Lara Glenum: Organic surrealism galore

Gently Read Literature on Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum:
"A phrase that popped into my head after reading Lara Glenum’s MAXIMUM GAGA for the first time was ‘post-apocalyptic porno poetry’. Post-apocalyptic because the land of these poems is populated with post-human creatures that are strange mutations of animal and machine. Porno because the land of these poems is riddled with extreme sex acts and meat and teeth and perverse modes of consumption and bodily fluids galore.
Another thought that occurred to me is how it seemed strangely apt that I could abbreviate the title’s collection as MAX. GAG. In a way, this collection seemed like a vomitous outpouring of grotesque hybrids in which misshapen chunks were hacked up into different pieces, also misshapen."

And from Blake Butler:
"In 110 pages Lara Glenum has calcified the remains of what she might have in her sleep licked out of the head of one of the 1500 brains that died trapped inside the body of Gilles Deleuze's suicide, flushed from the spewmater of Lewis Carroll's brain damaged brother's long-rotten LSD baked corpse, and churned together with the sugars of recalled candy wiped out whole middle schools in Japan.
These are poems that as they create their world among the lines become banned inside the created land as soon as the land therein hears itself.
The terrain of the book is filled with malformed sexual machines, Sade-ian cartoon demons with child names like Minky Momo and Seven Cunt Mary and the Bull. There is a stage play that seems implicating in and on the poems as if by quasi-candied-dictatorial reign, which then scourges itself in and of the poems as if it is one of them."

And this is from Maximum Gaga:
"The vagina is found in divers Manners, and with divers Ornaments. Many of them provide the finest Articulations, and Foldings, for the Wings to be withdrawn, and neatly laid up inside. Occasionally the petiole embraces the branch from which it springs. The Empalement, which commonly rises out of a membranous vagina. The embryio dracunculi, it is sad, will quit the body of the vaginaless parent worm. Sometimes soldiers lie together like teeth crouching in a perfect labia. The fibers of their leg muscles are then distinguished by crenellated or adipose septa, as by so many peculiar vaginae. The vagina's variants in North America alone are innumerable, the most important being the entrance to heaven, snapping doors."

And this is Lara Glenum's manifesto:
Manifesto of the Anti-Real
1. Art is neither a form of consolation nor a butler to hegemonies. Even in its most discreet moments, art explodes.
2. The Anti-Real does not deny the Real.* The Anti-Real knows that everything is in annihilation in the Sublime. The Anti-Real is that which seeks to manifest itself through the secret side-door to the Sublime rather than through the mock world of realism.
3. Realism is the bordello of those who would have their perceptions affirmed rather than dilated. When the door of fascism is opened, Realism will be seen lounging like a whore in its inner sanctum.
4. The Apocalypse is a way of thinking. Only the Apocalyptic clock announces from atop the grotesque pile of refuse, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is now.'
5. Irony is not a device. It is a state of being.
6. To be Anti-Real is not to be Surreal. The achievement of Surrealism lies in displacing correspondences, in the poem not arriving. In the Anti-Real, all assumptions are disabled, too, with one difference: the Anti-Real displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence.
7. ‘Defile! Defile!’ shriek the Obliterati as they vandalize the museum of language.
8. Sentimentality is a form of exploitation, a connivance with official lies. Hang sentimentality on the gallows of Emergency.
*Even though the Real does not exist

"Singing chorus of fetuses" doing lap dance, screaming of desire comes across the mutant sky. Prepare for the joy of the worst!



Lara Glenum, Pop Corpse, Action Books, 2013.

Pop Corpse by Lara Glenum is a wildly entertaining book. A retelling of both the Hans Christian Andersen text and the Disney movie, the book follows XXX, youngest and most troublesome of the daughters of the King of the Sea, as she pursues, through a predatory and trashed and glittery world, her all-consuming dream of getting her very own sex organ, so as to fuck The Smear-né-Prince, most perverted of the Land-Dwellers.
Glenum, author of The Hounds of No and The Gurlesque opus Maximum Gaga, is a master of subverting taste buds, though her monstrous imagination has for sure frightened timid readers off after a page or two. This is a mistake on said readers’ part. Pop Corpse is an aggressive and shocking work. It is also a brave and ambitious work that does not limit its innovation the realms of narrative and language.

