January BOOK CLUB in Vanity Fair!

Hey, January’s BOOK CLUB is Blake Nelson’s Dream School, the sequel to his 90s grunge classic Girl. Here it is in Vanity Fair! Blake is no stranger to magazine love – Sassy excerpted Girl before it was a proper novel and later a movie with Dominique Swain. Come to Viracocha on January 25th and hear Blake in a reading and a Q+A, plus special guest Rhiannon Argo!

Coming Up @ RADAR: Priscilla Lee

Priscilla Lee's Xmas Tree

Hey, I’ve been wanting to have poet Priscilla Lee in a RADAR ever since we read together at one of Stephen Elliot’s excellent literary nights, when she read from her book Wishbone, which I then bought and read myself and liked very much! Priscilla’s poetry is sort of domestic and humorous and feminist and intimate. She’ll be performing TOMORROW at RADAR with Amra Brooks, Greg Youmans, and Fauxnique. At the San Francisco Public Library. 6pm, Free. Peppermint bark. Yeah! Here is a holiday gift from the poet to you.

O Christmas Tree

Coming up at RADAR: JACK HALBERSTAM!

You either saw Jack Halberstam  read from her latest brain explosion, The Queer Art of Failure, at City Lights last month, or you did not. If you did, you are like AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH I want to hear all that again only with visual projections, and also MORE! If you didn’t you’re like, Fuck, I can’t believe I missed that reading, everyone is rubbing it in my face what an AWESOME event I missed, I’m sick of it! Either way, we at RADAR are here to help you out. The Queer Art of Failure is the  RADAR Book Club selection of the month, which means a) You can get a copy of the book RIGHT NOW for 40% off if you buy online from the publisher and enter RADAR at checkout – http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=19523 and b) You get another chance to hear Jack’s super fun and engaging read on pop culture, revolution, queerness and failure, this Friday night at charming Viracocha at 998 Valencia, with extra special guests Falling in Love . . .  With Chris and Greg. Doors at 7:30, $10, Modern Times will be on hand selling books and RADAR will be on hand selling lovely bottles of Gilda, the perfume especially crafted for Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. A perfect holiday gift? Duh.

Now let’s get a sneak peek of what’s to come with Jack Halberstam’s

OWS and the Pixar Way of Life

The occupation movements that quickly spread around the country this fall were easily explained in terms of a bad economy and the increasing gap in this country between the rich and the poor. The naming of the gap as the 1% versus the 99% represented in simple arithmetic the relation between the expanding wealth of the few and the spreading destitution of the many. While regular people lost homes, bankers, realtors and money managers made big bonuses. While colleges raised their fees, teachers picked up pink slips and while students took out more loans, education administrators gave themselves a raise. For the first time since the 1960’s young Americans have a critique of capitalism and are willing to risk being called liberals and commies to articulate it.

While to some the critique of capitalism and the use of anarchist organizing tactics may seem to have come out of the blue, in actual fact, some of the young protestors may have been primed to embrace the critique of capitalism by an unlikely source. Have they all been reading too much Marx in their humanities classes? Not exactly. Have they all finally woken up to the exploitative realities of a free market economy? Perhaps. But they have certainly all been raised on a generation of wacky animated films, especially Pixar films, that deliberately link social inequity to the excesses of big business and that often offer solutions in the form of bands of righteous animated creatures, multitudes really, rising up to fight off the bad, greedy few. Just think of A Bug’s Life, one of the earliest Pixar marvels – ants are preyed upon by grasshoppers, who use their size to bully the ants out of their food. The ants finally realize that they can only stop the grasshoppers by working together and using their numbers to even the playing field. They drive off the grasshoppers and everyone eats! In fact, Pixar films are precisely representations of the 99% who win out by casting out the 1%!

