Aaron Apps suggests communication as beastly, 'extra-somatic,' 'liquid infection.' Morphine drip as the scalpel tears open the new machine. The petri dish is an appetite for the borderlands of experimentation which is now shattering

Aaron Apps, Intersex, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2015.

Intersex explores gender as it forms in concrete and unavoidable patterns in the material world. What happens when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia? What happens when a body is normalized? Intersex provides tangled and shifting answers to both of these questions as it questions our ideas of what is natural and normal about gender and personhood. In this hybrid-genre memoir, intersexed author Aaron Apps adopts and upends historical descriptors of hermaphroditic bodies such as “freak of nature,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “sexual pervert,” and “unfortunate monstrosity” in order to trace his own monstrous sex as it perversely intertwines with gender expectations and medical discourse. Intersex leaves the reader wondering: what does it mean to be human?

A book of time and because of it: “Time stopped queerly.” Not a book but an essay: a “vibration…along lines.” Or the book as “gesture,” intervening with: the other possible, “faintly disembodied” mid-line “trajectories.” Aaron Apps’ Intersex is all feral prominence: a physical archive of the “strange knot.” Thus: necessarily vulnerable, brave and excessive. Book as trait. Book as biology without end: modified, pulsing, visible, measured, folded then folded again: an “animal self.” I felt this book in the middle of my own body. Reading, your own organs stir. In this way, Apps indicates the “creature” that you are too. Where do you “reside”? Where do you “collect”? Like the best kind of memoir, Apps brings a reader close to an experience of life that is both “unattainable” and attentive to “what will emerge from things.” In doing so, he has written a book that bursts from its very frame.—Bhanu Kapil

The book is clear, forceful, and moving in its concerns: “I’m interested in the formation of gender. The way bodies with weird formations slip and exist below expectations. The way we form and un-form in the fluid when thrown out of the womb gush.” Apps writes about growing up with an obviously unusual—apparently an intersex—physical body, and that bodily estrangement, along with early sexual experience, lies at the root of his work, which finds “no tranquil answers in the simplicity of facts.” Sometimes sexy, though haunted by self-disgust, Apps is “a grotesque puppet,” and “a raucous sac of sex.” … The results—part memoir, part analysis, part outburst—become not just memorable but pellucid and teachable: the volume might be important far outside the precincts of poetry, a classic for young people trying to figure out, and then to say, who they have been who they could be, and who they already are.—Publishers Weekly

Dear Herculine, a harrowingly eloquent cri de coeur, melds consciousnesses and bodies across one and a half centuries, from 1832–2014. Intersexed writer Aaron Apps to intersex reader, the long-dead martyr to early gender-reassignment surgery, Herculine Barbin, speaks from a place so far inside of the abjected subject that it comes out the other end as estranged, engorged and gorgeous language, in letters comprising ‘two intersexed bodies composed of multiple parts, and the mess of flesh and text that stands between.’ … Apps’s fearlessness and the beauty of his prose inspires, pushing poetry, kicking and screaming and expiring with shame, to where it desperately wants to go. A brilliant achievement that defies the triumphalism of that descriptor, Dear Herculine is a cache of love letters urgently needed to heal this world.—Maria Damon