*

PC opens with a Hans Christian Andersen epigraph, followed by the bracketed, all-caps declaration: “[THIS POEM IS MY VOCAL PROSTHESIS]”, and wingdings of an all-black speech bubble and a kind of surprised looking fish. The next page literally sets the scene. “SCENE: There is no land. Only floating islands of plastic garbage.” The four pages that follow serve as ars poetica, lyric, and carnival barker—“I am trying to speak in a different register/ The register of candied decay”; “My suffering has become frivolous & ornamental”; “U are hereby invited to wars of attrition/ & other show stoppers”. Glenum is accomplishing a lot with these few sparsely populated pages. We are given a solid context for the play to come—the HCA excerpt—a personal context for the author that claims a deep investment in the irony of the telling, and, via text-message shorthand, a relatively lite introduction to the language of the book. At the same time, Glenum is holding the reader back from immersion in the story—in fact, continuing on with a waist-deep “Opening Score” in which the voice is stuck partway, both lyrically above-it-all and yet bounded by the world of the story—so to milk even the initial “I’m just starting to read a book of poetry”-space. By this I mean many books, including Glenum’s first two, ask the reader throw his or herself right into the full language and cosmology of the poems; PC begins surfaced in the real world and reels the reader down into itself. This approach acts in part as assurance that we are in good hands, that here is skill and here is purpose—a trust-me-this-will-only-hurt-a-little gesture that is necessary because the instruments the poem is played on are not, you know, lyres and guitars and church organs. It’s played on Tibetan skulls, Dance Dance Revolution pads, organ organs. And I mean, yes, you’re reading Octopus. But think about those poor, easily shaken people reading New England Review. PC is, in these first pages, applying lube to the reader and letting us in real slow.

*

Much has been written of Glenum’s poetics’ politics. Essentially, they’re radical. “Feminine” identity is corrupted. Nostalgia stapled to the mass graves. Tastefulness surviving with Shepard Fairey’s “HOPE” poster as a human centipede. The pastoral bukkake-d. Not nearly enough has been written about Glenum’s poetic innovations, partly because they are, like any innovation, difficult, and partly because it’s so fun to riff on such an “avantcore” language space. This has left some the impression, if Goodreads reviews are any indication, that Glenum’s prime skill is shock; that her poems, because they’re often loud, are easy. That the pleasures are only ironic. And this is what “kitsch”—see: nearly like a third of the posts on Montevidayo—one of the major planks of the “Gurlesque”—see: another third of the posts on Montevidayo—suggests. The detritus of our world is so numerous and braindead—the Pacific trash vortex thru mini-malls thru herbal supplement infomercials on 93.9 KPDQ Life Changing Christian Radio—that perhaps this consumption—of material, fashion, people—is not just our inheritance but our true desire. Beauty is trash, truth booty. And PC does make this case. The world, post “Disaster” is plastic garbage, “{The people on land.} {Look like large hunks of uncooked bacon} {suspended from walls} {in plastic medical bags.}” The remaining drives are self-pleasure and avoiding scandal. Self-pleasure turns into performance art into self-mutilation, as when XXX
Turns on webcam. Opens her cutting box & takes out scalpel. Carefully cuts a hole into her scales where her snatch should be. Lubes her finger with her spit & inserts it.
after which, her family is distraught that she’s once again “in the headlines.” But there’s a classic beauty to this, not defeated by irony but enabled. The beauty of colors—onanism, exhibitionism, youth, rebellion, power, surrender, and sushi—mixing unencumbered by the physics of the world. It’s the beauty of walking at night, as more stars appear as your eyes adjust to the darkness. And even a small light source could prevent, overpower this—say, traditional sonic texturing, or life-like dialogue. In keeping with the soul of the book, new prosthetics are fashioned in place of these traditional mechanisms.

