Incorporating the catastrophe of my personality

As I approach the one-year mark of my layoff and introduction to full-time freelancing, I'm finding that I am learning so much, yet there is so much more to learn. I often feel like I'm flailing, crouched behind the staid projects I've been doing for years, the ones that are almost rote, even when they are frustrating, the ones that make a little bit but not too much money, the ones that are fine but not moving me to the next level. I forget that sometimes you have to get accustomed to one thing before you leapfrog to the next. Or maybe I just need to take more risks.

Speaking of which, I met with my accountant, who recommend that I incorporate. I get all the reasons that makes sense, but it unnerves me, even though I saw the numbers. I get the logic behind it but it feels like turning myself into a corporation means I'll be selling out my emotions in some way, that rather than help me make money, it will hinder me in the actual act of doing the work I need to do to earn money. Ultimately, that process of paperwork and making up a name and all of that feels so serious and adult, which seems at odds for someone who is about to visit a Hello Kitty Spa. More so, it feels like the antithesis of creativity, even though I know creativity alone does not pay my rent. Sometimes I'm not even sure what does, yet according to those numbers, I did well, better than I would have guessed.

I picked up Katie Roiphe's new book of essays, In Praise of Messy Lives, at the library, and skipped ahead to her Mad Men essay, "The Allure of Messy Lives." In it, she quotes Don Draper quoting Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky."



Don quotes this part:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.


The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

That led me to reading more about the man, Vladimir Mayakovsky, O'Hara's friend and a Russian poet and playwright who committed suicide. Here's a little from that Wikipedia entry:

In 1938 the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened to the public. In 1974 the Russian State Museum of Mayakovsky was opened in the center of Moscow in the building where Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930.[12]

Frank O'Hara wrote a poem named after him, "Mayakovsky" in which the speaker is standing in a bathtub, a probable reference to his play "The Bathhouse".

In 1986 English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg recorded the album Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, named after a namesake Mayakovsky's poem.

In 2007 Craig Volk's stage bio-drama "Mayakovsky Takes The Stage" (based on his screenplay "At The Top Of My Voice") won the PEN-USA Literary Award for Best Stage Drama.[13]

The poem I found so beautiful, so stunning, so striking, that made me relate, like Don, to the catastrophe of my personality that seems to get me in trouble with its impulsivity, seemed trite after I read more about Mayakovsky, but still powerful. I am now carrying O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency in my bag, a slim, potent volume. Maybe there will be more revelations.

So back to me. At the same time as I feel a little bit odd about turning myself into a business, it's exciting, and the fact of the matter is, it already is a business. I just submitted an essay on spec about something that's extremely personal, but it helped to get it out, to write about it. It feels as surreal as anything that's happened in the last year. I feel like the least business-minded person ever and now I'm going to be a business, just by existing. That's probably the wrong way to think about it, but it's how it feels. The work I do, rather than me, the human being, is my business, and yet almost everything I do winds up as fodder for my work, sometimes in ways I could never have predicted. I don't know how to separate them, and I think if I were try to separate the "real" me from the "writing" me, I would fail at being both.

That is the real "issue," if it's an issue at all. The writing about my life part comes naturally; it's how I sort out the good and the bad and the confusing and the in between. It's a good reminder as I wonder whether to pitch an essay about one of the craziest things I've ever done to a new editor; my first instinct was, "What will she think of me?" And yet...I want to share it, to get it out there and make it seem, even marginally, a little less crazy, because I wrote it down, because I contextualized it.

I'm not going to pretend I have a thing in common with Frank O'Hara, save for the fact that words, trite as they are, are how I cope. I hope it all means more than writing off the cost of the O'Hara book, because that is precisely what I don't want to become, someone reduced to figures, numbers, facts that don't mean anything without feelings.

diving into the umpteen stories of the wreck, and the mythology of the truth

Last weekend, twice, I saw my boyfriend's production company put on After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo. It's an often over-the-top play, where I was trying to catch up with the plot, and sometimes it was hard to take the relationships in it seriously because there was this backdrop of absurdity, but there's a moment near the end that struck me both nights. It was this moment when Justin, trying to rectify what he sees as a false image of his murdered mother, quotes Adrienne Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck." He says he wants to show "the wreck" and "not the story of the wreck," and reads a passage from tehpoem that includes these lines: "the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth" and then proceeds to serve up a videotape as evidence that the story being put forth is false, and his is real, true, honest.