Intersex is a hybrid literary work that considers issues of gender. It’s about “I, a violence done, doing violence,” upon the “wrapped blood bubble” of the ambiguously queer body; about violence upon animal, upon self, upon world. It’s textually dynamic, a perpetual stir in form.
Here, Danielle Lea talks with author Aaron Apps about time, violence, bathroom narratives, transcendence, and death in Intersex:
Narrative Lines progressively accumulate throughout Intersex—building into a linear trajectory. For example, Intersex begins in Narrative Line 1, 2, 3… middles into Narrative Line 1982 (1), 1987 (1), 1988 (1), and ends in not quantification, but instead a series of Clicks—followed by a single photograph that shifts subject matter via altered camera angle and zoom.
Can you talk about the relationship between text (body), temporality (time), and the photographed image in your work? Does each function symbiotically? When language (body) dies, and title (time) falls away, what’s left?
I was attempting to describe linear temporalities as formative, as the ground or background that is constitutive of a way of being in the world, even at the site of gender. It’s not a conflation that always works, or that is always legitimate (such formal arguments rarely are), but I think it serves to illustrate how particular framed moments that move through time in expected ways—narrative movements pinned to specific temporal sites (1982, 1987, 1988)—often overlap with how gender and sex becomes normative. This is a book that’s not just about performativity and transcendence out of norms—it’s about medicine, the pharmacological, and the body’s materiality.
To turn this toward the photoshopped images at the end of the book: the images play off the text below them and are distinctly slowed down, broken, and iterative. They represent a moment where time breaks, stops, queers, and allows for reflection. There are other moments in the text that do this too: the epiphany in the bathroom scene, and the confrontation with the alligator where time is described as stopping “queerly.” These are moments that allow reflection against the expected movement of gender and time provided by medicine, capitalism, and gender norms.
Language and linear temporality, to me, even if necessary in terms of existing in our contemporary world, are very much bound up in discourses that determine who does and does not get to be included in the category of the human. Language and linear time are inextricably fraught categories as constitutive aspects of our being.
“Barbeque Catharsis” is the one of the most powerful essays I’ve read in so long. It was included as a 2014 notable essay in Best American Essays, and featured in &NOW Awards: Best Innovative Writing Anthology. It hit the stomach before the mind. I craved meat. I remember standing over a soap dispenser in a Baton Rouge laundromat, carnal and stained, a sauced face like (in your words) “we are wounds,” devouring pork ribs next to rows of washing machines. I thought of you, Aaron, and so many Intersex lines.
Retrospectively, it’s the closest I may be to understanding your gripping narrative—which isn’t close at all. It’s a narrative told unflinchingly, with a bravery I admire, a reminder of why I write. Do you want to provide a brief synopsis of your narrative?
Given where the essay goes (towards the scatological) I wonder if you were actually desiring excrement? The part of me that reads Bataille, that thinks we’re all excrement spewed out of the solar anus, thinks maybe that’s true.
Half-kidding aside, there’s something about bathrooms as sites of confusion and conflict that is pretty ubiquitous in queer literature. There is something almost cliché about bathroom narratives: there are so many of them, they sprout up like weeds in all books that approach the subject positions of people with non-normative genders. But I think they’re cliché within queer literature for a reason. Right now conservative legislators are trying to pass a law in Florida that would legalize discrimination against trans people for using bathrooms not aligned with assigned sex at birth.
I wanted to do something different with my attempt at the bathroom narrative. In many ways, it is about eating the very thing that one becomes or is made to become: animal. There’s lots of poop, bathrooms, and viscera in the story. That’s not exactly a summary, but I think it gives a hint about the essay’s contents.
“Barbeque Catharsis” begins with animals “foaming in the guts”: meat strands, hacked carcasses, butterfluid pigs, silver fat, wooden meat smoke, grey pink animal. The animal then stains lips, fingers, soils napkins, and drips on the shirt. In “Barbeque Catharsis,” the animal is consumed and becomes a part of the self.  A boy sticks pins in a frog heart, squeezes plop and splooge out of a cow eye, cuts through a crunchy fetal pig ribcage, marks veins of an embalmed cat in a notebook. There’s the wonderful line: “I, a violence done, doing violence.”
You present violence as many things but also a form of sustenance, both repulsive and seemingly necessary, for not only the self but for ‘science.’ You quote Georges Bataille: “Animals are the absence of transcendence. The animal is in the world like water in water.” The conflation of the animal and human is a reoccurring motif throughout Intersex.
What, in your opinion, does our human relationship to animal say about humanity’s transcendence? Is it separate from that of the animal? What, to you, does transcendence mean? In a utopic Apps world, what would it look like?
With regards to human transcendence: recently I’ve been circling back to a short essay by Levinas about a dog named “Bobby” who approached Levinas in a concentration camp and acknowledged his face as being the same sort of face any other human might have. Levinas describes Bobby as the being the last Kantian in Germany, except he lacks the mind to universalize concepts. Bobby, like Bataille’s animals, lacks transcendence, but so does Levinas as a dehumanized body in the camps: all of Levinas’s words are, in the face of a dehumanizing murder-machine, “monkey talk.”
There’s something about occupying this flickering space, this space that puts an immovable version of the category of the human into question, that has value in the shared carno-phallo-logocentric swell of violence we all occupy. My work often tries to straddle the line between the human space that allows for the ethical spaces and categories we all occupy as given, while simultaneously asking: ait, how human are any of us anyway? Why are we using the category of the human to claim privileged positions? I’m in no way perfect in acting on, or even thinking about these things, but I am invested in a practice that moves toward more equal treatment of all bodies.
You beautifully state: “There’s a grammar to the body.” One of my favorite aspects of Intersex is its constantly flickering form. ‘Androgynous’ text is the best literary term I’ve heard in years. Intersex is so textually dynamic—in both surface and depth. What’s next? Will it still be as ruthless in its rummaging? You make me think deeply about what it means to ‘modify’ a text. Did Intersex go through any editorial modifications? I’m reminded of your Heraclitus reference: “Changing, it rests.”
At best, “hybrid” forms are an attempt to present a text in a form that speaks to it being broken of necessity: a book that speaks to its inability to occupy the space of the novel or prose manuscript, or even the sonnet or villanelle, because something else is at stake. Gender is part of it, bodily metabolism is maybe another part—but I also think class plays a large role too. My father was a janitor and farmer, and my mother has a one-year LPN degree, and something about attempting to occupy certain revered voices or forms feels very impossible to me. This might sound ridiculous coming from a doctoral student, but becoming capable as a writer and thinker is still a slow process for me. It’s a process where I attempt to remake myself in the wake of what I’ve encountered and learned. It’s quite possible that my tendency toward broken forms is a result of feeling caught in this politicized and recursive space: too much needs remaking, so how can I let it settle?
What is it about soft serve ice cream?
My mind goes directly to William S. Burroughs and thinks of some kind of apocalyptic pooping machine, and also to César Aira’s novel How I Became a Nun, which involves a gender-switching narrator and poisoned ice cream. There’s something really strange, uncontrollable yet mechanic, linear yet squishy, about soft serve ice cream. Wait, why are we talking about this?
“What we follow, what we do, becomes ‘shown’ through lines that gather on our faces” –Sarah Ahmed. Your words: “What crevice do you look back into such that you lose your life again?” Question: Is there a line (on your body, on animal body, on landscape body, on ANY body) that doesn’t “leak death”?
The thing is, I don’t want death to be posited as singular, but I want to acknowledge its existence as something structural, something we survive amid, something multiple, something that is only very minorly our own.
A vital question (for me) that I’ve encountered in graduate school and still muse over is: Who owns experience? The experiencer? Or the one who ‘writes’ experience ‘better’—thus ‘better’ able to potentially increase awareness and empathy?
Some people think experience is a free-for-all, but I’m not one of those people. I’m hesitant about co-opted narratives, about things and bodies being used without context for the false appearance of a politics, or worse, poorly outside of politics in a way that does violence to already fraught and politicized bodies. I don’t think this has to take the form of a first person account: I respect detailed investment, close research, excessive pastiche, or anything else that feels like an honest take on the thing in the background.
Turning to myself as an archive, or as the site where different aspects of the archive work their way in, allows me an access to a kind of writing I love. I can get the detail and complexity into my concerns by doing lots of research, which is something I do, but I also can swell my archive even more through the inclusion of my personal experience. Having all of this at hand opens up to a space that lets me do the kind of thinking I value, and in the end I’m invested in the thinking more than a decontextualized pile of epistemic facts.

I feel split when composing questions and probing into Intersex—an anxiety that I’m dissecting a frog heart or squeezing out eye sploog. Intersex’s Narrative Lines line into childhood. In some ways, childhood violence against animal is idyllic, so endemic–the dissecting, insects trapped in jars, sticking needles in butterfly wings, firefly bodies crushed against our own for a little light.  Has your relationship to the animal, to nature, to self, altered with age?

