remained, like Emerson, a ‘man of his time.’ His attitude towards race was conditioned by broader social attitudes.
Of course Emerson and Whitman knew each other. Indeed Emerson was one of Whitman’s supporters, writing, in a famous letter of 1855, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career”.[8] Their relationship was one of an older poet to a younger one – an intergenerational exchange of advice, endorsement and argument. It was the older, more sexually conservative Emerson who tried to convince Whitman to remove the sexual content from his poetry. Sex, Whitman responded, was at the core of his poems. [9] Indeed there is no way that one could de-eroticize Whitman’s poems, which pulsate with sexual energy regardless of what they are describing. Sex infuses every moment, every encounter, every word.
The erotic dimension of Whitman’s poetry resonates more in our time than in Whitman’s own time, when homosexuality was socially unacceptable. In our time it can be openly celebrated. Thus Whitman’s poems have come into their own in a way that they never could during the poet’s lifetime. Whitman seems to know his future readers. He wrote:
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States, To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence, To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you. When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible; Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me, Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover; Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I am now with you. [10]
This fragment is not included in Ligon’s piece yet it could almost be the spur for the project as a whole—the call that the contemporary artist answers ‘a century hence’. Though he does not foreground his sexual identity, Ligon is gay. It is important to acknowledge that the queer reading of Ligon’s work goes beyond the artist’s intentions since he has never positioned himself as a queer artist; his politics do not revolve around his sexual identity. Yet it is also hard to ignore the homoeroticism embedded in Whitman’s words, here emblazoned on the wall. The veiled sexual charge of Whitman’s poems is a call for recognition from a time when open recognition was impossible. We might imagine Whitman’s writings as a sort of ‘message in a bottle’ that he sent into the future. Thus Ligon’s illuminated transcription of Whitman’s words is its own kind of letter, a response to Whitman, but one that cannot go back in time to the poet. This cerebral, elegant illumination of Whitman’s text answers Whitman’s call to be recognized at some fundamental level. The words do not lose their sexual charge on the wall.
Whitman projected himself into the future; he imagined himself here among us. When Ligon says that you never know what the future will make of your work, he addresses not only us but also Whitman, his eminent predecessor, reassuring him that the future has made much of his work. Ligon himself makes them concrete, in metal, glass, plaster, electrodes and ignited argon gas. Through their material illumination, Ligon crystalizes Whitman’s carols into something visible, glowing high above our heads, as a testament to survival, a complex work of homage.
Click here to read the graphic version produced when this piece won the Vera List Center for Art and Politics writing award.
[1] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, (c1900). 108 [2] University of Warwick Art Collection, Untitled by Glenn Ligon, University of Warwick Art Collection, collection database. Accessed from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/art/artist/glennligon/wu0883/ accessed on 5/23/2016. [3] The New School, Glenn Ligon Unveils “Comrades and Lovers” at The New School, Published on May 6, 2015,http://blogs.newschool.edu/news/2015/05/glenn-ligon-unveils-comrades-and-lovers-at-the-new-school/#.VmmJ6WQrK2w. Accessed on December 5 2015 [4] Indeed this piece does the opposite of the light work For Comrades and Lovers. Where the latter emits light constantly, these words are rendered in black on black – the chemical configuration that absorbs light and reflects almost nothing back for our eyes to register. [5] Ralph W Ellison, Hidden Name and Complex Fate, The writer’s experience, Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1964. 1 – 15. [6] Carl Hancock Rux et. al. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, Arts, WNYC , 16 November 2005. Radio. [7] Glenn Ligon, interviewed in Glenn Ligon's "For Comrades and Lovers" 2015 | A Site-Specific Commission at The New School, accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWB-zpCBcSA, accessed on 5/25/2016 [8] Rux et. al. Walt Whitman: song of myself, 2005 [9] Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 111-12 [10] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, (c1900). 112
#glennligon#thenewschool#forcomradesandlovers thenewschoolartcollection#veralistcenterforartandpolitics#walt whitman
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After finishing taping The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Emma raced out of the Ed Sullivan Theatre and made her way through Midtown to meet Karah at the legendary Strand Bookstore for a conversation with the one and only Ariel Levy:
EMMA ROBERTS: It was interesting that you said during your conversation with Emily [Nussbaum] that The Year of Magical Thinking is the bible on grief because the last time Karah and I met up and chased after a writer at an event, it was Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion at St. John the Divine…Early that day, I had been at a photo shoot and they were like, "You're not going to make it to your book event," and I started crying, and I said, "I have to see Joan!" And she [Karah] was waiting for me outside, and we ran in laughing. So tonight I was at Colbert and I ran here and met Karah outside, and it was a Joan moment…
ARIEL LEVY: I just think it is the coolest, best thing in the world that you're putting your weight behind books. It just makes me so fucking happy, I can't even tell you.