*

The text’s lyricism, in those assonance/consonance/rhythm kinda ways, is obscured on the page by a typography hyper-saturated with information. Even having retyped the book, I only first heard the beauty in the sounds during Glenum’s reading in Portland this summer. Wingdings are used not just to reflect what’s going on in the story, but for elevating the reader in real-time. The psi symbols that cascade down the first scene evoke both physical shape and the sound of waves, and are homophonic to “sigh”—for sure what XXX is feeling just then. The desk-bell dinging once XXX finally gets in The Smear’s pants echoes XXX’s spoken “Ring-a-ling”, the clit she’s about to grow, and the modern confirmation of an accomplishment of a download finishing or a WoW character leveling up. Multiple typefaces and point sizes are used, and used inconsistently. This is the mark of a Shenzen-manufactured, third-party-licensed, private-equity-firm-owned piece of future trash, at least against the leather-stitched, letter-pressed, restored 18th-century-German-boutique-foundry-typeface-d art books one’s used to receiving in the mail. But the melted face of the text is not just gesture—it’s rigged-up somehow as one of the prime momentum generating mechanisms of the book, while reinforcing the disorientation of the layout, of the interstitching of different forms of texts (lyric passages, a song, Twitter feeds, diary entries, the play, the play within the play), and of the characters themselves.

*

And for real, the characters. XXX’s sisters are Blubber Socket, CIinderskella, Kinderwhore, and Pursed & Puckered, though they only address each other as skankivore, sparklepants, crack tart, etc. Other characters: The Smear (aka The Prince), Ju-Ju Jezzy and Coco Le Sob (a moping jellyfish and a randy dolphin; stand-ins for Sebastian and Flounder), The Jizzler (?), and my fave, Octowarden né Octocock (...). To compound the difficulty of traditional investment in character, a good portion of what the characters say to each other isn’t even acknowledged, and almost nothing that is said is of any consequence. In one of the final scenes, Kinderwhore and Cinderskella are gossiping idly as insurgents attack the Royal Guard and tiger sharks attack the players and the audience. It’s so bad with The Smear—whose dialogue is collaged from Johannes Göransson’s poems—it shocks the other characters. The only conversational options open to them are questions like, “You tweaking, or what?” and, “Are you on eel crack, or what?” And XXX, our heroine, has no desire for spiritual union—the emotional anchor of both HCA’s version and Disney’s. When she dreams of The Smear she dreams of “fucking his eyebladders with my seafingers,” and yearns most sincerely for another hole, a real hole to “be able to feel shit.” In fact, that is her exclusive yearning. Our heroine wants only to feel things with some honest-to-goodness junk. The closest she gets to genuine affection is either lust or mutual admiration, and the urgency of her emotions is undecipherable. So why do I feel so glad when she gets in The Smear’s pants? Why doesn’t the tossed-off deus ex machina, “After some time, XXX spontaneously grows a snatch” ruin whatever investment I had in the story?

*

Whereas a traditional story relies on a rising conflict/resolution plot arc to generate tension, PC involves the reader in its text via normalization and ambient elevation. Instead of a bottle of wine it’s a weed brownie. Instead of a garden, an isolation tank. The irony created within oneself as the cobbled-together and very, very shitty world becomes the new normal is chilling enough to give you pause. But isn’t this also the experience of the real world now? Haven’t I deleted the last fifteen MoveOn.org petitions that hit my inbox? How many minutes now do I take processing each new mass shooting, and how many days did it take me before? Aren’t Syrians still getting massacred? And isn’t it all just so normal? The slow drift into the world of the book (see: paragraph 3)—the sinking-through-levels-of-experience—is the same mechanism that propels the story in place of traditional tension. It’s not the hope that a certain thing will/won’t happen to this-or-that character that keeps you turning the pages, but rather the changes in your own mental landscape as you read. You know how in The Autobiography of Red the adult-Geryon episodes feel so much more discursive and breezy than the sharper twists and sepia tone of his childhood adventures? Pop Corpse does this, but in a half-dozen ways all at once: Characters drift in and out. The rising affection we have for XXX and, eventually, The Smear are played against very sudden reevaluations of the supporting cast. Different sets of emoticons are introduced, crest, and recede. Our sense of the world greys from its technicolor, consequence-less beginning to the sheen and smell of garbage-juice. But except for XXX’s physiological changes, hardly anything is lost or gained or transformed in the world. Glenum is playing the imaginative and emotional space of the world, not the objects in it.