Somewhat, but I’m still working at it. Life is practice, and we’re all here poorly in it. - Danielle Lea Buchanan 

Aaron Apps, Herculine, Ahsahta Press, 2014.

Winner of the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

excerpt (pdf)

A book-length epistolary collection of hybrid-, trans-, and inter-genre prose, Dear Herculine is an intertextual project that recalls portions of the 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin’s memoirs, discovered and re-published by Michel Foucault. The medical reassignment of Herculine’s gender eventually led to his/her death in February of 1868. Herculine’s experiences are set against and interwoven into the author’s experiences as an intersexed body through the epistolary form.
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“Dear Herculine, a harrowingly eloquent cri de coeur, melds consciousnesses and bodies across one and a half centuries, from 1832–2014. Intersexed writer Aaron Apps to intersex reader, the long-dead martyr to early gender-reassignment surgery, Herculine Barbin, speaks from a place so far inside of the abjected subject that it comes out the other end as estranged, engorged and gorgeous language, in letters comprising ‘two intersexed bodies composed of multiple parts, and the mess of flesh and text that stands between.’  Unlike Yeats, who desired to be consumed in artifice to escape the human condition, that of being ‘sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/[That] knows not what it is,’ Apps plunges into the carnal killing floor with his nineteenth-century interlocutor, binding their fates as he is ‘shackled to a rotting double, rotting in the space between, rotting in the space of the letters.’  Apps’s fearlessness and the beauty of his prose inspires, pushing poetry, kicking and screaming and expiring with shame, to where it desperately wants to go.  A brilliant achievement that defies the triumphalism of that descriptor, Dear Herculine is a cache of love letters urgently needed to heal this world.” —Maria Damon

In this second collection of verse and lyric essays, after Compos[t] Mentis , Apps speaks to, empathizes with, and commemorates Herculine Barbin—the 19th-century memoirist given posthumous fame by Michel Foucault—as one intersex, or ambiguously gendered, person to another. The book is clear, forceful, and moving in its concerns: “I’m interested in the formation of gender. The way bodies with weird formations slip and exist below expectations. The way we form and un-form in the fluid when thrown out of the womb gush.” Apps writes about growing up with an obviously unusual—apparently an intersex—physical body, and that bodily estrangement, along with early sexual experience, lies at the root of his work, which finds “no tranquil answers in the simplicity of facts.” Sometimes sexy, though haunted by self-disgust, Apps is “a grotesque puppet,” and “a raucous sac of sex.” Apps uses Barbin’s story along with images from the animal world—slugs, octopi—to push back against the “labels tattooed into every pore of my flesh.” The results—part memoir, part analysis, part outburst—become not just memorable but pellucid and teachable: the volume might be important far outside the precincts of poetry, a classic for young people trying to figure out, and then to say, who they have been who they could be, and who they already are. - Publishers Weekly

I loved this book. I loved everything about this book. Herculine Barbin lived in the late 19th-century as intersexual. He/she kept memoirs until their suicide at the age of 30. Herculine’s body, once discovered, transforms once more from corpse to specimen. The word hermaphrodite is used. Diagrams are kept of Herculine’s sexual organs. Aaron Apps writes page after page, letter after letter, in answer, response, affixing appendages together, mouths together, screams together. Aaron is here too, suffering the same ignorance of societies who cannot grasp a world beyond binaries.
I read about Herculine Barbin further. I found a line of his, Le vrai ne depasse-t-il pas quelquefois toutes les conceptions de l'ideal,quelque exagere qu'il puisse etre? If the truth sometimes exceeds all our concepts of the ideal, couldn’t exaggerations at times be truth? I couldn’t sleep while reading this book. At the time I was making final edits to my poetry collection, Swan Feast, which struggles to fit between the chasm of ideal and exaggeration. In the middle of the night during this time, I woke up to a voice from my dream; it told me, “The most beautiful epistles are written between 5:30 and 6:30am.” I felt a presence wanted me out of bed. But write what? And to whom? “From death you write yourself to me,” writes Aaron Apps to Herculine, to me. I did not write that morning.
Apps calls his work process here a metabolizing. It is a metabolism. Holes bubble out, oversaturated enzymes oversaturate. Never have I read a poet write so unabashedly about death. Not simply death as a gloaming metaphor. Death as a cellular procession from whole to parts to ooze to slime to worms to “oyster skin.” Death is disgusting, perverse, an inevitable violation of bodies. And then there is the issue of bodies, which we have beneath hundreds of layers of shame. The opening poem reminds us of the cold damp of cloth over our pits, the warm cloth over our genitals, where the cloth stretches, where it falls. How it protects, and how it betrays:
Layers. Layers are preferable. All through my body I’m full of a deep animal shame, which runs right up through my choice of clothing like rain water through a stalk of yellow wheat. I avoid removing my clothes in public settings at all costs. I check who is in the bathroom before I go to make sure that no one sees that I never use the urinals. I’m always already in the toilet stalls sitting to pee. I’m 14. I’m hermaphroditic. I try to avoid going to the same bathroom twice, and I always wear a loose button-up shirt to cover over the shape of my androgynous, fattened body parts.
It is hard to describe to you what happened to me while reading this. What happened again when rereading this. I felt that same soul-crushing existential despair as when I read Citizen by Claudia Rankine, but this was different. The death boiled over the top. It wasn’t the death anyone wants to see. The genitals anyone wants to see. The alienation anyone might know better to see. There is an important despair to how this casts light on gender, one that, like Citizen, put me in the body of the other again. This collection othered me again anew.
Aaron Apps is so smart. A refrain in this book is “always already,” an argument used by Heidegger and Ricoeur and Derrida and Marx to describe how a place in time, once achieved, can’t necessarily be enacted again. It lives in the past and always already is molded to its new course. Even if it happened earlier. Even it happened later. It’s always already happening. This construction/deconstruction happens in Dear Herculine over and over. A central valve of human/animal, life/death, letter/life/death pumps through:
When I do think about myself, I think of the history of bodies. I think about the small histories of my own body, the histories inside each organ, each gonad. I think about the way in which we animals treat we animals, and I think myself an animal, a body amid bodies contorting ideas into and out of texts.
He goes on to write,
And when I try to interrogate my selves from above the river my cells grow scales and feathers and under those dead things grows rot. The pores putrefy. Some organ in the gut is traumatic. Some gonad is confused. When I see labels tattooed into every pore of my flesh speak the word, “hermaphroditic,” I see not labels, but an inextricable etymology of entomology. 
Plath concludes in “Fever 103,” “(my selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)/ To Paradise.” There is a relation here between the smoldering examinations of skin. There are so many deep broiling connections. This is certainly one of my the more important books of poetry I’ve ever read, for its brilliance, its suggestions of what text can do to the decaying limbs, its glimmering desire to exist phosphorescently in a world that cannot see him. That cannot see them. Please do yourselves a favor and buy this book and read it forever. I will be writing a more extensive review very soon. - Natalie Eilbert