I don't know enough about the poem or poetry in general to do the poem justice, but I couldn't get that image out of my head, nor the idea that any of us can separate ourselves from our story, which is really "stories," that there is ever "the thing itself" sans mythology. Please show that to me, that person or thing or place that exists without a story, without a mythology built up around it. Of course I understand his impulse; he wanted to right what he saw as an injustice, an untruth, and I don't mean to imply that he was making something up. But the idea that because you have a history, a memory, or a tangible item, like a videotape, and that therefore you are free of mythology, free of the framing of the story, is, to my mind, false.

I thought about so any stories I've told myself, about my body, my heart, my home, my relationships. I would imagine that Rich would agree, given this bit from her poem "On Love:"

An honorable human relationship-- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"-- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

The story of the wreck, which, again, is an ongoing one, especially when it comes to our fellow humans (and ourselves), is indeed a constant refining. It's informed by so many things, and the idea that we know someone else, whether they are dead or alive, in the best and clearest and most correct way, is one that is easy to be seduced by. Who wouldn't want to claim that they have this clear insight, this omniscient vision of "the wreck?" I thought of that when I read the Wired cover story that purported to be about Steve Jobs, but was much more accurately about Steve Jobs, the Walter Isaacson biography. Indeed, Isaacson is interviewed as are many businesspeople who've read his book. This same assumption Justin makes in After Ashley is right there in the title of Ben Austen's story: "The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?" (Italics mine)

I was fascinated by the way Isaacson's story was taken as fact, rather than a very popular 600-page biography informed by facts, but at the end of the day, a story. I almost wrote "like any other," which I admit isn't accurate; Isaacson had an immense amount of access to Jobs and those surrounding him. But the idea that he has written the forever definitive story, one that is so singularly truthful and decisive that no other even gets mentioned, is telling, even as the story purports to be about Jobs as multifaceted angel/devil.

It's been this wonderfully eye-opening lesson for me, to see where I am too much like Justin myself, where I want to fit people into the story I think they'd wear best, tailoring my own visions around them, rather than letting them dress themselves, shucking a coat here, wiggling into a pair of jeans there, coating themselves in all manner of disguises. Are their (dis)guises "true" simply because they picked them out of the closet? Not necessarily, but I also know that neither is mine; we are all entitled to our story, our viewpoint, no matter how much other people might disagree. There was a moment, when I wasn't blindfolded, during Taylor Mac's show on Monday night where he had an audience member come up and peel the liquid latex off his face, and it was hilarious but also shocking. You've started out in a mask--what else is artificial? All of this?

I am more cautious, in some ways, than I have ever been. I am always looking for the stories that aren't being told, the hidden language of silence, deliberate or not. I am looking for the stories of wrecks and successes in equal measure. I know that the stories we present, conscious or not, are just as important as the "truth," if such a thing exists. When I was in the middle of that spectacularly bad romance, I told myself the most vicious stories, ones that built me and that relationship up in ways that could only leave me with absolutely nothing. For a long, long time, I blamed other people for that failure, for my own lack of insight, for my lack of seeing what was literally right in front of me.

I was, in a word, angry. I hated that I was that fallible, that gullible, that stupid. I hated that part, in some ways, more than the hurt. I hated that I had fallen for my own mythology of what was happening. And it's not like all of a sudden I love that I did that, but I know it was something I had to learn from, knowledge that I could, hopefully, put to use in the future, to ask when I wasn't clear, to not elevate myself to that pedestal I'd put myself on, but also not let myself think so little of myself that I'd accept the things I did. It's more complicated than that, of course, and I think it would've been unfair in the thick of it to expect myself to see any more clearly than Justin. Do I sometimes wish I could go back and be different, better? Of course, but I also know that I was playing a losing game from literally day one. That story was right in front of my face, surrounding me, but I didn't want to see it, I pushed it away at every turn, shut anyone up who wanted to tell me their version of the truth of that story because I wanted to be special, exceptional, worthy. I don't want that any more, from that person, but it only takes an instant to embody that girl who did. I still have days when I wake up and think that maybe I could, I don't know, erase that history and hurt and indeed be worthy, for a few seconds, for the span of a conversation. Then I shake the silliness out of my head and proceed into real life, which is much messier than my flighty fantasies. There's a lot of be careful what you wish for in there too; fantasies are stories that can veer on dangerous.

That so-often fine line between story and truth, especially the ones we tell ourselves, is a space that fascinates me. I want to use it to learn how to undo some of the most damaging stories I've told myself; that I shouldn't bother starting, because I will fail, that I'm not worthy, because someone else decreed it, that the world is more limiting than limitless.