Pixar films, as we all know now, was one of the many brainchilds of the recently departed Steve Jobs who believed in the possibility of 3D computer animation and put money into early versions of the Pixar studio in 1986. The new CGI films that resulted from his collaborations with animators revealed a very different animated universe than those of Disney or Warner Brothers. These three dimensional worlds had depth, perspective, and perhaps most important for our purposes, the algorithm for representing crowds, masses and multitudes in all of their complexity rather than as a single figure repeated across the screen. The algorithm for multitudes may in fact turn out to be the quantum leap that enabled a generation to stop thinking in terms of singularity and self and start thinking in terms of the many and the collective!

Totes The Man!

And so, while there are many different explanations that one could give for the almost spontaneous, nearly convulsive force that has propelled people into collective action –rage, desperation, the Tea party, Sarah Palin – and while there are many excellent documentary films like The Inside Job and Capitalism, A Love Story that have exposed the banks and insurance companies, neither rage nor education would have led so clearly to the ludic and even whimsical tactics deployed by OWS and other occupations.

Like the woodland creatures of Over the Hedge ( Dreamworks, 2006)who wake up to find their pristine environment fouled up by suburban McMansions, SUV’s and junk food and who find a huge hedge erected between the wasteful humans and themselves, the OWS’ers  refuse to be walled out of Wall street, and, just as the animals tore down the hedge that encroached upon their woodland sanctuary, so the protesters today sit down in the middle of the city and refuse to move or be removed. Like the chickens in Chicken Run (Dreamworks, 2000) who “get organized” to rise up against the farmers who take their eggs and fatten them up to become chicken pot pies, the OWS’s refuse to contribute anymore to their own exploitation – on Nov 5, people were urged to withdraw their money, their eggs if you like, from the big banks and the week before in Occupy Oakland, the protestors tried to jam the route of capital by closing down the ports.

Still not sure? How about Monsters Inc. (Pixar, 2001) where the monsters fight the corporation that uses children’s screams to generate energy? AT OWS and Occupy LA, the monster/occupiers redirect the nation’s attention away from fear and insecurity and towards pleasure and the power of collectivity. Or how about Bee Movie (Dreamworks, 2007) where the bees fight the humans for stealing their honey? At OWS, we are all fighting the bankers for stealing our money! Or, think about Robots (Fox Studios, 2005) where the robots protest the replacement of the old and worn out with the new and the shiny and they argue for recycling? The occupation movements are not only about money but also about natural resources that are being used up without any care for recycling or replacement. Or, finally, what about Finding Nemo (Pixar, 2003) for pete’s sake, where the fish led by Nemo, the little disabled fish, his father and Dory, a queer blue fish, swim down to break free from the fisherman’s nets and to disrupt maritime profiteering? The lesson there was that while one fish/bee/chicken/monster/human can do little to obstruct the process of profiteering, many creatures together, all swimming in the same direction, all oriented to stopping the pillaging of the ocean, can break free. The fish in Finding Nemo, the bees in Bee Movie, the monsters and the robots may not necessarily have an elaborate plan for what follows, they may not have a list of demands or a clear manifesto for progress, but they all know that change depends upon rupture and rupture depends upon new tactics, new forms of protest and different methods of engaging the imagination.

It seems whimsical and possibly a little crazy to attribute so much political action to animated films that kids watch when they are barely walking or talking; and yet, whimsy and spectacle actually sets these protests apart from the pious marches on Washington of the Bush years. Many people have described the occupation sites as carnivalesque, and photographs show protesters in masks, costumes, and in drag. This is a political movement born of eclectic combinations of anger and imagination, camp and clout, improvisation and action. Could it be that a generation raised on fantastic spectacles of collective action have learned well how to say no, how to stage loud and effective forms of refusal and how to animate revolt?

THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE

RADAR Book Club presents Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure with special guests Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans with Falling in Love . . . With Chris and Greg. Friday, December 9th at Viracocha, 7:30, $10

Coming Up @ RADAR: ALI LIEBEGOTT

Ali Liebegott has been one of my most favorite writers in the world ever since hearing her read her poetry at the Paradise Lounge open mic in 1994. Not much could cut through my haze of beer and cynicism, but Ali came barreling through, as she does, with heartbreak and humor, a humble self-regard and fearless commitment to telling the truth in her writing, whether it’s poetry, memoir, fiction, journalism, graphic novel or any combination. Facts about Ali: She was the only poet who signed up for my All Girl Poet gang in the 90s who actually wanted to be in a gang, not a writing group, and so we vandalized the city together. Her book The Beautifully Worthless is an epic road poem, a classic American endeavor and this American is a lez so it’s got all that in it. It’s part poem, part letters to an abandoned lover, part lists, part stand-up comedy. If you find it anywhere grab it cause that edition is out of print and will be a collector’s item once Sister Spit Books publishes a new edition, which we will do while publishing Ali’s new novel, Ch-hing! at the same time. It will be hot Ali-on-Ali action over at Sister Spit. Ali will be reading from her new work this Saturday at RADAR’s Book Club event for Sarah Schulman. When Ali’s novel The IHOP Papers won the Lambda Book Award, Sarah mentioned that she had written the first Lesbian Waitress Novel – a genre! I am so happy to have them reading together! FYI, Ali is also at work on a collection of interviews with female American poets, working on an art book titled Faggot Dinosaur, has her graphic novel The Crumb People shoved in a drawer somewhere, and makes really fucking cute Holiday cards, which you can look at and purchase AFTER you read this short story, The Depression Van. All aboard!

The Depression Van

I wish someone had told me a long time ago, beware of a sliding scale that slides too low.  Then I could’ve avoided that five-dollar-ex-postal-worker-piece-of-shit-therapist I had in Providence, Rhode Island.  The first thing I thought when she told me she used to work at the post office was, “What did you do to get fired?”

“Why are you here today?” she asked when I came in.

“I’m depressed.”

The truth was I’d been depressed forever, but I’d become especially unraveled when I quit drinking a few months before.

She blinked a few times slowly and said, “Depressed, huh?”

But she said it in this far away voice, like she was the most depressed person in the world.  For the rest of the intake she made small talk as I sat awkwardly across from her like a stranger at a bus stop.  When I left her office, I had the same bad feeling I’d had when I left the offices of the thirty-three lousy sliding scale therapists before her.  Only desperation, poverty and my ridiculous hope that people are capable of change led me back to her office the next week.

“I saw this in the paper, and it made me think of you,” she said, handing me a tiny rectangular newspaper clipping the size of a personal ad.

When I reached to take it, she pulled it back and said, “Let me read it out loud to you.”

Her taupe armchair faced my taupe armchair and I watched her giant Rhode Island frost-and-tipped hair bob up and down as she read the newspaper clipping to me.

“The Depression Van is coming to Providence, Rhode Island!  It will be parked in front of 700 Hope Street from 5 PM to 9PM every Wednesday in January to provide free screenings for Depression.  No appointment necessary.”

She blinked a few times quickly and then handed me the clipping.

I took it from her.

“I think this is for people who don’t know they’re depressed,” I said.

She sat silent, blinking.

I continued to break it down for her.

“The Depression Van helps people find out if they’re depressed.  I already know I’m depressed,” I said, handing the clipping back to her.

The clipping hung wilted between my fingertips—a contaminated piece of trash neither of us wanted to touch.

“Well, you can keep that in case you ever need it,” she said, nodding at the clipping.

If I needed it in the future that would mean I’d forgotten I was depressed, which in turn would mean I was cured, right?

“Tell me a little bit about your depression,” she said.

This was the first normal thing she’d said since I met her.  I took a deep breath and started to tell her my psychotherapy history.  About three minutes in, she interrupted and began to read me random paragraphs from a self-help book in her lap.  Each time I began to talk, she’d interrupt and say, “Oh, hang on a second.  I read something in my book about that.”

Then she’d flip through pages aimlessly looking for a passage while I sat courteously enraged, watching the snow fall steadily out the small window behind her.  I don’t know why I believed somehow she’d turn into a good therapist.  My eternal patience frequently works against me.

Each week, at least twice a session, when I told her I was depressed, she asked me what I did for a living.  And each week I told her I taught ESL.  Like clockwork, the conversation ended there.  She flipped through her book.  I watched the snow.  One day during her page flipping it occurred to me, if I dove out the window behind her and fell three stories to my death that would probably stop her from becoming a therapist.

