DAY 1: RIOT AESTHETICS MAKE US FREE, ALICIA COHEN

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RIOT AESTHETICS MAKE US FREE

ALICIA COHEN

The joyful science of occupying squares
The will to everyone’s power…
Direct action – the future of mankind!
LGBT, feminists, defend the nation!

                                                        —Pussy Riot

1.

Riot knit rainbow

for free  to undumb

our sad ears

for all sweet faces to hide in   its

mansion forests

balaclava to shine on and blind bitterness’s    sweet

glowing

heat our hidden free hearts

hearts her lovers wield

a fiery torch not a candle of life-short

in palaces made of prisons

love impels us impulses   us

against our Putin-of-Seven-Billion-Faces to free

Him from the seven trillion forms of vainglory and

struggle to unsmuggle and reveal

God Hooligan Mother singing

we love you too and you and you

may all beings be free

may all beings know peace

and the joy-

ful science!

2.

in prison’s

uncovering

every second they serve

a bequest of undoing

the hurt part in

the deepest lake’s dark and

our starry hearts

riot work makes

more flowing the air

more flowering

blooms

and less cars to roam

Saint Alyokhina Saint Samutsevich Saint Tolok-nikova again made the world

by making it

Matter

Chick Flix Cast (so far)

Sharon Mesmer • Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Stacey Harwood • The Way We Were

Nicole Callihan • Legally Blonde

Rachel Shukert • Troop Beverly Hills

Marisa Crawford • Thelma & Louise

Rachel McKibbens • Aliens

Danielle Pafunda • Jennifer's Body

Nancy McGuire Roche • Barbarella
David Lehman • Brief Encounter
Dava Zuckerman • Sixteen Candles

Jennifer L. Knox • Gidget
Joy Katz • Romy & Michele's High School Reunion
Gina Abelkop • Meek's Cutoff
Krystal Languell • Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Laura Theobald • 3 Women
Amber Rose Tamblyn • The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Stephanie Paterik • For Me and My Gal
Nicole Steinberg • Earth Girls Are Easy
Ada Limón • Pretty Woman
Trish Harnetiaux • While You Were Sleeping
Susanne Reece • You've Got Mail
Laura Orem • Some Like It Hot
Elisa Wright • Say Anything
L.B. Thompson • Steel Magnolias
Lisa Leech • Love Actually
Raymond McDaniel • Ginger Snaps
Gina Meyers • Pretty in Pink
Nate Logan • Slums of Beverly Hills
Amy Lawless • Young Adult
Jess Rowan • Volver
Jeffrey Berg • Peyton Place
Elisabeth Workman • Kill Bill
Becca Klaver • Foxfire
Lauren Besser • Clueless
Colleen O'Connor • Coyote Ugly
Scott Fynboe • A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
& A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Caolan Madden • The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn
Alissa Fleck • The Virgin Suicides
Katharine Jager • Heathers
Angela Genusa • Women in the films of David Lynch
Jen Benka • 9 to 5
Joanna Penn Cooper • Bell, Book & Candle
Catherine Esposito Prescott • Dirty Dancing
Carrie Long • Divine Horsemen
Daniela Olsewska • The Cutting Edge
Megan Boatright • She's All That
Natalie Lyalin • The Proposal
Lea Graham • Practical Magic
Pattie McCarthy • Pride & Prejudice (& other versions)
T. A. Noonan • The Cabin in the Woods
Maureen Thorson • Labyrinth
Laura Carter • Desperately Seeking Susan
Tanya Larkin • The Women
Jessica Rae Bergamino • A League of Their Own
Lisa Janssen • Liquid Sky

& the curator requests:

The Sugarland Express

Wish You Were Here

Far from Heaven
Auntie Mame
Valley of the Dolls
Miss Congeniality

See the post below for the call for submissions.

COMING SOON: CHICK FLIX

Jennifer L. Knox is curating this round.

Updated call for essays:

The subject, Chick Flix, is wide open. You can take it from a Gone with the Wind angle, to Gaslight, to Gas, Food & Lodging, to Gidget (me), to The Good Girl, through Gena Rowlands and out the other side of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was going to declare one chick per flick, but if two people cover Heathers or Pretty Woman, it’s not going to retread any ground. Nevertheless, I'll be posting a sign up sheet soon.

You can write a 50 word punch in the face, or a 5,000 scholarly treatise. That's why there are scroll bars. Just don’t be a bore.

The deadline is December 1.

Essays should be uploaded to Google Drive and shared with delirioushem1 [at] gmail [dot] com (preferred), or emailed as a .doc or .rtf to that address.

Please include links to film stills, YouTube clips, or other illustrations/supporting materials you'd like to appear with your piece.

Direct questions Jennifer or to delirioushem1 [at] gmail [dot] com.

Some of the films being thrown out by contributors so far...!

Gidget

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Fire Walk with Me

Mystic Pizza

Aliens

Bridget Jones's Diary

Slumber Party Massacre

Moonstruck

Sleepless in Seattle

Steel Magnolias

9 to 5

Gas, Food, Lodging

Slaves of New York

A Walk in the Clouds

When Harry Met Sally

Pretty in Pink

The Trouble with Angels

You've Got Mail

The Devil Wears Prada

A Room with a View

Thelma & Louise

Sixteen Candles

Fried Green Tomatoes

Pretty Woman

A League of Their Own

Beaches

It Happened One Night

The Awful Truth

Desperately Seeking Susan

Foxfire
...& many more!