EMMA ROBERTS: We literally love books. I think that's been the strongest part of our friendship. We met through mutual friends, and it was one of those things where people thought maybe we wouldn't really become that close, but we ended up becoming really close because of...
KARAH PREISS: Books.
EMMA: ... a love for reading and just wanting to learn more, read more and ... she [Karah] really imposed such a reading list on me.
ARIEL: It's such a gift to writers that you guys are like, instead of using the power of social media to sell a handbag...
KARAH: Tell her.
EMMA: You tell her!
KARAH: We said we want to do what Kylie Jenner has done to lip kits ...
EMMA: ... for books.
KARAH: For books.
EMMA: Well I know you said The Year of Magical Thinking obviously influenced you, but before, even when you were a teenager, what were some books that you remember that you fell in love with, or even just ...
ARIEL: When I was a teenager I read some weird things. When I was in my early twenties, or when I was in college, I was super into Grace Paley, who I still love.
Grace Paley, was super important to me always. I think when I was right out of college, I was reading Jeannette Winterson…I think that may have also been when I first started reading Joan Didion, actually, like Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And also Janet Malcolm, who's now my colleague, who I worship. I think probably the first thing I read of hers would've been The Journalist and the Murderer. But my favorite Janet Malcolm book is Two Lives, about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.
When I was at Wesleyan, there was no core curriculum, and I was very committed to having a canonical education, so I took a lot of Greek mythology and Victorian literature. But then when I was out of school is when I got ... I was really into short stories. I was really into reading short stories.
I particularly love American short stories. I think we're good at that. I mean, not me, but other Americans who can make things up.
EMMA: I love short stories. Would you write short stories?
ARIEL: I can't. I can't think of things. I can only ...
EMMA: I beg to differ after reading this book, I think you can ...
ARIEL: I can only think of things ...I can't make things up.
EMMA: Did it ever cross your mind to maybe rework this book into a novel and not write it as a memoir, or was it ...
ARIEL: I probably should've so I wouldn't have hurt people's feelings as much, but... no, I really think of myself as a nonfiction writer. I think that's what I do. I'd feel like I was fronting if I was just like, "It's a novel!"
EMMA: You'd maybe slip up in press, too.
ARIEL: Yeah, I can't ... I just am not, I don't have it. Liz Strout told me that the way she writes is like a character comes to her, and she just sees it in her head and then she starts writing from that character's point of view. And Zadie Smith told me not that, but something enough close to that, that I'm like, there's a thing that is being a fiction writer, and it's not what I've got. I've got a desire to see the things in front of me and write about them, and try to convince readers that that's the world.
EMMA: Yeah. Well, it's a gift. You do it really well.
KARAH: Very, very well.
ARIEL: How old are you guys?
KARAH: I'm 27, and you're [pointing to Emma] 26 ...
EMMA: I'm 19…
ARIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
KARAH: I was just wondering, from when you were 20 up until now, how much have you grappled with domesticity versus ... your wild life?
