The Hills

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. She is author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books, 2009), E! Entertainment (Blanc Press, diamond edition, forthcoming), ABRA (Zg Press, forthcoming w/ Amaranth Borsuk), as well as the conceptual fashion magazine The Fashion Issue (Zg Press, forthcoming), and five chapbooks, including, most recently, E! Entertainment (Insert Press, 2011).

SEAM RIPPER INTRODUCTION

REVENGE OF THE SLIP DRESS SLUTS

Mildred, a black feather eyemask!

-Chelsey Minnis

(Sketch from Hannah Weiner's "Fashion Show Poetry Event")

by Kate Durbin

Since Baroness von Elsa paraded down the street naked save for black paint. Since she wore shower curtain rings as bracelets and postage stamps as beauty marks. Since Hannah Weiner wrote WORD on her forehead and staged the first “Fashion Show Poetry Event.” Since Mina Loy crafted thermometer earrings. Since Sylvia Plath posed in swimwear for her college newspaper’s fashion column. Since the same Sylvia Plath spent her post-divorce money on clothes instead of groceries (girl, I did the same thing). Since Harryette Mullen wrote Trimmings. Since Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons.

In a recent google search on Emily Dickinson, I came across this: “Emily Dickinson was a shy crazy lady who dressed all in white.”

Fashion and its relation to writing, or women writers, is not limited to poets of course. Would Joan Didion be Joan Didion without those massive so-L.A. sunglasses? Who could forget that image of her standing next to a Corvette, a shroud of cigarette smoke obscuring her face, her thin frame sleek in that 70s gown? And while Zadie Smith may be ashamed of her fashion obsession, she still let Vogue into her dressing room, replete with vintage dresses, colorful head wraps, and a Venetian vanity.

Still, there’s something about the dangerous, too-sexy combo of fashion and writing—in particular women’s fashion and women’s writing—that tends to make people react in one of two ways. They either want to tidy the women up, safe-sex them, prop them like dolls, and sell to the highest bidder, much like Oprah’s recent Talbot’s ad of poets. Or they want to dismiss the fashionable women writers as frivolous accessories, unserious artists, like David Orr’s masculinist response to Oprah’s spread. These attitudes unfortunately often trickle down to the women writers themselves, who internalize this unconscious cultural sexism and feel bashful about their interest in fashion, or they compartmentalize their fashion from their writing in a Catholic sort of way.

To this I say: FUCK FASHION SHAME.

I cannot tell you how many female poets have told me that by encountering my work they now feel permission to wear hot pink lipstick and ball gowns to reading or conferences. I am glad they feel permitted, but I think it’s sad they ever felt there was something suspect about wearing lipstick and ball gowns to intellectual events. It’s my belief that my unwavering allegiance to glitter is the most radical stance in my career.

When Becca Klaver first contacted me about co-curating SEAM RIPPER, the title of her email was: REVENGE. In high school, Becca and I were both called into our respective principal’s offices for fashion crimes—hers, a slip dress from the Delia’s catalogue, mine, purple hair. Becca and I have been talking about fashion for awhile now—we really can’t stop talking about it—and we are both drawn toward the many brilliant women writers, such as the Gurlesque poets, who make fashion a part of their work. The thing about most of us fashion poets is that fashion’s been a part of our lives since we were teenagers, and yet, like many things teenage girls obsess over, the larger intellectual community rarely accepts fashion as a legitimate art form. And, if it is “embraced,” it’s misunderstood, as Oprah recently proved. Becca knew that Oprah had ripped off, and misunderstood, some of my work with fashion and poetry. So, like the two teen rebels we are, we decided it was time for a little payback from the Slip Dress Sluts.

Delirious Hem already speaks to fashion in its very title. What better space for a response to the intellectual community at large on women writers and fashion? And what better way to respond than to let these women speak and glitter and shimmy and bedeck and bedazzle for themselves? For that’s where Oprah and Orr made their biggest mistake—they put “fashion” on women, instead of realizing that fashion, like poetry, is something that comes from a woman, that she does by and for herself.

December 23rd: Kate Durbin

FASHIONWHORE: KATE MOSS

Marking her thirtieth British Vogue cover, supermodel Kate Moss takes over the September issue of Vogue UK with a mix of rock ’n roll flair and classic elegance. Lensed by Patrick Demarchelier, Kate shines bright in “The Moss Factor.”

Willy Vanderperre captures a sultry Kate Moss for the cover shoot of April’s Vogue UK. Styled by Miranda Almond in flirty and elegant looks, the British supermodel is a stiletto-wearing vixen in “Basic Instinct.”