In Aporia: The Annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

In Aporia: The Annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

September 19, 2012 at 7pm
Lang Café, Eugene Lang College
65 W 11th street, NYC

The annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading at The New School honors the memory of Akilah Oliver, a radical poet, professor, feminist, and activist. The second of this annual reading series, this event will feature the work of Nick Von Kleist, Krystal Languell, Wendy S. Walters, and Eileen Myles.

Nick Von Kleist is a current senior at Eugene Lang College of the New School, where he studies Literature, Chinese and Fine Arts. Nick has been published on the online zine ShortfastandDeadly in London, where he also did many readings at the Woodburner. In New York, Nick has read at Bowwow at the Bowery Poetry Center.

Krystal Languell is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she won the Mercedes Jacobs Thesis Award. Her first book, Call the Catastrophists, was published by BlazeVox in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, esque and elsewhere, and her reviews and interviews have been published online at NewPages and Coldfront. Founder of the feminist literary journal Bone Bouquet, she is part of the Belladonna Collaborative in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Pratt Institute.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Troy, Michigan (forthcoming from Futurepoem Books in 2013), Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA). She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Walters’ poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Cave Canem and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review and the Yalobusha Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her prose has been published or is forthcoming in Bookforum, The Iowa Review, Coldfront, Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She is also a co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem with Amy Benson and Stacy Parker Le Melle.

Eileen Myles is from Boston and moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Eileen has published 18 collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction most recently Snowflake/different streets (poetry), and Inferno (a poet’s novel). Also The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers grant. She is a 2012 Guggenheim fellow. She lives in New York.

Eileen Myles on Charles Dickens

I always date people who turn me on to great books. Often not right away. Sometimes right away. An ex said Bleak House was of great interest to Marxists. And now my beloved Leopoldine had Bleak House by Charles Dickens on her shelf. We were auditioning candidates for the reading aloud before bed spot. I read the first chapter of Bleak House and I was so elated by the flow which was utterly English, a thing I mostly have no use for and yet in Bleak House I was in the poetry of it. I would claim that the best English poetry is in English prose though I will also say that I was doing a studio visit in Rotterdam last week and a young artist asked if he could read me some Jeremy Prynne who Lisa Robertson had introduced him to and I was also taken by the compressed and odd music of Prynne’s work. But Dickens. He’s funny. He nails people in these flash character portraits but you know I think it was generally the landscape that mostly took me:

The sun was low – near setting – and its light came redly in above, without descending to the ground.

And soon after that the human landscape: Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not long to be seen, I think.

Dickens wrote in time where people talked like that - Death was perhaps a matter of going off stage – for good. Or else least people aspired to talking like that. Since it’s all that there was language was in everyone’s ears. I think of the 19th c. as having talk, and landscape, and a wealth disparity as grand as ours. So to be in Dickens observant colloquial world of this book (and it took me months to read) was to be both more and less at home in ours. In 1853 when Bleak House appeared the world still spoke richly of its problems and since even my own grandmother was born in 1880 and she is long gone we can’t ask anyone if a world about talking hurt less. But they died younger. So.

(Learn more about Eileen Myles herself here.)

Laura Mullen on Daphne Marlatt

“Who’s There?” The book begins—as Hamlet begins—with a question, and the insistence on an unfolding that must follow upon a sudden awareness of presence. Who = character, There = setting and both together: plot. His story: “history, the story of dominance. mastery. the bold line of it.” A deep engagement with the archive, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic is also an exquisitely and subtly crafted novel (this “book of interruptions” feels loose and fresh as a draft), its poetic prose both transparent and prismatic, providing a wise guide to the problems and opportunities exposed by second wave feminism while opening—gently, lovingly, lucidly—an inquiry into history as a discourse, and lineage as an issue. The territory the book explores includes the rough beginnings of a logging town or outpost in the Pacific Northwest and—as palimpsest—the civilized present incarnation of that geography; the narrator is a history student turned faculty wife who turns again, away, straying first with her mind and then with her heart and soul, becoming one of those who can never go home again, given what she comes to know. In questioning charged absences in the historical chronicles she finds traces of women whose almost erased lives fire her imagination, and she unfolds herself—going from research assistant to novelist and from a stale and stalled marriage into a relationship which is tender, warm, intimate, and vulnerable. She unfolds herself: it turns out that that opening “Who’s There?” was not necessarily a question for another after all. Or not only. Ask it of yourself: read this—more than once. “the real history of women…is unwritten because it runs through our bodies: we give birth to each other…it’s women imagining all that women could be that brings us into the world.”

Hear Laura read from this here.

(Learn more about Laura Mullen herself here.)

Daphne Gottlieb on Katherine Dunn

In 1989, I had a cat named Pooka and I didn't eat meat. I was baby steps queer. I shaved my head and dyed my hair pink and shaved my head and pierced my nose. I marched on Washington DC. There was no internet. Being a fierce outcast took work. All my clothes were black. 

In 1989, books were stars -- you wanted to know what the newest, the hottest, the edgiest were. Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior was like that. The RE/Search books were like that. 

I was 20. At 20 and before that, books change your life better and more profoundly than they can later. Siddhartha. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Little Prince. Still Life with Woodpecker. Cat's Cradle. 

And Geek Love. The story of a "freak show" family-- what begins as a story about outcasts and quickly becomes a story about cults and betrayal, only to ultimately become a meditation on family, love, home and sacrifice. 

I was a freak show. I wanted to find my cult. I knew all about betrayal. The rest I continue to learn about. 

I have read that book at least four times now. I come back to it and come back to it, a favorite resort, a dry place in a storm, a party, a prayer meeting. It has never disappointed me. And I always find something new. I hope you do, too

(You can learn more about Daphne Gottlieb herself here.)