During my third appointment she said, “Tell me again, what do you do for work?”

I wanted to say, “I can’t remember what you do either.”  But instead I said, “I teach ESL.”

“ESL?” she asked.

“English as a Second Language.”

“Huh?” she blinked.

“I help immigrants learn English so they can get jobs and housing and—”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” she said, disgusted.  “Those people always came into the post office.  ‘Me no speak, English.  Me no speak English.’  But they always knew how to count the money.”

I’m not sure how long I sat frozen in my taupe chair before I excused myself to the restroom.  I walked down the hall past the bathrooms, into the elevator, and out into the snowy day.  I began a two-mile march home.  So this was five-dollar therapy.  I could’ve done better driving fifteen minutes to the local dog track/casino and feeding a five-dollar bill into a psychotherapy themed slot machine called Bonkers!  Get three psychotherapist couches in a row and you win.  Freud, Freud, Freud!  You’re rich!

Since I quit drinking, I’d picked up gambling, but we never go that far in therapy for me to tell her.  My breath come out of me in angry puffs as I headed up a steep hill, and when I looked behind me, I only saw one set of footprints in the snow.  And they were mine.

Buy Ali’s Holiday Cards and more of her work at http://www.etsy.com/shop/aliebego

See Ali read with Sarah Schulman on Saturday, November 12th at Viracocha, 998 Valencia, Doors 7 / Reading 8, $10

SARAH SCHULMAN’S FACEBOOK PAGE

How long before Occupy Wall Street: The Musical?

The vulnerable white broker who heroically overcomes his prejudices to fall in love with this little white girl with dred locks and a pierced eyebrow , while everyone else (poor people, people of color, queer people, old people, the unemployed) make up the chorus.

Read It and Lament- Ferran Adria, World’s Greatest Chef

Adria, on right. Interpreter on left.

Who’s that guy in the fuzzy, nondescript photograph? Just Ferran Adria, THE WORLD’S GREATEST CHEF who ran El Bulli, THE WORLD’S GREATEST RESTAURANT. This isn’t my hyperbole, either! Both the man and the place were crowned The Greatest by publications, people, and governing bodies who oversee such titles–multiple times. Last night, I sat in a sold out Castro Theatre to listen to The World’s Greatest Chef on his book tour. Something like 1400 people were there, shelling out $30 to hear this guy and he didn’t even pick up the book during the 90 minute event.

Buy this book. Or come over and cook with me.

You never ate at El Bulli, in all likelihood, and you never will.* El Bulli, located on the coast of Catalonia, Spain, was open only 6 months of the year, costs upwards of $450 for the tasting menu, held a 3-star Michelin ranking for years, and had literally millions of requests for its 8,000 seats available per season. El Bulli closed on July 30 of this year so  that Adria can build the El Bulli Foundation on the restaurant’s very spot. And, presumably, move on to a  more financially lucrative career than running so costly a restaurant.

LAMENT. Like the scent of  Guerlain’s original Eau de Cologne Impériale made for Napoleon III or watching stifled, jealous glances thrown at Gertrude Stein by Alice B. Toklas, I’ve missed out on something that the internet cannot recreate. Who knew there still were such things??

How often do we listen to someone who is definitively the greatest in the world at something? I asked this question of my girlfriend who picked me up after the reading. She laughed off and ridiculed my intellectual queries into watching Yo-Yo Ma or, I don’t know, some other undisputed greatest. The best part of Adria’s talk was that he started off the lecture insisting, ‘I know nothing about cuisine or cooking.’ He gave endless examples: if there are over 500 varieties of citrus and this is but one type of fruit which is but one ingredient, how can a person say they are an expert at cooking and cuisine? I saw the Queer Food For Love’s undisputed food genius Yasmin Golan outside the Castro following the event and she said it was really cool to hear such an un-American response to our chef-frenzied times. This guy was not about ego at all. Two things, Adria said and his interpreter held up her fingers: 1. We know nothing about cuisine. 2. Everything is subjective.