I think we all have, to one degree or another, a desire to control the story. It's a primal sort of self-protection, and I get it, I really do. Of course we want to dictate what others think of us, and in some cases, what others do. I am grateful that I am making hesitant, tiny baby steps toward recognizing that that's not something I can control. I still hate it, but I also know that the more you try to exert that iron fist of control, the more damage you do.

There have been so many times in the last year and beyond, specifically last week, where I was in such a dark place, I literally couldn't see anything else. Somehow, certainly despite myself, rays of positivity forced their way in, forced me to see that that dark story I was telling myself wasn't so much false, as temporary. Even if it's just a coping mechanism, a story I have to tell myself to get up in the morning, I do believe that every day is a new opportunity, not to undo the past, but to reframe the present, to live up to my own expectations for myself, and to force myself to keep looking for the false notes in the stories I tell myself. It makes teasing out the truth more challenging, to be sure, but I would like to think it makes me more empathetic, to be less like Justin, myopic in that search for justice, and more aware of the fact that even Ashley herself didn't have a monopoly on the "story" of herself. All we have is our own version, however twisted, subjective, loving, hateful, flawed and beautiful, that is.

Duplicitous hearts and why I'll never get rid of my Margarat Atwood books

I've owned Margaret Atwood's Selected Poetry II for over a decade. I don't know precisely how long, but I picked it up off a dusty bottom bookshelf and read some poems like I'd never read them before, which probably I hadn't. This one I especially liked; maybe those of us who relate can form a duplicitous hearts club. I'd totally join that. In this other book I'm reading, 31 Dates in 31 Days, author Tamra Duricka Johnson questions at one point whether she's dated too much with her heart, and not enough with her head.

I've questioned that at times but I actually think it's the opposite for me, or rather, I'm in my head so much, too much, perhaps, and I keep my heart a lot more guarded than my head, and when I let it out to play I'm not a helicopter mom. I don't monitor its every move, don't monitor much of anything until its about to flatline on me and then I go into triage mode. And yet...not that I like to be in that mode, I try not to seek it out or go toward it, but if that is the risk of having a duplicitous, or perhaps just naive or optimistic or tender heart, I'll always choose that over the more guarded, cautious, practical alternative. I wonder often if my heart already belongs to the children I want to meet so badly I see the whole world through that lens. Ideally I'd have enough heart for, well, I don't know who for, but for more than one person, but I know I have too much for just me. That particular want has been constant, not duplicitous at all, and if I had to pick which quality I most want to pass on, it would be heart over head in an instant. Not heart at the exclusion of head, as 2011 has beaten into my skull (hard to type those words after watching Drive, but, you know, metaphorically), but never head at the exclusion of heart.

Being on the other end of "I don't want" isn't easy, to put it very, very mildly. When you are and there is someone on the "I want" end who is everything you're not it's excruciating, for lack of a more powerful word. It's like a constant blaring ubiquitous reminder, for me, of what I'm not. As much as I don't want to care, I do. A lot. But again, as dark and searing as that is, and trust me, I could fill a paragraph with synonyms for dark and they'd barely touch what it's like, I'd still rather be a heart girl. I'd rather face that, over and over and over, until I learn whatever it is I'm meant to learn from it. So, I am, and the thing I'm most afraid of is my heart not ever wanting again. It's not something I can control, much to my chagrin, though, so there's a lot of forced listening, as Atwood describes, a lot of digging through the layers and layers of darkness, unpacking, unspooling, unraveling them, forcing them into the brightest light rather than keeping them buried so far away I barely know they're there, burrowing, lying in wait. I can live with my...not faulty, exactly, not even untrustworthy, more like recalcitrant, difficult, challenging heart. Maybe it knows things that my head would never even consider.

Would've put this on Tumblr but it insists on putting lines between my text and I can't be bothered to figure out how to fix that, but click here for her gorgeous poem "Variation On The Word Sleep." Sleep plays a role in both poems. I'll take this with me when I get my "heart" tattoo. Still plotting who, what, when, where (I've got why covered), but I'm thinking this place, while I celebrate my birthday.

Oh, and in Selected Poems II you'll also find "The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart."

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
by Margaret Atwood

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorated cakes with,
the heart this is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggled against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don't want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

Remembering Cheryl B.

I'm too sad to be coherent at the moment. Maybe it was naive or stupid or just wishful thinking but I was sure Cheryl would pull through. And I didn't let myself think too much about the fact that she might not, I just couldn't, though maybe part of being an adult is facing that. I didn't visit as often as I could have, but I thought of Cheryl often the past few months.