*

Outside all that there is to explore in the text, I recommend this book because it’s really, actually fun. I number it with Letters to Wendy’s, No Planets Strike, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Christensen’s Alphabet, etc., etc., as a book to loan to non-poet friends. It’s a book seeks mastery only in its own innovations and succeeds; a book that makes me excited about what hasn’t been done yet. And like these other books, Pop Corpse’s innovations aren’t—at all—at the expense of enjoyment. They are not novelties, or shocks, or experiments. They are of an originality that is less a call to imitation, and more a shout to keep up.- Donald Dunbar

A fairy tale, a popular tale, a pop tale, a dead tale, a pop corpse. A rotting version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid which nevertheless hews closely to the original. A love story, love letter, and happily-ever-after.
Published by Action Books, Lara Glenum’s Pop Corpse is presented in the “register of candied decay.” Which is tooth decay, mouth rot, rotten speech, a kind of half-speech found all over the internet. An expression of what poet Kevin Davies identified as “a metaliterate culture with time on its prosthetic tentacles.” Ostensibly in the form a play, Pop Corpse appears more as a mutated internet chat. It’s a hyper-contemporary re-mix, a Frankenstein-monster stitched together from adolescent status updates, feminist theory, Johannes Göransson’s poems, emoticons, chaotic online flotsam. The text is alternately presented as a traditional play and spattered anarchically over the page. One section recalls a Twitter feed, some pages contain nothing but a series of icons. Cryptograms or gibberish? At any time, huge fonts may interject: “SEA PRINCESS INDULGES IN SELF-ABUSE!!” or “YR COCK BELONGS UP THE ASS OF THIS BOOK.”
Pop Corpse opens with a quote from Andersen’s original in which the mermaid princess is about to have her fish tail transformed into legs in exchange for her tongue. For Glenum, the gain is not merely legs, but human female sex organs. The epigraph behaves as a thesis statement to which the rest of the book is an apoplectic reaction: in order to become capable of pleasure, a woman must be silenced.
“THIS POEM IS MY VOCAL PROSTHESIS” – a prosthetic voice to replace the voice claimed as payment for pleasure. The drama which follows can be characterized as a struggle for pleasure in an apocalyptic world, to escape a suffering which is “frivolous & ornamental,” an entire life of “ornament and excrement.” An entire world of excrement where we find a building which appears “as though a gigantic infant ate Barbie Dream Wonderland & shat it out & rolled the turd in glittering crustaceans.” These environs are “festooned with horny mermaids” though the mermaids cannot self-produce the excrement, the excess of their world: “The mermaid is the forgetting of the colon + / piss tube + snatch.” Thus our narrator, the mermaid princess XXX, desires to have the fish tail removed, become “all holes” and “open 2 whatevs.” It’s a desired freedom from horniness, from possessing a body incapable of orgasmic pleasure. The mermaids exist in a suspended state of sexual tension which cannot be dispelled. For XXX, it’s preferable to bleed out.
Occasionally, abstract academic language will appear in the midst of the Pop Corpse‘s far more characteristic “candied decay.” For instance, directly following a conversation between a Land-Dweller and Undersea Denizen about the “atomic dumps” the mermaids take from their mouths (“WTF?”), we’re treated to a definition of the mermaids as vision machines: “A culturally-produced spectacle that naturalizes highly specific forms of desire and consumption. The abject recuperated in the service of reproductive capitalism.” It’s impossible to know if we’re meant to take this seriously, as the whole of Pop Corpse seems a kind of “vision machine” in exactly this vein. A stilted argument between XXX and the other mermaids about gender, interiority, and agency concludes: “Fergit this shizzle! Let’s bounce!” It’s good advice.
But to read a Lara Glenum book primarily for theories on capitalism or gender would be a terrible mistake. The joy of her work is found in the astounding word-play which abounds not only in Pop Corpse but her two previous books as well. When the text gets “all swiggnotic / & whammo” Glenum enacts pleasure rather than theorizes it. “I’m vextipated / in my boo shank // I need some varmint to crank my jank” – the quirky sexuality of the language surprises on nearly every page. “In the suckshack / will his face finally debase me & / unbuckle / My junk flinching pinkjoy eggwhite noise spurt” – the lines unabashedly have fun, even as XXX fears debasement. The words roll over one another, it’s a simple pleasure, but potent. “I go squelch / in my welkin.” In order to enjoy Pop Corpse, it’s necessary to put aside the theoretical confusion and revel in the words themselves, to take pleasure in Glenum’s uniquely twisted language. Her neologisms and typographic distortions impart a mutant physicality to the text which provides the perfect vehicle for getting in and around the characters’ bodies as they traverse their excremental environs.
As Pop Corpse concludes, the newly legged XXX and her land-dwelling love interest, The Smear, have cemented their relationship and run off to be artists, “cannibalizing themselves in2 art.” It’s a perfect teenage dream and, in fact, teenagers are the ideal audience for this book. Muddled sexuality, self-harm, becoming an individual and artist; the themes and confusions present throughout speak to forming consciousness and would undoubtedly resonate with young readers. Send a copy to your local high school’s library. Pop Corpse is a splattered fairy tale for today, a new flavor of poetic candy, and, ultimately, a pleasure to read.
- David B. Applegate