Besides the aforementioned descriptors, El Bulli and Adria are known for deconstructionist cuisine though he balked somewhat at the ‘molecular gastronomy’ label.  (Molecular gastronomy chef, Grant Achatz, owns the Chicago’s famous Alinea restaurant and did a 3 week stint at El Bulli early in his career which sent him in this new direction.) Adria and El Bulli have many food and cookbooks written with or about them but his newest book, the one that I received signed last night at the Castro Theatre is The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria. Worth $30, bitches!

Adria told the crowd over and over his simple idea that created profound change: if cooks eat well, they cook well. Unlike simple leftover dishes at most restaurants (including fine dining, Michelin ranked), El Bulli served beautiful, delicious 3-course family meal for the 70+ staff each day. The cookbook includes those recipes: a month’s worth of 3-course meals, aimed at home cooks feeding people for less than $5/person per meal.

The book is exactly what I want in a cook-book. A clear, concise shopping list and instructions for making simple sauces and stocks to then freeze and use over the course of the month. (And permission to use bullion cubes if one must!) Each 3-course meal can be made in a few hours, tops. Many dishes can be made in no time at all and all are really fucking impressive. The instructions include a shopping list, cooking timeline, and are broken down into methods for 2, 6, 20 or 75 people!

I inhale food books and cookbooks the way you nerds do the same with The Hunger Games (next on my list.) Writing about food, though incredibly fashionable these days, is no simple task because of the inherent problems in describing the senses well. We cannot all be Diane Ackerman.  The exciting thing about Adria’s new cookbook is the recipes themselves are so fascinating because -like the 40-course tasting menu at El Bulli- I would never have come up with the combinations, techniques or core belief that I can make this food on my own.

Call me if you want to try out some recipes together!

*Me neither. If you somehow ate a meal there, please contact me, you lucky jerk!

Coming Up at RADAR: MYRIAM GURBA’S Halloween Hiccups

Halloween Hiccups

Before I was big enough to smack her down, my mother made Halloween’s sartorial choices for me. Clown. Rabbit. Cat. Devil. Thieving Gypsy. Yes, thieving Gypsy. Don’t blame me for picking an oppressed ethnicity as a costume. Blame Beatriz Gurba.

One year, I trick-or-treated as a Mexican. Looking back on this, I realize this was not a costume.

By age ten, I got big enough to boss Mom around and make her step off. I began designing my own Halloween costumes. I lumbered as Cleopatra, which, if you’re chunky, becomes Cleofatra. At age 11, I became the first and only child in the history of trick-or-treating to beg for candy costumed as a primatologist. I was so angry that the candy passer-outers in my neighborhood couldn’t figure me out. It was obvious, duh, I was giving a plush gorilla toy a piggy back ride, a dead giveaway that I was Dian Fossey, National Geographic pin-up girl.

The annoying what-are-yous that I experienced that primatological Halloween sharpened my empathy for similar cases, others whose Samhain experiences were marred by strange choices that seemed so genius in our heads, so mentally ill when executed. These are their stories (sound of SVU’s dun-dun!).

Case 1: Cristina R.

“From the Diaphragm”

I thought I knew everything about Cristina R. – we’ve know each other for about fifteen years, we were roommates in college, but last Easter, as we were tearing apart a ham, I discovered her Halloween secret…. She was in sixth grade and thought she’d seen it all, every witch, every vampire, every dull hobo. She wanted to break free of Halloween’s clichés. Also, in fifth grade, she’d had a wildly successful run as an old lady. The costume won prizes. She felt pressure to top that, so, she decided, “A hiccup. It’ll be great. Everyone will love me. Hiccup. Make it happen.”

The color green came to mind. It seemed so natural. Green. And it seems natural to me, too. A soothing, lunatic asylum green. Cristina never doubted her abilities. She needed minty tights and a trash bag to paint. She would jump up and down. It would be okay that she was amorphous. Hiccups don’t have shapes.