ARIEL: A ton. A ton! ... in my twenties and my early thirties, that's all I thought about. I think I thought about all that stuff constantly, and I think that it's very much a human conflict, the fundamental human conflict between the desire for adventure and novelty and excitement versus the desire for stability and intimacy and safety. That's humanity ... But I think it's extra-complicated for women, because ... I think that men have been able to have both without much trouble for generations. And it's only recently that the world of adventure and being the protagonist in your own life is even available to us. So I think that this whole thing where people are like, "Can women have it all?" It's like, well no one can have it all, but the reason we're asking that about women is because, until recently, we didn't get to leave the bloody house! So of course we weren't out having adventures! Of course you didn't grow up reading stories, other than Pippi Longstocking ... it's always a boy. You had to learn how to project yourself into the male protagonist because it would be boring to always identify with the female sidekick.
EMMA: Well, I think also it feels like it's being asked more and more now because ...the question is allowed to be asked louder, which is a good thing.
ARIEL: I think that is a good thing, and I also think it's not untrue that being a mother is demanding in ways that are unique. Physically, for one thing. I mean, I think that pregnancy, breastfeeding, all the stuff that you have to do as a female animal as opposed to a male animal when you have an offspring, it's a different project, and it is ... just because I can't have children doesn't mean that you have to pick between being an adventurer and being a mother... all those women I was just talking about. Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, many of my colleagues- ... they all have kids. They've all managed to do both. It just didn't work out for me. And that blows! That's a sad thing. And now I have so much extra maternal energy that I have an almost inappropriate reaction to younger women. Like, I'm like, "I want to raise you." I have a lot of extra maternal energy.
EMMA: ... you have hands that are ... like when you were talking up onstage, I was like ...
ARIEL: I have the hands of a Muppet, it's true.
EMMA: No, very ... comforting.
EMMA: When did you realize the title of this…
ARIEL: The initial title I had in my mind was: To the Blue Sky and Back, because it was like, "to the blue sky and back adventure," but also the hotel in Mongolia was called the Blue Sky.
EMMA: I love any reference to Blue. Bluets by Maggie Nelson is ...
ARIEL: Oh, it's a beautiful book.
EMMA: ... the Rebecca Solnit Field Guide to Getting Lost, she talks about “the blue…”
ARIEL: And Joan Didion has Blue Nights.
EMMA: Blue Nights. My eye starts twitching when I think about Blue Nights, literally.
ARIEL: But my editor convinced me, and I think she was right. She was like, "It sounds too dreamy..." Don't call it that. It's too dreamy." And I thought it was like, it should have a more aggressive title.
EMMA: I also like it because The Rules Do Not Apply to some… that is actually a positive thing sometimes, like the rules don't apply to you, so it's kind of ... it's a little ironic at times, obviously in this [book].
ARIEL: It's both. That's what I always look for with New Yorker profiles. I'm always trying to write about women who, like Edith Windsor, or Diana Nyad who swam from Cuba to Florida when she was 64 years old, just who are like ... "I'm just not going to be constrained by society's definition of women or the expectations of my gender." So I think it's a very positive thing. I mean, I don't think we'd have many of the advances we've had. You wouldn't have gay marriage, for example, if someone hadn't been like, "No, that's a bad rule. I'm not following it." But it's also the case that once you're like, "I'm free to do anything I want," you can get into the delusion that you have the power to do everything you want and that you can control things. Your life.
KARAH: Well, I was going to ask you a follow-up about visionaries being narcissists, do you think that's ...
ARIEL: No. No! I don't think visionaries are narcissists, I think that it just happens to be the case that the Venn diagram of narcissism and the Venn diagram of visionaries intersects, and that they think the rules don't apply. So like Donald Trump doesn't think the rules apply to him, right? He doesn't have to tell the truth, disclose his taxes, have a press co-, he doesn't have to do anything a normal president has to do. That's bad. That's narcissism.
But it's also true that Hillary Clinton thought the rules didn't apply. She was like, "I'm going to be the first woman president." So it's both a liberating, exciting, fantastic way to look at the world, and has the potential to be a perspective where you don't realize that there are limits to every life.