Captured by Peter Lindbergh, supermodel Kate Moss falls easily into the role of seductress for an all black-and-white story in the latest Harper’s Bazaar US. After having some sexy fun with male models Ash Stymest and Callum Wilson, Kate luxuriates in sultry yet elegant looks pulled by George Cortina.

After working eight consecutive seasons with Longchamp, supermodel Kate Moss collaborates with the French label for a handbag collection. Captured by David Sims, Kate stars in the black-and-white campaign shot in Elsa, Paris.

In V Magazine’s editorial “Kate & The Gypsies,” stylist Karen Langley and photographer Iain McKell have the opportunity to work with the legendary Kate Moss. Dressed down, but still wearing the best from labels like John Galliano and Dsquared², this supermodel shines regardless of her surroundings.

Stylist Simon Robins proves he is not afraid of a little glam and sparkle as he adorns Vogue Russia cover girl, Kate Moss, in glittery pieces by Gucci, Balmain and Alexander McQueen. Under the well-trained lens of Sølve Sundsbø, Kate looks quite the part of a seductive vamp with her smoky cat eyes and intense gaze. Me-ow!

Kate gets clad in skin-tight, black leather for the September issue of Vogue Paris. Lensed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, the British supermodel delivers editorial gold in rebellious ensembles courtesy of fashion editor Emmanuelle Alt that feature the work of DSquared, Isabel Marant, Chanel and more.

We’ve already seen Kate Moss’ October cover for French Vogue, and now it’s time to get a look at the shoot in its entirety. The British supermodel was captured by Inez and Vinoodh in an all black-and-white studio shoot which features a combination of elegant and hard-edged looks as styled by Emmanuelle Alt. Entitled “Kate Moss,” the spread only reaffirms Kate’s status as one fashion’s most iconic faces.

*Significant portions of the text from FASHIONWHORE: KATE MOSS originally appeared at the fashion editorial site Fashion Gone Rogue.


Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. She is the author of the poetry collections The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books, 2009) and, with Amaranth Borsuk, Excess Exhibit, forthcoming from ZG Press. She has written several chapbooks including Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot (Dancing Girl Press, 2009), FASHIONWHORE (Legacy Pictures, 2010), The Polished You, as part of Vanessa Place's Factory Series (oodpress, 2010), and Kept Women, forthcoming from Insert Press. She is founding editor of the journal Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga. She writes about celebrity style at Hollywood.com.

Day 20: Kate Durbin and Amaranth Borsuk

Kate Durbin is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat/Akashic 2009), and the chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot (Dancing Girl Press 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Action Yes. She lives in Whittier, CA, 17 miles, as the crow flies, from Pasadena, CA, where Amaranth Borsuk lives and pursues her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from USC. Amaranth's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FIELD, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Pool, and ZYZZYVVA. Collaborative translations of Paul Braffort’s Hypertropes (with Gabriela Jauregui) appear in New American Writing and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.

Kate Durbin on Angela Carter and Joan Didion

Kate Durbin's first full-length collection of poetry, The Ravenous Audience, is forthcoming from Black Goat Press/Akashic Books. Her chapbook, Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Whittier, California.











The Deviant Woman


(Not So Much an Endorsement As a Femfight)


I am not so much concerned by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes a letter.
-Maria, Play it as it Lays

Angela Carter loathed Joan Didion. She called her “an alien from another planet.” She abhorred her female characters even more, stating in an interview: “Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didion’s female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest…”

Carter was known for being “spikily outspoken,” as Salman Rushdie coined her in the introduction to Burning Your Boats. Her ferocious, funny statement above does not end with the wreaked havoc of the Hells Angels. Carter provides two more colorful ends for Didion’s female characters, one involving the rape of the Sabine women. As with most judgment statements made about other people, this reveals more about Carter’s person than it does about Didion’s characters, here cruelly caricatured. And yet, Didion was no fan of feminism, at least not in the 70’s. Here’s a statement from her at the time, also from an interview: “The feminist analysis,” she said, “[denies] one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death."

This is typical Didion—frank, though less gaudy than Carter. And her statement is just as troubling. For one thing “the feminist analysis” she refers to is vague—whose feminist analysis, and what specifically is that analysis all about? Then there is the “irreconcilable difference” she speaks of—but the difference of what to what, precisely? What are we comparing here, and to what end?