So what went wrong? Cristina had to cobble her hiccup…alone.

She walked to Walgreen’s and browsed for a face. The only thing they had vaguely fitting the hiccup bill was a heavy, green Frankenstein mask with grotesque stitching. Walgreen’s did not stock green tights. So, dressed in a horrifying mask, cape, and tunic, she walked to school. In her head, she was a hiccup.  Every few steps, she hopped.

At school, kids told her, “You’re a monster!”

“No,” Cristina said, jumping. “I’m a hiccup.”

“No you’re not.”

By the end of the school day, Cristina had stopped believing in her inner hiccup. She began embracing her outer monster. Her class hosted a haunted house for the little kids and Cristina climbed onto her desk and played air guitar. She kicked her legs in the air and realized that what she really was was a rock n’ roll monster.

Case 2: Melissa L.

“Sylvia Plath Wrote a Poem about This”

Melissa L.’s case presents some uniquely intriguing circumstances. During her early childhood, her parents belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness cult and, therefore, deprived Melissa of Halloween for years. On that special night, her family would shut out the lights at the front of the house, make popcorn, and hide from the godless in a darkened room.

By the time Melissa was six, her family had left the cult to join the ranks of the godless. Melissa entered Halloween society with full force. She and her best friend combined to form a cute besties costume: a pair of dice. With success notched into her belt Melissa thought, “My next costume will be a… mushroom.”

Why a mushroom?

“I was a funny little kid, strange,” says Melissa. “I liked the look of mushrooms. They’re beige, soft, and squishy. I didn’t like to eat them. I wasn’t going for veggie platter. I was going for aesthetic appeal.”

Like Cristina, Melissa did not doubt her abilities to manifest fungus. “Because of the dice, I got the idea that my mom had Halloween omnipotence. She was immediately on board and I could see the wheels start turning. She said there must be some sort of way that we could attach an umbrella to me and use the top as a cap and drape cloth over it and maybe wrap a tube around me and drape cloth around the tube. It seemed perfectly reasonable. I feel like I could do this right now.”

I talk Melissa out of this. She is my tallest friend and her mushroom stem would be just too long. She’d look like something else.

“So what went wrong?” I ask.

“The umbrella couldn’t attach to me, something went awry, and my mother was very disappointed that she couldn’t fulfill my Halloween wish. She was so disappointed that we rejoined the church. Just kidding. I believe that was the year we threw together an old woman costume, curly white wig, shawl, and a cane. I wasn’t excited, but when I finally stepped out I embraced the role. I shook my cane. But I remember feeling bad that my mom felt bad.”

Such pathos.

Case 3: Richard M.

“Perv”

Richard M. is a great guy I used to teach with. Because he still works with children, I have to be very careful not to reveal too many identifying details about him. Richard told me that when he was in junior high, his mom thought it would be a great idea to costume him as a flasher. A flasher costume is easy and inexpensive. All you need is a trench coat, pantyhose, and lot of gym socks. Richard’s mom stuffed one of the legs, tied the other around Richard’s waist and voila, her son had a third leg dangling out the bottom of his coat. The head swung as he walked, and Richard’s mom made him practice flashing in the living room. Once he had his routine down pat, she drove him and his brothers to school. Of course, Richard was a hit; he had a long, soft schlong  he could tap people on the shoulder with. His homeroom teacher, however, didn’t find the costume so amusing. She referred him to the principal’s office, and she thought the costume was disgusting and rogue. She called home.

“Mrs. M, do you have any idea what your son is wearing?”

“Yes. I made it.”

Silence.

“Well come and get him.”

Richard’s mom drove to school and being a proud woman, she didn’t apologize. She brought him home and let him have a free day.

(And in case you’re wondering about this year, my girlfriend and I are handing out candy as Frida and Diego. I will connect my eyebrows and wear traditional ethnic dress. TJ will stuff her overalls. The hiccup will be our shared bisexual lover. It’s an easy threesome.)