When I visited her a few months ago she showed me the honey badger video, which I hadn't seen, and then right after that I saw this t-shirt on my coworker's desk, and ordered one and gave it to Cheryl. When I got to the ICU, I was struck with this feeling of stupidity; maybe she would have to just wear a hospital gown and I shouldn't have gotten it. I realize now that I let my fear of not knowing what to say, of being nervous and uncertain, get in the way of telling my friend how much I cared about her. I hope to never be in that situation again but if I am, I'm gonna get over myself, and right now I'm trying to both take care of myself and not just wallow in sadness, reach out to my friends and loved ones, and live life as fully as Cheryl did.

But you know what this reinforces for me? "Everything happens for a reason" is total, complete bullshit. There is no reason for this to have happened and the only positive things I can say are that I'm glad Cheryl is no longer suffering, and sharing memories about her and just "I'm sad/mad too" sentiments is...something. Not heartening and not cheerful but comforting, I guess.

Anyway, I'm sitting in Starbucks at Grand Central, surrounded by bags of stuff that feel really useless, crying and blowing my nose and traversing the internets, after having fallen asleep so hard on the train a stranger had to wake me up to tell me we were here. I got some coffee and am trying to edit other people's stories but can't seem to get anywhere.

Speaking of my stuff, tomorrow my organizer is coming over for a session. I was supposed to have either bought a dresser or gotten rid of the 4 giant bags of clothes we gathered for giving away a few months ago. I haven't done either yet. But it reminds me of this one time Cheryl brought her cat over to help catch mice. The cat got lost in my two bedroom apartment and we were looking all over and it was crazy hot. We found dollar bills that had been eaten by mice and I think Cheryl was a little annoyed that her cat might have gotten lost in my home (we found the cat under my bed, caught in the netting). "This place looks like a crack house, and I would know," she said. It was funny but caustic, and, yes, true (well, I'm gonna assume it's true, never having been in a crack house). I think she'd like to know that I'm gonna part a little more freely with some of my stuff, at least, I hope I will. The stuff that matters is what's on the inside. I know that, much as I might surround myself with belongings, and I hope to be someone who privileges people over possessions. That's part of my goal in this year of transformation.

I wanted to share this beautiful tribute to Cheryl Kathleen Warnock of Drunken! Careening! Writers! wrote. DCW is a pioneering, amazing reading series and I'm posting details about Thursday's reading there. My favorite part of Kathleen's post:

She had a dayjob until a couple years ago, then got downsized along with a significant chunk of the American workforce. She pieced out a living from freelancing and editing (she was a very good editor), and while the unemployment was difficult, it was hardly a period of lying fallow. She got a lot of writing done, and her name appeared on a lot of articles and blogs, and when she came to DCW, she read pieces of her memoir, which she called “When I Knew Everyone on Avenue A.” There was a piece about when she decided not to drink anymore. A piece about her father throwing a plate at her across the dinner table. She performed in a multi-media piece downtown with some other poets at the Flea Theater, in an evening curated by Regie at full glamour. It was marvelous.

We saw each other often, at readings, panels, birthdays, the occasional “at home” at her apartment in Brooklyn, where a salon of queer divinity often reigned. While the accent was on queer, it was talent that got you in the door with Cheryl, and labels were the last thing she judged you by. As someone who had identified as bi, she occasionally took some pushback from people who demanded she pick one side or the other. She told me once a guy asked her what PERCENTAGE she was (which seems to me just the kind of question a lot of guys would ask) and she said answered: “75/25 women/men” and then commented that she answered so quickly, she knew it was true.

Is that not a brilliant memoir title? I hope we get to read it. From Cheryl's site:

When I Knew Everyone on Avenue A is Cheryl B.’s personal, irreverent take on New York City in the 1990s. In this humorous one-woman spoken word/storytelling presentation, Cheryl offers up bits of her twenty-something existence; logic-defying relationships, sexual bewilderment, artistic experimentation, fleeting friendships, the death of her father, high doses of self-medication and ultimately, sobriety. While in the background, some of her beloved NYC haunts fade into relics.

This is an amazing lineup - I'm looking forward to reading Bob Smith's novel Remembrance of Things I Forgot, which has been waiting for me in its beautiful hardcover, beckoning me.

Drunken! Careening! Writers!