Aaron Apps’s new book of epistolary prose takes the form of a series of letters addressed to Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century inter-sex person immortalized by Michel Foucault’s rediscovery of their memoirs. Written while simultaneously studying Barbin’s memoirs and grieving for a close friend, Dear Herculine interweaves Apps’s life experiences with those of his subject. It does so, what’s more, in pulsating, eruptive, and often nauseating prose. Apps co-opts the epistolary form to stage a torrid meditation on the condition of inter-sex embodiment, a meditation that accesses an abject dimension of bodily life repressed in quotidian (that is, quotidianly gendered) corporeal experience. The ungenderable body in Dear Herculine becomes visible as a sloppy patchwork of blood, foodstuffs, lipids, vegetal matter, and sweat, an abject amalgam of excreta. The achievement of the book, however, is to reclaim abjection, to posit embodied abjection as an erotically viable dimension of experience, and very particularly, of queer experience.
Dear Herculine opens with a meditation on “the formation of shame within rooms.” That is, both Barbin’s shame and Apps’s own: a visit to the doctor, a school-“girl”’s class trip to the beach, an episode of locker room “shenanigans,” a moment of unplanned public nudity in a dormitory, a moment of poolside exposure. The phenomenology of queer shame, according to Apps, involves a transformation of the environment into a field of hostile immanence: “Pulsing. Pulsing being and event in the thick sack of a trembling room. . . . The walls pulse. The room breaks and is overwhelmed.” As Apps writes to Barbin: “Your shame is that constant humming of a profane danger.” The shame-inducing “room” transfixes the body, renders it exposed and immobilized. The psychologist Silvan Tomkins once argued that shame is the most individuated affect, and the only one that functions with direct reference to the gaze and consciousness of another person. In Apps’s letters, the experience of shame becomes so intense that the hostile gaze is sublimated into an entire environment, a “room” that pulses with malignant judgment.
In Apps’s rendering, however, inter-sex embodiment is characterized not just by shame but also by sloppiness, by a sense of the body’s blotchy continuity with its adjoining “ecology.” Divested of their inflection by gender, bodies become a kind slough of flesh, genitalia, food, and excreta:
Our throat-pores fat with cake dough and meat slop.
I misread beasts as breasts and we watch our selves feed ourselves with our selves. Mouthfuls of tit and all of the saliva skin that gleams. The feeder fetish of the food chain that composes us. We are animals with weird genitals rubbing on animals, eating animals.
Eating, sex, and vomiting merge into an undifferentiated process of osmosis; a condition of indistinguishability sets in between excreta and body parts (saliva and skin), body parts and other beings (breasts and beasts).
Operating within this “ecological” conception of the body, autobiographical confession immediately crosses over into putrefying excess:
My own childhood is similarly textured like menstruation.
Thick.
Raw. Blackening. The rotten grapefruit exploded in the ditch and the teeth of the dogs that lick at it. . . . My body is a filth storm, strange.
It is not precisely that the rotten grapefruit is a metaphor for Apps’s menstruum-like childhood, but that the affective texture of childhood flows seamlessly into the material texture of putrescent organic matter. Similarly, Apps adopts the terms of premodern humoral theory for describing the affective experience of melancholia:
The folds in the fabric hold melancholy. Melancholy (n.) a long lasting sadness. Melancholy (n.) a black bile. The box from which I unfold the fabric is my guts, my greasy flesh that unfolds in an inhuman mode.
The paunch, here, is a repository both of fatty substances and bad feelings. It is not just that affect is an embodied experience but that it becomes an excrescence of the flesh. Expressivity, it follows, is achieved by a turning inside out and unfurling of the body, an extension of flesh into adjoining space. Such procedures are typical of Dear Herculine, a book in which autobiographical or affective narration tends to be routed through the “filth storm” of the body, through an imagination of the flesh as a greasy, eruptive fabric of abjection.
As closely as Apps follows (indeed, as he puts it in an opening note, “metabolizes”) Barbin’s memoirs, Dear Herculine’s sludgy, putrescent conception of the body seems to be Apps’s own innovation. In fact, in a series of ranting, disconnected manuscripts Foucault places near the end of their memoirs, Barbin seems to imagine the inter-sex body as virginal and angelic. Writing near the end of their life (after a traumatic gender-reassignment at the hands of a well-meaning doctor and clergyman, and presumably in the Paris garret where Barbin would commit suicide) Barbin soars above the grisly realities of heterosexual intimacy:
You are to be pitied more than I perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels . . . You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Barbin’s queer melodrama posits the inter-sex body as ethereal, exiled from sociality but therefore able to pass judgment on the “slime” that covers men as the residue of their sordid dealings with women. Apps’s melodrama departs from its historical interlocutor by pursuing nearly the opposite course, positing inter-sex embodiment as primordial slime, a flux of genderless sludge uninflected by any normative form of desire or belonging. Queerness, in Apps’s idiom, makes visible what Mikhail Bakhtin, in a famous discussion of Rabelais, termed “the grotesque body”: the body that is all orifice and no interiority, all flow and no retention.
What’s more, the grotesque inter-sex body always, in Dear Herculine, bears a relationship to death. In “A Letter Concerning our Bodies as Corpses,” Apps and Barbin are held together in a state of decay:
These letters are the memory of two bodies coupled until amalgamated by putrefaction. . . . A dull black-blooded chamber music that runs through all of the chambers enveloping everywhere. . . . Our skin obscures into brown rot, and spreads out into a continuity of black slime. We become the environment feeding the environment, ass to mouth. We become the promiscuity of a rotting blood cocoon, as we bubble into dark foam.
This sepulchral love letter makes the familiar Renaissance connection between sex and death, but with a twist: sex points us toward death not just because it wastes our vitality, but because it makes our bodies flow out of their discrete, contained forms. The inter-sex corpse-body is rotting alive, but rotting into its lover.
To be torn away from one’s lover, then, is to feel the unbearable separateness of one’s body from other bodies, as Apps argues in “A Letter Concerning Tucking a Corpse Self into the ‘Living’ World”:
But to return to the way the world was like sandpaper . . . In that world [the world of school, peers, straightness] there were harsh glares, and a general inability to fit in — a sense of being outside in which every effort to enter creates friction that calluses the body’s rind. Friction creates more friction, the body castigated is never in the world like water in water, like oil in oil, like fluid in fluid.
To be a living corpse, within Apps’s speculative physics of embodiment, is far preferable to having a rind, to rubbing against other bodies without flowing into them. Abjection, paradoxically, is a route of escape from the “frictional” effects of shame, which cuts the body off from its social ecology, rendering it all too individuated. In this way, it might be said that queer embodiment, as Apps renders it, becomes a point of access to a kind of abject corporeal universalism: we’re all constructed of flesh, and all flesh is subject to decay. But we also, therefore, all have a chance not to be alone.
The act of writing itself, finally, forms part of Apps’s necro-erotic praxis: “This letter is letters written into a filthy loop, two bodies consuming each other, flesh into flesh, and the filth that spreads unreasonably outward . . .” Language is just as compostable as the body, forming a tributary current to Dear Herculine’s river of filth. Related to language’s compostability is a certain gleeful bathos in prose style, which Apps is more than happy to acknowledge: “I can’t really write for anyone. I can’t trust the medium. . . . I have no taste. I eat rubbish.” (75) Or, more explicitly: “I assume that everything I write is thoroughly cliché — a dumb repurposing in an architecture of trauma that exceeds the slippage of language.” Apps is certainly incorrect in this assumption, but if not cliché, precisely, much of the prose in Dear Herculine does land with a splat rather than a pirouette. Though there is a great deal of excellent writing in Dear Herculine, one shouldn’t approach the book looking for restraint or intricacy. The book’s strengths lie elsewhere, in its eating and repurposing of rubbish, its residency in a dense “ecology” of abjection, flesh, desire, and language.
Dear Herculine, then, responds to the trauma of shame in a curious way, by failing to do precisely what shame is supposed to induce one to do: cover up. Rather than covering up, Apps assents to the various theses shame puts forward about the inter-sex body: that it is neither masculine nor feminine enough, too fat, too sticky, wet, or smelly, not beautiful enough, too close to death. Against the radical exposure and abjection of the shamed body, Dear Herculine deploys a kind of radical flaunting. Flaunting, that is, of the fundamental dynamics of embodiment that operate below the level of capture in normative frameworks, “the way we form and un-form in the fluid when thrown out of the womb gush.” - Sam Rowe