Lara Glenum’s third book of poetry, Pop Corpse (Action Books, 2013) opens with an epigraph from Hans Christian Anderson’s short story “The Little Mermaid.” In Anderson’s story, his mermaid endures a painful transformation into human form in order to pursue a prince with whom she has fallen in love. Unfortunately, her romantic advances go unrequited, and she dies in heartbreak.
With Pop Corpse, though, Glenum retells the mermaid’s tale wherein the protagonist becomes a champion of (and allegory for) sexual and creative freedom in a post-apocalyptic and “post-gender” (48) world. To this end, the book echoes Donna Haraway’s insistence in “A Cyborg Manifesto” that those with non-normative or marginalized identities need to “seize the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” through “stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.”
In her manifesto, Haraway also recognizes that we are engaged in a “border war,” the stakes of which are “territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.” In order to proceed most ethically, we should take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for the responsibility in their construction”; ultimately, such confusion and construction will aid in the “imagining of a world without gender.”
And it these very issues of border construction, confusion, imagination, reproduction on which Glenum’s book focuses. Near the beginning of the Pop Corpse, an Undersea Denizen says:

[The mermaids'] gender was chosen for them by their parents. The King and Queen of the Sea. Who have the most to gain by keeping the current power structures in place. And they succeed not by openly oppressing us but by persistently courting/curtailing our lines of sight with spectacle of their Vision Machines. (37)

The Denizen goes on to tell his companion that a Vision Machine is a “culturally-produced spectacle that naturalizes highly specific forms of desire and consumption” (37). In other words, systems of power enforce predetermined gender roles by providing subjects with highly-stylized images in order to produce and reinforce a particular type of want and, thus, thought. Even more troubling, XXX the mermaid informs the reader that:

     I got no holes to fuck with
                    No legs
                    Nothing between (32)

Indeed, XXX has no sex organs; therefore, this “CUNTLESS DUMPLING” (17) cannot experience sexual pleasure. She is both subject to an identity she did not create, and incapable of sexual fulfillment. Or, in XXX’s own words: “The Disaster’s being serially cut off from our own pleasure” (44); and, a bit later, “we can’t fuck. And that sucks seahorse butt” (48). The remainder of the Pop Corpse, then, follows the mermaid on her quest for functioning sex organs, sexual pleasure, and love.
Of course, if XXX’s narrative was simply a conduit for didactic musings on gender, sexuality, and social construction, Pop Corpse would most likely fail (at least to the extent that a theoretical text such as “A Cyborg Manifesto” could convey the ideas more effectively than a poetic text). But Pop Corpse succeeds because it also employs language in an “excessive & slightly off” manner that places “emphasis…on artifice & the unnatural” (23). Take, for instance, the following passages:

My father is a gillygobber &
the King of the Sea
In his freakopolis the liquid children
do not go in for cuzzly wuzzly mooncalves
but I sure as fuck do (24)
…
#Yr anus heart
gives me
a retard-on (66)
…
#Eyetwinkle hawt
U have retarded my dayz
in2 a narcoleptic stammer
A labial hiccup (71)
…
How long will this stellectric meat knot take
In the suckshack
will his face debase me &
unbuckle
          My junk fliching pinkjoy      eggwhite noise spurt (172)

The poems in Pop Corpse make liberal use of Twitter/text short-hand, neologisms and kennings that more often than not refer to some sort of sexual activity/organ, as well as webding-like symbols. Such language play allows for Glenum (and the characters in her book):

                      to speak in a different register
The register of candied decay
The filthy register of the halfbreed
which is
[her] own (10)