Isa Coffey

Joel Derfner

Jenifer Levin

Bob Smith

"Glitter and Be Gay"

Thursday, June 23, 7pm

KGB Bar

85 E. 4th St.

FREE

Kathleen posted this video of Cheryl reading and it's so quintessential Cheryl. She had this tough girl voice and style of reading, even though she was wiry and didn't "look" tough. She was one of the first slam poets I saw read. When I first met her, she wasn't sober, and I don't know how much to say about that, plus that was a looooong time ago so some details are fuzzy, but we always laughed about one particularly crazy encounter with a boy who is long forgotten. Anyway, enjoy this video:



And I found the photo below at Sugarbutch Chronicles, taken by Syd London, of Cheryl looking as fierce and glam and gorgeous as she could.

"New York Girl" by Cheryl B.

I'm sad and stunned that my friend Cheryl B. is no longer with us. I hate that I can link to her website but can't give her a hug. She was full of spark and passion and is an example to me of someone who saw how she wanted to change her life, and did it. Here is her poem "New York Girl." If you want to read about the last part of her life, her cancer blog WTF Cancer Diaries is something. She was one of the first people I met in the queer writing scene and we had some crazy times and some fun times and I don't have anything else to say except that I will miss her and her death is so unfair.



She's got the click of fierce heel hitting blacktop

She's got sarcasm dripping from the tip of her tongue

She's got a bra made out of steel and panties made out of licorice

She's got a vibrator in her pocket and she's very elusive to see you

She's got that tri-state area glow and a laugh that comes out of nowhere

She's got a voice like a cannon and lips that unravel like spools of silk

She's got a body that curves like the beauty of the open road

She's got Polaroids of herself floating about this city, wearing

nothing but her pet snake

She's got no problem with that

She's got that edge, you know that edge, she's got that leather cuffs

in the top drawer of her dresser, hot wax dripping onto warm flesh

kind of edge

She's a New York girl with a flask full of courage and determination

cocktail strapped to her left hip bone

She's got important aspects of your psyche drowning in the milky

ocean of her complexion

She's got various parts of your anatomy tied up and quivering

in her fist and you're going to have to play a little game to get them

back.

New essays up at Modern Love Rejects and Thought Catalog

I have two new essays that, coincidentally, both went up today.

One is at the new site Modern Love Rejects. It's called "The Unlikely Other Woman." It feels dated to me, because it's from a while ago, but as part of my new try, try, try again attitude, I thought it fitting to send a piece that's in part about rejection to a site about rejection.

I thought I was too smart to get hurt, which was my ultimate downfall. There’s no such thing as “too smart” when it comes to love; it’s the great intelligence equalizer. Why else would Nikki Giovanni have a poem addressing precisely this scenario called “I Would Not Be Different.” I grabbed it off the shelf at my local bookstore, one where we’d even had a date, where he’d kissed me between the stacks. I was desperate for a sense of community of fellow women who were not smart enough to evade the charm of the married man. “You sort of see someone/And you don’t want to notice/That ring on his finger/Nor really that sort of happy/Look in his eyes,” she writes. I thought he could be happy with her—and me—and that I could be too.

And that local bookstore is that fantabulous WORD, where I got some amazing books and ogled cute items last night. More on that later. But since it's still National Poetry Month, I'll recommend you check out that stunning Nikki Giovanni book, Bicycles: Love Poems. I kept that book in my bag for a long time and would read it almost daily. Yes, it helped.



The other essay has a crazy long title, and I'm really happy with it. Some of it is about the fact that social media is, well, social, and is a counterpoint to some of the people who think it's not. I described it on Twitter as being about "art appreciation, theater, iPhones, Flickr, 4square, Nirvana, David Carr, technology & more." That pretty much sums it up, I think. Please read it and, if you're so inclined, pass it along. I'm honored to have my work published their because I love what they're doing. Do make sure to check out their Love & Sex section. I have my eye on some pieces for Best Sex Writing 2012 (no decisions have been made on that book yet, as I'm wrapping up Best Bondage Erotica 2012 and madly reading reading reading).

"Why I Had My iPhone In My Hand While Viewing The Nirvana Exhibit At Experience Music Project"

I can contrast my visit to EMP with the other Seattle Center cultural offering I took in, a matinee of the play This at Seattle Rep, a few minutes’ walk away. There were plenty of moments in the play I found noteworthy, from the married man who tells the woman with whom he had a one-night stand, “You invade my psyche,” to the game the other characters play with Jane, whereby she leaves the room and has to guess the story they’ve made up, using only yes and no questions. Only there is no story, save for the one she spins, and she is the last one in on the not-so-funny (to her) joke. Unlike the museum, except for perhaps the video interview sections, the play moved too quickly to capture except by memory.