from A LETTER CONCERNING THE FORMATION OF SHAME WITHIN ROOMS.

SECOND ROOM:.

* * *.

The sea is its own room, beating its foam of boneless jellyfish against the sand embankment, translucent.

During the summer the students in your school go sea bathing, kicking up the jellyfish with the stiff ends of their animal feet. Carnal. You refuse to go, constantly. The idea of stripping down to the bare flesh, exposing the thick hair on your arms and body, your undeveloped breasts, your unshapely hips, your thin masculine frame, frightens you constantly the ways a gazelle is frightened when a cheetah leaps at it with extended claws.

Your black eyes vibrate out of your skull with nervousness.

Your muscle fibers twitch.

Your shame is the constant humming of a profane danger.

* * *.

The beach remains an expectation, a social pressure, and a sea that pushes you towards the sea. Foam against foam. Form against form. And when you do decide to take the trip to the beach, all of the girls rush to the water and strip off their outer layers before launching their bodies into the froth of the entering tide. Their red lips are salted, seaweed curls around their toes and gives them a wild wild joy. You stand on the shore as a spectator, trapped in a kind of modesty. Trapped because you see their breasts plunging below the surface with each wave, a salty wet mash of erotic flesh amid pulsating sea creatures, and you worry that your own body will offend their image. A masculine stick set against undulating fluid hair and black-green seaweed, set against the idea of a body you are expected to be.

Wet bodies. You worry about what their bodies’ image will think of your image, screen on screen, so you stand behind the screen high on the beach with the dune grass. At a distance. In your eyes, blood pools. Hiding from predators, your nervous eyes thick bowls of black borsht, egregiously salted with sea broth, teeming with infectious organisms in the massive slurp spit, replicating their surf selves. Animal set against animal.

Dear Herculine,
A LETTER CONCERNING OUR MOVEMENT AS MONSTROUS ANIMALS
Childhood. The rawest of raw meat. Steak sawed off the bone in a red bloody flop.

Blue blood in purple veins exposed. Meat. Ugh. The shame before you understand shame, the animal nakedness that gets covered over with guilt. What does it mean to have a vague sadness constantly and completely? What does it mean to retreat into letters, to hide behind pages?
What does it mean to shadow one’s flesh with tree pulp? To know that something is wrong but to fail to understand it in its fullness, roundness. When you were a child you would devour history texts, you’d take them and retreat into the chestnut grove filled with those little spheres of round nut meat. Little round things like gonads. Little tree fetuses ripe for the crunching. Hot pops on the cast iron.
Snap, crackle—the sound below the feet in the chestnut glade as you wander alone, face in your letters, your body hidden like an animal tucked back into the womb after being born. Red. Raw. Meaty. Exposed in seclusion.