Instinctively, however, I feel Didion is speaking of a real contradiction, not so much in the sense that Carter is a hypocrite in her statement above by calling herself feminist and then wishing wild demise upon women who deviate from her agenda, though that touches the surface of it. But the inherent contradictoriness of being a person—no, not a person—in being a woman, which has to do with “that dark involvement with blood and birth and death.” A dark involvement, it seems, that feminism, at least to Didion, had not completely come clean about.

There is plenty of involvement with “blood and birth and death” in “card-carrying feminist” Angela Carter’s works. The Bloody Chamber is a glorious example. And yet, Carter’s involvement, for all its grotesque decadent darkness, is ultimately a very redemptive one, even if it’s a pagan or animal redemption. There is little malice in the stories beyond that malice of the patriarchy. Carter’s women are rarely self-destructive, and if they are ambivalent about themselves, then narrator/Carter swoops in quickly to tell us exactly how they have been manipulated by the patriarchy into being so. Carter’s women are feminist heroes—complex and sexual and insatiable, and forever feminist—and we love them for it.

Didion’s Maria is no feminist hero. Maria spends the bulk of Didion’s classic 1960’s Hollywood novel Play it as It Lays driving the desert aimlessly or flipping through Vogue magazines by the pool. She is filled with ambivalence about everyone around her, and herself (particularly her body). She barely eats, gets her hair done for no reason, sleeps all afternoon. She is infuriatingly, willfully passive. Try and count the number of times in the novel where “Maria said nothing” and “Maria did nothing.” You will get sick of counting. Like Carter’s, though, this book, for all its praised “aridity,” is actually very bloody. Maria bleeds for fifty-one days straight from a botched abortion, refusing to go to the doctor when she is obviously hemorrhaging. A male character says to her, after she is arrested for stealing a car and vomits on herself: “There’s something in your behavior, Maria, I would almost go so far to call it…a very self-destructive personality structure.” This man is an ass, but he’s right.

Still, there is something else about Maria, deviant Maria. Something easy to undervalue, because it’s inexplicable: Maria, for all her evasion and self-damaging (in)decisions, seems to know the “irreconcilable difference” of herself. And in the face of this awful knowledge, she chooses to live on. Maria is a scarred survivor, in the sense that only those women who have experienced impossible paradox—stared straight into the empty pit where the eye should be—can be. This seems valuable, a necessary message in a language I can’t comprehend.

But what is it really, you ask—this mysterious “irreconcilable difference?” The question, of course, is impossible. It is, as Didion says, “the sense of ones deepest life being lived underwater”—the very darkest of “dark involvement[s].” You cannot understand it by reading about it. Maria calls it “nothing.” At least, in the light of its darkness, nothing is all that applies.

What do you do with the woman to whom “nothing applies”? The woman whose deviancy comes not from resisting patriarchal structures and attitudes but from believing that resistance to such structures and attitudes does not ultimately matter? Who has no interest in returning to the woods and feral, life affirming ways, but who knows only the way of the desert, the brutal truth of “the rattlesnake in the playpen”? Angela Carter clearly did not know what to do with these women, which is why she wanted to sick the Hells Angels on them. Interestingly enough, Maria does encounter the Hells Angels twice in the novel. Both times she comes out surviving. So Carter’s wish—which is really a wish that these women would not exist at all, since they complicate the way of progressive feminism—is a fantasy, and underestimates the endurance of the deviant woman.

There are women who, like it or not, cannot or will not reconcile their contradictions. There are women writers are hostile or ambivalent to their female characters because this is how they see themselves. This was as true in the 60’s and 70’s as it is now. But is it solely because they’ve swallowed institutional bias and cannot figure how to heave it back up, or is it because they know that if they begin to throw up, they won’t be able to stop? There are truths women know only in nightmares. Maria’s nightmares are of plumbing stopped up due to “hacked pieces of human flesh” stuck in the pipes, of fetuses floating in the East River. The patriarchy’s power, so blatant in the waking world, is less direct in dreams. At times there seem to be other, elemental forces at work. What are they? Where do they come from?

These are questions for which I venture no answers, and Didion would likely say there are no answers. Carter, I suspect, might not have found the questions relevant.

As for Maria, she sits in front of a mirror “picking out her mother’s features. Sometime in the night, she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women.” During the day, she watches a woman walk across a parking lot with “slow mincing steps.” The woman is “the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.” After more nightmares, of both the dreaming and waking sorts, she concedes only this: that “there would be plumbing anywhere she went.”

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and I keep on playing.
-Maria, Play It As It Lays

References:

Interview with Angela Carter
Interview with Joan Didion