Both ways of processing and responding to art with simply our eyes and ears, or with the aid of technology, or perhaps pen and pencilæare, I believe are necessary. Any time I walk into a museum, a theater, or even a park, or open a book or visit a website, I am hoping that something I find there will leave me changed and different than I was before I ventured into that space. My photos (which you can see here) don’t tell a whole story, mine or the museum’s, so much as offer a tease, a glimpse into what stood out for me during my two hours in EMP. They aren’t meant to replace or stand in for the exhibit.

Read the whole thing

On preparing to read The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles

Everyone is talking about e-books these days, how they will change books, reinvent them, make what we think of as “books” obsolete. That may or may not be true, but for now, I want to hold on to one of the moments of reading I love best: opening up a new book. Holding it in my hand; I prefer to own it, because I’m greedy like that, but I make frequent use of the New York Public Library too. But at that moment, something magical awaits you. Or doesn’t, but you won’t know until you crack it open. I like to hold my books, devour the back cover text, though this time I didn’t. I started flipping through The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (which for some reason I just typed twice as "England" even though part of what intrigued me was the theme of Iceland, because my aunt's from there), a book I was drawn when I first heard about it in an interview with Myles at The Rumpus, perhaps more for the title than for the author, Eileen Myles, who I’m a fan of, and who was in the audience and asked an interesting question yesterday at the CUNY panel on Pornography and the City, about teen sexuality.



I read a lot of books because I want them to be an escape. Easy. A rest for my mind from its ongoing spinning and cycling and list-making. Some books, though, are the opposite. They make me think, for if I am to give them a shot, I have to exercise my brain. And/or delight it with the words, the grappling and the sensations of the words, as opposed to just their meaning.

I must admit that this book scares me a little, not because of the book itself, but because of me. In it I know there are many topics I know little or nothing about – Iceland, poetry, art. I know I am coming at it not with some wealth of knowledge, but a beginner’s mind. I look through the table of contents and see many names I don’t recognize: Nicole Eisenman, Robert Smithson, Susanna Coffey, Martha Diamond, James Schuyler, Alice Notley, Ann Luaterbach. Peggy Ahwesh.

There are some I do know as I flip through – I know before confirming that “Allen” is Allen Ginsburg. I see Ntozake and would be astounded were Myles talking about anyone other than Ntozake Shange. I now who Björk is. But I like that. I want that. Crave it. Maybe need it. I want to learn things about writing and art and Iceland. I want to keep reading essays that start with lines like “Allen was more of a star than a homosexual.” And “I think this guy is wringing out his towel his dick is so huge.” As far as I know, I’ve only read one piece before, in the excellent anthology Live Through This, about flossing.

And best of all, as I read, I hear Myles’s unique, powerful, strong voice, the one I’ve heard at readings and on CDs and on YouTube, in my ear. I almost wish there were an audio version and I don’t even listen to audio books. So that’s what I’m thinking about as I prepare to sink into the pieces that make up The Importance of Being England: Travel Essays in Art.

And here’s a clip of Myles reading the poem “O”– she can say a hell of a lot in just over a minute.



Read excerpts and reviews at EileenMyles.com

But The Importance of Being England on Amazon

Official description from the publisher, Semiotext(e), who I first encountered at St. Mark's Bookshop when I saw and immediately grabbed Michelle Tea's first book The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America - their front shelves always pull me in.

Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds.

Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

Monica Day reading at August's In The Flesh

We need more erotic poets at In The Flesh. Watch Monica Day to hear why. If you are one and want to read November 20th, write me at rachelkb at gmail.com with writing samples and "In The Flesh" in the subject line.

Monica Day reading in August at In The Flesh. Catch her, and me, and you too if you choose (it's an open mic) on Wednesday, October 1st at Bowery Poetry Club:

The Sensual Life presents…
Living The Sensual Life:
An Evening of Erotic Open Mic

Join us for an evening of seduction and truth-telling…
art and pleasure… to a place where raw desire collides with expression, and explodes.
Bring your poems, stories, songs, art – however the spirit of Eros moves you to create, we want you to share and explore with us. Sure to send tingles down your spine – among other places.
Place: The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery St.
Time: 8pm (sharp) to 9:30pm
Fall Dates: 9/3, 10/1 & 11/12
Admission: $10 (bring a friend for free)
*Recommended: writers and artists call ahead to ensure