 {       A LETTER WITHIN A LETTER CONCERNING THE CHESTNUT-LIKE GONADS  

Dear Herculine,

Photograph of histologic (microscopic) sections of a gonad from the turn of the twentieth century provided by scientists as evidence of their alleged case of “true” hermaphroditism. According to this method (this logic) the only possible “true” hermaphrodite being a dead or castrated one affixed to the surface of a microscope slide

Small lovable cells that spread thick, slime butter.
A nut lard that vibrates, a dark fruit.
Kill the thing, cut open the dead, get at its essence.
Cut and biopsy the autopsy, declare the gender.
Essence as if sex could be defined by a few cells in a profuse smear.

With deathlife the rhetoric of gender is always complicated, messy.
With deathlife even the opened, dissected body is confused.
With deathlife hermaphroditism contorts outwards in a cell flood.

***

My own childhood is similarly textured like menstruation.

Thick.
Raw. Blackening. The rotten grapefruit exploded in the ditch and the teeth of the dogs that lick at it. But I do not have letters to hide in, so I simply tumble in sticks and mud. I do not read. My body in a filth storm, strange. But I too retreat into the woods, and temper myself with animal. In the sweaty heat—In Florida—there are snakes and coconuts. Creaturely. And they have their own genital meaning. Their slick, writhing bodies, clear fluid and crisp white flesh cracked open can-like under machetes.
The fluid everywhere leaking.

Reading history—you as a child until you became a schoolmistress, me as a history student still finding my grip in the mud—and it seems to give us both a kind of authority, it seems to give us an explanation of the structures of social life.

***

Life: but really no tranquil answers in the simplicity of facts.
Life: but really a dark haunting.
Our bodies becoming corpses of animate flesh.
The pages seep, burn, and become ghastly.
The red meat makes the grill flare its fat smoke upwards into threads.
Rags fill the room with their unwoven tendrils.
Haunting: the massive fabric octopus breeding its twisted legs into our . . .

   

histories.

   
A LETTER WITHIN A LETTER CONCERNING OUR PERCEPTION OF STARS 
A LETTER WITHIN A LETTER CONCERNING OURSELVES AS NODES AMID NODES

***

Across a vast black two bodies eye the same star and are seemingly connected in the present: a triangle between a node of soft light and two masses of flesh.

***

Two others through a third object always.
Across time two bodies meet two different stars and there is a vibration between the two stars.

***

Two stars, and another two, and another two, and another.

***

Across the letter the mess of stars vibrates.
Across two bodies there is always different time such that we never look at the same star—bodies never really present.
Across all of the vibration the death of a body like one’s own still makes a ripple.
Across the edge of the ripple an echo of pain perceived

} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:

In this is the dark ecology of my sex unfolding into space with other sexes, nebulas, and fibrous bodies.
In this is a kind of bestiary in which the “I” is every beast that is “I,” and this eye writes to another eye through a black epistolary that turns back into itself.
In this bestiary the term “hermaphrodite” exists as one of the more neutral descriptors of intersexual animals, I myself one amid many screeching.
In this “I” a twisted unfolding folding mass bubbling in an envelope called form, and multiple envelopes foam always into each other — the bubbles atop a vat of slime soup re-forming.
In this there are always already more derogatory terms for such bodies such as mine such as “freak of nature,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “sexual pervert,” and “unfortunate monstrosity.”
In this such derogatory terms pervade medical “literature,” this letter is not literature it is neon fat gleaming on the page, it is death’s opalescence.
In this words and bodies appear as things chewed out of lungs—phlegm, slime, and air in a teethy mouth hole’s hole.
In this such descriptors course in a queer organ that pulses these words through this blood as matter extrudes within a filthy ecology.
In this a fleshy pastiche that is the only access point to the trauma-tendrils that are labyrinthine and organic in every visible and invisible aspect of every capillary and circuit, monstrous and electric.
In this “I” folds this idea (this) into an unfolding folding like a wad of thin threads caught in the current of a fat pool, in the eddy of that which is rendering itself inexorable.
In this flooded room, a vomit full of mouth a fat gurgles until black bubbles foam out the sides their nightglow.
In this a body melted into a body melted, fat thick and slimy from eye to eye sluicing across the grotesquery.


} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:

When I say this is nature writing, I mean that I am an animal and that there is no outside in which one can stand to call this ecology “nature.”

This body, this I ecological, cannot step outside of the words “freak,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “pervert,” “unfortunate monstrosity.”
I let the words compose the way I go in the world.

The words surround from within.
The within roars from its trash organs.
The filth floats in the flood folding.
From the flood language inhabits us, infiltrating our thoughts and bodies, coercing ideas and movements, choreographing our little deaths. A flood language, a slime virus: it feeds on us, it needs us, and it lives in us. The reverse too: we feed on it, we need it, and we live in it. Language is a miasmic force engulfing. The miasma of the aroused genitals our air. Slipping obscurity. The hegemony rising up from the sexed gonads, the steam from the hot fruit entering and composing the architecture of the room. This is a text about rooms. This is a text about bodies in space. This is a text of creature textures variegating through envelopes and letters. The world an organic epistolary, composed of letters, pasted and folding into the folds and fissures inside bodies and rooms.