The Hiccup Today

Myriam Gurba will be answering advice questions during the Hot Probs at RADAR at the LUGGAGE STORE Wednesday, October 12th, 7pm, 1007 Market Street at 6th, Free AND reading as part of RADAR’s Litcrawl program at the Lexington Club Saturday, October 15th, 7:15, 19th + Lexington, Free.

VALENCIA CHAPTER 21 – Jill Soloway

Listen, I’ve gone on at length in this blog about how much I love Jill Soloway, and I’m going to do it again. And you know what? I might decide, a few months from now or whatever, to do it again. Because she’s amazing. Did you happen to enjoy the Emmys this year, for the first time in your life? That’s because she wrote it with her lezzed out sister Faith, who is a famous funny lesbian. Jill’s eye on the world is super female, feminist, hilarious, and really heartfelt, and you might have seen it on Six Feet Under, United States of Tara and How to Make it in America, as well as in the pages of her audacious book Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants. I am hugeky thrilled that she is not only shooting a VALENCIA chapter, she’s shooting the final chapter. Grand finale! I talked to her about her chapter. Look!

Michelle Tea: Hi! What happens in your chapter?

Jill Soloway: It’s the last chapter.  An empty apartment. Tarot cards. The meeting of Michelle and Magdalena Squalor. Melancholy.

MT: How did you find your Michelle? And the rest of your cast?

JS: My cast is only Michelle and Magdalena and they sort of came to me.

Terra as Michelle. I have a crush on myself.

MT: Are you interpreting your chapter literally or are you mashing it up?

Talia as Magdalena. So right on it's eerie.

Morning Mail Call – ZIPPERMOUTH! And more.

You are either literally  – literally  – jumping up and down with joy right now, or you simply don’t know who Laurie Weeks is. And if you don’t know who Laurie Weeks is, well, I envy you. Because before you lies the insane, exhilarating, manic genius discovery of her. After a wait that had many fans sinking in and out of a decades-plus depression, her novel, Zippermouth, has finally arrived, packaged with amazing 70s coolness by The Feminist Press.

I first read Laurie in the pages of Amy Schoulder’s (FP’s current visionary) anthology Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat which came out in the 90s and had incredible pieces by Camille Roy (Date Rape Brownies) and Silas Howard and Harry Dodge (how to make perfect nutritional yeast popcorn and they used to date when they were tiny!) Laurie’s piece blew me away: in Nachos From The Edge the narrator, in near-blackout, tries to make nachos with a postcard and a hunk of cheese while ruining their loathsome boyfriend’s stereo with a hammer. It’s incredible. Then I found her in the pages of Eileen Myles’ classic anthology The New Fuck You, a rambling, nightmarish piece called Debbie’s Barium Swallow. You also might have read her letters to Sylvia Plath in an old fiction issue of Vice, and amazingly she came on the 1999 Sister Spit tour and some of my best memories of life are from that month – staying up all night talking to Laurie about Philip K Dick as we drove into Nevada, the sun coming up over the mountains. Laurie’s oeuvre, which she dives into, over her head, in Zippermouth, is addiction – it’s thrill and draw, it’s chaos and desperation, it’s oblivion and obliviousness to reality. It’s a point of view of deep inside the swells of it – wandering, driven, awake all night, picking up weirdos. that gorgeous openness to fucking everything, a spiritual disbelief in the concept of consequences, even as life piles up with them. There’s tons of romantic longing, the impossibility of it encapsulated by segments of letters to movie stars and dead poets. It’s about femaleness as the body and the psyche’s primary damage; as a given of failure and a constant scab. And it’s full of HILARIOUSNESS. A dark and deeply kind, absurd sense of humor is really the point of this book. We’re all damaged, and aren’t we buddies in the wreck of our lives, aren’t we all in on that joke?  In the words of a friend quoted by another friend, we’re all just ‘bodies in space’. You really, really want to share that wild, honest, funny space with Laurie Weeks and now we all get to.

Laurie will read from Zippermouth at RADAR at the LUGGAGE STORE – a LitQuake event, October 12th.

Look what else came in the mail!