EMMA: I love the Lamar Van Dyke quote, you quote her in saying, where she's like, "We weren't all looking at our screens, we were actually doing stuff ..."
I love that because I feel like, as much as I'm a part of social media and I like social media, and even starting this book club, social media is a huge part of it and we get that, but there is a love-hate relationship with it of when to step away and when ...
ARIEL: When to be in the world and when to be ...
EMMA: Exactly. So I was just wondering what your relationship is with social media and with your phone in general, and especially being a journalist…
ARIEL: Well I use the recorder like you guys do a lot, so it's become important, like I always have it.
EMMA: So what is your relationship with social media?
ARIEL: Really, really glad you guys are helping me with it, because … I don't quite get it.
EMMA: Honestly, I feel like I was so ahead of everything being a millennial, and now everyone who was a toddler is now a teenager, and so they know more than me, and now I'm the person that doesn't know anything. My sister's 16, so I'm like ... so now I'm the idiot. I was the genius, now I'm the idiot. You know how it goes.
ARIEL: I know exactly. I read you say how you always like the book itself.
EMMA: People make fun of me on trips because I'll bring a tote bag to the beach of all these books, and they're like, "Put it on your iPad!" and I'm like, "No, I want to see what I'm reading, I want to look at my ... I want to see it all, and I want to have my notes." Also, how many times have I gotten on a plane with one of my stupid friends whose iPad's dead, and I'm like, "Hm! I guess you're going to be bored the whole flight."
That's a diss, by the way. That's my version of a diss. "Your iPad died, loser, you don't have a hard copy."
ARIEL: That's tough stuff. You pack a punch.
EMMA: Anyway. Karah?
KARAH: ... in the book, there's a line, I think basically where you had decided to have a child, and you said, "I decided that I no longer wanted to be ruled by wanderlust” and I don't know if this is because I'm neurotic, but I wonder, had you not been ruled by other things ... and I know maybe you were taking creative license ... but had you not been ruled by other things before that, and what are you ruled by now? As you've said, you know you're not going to have a child. What are the things that rule your life?
ARIEL: The upside of having my whole life fall apart at such a speed that I was like, "The fuck is going to happen next? Is my apartment going to crumble?" I was just like, "This is getting ridiculous!" You know? The upside of that is that it left me like, "All right, I guess I'm just going to surrender to what happens." And because of that, I was able to be like, "I guess I'm going to keep emailing with this dude who is a doctor in Mongolia who lives in South Africa," and then eventually like, "All right. I guess we're in love!" Like, "All right, I guess I'm going to spend half my time riding horses in the mountains in South Africa." I didn't see that coming.
So now it's like, I would say I'm a lot more open to whatever's coming my way, but also the thing that I was always ruled by was writing. That was always the A #1 priority and it still ... it's writing and ... the nice thing about my relationship with the person I'm about to marry is that he's got a lot of wanderlust too. It's not for nothing that we met in Mongolia, and we're back and forth between New York and South Africa and wherever, and it's like we can take this home that is each other on the road.
My dream as a kid was always to be in a gypsy caravan, and I think you [looking at Emma] know where I got that idea.
EMMA: “Emma Rose”
KARAH: I just want to say to people, I want to say to girls [grabbing The Rules Do Not Apply], I want to just be like, "Just go read this in the fucking corner and come back and talk to me."
ARIEL: Well I wish you would do that.
EMMA: Well we're going to.
KARAH: We're going to do that.
EMMA: I just want to show you something really quick. So last night I was deep ... I was watching interview after interview with you and reading all your articles just so I was prepared ... ... and then I was like Who did say you can have it all?"
ARIEL: Well, who did?
EMMA: [Showing Ariel phone screen] "You are not connected to the internet." That's what came up! I typed it in, I said, "Who said you can have it all?" and my browser, it said, "You are not connected to the internet!” I was like ... yeah, I was like, "That's the answer. You are not connected to internet."
ARIEL: Well there it is.
EMMA: Witchery.
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