Dear Herculine,

A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX

***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING ARISTOPHANES’S SPEECH FROM PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM }


Aristophanes makes a comic myth out of heterosexual desire. He makes all bodies masculine and feminine distinct entities, wounded, in need of each other.
All of mankind starts off as a spherical whole, self-sufficient, powerful within the world. This spherical whole, the sphericity, of these sexed creatures reaches out into two heads, four arms, four legs, and two genitalia. They roll vigorously around the world sphere. These “natural” bodies come in three types: male, female, and androgynous. And even the androgynous mass has two perfect sets of genitals. They are “perfect,” round bodies that replicate the divine. When the human spheres anger the god spheres they are severed into two selves, male and female. They crave each other in order to complete themselves, to reach at the perfection they once had. And they hold each other, wound to wound. And those bodies re-affixed crave each other so hard they die. The gods pity their deaths because they need humans to give them offerings, so they give the bodies intercourse. They give them the need to fulfill their abstract monogamy physically, perfect genitals inserted into perfect genitals. These bodies lie as they lie.

What if we throw out this abstraction?  What if we eject the perfection? What if death was the regular state of things? What if divinity was stripped from the equation? What if all of the spheres, all of the blebs inside of blebs, were equaled in their power? What if death foamed?
Already dead, we would reproduce in the soil like cicadas, black fluid out our asses, viperously biological. Cicadas that are always already dying during intercourse, becoming fertilizer for the trees that house them. The weird energy that feeds the weird energy of the ecology. A black black blooded creature cult of organic velvet in a primordial cave collapsing the very shape of the cave itself. A shadow pastiche of unruly, humid animal intimacy.


A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX (cont.)
  
***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING HERMAPHRODITUS AND SALMACIS }


You stumble into Ovid’s description on the bookshelf and you discover a facet of yourself. You discover a third sex, a thing that explains yourself to yourself. You discover that Salmacis wove her nymph body sexually around Hermaphroditus, grabbing him below the surface of the bubbling water, touching his breast, kissing his pink flesh, wrapping limb around limb like octopus around a twig until the two of them transformed into a creature of both sexes.

But our flesh is not that simple, the merging is creaturely.
There is no “perfect” union, there is only the mess of biology, and the mess of body parts moving through space like a bloody finger poked into a bowl of flesh flavored gelatin. Descriptions of the actual meatiness of things never satisfy easy abstractions—bodies reform along their paths of formation like octopuses that reform their entire bodies to fit into a dark cave in the dank wet, again and again with each tide.

  
A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX (cont.)
  
***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING OUR BODIES AS CORPSES }

***

The longest of books are letters written to friends. Thick missives that are sent, that is written almost as if letters, out an unknown audience. A letter hurled out into thin air. If the humanistic tradition, at its diseased heart, is flinging a letter into a void, what does it mean to write a letter to a dead body? What does it mean to assume that my own body is a dead thing too. Dead because dying. Dying because dead. Dead because fed on dead matter unearthed as oil. Dead because lubricated with death fluid. Dead because. Barbaric. Uncivilized. Given to bestiality and violence. Given to bestiality because hermaphroditic, because monstrous, because that much more animal. Given to violence because reacting to being tamed, cut, reformed by medical discourse. Barbaric and uncivilized because an animal disciplined, utterly.

 ***

“Aristotle says, that we are punished much as those who were once upon a time, when they had fallen into the hands of Etruscan robbers, were slain with elaborate cruelty; their bodies, the living [corpra viva] with the dead, were bound so exactly as possible one against another: so our souls, tied together with our bodies as the living fixed upon the dead.”
-Reza Negarestani quoting Augustine quoting Cicero quoting Aristotle.

 ***
These letters are the memory of two bodies coupled until amalgamated by putrefaction. Two hermaphroditic bodies tied to each other’s corpses face to face, mouth to mouth, limb to limb, with an obsessive exactitude in terms of how the parts correspond like a dull black-blooded chamber music that runs through all of the chambers enveloping everywhere. Shackled to a rotting double, rotting in the space between, rotting in the space of the letters. Letting our agency become the agency of worms gliding through the dangerous dirt voids. Our skin obscures into grey brown rot, and spreads out into a continuity of black slime. We become the promiscuity of a rotting blood cocoon cocooning. We become the environment feeding the environment.

Aaron Apps, Compos(T) Mentis, BlazeVOX, 2012.

Excerpt

blog

 "Knuckles digging in the knee and not knowing it, while reading! To be disturbed and to be reminded of something you never quite knew. To be reminded and made to know that memory a new way, this is the way Aaron Apps gives it. Morphine drip as the scalpel tears open the new machine. The petri dish is an appetite for the borderlands of experimentation which is now shattering. You are now under the spell, you have been since you started reading it. If poetry is a way to live then I want to live with these poems, permission without question!" — CAConrad

"If angels represent the human idea of frictionless communication between souls, the 'fuckscapes' of Aaron Apps's ranty, violent first book COMPOS(T) MENTIS suggests communication as beastly, 'extra-somatic,' 'liquid infection.' Instead of the perfect, clean medium of the angels, Apps wants his medium to be 'dripping filth.' Instead of the ideal of private interiority, Apps's book pushes his poetry as a form of violence to the self, constantly brutalizing and opening up bodies with cuts and liquids. Even beauty is rubbed, ripped open and made to 'bleed ink.' Apps is not looking for angels, he is becoming a goat." — Johannes Göransson

"Aaron Apps's poems turn language upside down. As the reader tries to hang on to this new reality, Apps's poetic powers reimagine the connection between reader and writer. His visionary approach offer directions few poets take. This freedom of form and experience lifts this book beyond normal relationships between language and the larger world. Aaron Apps's gifts are clear. In this age of wonder, he has plunged ahead and created a sequence of poems that are one key in understanding what American poetry is accomplishing in the new century." — Ray Gonzalez