Yasmin Golan’s super snazzy and smart Michael Jackson’s Masculinity, in which the multi-talented brainiac, poet, and force behind San Francisco’s innovative Queer Food For Live collective interrogates Michael Jackson’s masculinity – or rather, interrogates we, the readers, on the subject. A series of writing prompts for a class you wish you could take, Yasmin asks Is celibacy gay? Is a soft speaking voice gay? Is cosmetic surgery gay? Is single fatherhood gay? You want this shimmering, lovely little book; get it at michaeljacksonsmasculinity@gmail.com

And look what else:

An advance readers’ copy of Citizen, a volume of poetry by Aaron Shurin, put out by City Lights. You know how a book of poetry is a portal into a personal country, a museum of an individual’s mind (heart?) with it’s own recurring imagery and language and customs. I’m excited to visit Aaron’s, verse which is arranged into solid chunks, paragraphs of poetry exploring the world outside, the city or the country, and the domestic sphere, and like all poets the sphere of the heart. This is not a swansong. I’m living the quiver. Dig it!

Point of Fashion: Books

Some questions: would I dress to match my Kindle as I dressed the other day to match Dodie Bellamy’s incredible The Buddhist? No, I would not, and it’s not just because I don’t own a Kindle. Kindles are ugly. I think that is the real heart of this back-and-forth about the death of books and the rise of KIndles – do we want to live in a fucking ugly world where beautiful, rich colorful things like books, things that contain mystery and are therefore magical are replaced by some utilitarian thing that makes my Android look rococo? I don’t. Neither does Karl Lagerfeld, if any of you care what he thinks about aesthetics and living well – he recently Tweeted Even a golden iPad (that exists) will never give the same pleasure to the reader as a beautifully bound book. Expensive books enrich us. This is from the man who owns 70 iPods, a man unafraid to adapt new technology when it is appropriate. And of course I’d like to chime in that even inexpensive books enrich us, as I have been deeply enriched this week by Dodie Bellamy’s newest, The Buddhist, maybe the most personal book I’ve ever read about her affair with a creepy manipulative professional Buddhist. It’s all about middle-age and sex and being female, having a body wanting sex, and love, growing older, being sad and depressed from this world and resisting the Hegemony of Happiness. Which I have completely capitulated to but I get it. It makes sense to be a mess in this world. The Buddhist is a total breakup book and you sort of want to send it to anyone who didn’t understand how to love you properly in your whole life, but more than that you want to send Dodie a bouquet of flowers for having the sanity to end a chapter with FUCK YOU, JONATHAN FRANZEN!!

Other books I got to meet this week:

Tao Lin started a small press called Muumuu House and asked me to blurb the forthcoming book by Megan Boyle, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee. I want to have Dodie Bellamy and Megan  Boyle over for dinner together, a dinner I would burn and then we’d just sit in my bed with my cats eating ice cream and possibly crying. If you think this sounds awesome you will LOVE this book. Megan is in her early 20s and having a mad downward spiral that includes condomlesss sex, alcoholism, and bleeding ulcers. By Megan I mean ‘Megan’, the girl in the book not the girl who wrote the book. I’m not sure of their relationship – you know how that goes. Anyway, these sparse entries are blunt and poetic and jaded and emotionally astute, so sweet about people, the big faceless mass of them which we are all part of, and weird about love, full of longing but also intelligently bored and over it because you know, people are dumb. I really love this book and want to send it to people I know to be like – this book is so you! But I think they would be offended. They’ll find it soon enough, it comes out in November and people are going to be reading it.Tao also sent along Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs which seems stylistically  linked to Megan’s book and also to Tao’s You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am -can we name this literary movement? I don’t have the time right now.

Also:

MariNaomi (who will show new VAMPIRE work in honor of the 20th anniversary of Jewelle Gomez’s Gilda Stories at Intersection for the Arts on October 22nd) sent me Sister Spit Tour 2011 Diary and I got to relive the night I was forced to sleep at a motel so gross I took a shower with all my clothes on afterwards. She also sent me Not So Butch, a cute investigation of gender + desire. You can’t get that on a Kindle! Word.