By using such language, which most standard-bearers would consider unpoetic, Glenum creates a unique and highly poetic language of a “different register” that aestheticizes the “decay” of what we consider formal or proper English. In doing so, the poet undermines normative conceptions of beauty that the antiseptic echo-chambers of poetry (e.g. Norton Anthologies and Best American Poetry,) try to reinforce. By melding progressive social themes with imaginative use of language, then, Pop Corpse delivers a highly-charged and imaginative poetic experience. - vouchedbooks.com/

There is certainly a widespread fascination with Pop in women’s writing and performance today. From the Warholian Pop Vanessa Place Inc., to Lady’s Gaga ARTPOP album, women’s culture has embraced the “lowbrow” of POPular culture, it’s would-be nemesis. Lara Glenum’s Pop Corpse and Becca Klaver’s Nonstop Pop, are two such examples. In an endless purposeful regression towards their inner fucked up girly girl, Klaver and Glenum explore not only in the language of pop but also in the relationship between the paranoid nature of pop and the always already dead and doubted girl.
Glenum’s Pop Corpse takes place in a post-apocalyptic ecological wasteland—literally, an unda-tha-sea Little Mermaid remix that takes place in a world devoid of terra firma, an archipelago of “floating islands of plastic garbage.” The book follows an asexual mermaid named XXX on her quest to give herself a vagina by any means (cleverly troping on the desexed Little Mermaid, who perhaps didn’t only wish for legs)—whether this means self-cutting, visiting the Sea Witch, or killing The Smear, the philosophizing love interest. XXX is publicly shamed for self-mutilation, and quarantined in a “RE-EDUCATION CAMP 4 THE SEXUALLY DEVIANT,” where she films her own self-mutilation, presumable broadcasting it on the underwater internet. Written in dramatic form, and utilizing pop-slang and e-slang, here, pop is a language, a way of thinking, but it also predicates pain and suffering for the mermaids. In many ways, Glenum’s scoring of feminine affect reads like a transcription of a hyper-girly Ryan Trecartin film. The mermaids talk like they’re texting: “Ever since the ocean’s gone toxic and the earth’s been burnt to a crisp, she’s been totes sketch.” And the male characters have absorbed the ironic, sexist adolescent boy humor that dominates American capitalist entertainment discourse: “Try kissing one sometime. It’s like giving a rim job to a dysentery victim. With really long ass hair.” Yet, the language remains manic, and at times is theoretically lucid. For instance, an Undersea Denizen observes that the King and Queen of the Sea are “openly oppressing us by persistently courting/curtailing our lines of sight with the spectacle of their Vision Machines […] a culturally-produced spectacle that naturalizes highly specific forms of desire and consumption.”
It is these acute observations about the spectacle of commodity that Becca Klaver’s Nonstop Pop performs. In this way, Nonstop Pop always predicts loss, even when it does not explicitly perform it. In a neoconfesional meets Flarf vein, the poems are a mix of lineated reflections and prose meditations that struggle with the ridiculous demands of consumerism—“less treadmill, more Skechers Shape-Ups” and “I was like so … Geico/ And you were like so… Activia”—as well as a troubled attachment to a more adolescent, indeed girlish, relation with capitalist commodity—from “Schwarzeneneggery”: “She knows she’s not supposed to love it but knows that’s why she does […] she presumes to be a muscleman.”
Lauren Berlant has argued that women’s culture is a juxtapolitical entity. Thus, women’s culture may not be revolutionary in a destructive or subversive sense—in the sense of a counterpublic or subculture—but rather serves as a maintenance mechanism. Women’s culture may be critical of the status quo, but remains in fidelity with oppressive structures and norms. Nevertheless, women’s culture also legitimates and embodies desires towards luminosity and exceptionalism and in this way is a kind of messy, confused clusterfuck of feminine desire.
For Berlant, the sentimental mid-century romance films are axiomatic of the female complaint, which is that love is the gift that keeps on taking. Women’s culture, an example of what Berlant calls an “intimate public,” thus allows need fulfillment, but also yearns for a more vulnerable, balanced, compassionate iteration of romantic love. However, the female complaint of the mid-twentieth century can hardly still be indicative of the multivocal frustration of today’s still marginalized women. Glenum’s and Klaver’s works give us two perspectives on female dissatisfaction. For Glenum, the female complaint is primarily a lack of symbolic access. XXX is neither female, nor male, and this symbolic reality is made material in her lack of sexual organs. But XXX wants badly to feel desire. As we will see, XXX is straight-up girl: as Delezue and Guattari argue, a figure of pure becoming, and thus pure desire.
Klaver’s work points out, however, that capitalist narrative fetishism is still largely interested in repackaging “the staged break-up under the antique lamppost haze.” And yet, for many women, “so grateful for the Hollywood formula,” those narratives, as obviously problematic as they may be, continue to define not just the pains, but also the joys of our childhoods, our girlhoods, and our womanhoods. We are still woefully (and often not so woefully) attached to them. Both writers fold the opposing and contradictory yearnings towards commodity fetishism and systematic rejection of capitalist exploitation into one another. “America so vast and usable,” as Klaver writes. And yet, acutely aware of the privilege of such a statement, “what can I tell you that will exploit myself and no one else.” In the words of XXX’s mermaid sister Blubber Socket, who seems more content with her vagina-less future, “We spiritualize consumption! We’re nothing but surface!”
Rather than purely sentimental, then, the female complaint contained in these collections is something more unstable and contradictory—full of irony, skepticism, mockery, disdain, panic, paranoia, freedom, play, and yes, nostalgia. Our girlfriend Glenum asks of our lover Pop:

“Is this a relationship
or just
a confused noise”

We see similar approaches to women’s culture in the performance and internet-based work of artists like Kate Durbin, and indeed in Glenum’s own readings of Pop Corpse!, which have recently included costumed performances. This kind of work is all owning the spectacle of the girl (OMG she’s making a spectacle of herself!), and yet, as Pop Corpse makes clear, it’s also about suffering.
It was, we should remember, the post-war economy of the 1940s that, along with a dissatisfaction with the formalism of Abstract Expressionism, inaugurated Pop Art and its later iterations. Poor economies necessitate greater popular distraction, not only to keep the masses sleepy, delusional and unmotivated to revolt, but also to help us deal. With all this in mind, it no longer seems strictly coincidental, self-indulgent, or even intentional that contemporary work has an increased interest in Warholian irony, performance, and ambiguity. To borrow a phrase from the new kings and queens of pop-theory over at Gaga Stigmata, many of us have no choice but to move at the “speed of pop.” Thus, conceptualism and these related feminist poetic iterations are closely linked: neither have time to dress up in fancy clothing, choosing instead cheap, bubblegummy, sale rack clothing, which feels more indicative of the 99%.
In other words, pop is poverty, and poverty is pop. Pop is cheap, fast, easy, sexy and an altogether intimate affair. And of course, pop is paranoid, because, as we know, pop is always watching us.
Capitalist commodification, specifically of the girl, is in both collections translated into an embodied, paranoiac state. Klaver’s work is here reminiscent of the witness in the Buddhist sense, observing the chaos of the everyday from a removed but not disconnected distance (whereas XXX is totally, even materially, imbricated). In both approaches, however, the subject is rendered permanently unstable, outside itself, and yet implicated by the gendered symbolic and by commodity fetishism. In these works, desire and drive do exist, but so does repulsion, injustice, eco-waste, war, self-mutilation, addiction and rehab.
Significant in Glenum’s Pop Corpse is this latter theme of torture, trauma and self-mutilation. It has been widely documented that self-mutilation is spurred by a desire to feel control of one’s body—no surprise then that this illness is primarily experienced by teen girls. The desire for pain here is not just a desire for physical hurt, but for certainty, where the world itself only offers the girl apprehension. The girl—forever a becoming—has been reduced to pure flesh, and so is dead before she is living. Or, perhaps, the erotic and bloodied girl-corpse women writers are so fascinated by today, is the desire for pure pain, the perversion-subversion of the candied and paranoid face of pop. This is not an Top Model ugly-pretty face, but rather pretty-in-pain face. Moreover, given the very patriarchal tradition of aestheticizing the tortured girl—the girl, interrupted—and the more recent phantasm of the girl as global neoliberal charity case, perhaps the most salient qualities of the girl-in-pop is pain and suffering. As Glenum writes:

My suffering has become frivolous & ornamental
which is to say
it now participates in “luxury, mourning, war, cults,
the construction of sumptuary monuments, games,
spectacles, arts”

Indeed, as Glenum writes, “When u r a GIRL/ yr body is a CRIME LAB.” In other words, a site of skepticism. When discussing with her sister her own self-mutilation, XXX claims “It’s performance art,” while sister PURSED & PUCKERED argues it’s “More like torture porn.” Given the number of untested rape kits sitting in crime labs across the country, as well as rape culture’s continued a priori dehumanization of the girl, all of these responses to girlishness feel dead on (pun intended), but it is being met with the pose of uncertainty, of doubt, that girls know best. - Amanda Montei

Imagine that you find yourself in a land of “plastic garbage,” as Glenum writes. This book burns with intense death, in the sense that you find yourself pulled in. All the characters are a total gas, too. This is the land of “Club Me,” and the opening score is about death and “seal flesh,” “bezerking in my pants.” Maybe you have been somewhere like this before, no? Well, let’s see what we find.
We have mermaids, and oh, teenage mermaids at that. Glenum writes that “a mermaid is supposed 2 b all seafoam,” and it’s tough not to believe her; I mean, aren’t mermaids sea creatures? Everything is sparkling and Technicolor, and the emoticons of the book really give it away as having been made from the kitschiest “Goo-Goo Lagoon,” as Glenum calls one of her many settings. Oddly enough, the emphasis in this book, in this setting, is on “artifice & the unnatural,” and everything is ornamental and excremental.
Glenum writes about “Little Merde-Maid & Her Shitstain of a Story,” something about how at the Yum Factory, there are only Vision Machines, what Paul Virilio might call the spoils of war, no? One of the Undersea Denizens seems to know the tune, and he calls it: “A culturally-produced spectacle that naturalizes highly specific forms of desire and consumption. The abject recuperated in the service of reproductive capitalism.” This guy seems to be on to something!
We wonder whether this is a refrigerator (I mean, “Poor li’l fish girls. No pleasure! All cold.”) or whether it’s a “Bone Palace,” as Glenum writes. It’s probably both, but no one seems to be going anywhere anytime soon.
A poor mermaid named XXX, one of the story’s stars, writes: “I think I’ve somehow wound up in the penal colony,” and we pity her.
Kinderwhore simply writes: “$$$$$$$$.” Yes! Do you know this story yet?
And the best part of the story is that everything almost seems to take place in “The Royal Chambers,” where (let’s face it) the sun lives, too (though he doesn’t make an appearance).
Here’s another zinger:
In the Slice Ward
they have an electrical shower
for girls who feel 2 much Who feel
nothing
They call it
The Gate of Heaven
And apparently, Jacques Lacan is floating around in the background somewhere (though he fails too to make an appearance): “MUSEUMS R 4 THE CURATION OF DISEASE.”
Everything in this book is a gas—no, really. And everything takes place in “The Sea King’s Undersea Pleasuredome”!
The King of the Sea shuffles XXX around, as he well should (she always needed a true Father).
And then we have a few words from Octowarden, who tells it straight (as perhaps, someone should):

YR SHELL BODIES WILL BE REMEDIATED INTO NORMS

THIS IS REPRODUCTIVE CAPITAL

THIS IS DESIRE PUT INTO THE SERVICE OF THE STATE

I mean, if this isn’t The Crypto-Real, I don’t know where else to find it. Everyone is swimming, everyone is alive with electricity, and no one is aware of how to respond to each other.
It’s a “Ghoulish Operetta,” and it’s taking captives. It’s happening in The Royal Theater, and everyone is wearing “lipstick worms.”
I mean, it’s theater.
XXX tells the truth about herself:
On national TV    I’m totes brillz
w yakkies
in my fishbelly        & Blood thunder in the aerodrome
as I pop a bunny
tying yr arms back
This is the Isle of Noise. It’s the “spectacle happening now / in the calcified docking zone.”
It’s the Gate of Heaven, and Glenum thanks us, the rest of the hooligans, for our crimes. Look out, the world is behind you. - Laura Carter