[ I am reading “A Carnal Shitstorm of Affections.” The cover looks like a tomato based stew and I want to eat it, but it is actually a petri dish with agar, festering with bacteria and fungus growing on and from Aaron App’s nail clippings, which nourish them, and I begin to eat it. Am I the agar, the nails, or the bacteria, or the microscope that is looking at it? Is the poetry the agar, the nails, or the bacteria, or the microscope or the person who put the nails in the agar or the person who clipped the nails, or the person who touches fingers beneath the nails and lies encrusted on the clippings? Reading this carnal shitstorm, I think about the way a poem is an ecosystem of dirt and cells and oil that smells kind of like cheese or butt crack. It is the exposure of a dark space between folds of a sensitive organ like the skin to air and light, the nasal and intellectual membranes of the perceiver. These lines grow as dense and complex as microbes on agar, via the fertile crescent of a moment as small, sad, and dirty as a nail clipping, the ungerminated seed that germinates the environment around it instead. I look closer and the microbes are actually a field of tiny cocks. I see that these cocks are infused by aesthetic philosophy and hip hop. I see that Nicki Minaj is bouncing and peeing with these cocks. I look closer and I see industry. I see tiny factories. I see that these factories are words. I see the failure that reflects the flaccid, diseased and swelling cocks of the industrialized world, of which I am a part of, through which I see and feel the tiny oars of App’s technically amazing poetic lines flick tiny crumbs from his navel, stinging my cornea. I feel and see that these flicked morsels are microscopic sympathetic somatic pains. There is vigor in how Apps’s agar medium bubbles forth helpless, nerve-filled tumors of language, a kind of tangle that I cannot describe but by being vulgarly infected by it. The math here is tender. Almost mushroom-like the toxic line decays the corpse of the body-politic and sprouts from it. Underneath the noise of decay there is silence. The sound of a void somewhere through this fluid-filled cancer, subjectivity fucking an O, another hole, which turns into itself, the Ape/App(s) which is a body of quotes grown from other bodies and chunks and proliferates. I am sad and ecstatic. Why am I thinking of the garden of Eden? It grows in you. Sometimes I am almost revolted but I feel infatuated, which becomes the same thing, guts and bubbles and waste. Now I know it is the same pain, I feel beauty. I am eating and drinking this shit in the storm and it eats me in everything. Light, feel-sight, “the liver a moth” and “at the base of the navel the whole irrational system blows
out into tubular microbes, not up.” ]
The above is an excessive blurb I wrote that was mostly not included in the marketing of Aaron App’s book, whose title was changed to Compos(t) Mentis to offer a more appropriately avant-garde texture. But it is still a lovely carnal shitstorm of affections. I have been trying to do a review of it for months now. It’s been festering in my body, and I have been feeling it in relationship to many other books/bodies and readings I’ve done. Now I will attempt to note some of the traces they leave in my water.

!) Slime Dynamics: Ben Woodard argues that time and slime is the dark vitalism or force that drives all activity/life. I see in his attention to slime a little bit of kinship with Black Ecology, which views nature as a network in which all objects have agential roles, not just humans. Slime Dynamics looks at the slimy basis of life, the way that it is entwined with decay, bacteria, microbes and fungi, these being the movers and the horrible universal infection, unseen but all-permeating beneath all life, (whatever that may be). I see slime dynamics in poetry such as Apps’ particularly when grammar and syntax break down as if cracked by decay, slime molds being the miraculous swarm made up of individuals, as the body is a swarm made up of innumerable other swarms of infection. What does time have to do with the poetry? I remember hearing Aaron say that instead of focusing on the foot that does not step in the same river twice (time = change), we should focus on the pebble underneath, the crushed dirt clod, the bodies underneath the clod, the blood that runs in it the tiny life that germinates in it, the unsaid history. Time stops, runs back on itself. The difference between Apps’s ethics and slime dynamics / dark vitalism is that App’s does not believe that one can transcend the social, no matter how posthuman.  Apps: “Everything is run through with infection, bacteria, and microbes. Smegma. Poetry should be especially aware of this bodily extension. Every subjectivity that perceives is phallic and diseased…” (7).
@) “Every subjectivity that perceives is phallic and diseased.” Aaron’s poetics is a poethics that smashes. There is no body uninfected by oppressive systems, conscious or not. He pushes our noses into our own shit. The shit that piles at our feet as we are blown back by the airy lines of history. Pooping angels. The digestive ecologies barely bordering on pathology allow the body to pass gas and waste. Ideological ecologies do the same (Racism, sexism and classism are infections and miasmas permeating us and not us, the air between us). So Compost Mentis is not an argument about the division between soul and body or its rupture. In fact it is an explosion of both, while knowing that there is no thinking outside the body, without the body. “Ensoulment” (a word I read on Elaine Castillo’s blog and that I have come to love) is a fold in the flesh, the darkness in it, the unseen machine materialized by slimy bodies. Totally porous, we are already open to the terror of the world which folds into our contours and content. “When I say lyric, I mean the I that is not I. I mean I take the complex I and put it in a single limb or single stone that rattles in a biological tumbler” (12).
#) Yet moments of collectivity, which I interpret as both being-in-multitude and being-multiple, are ephemeral: “The body seeps thoughts on plastic, petroleum, petri discs and watches them grow. Receives feedback from other subjects in fleeting moments. The body then notices all the trash, waste and pain this process caused others. The beyond the poem. The thing the body pushes into the act of writing, spitting on the filled page. The refuse of the short reaching dark-elsewhere. / But that realization is fleeting, the bodies in these poems feel helpless. The bodies howl through all the holes in their bodies” (21). Being numerous oscillates between one, the navel, and many, the dissipation of ego. I see in the lines a self-critique of poetic practice. I also see an analogous loop in any perception of others, any trying to interact as bodies embedded in already corrupted, slimy (figurative and not) systems. The poem acts as a membrane or a placenta (see Sarah Fox’s posts on placental economy) that sustains a symbiotic relationship that then immediately slips into parasitism. The body is not just meat. The body is bacteria and language, capital and power, affect and effect. But all of these things collapse into the form of a digestive tract in process and decay within a world.
$) Thom Donovan’s essay on somatic poetics talks about the body as a form (coextensive with content, becoming, written). It begins with an epigraph quote from Eleni Stecopulos: “I dreamt we were susceptive to language / that care might be agency’s complement / and form never more than condition / passing as body…” These poetries encourage me to think about ways in which we can reconfigure the ways we conceive of communities. How can we level hierarchies to exist with one another, when we are composites of such infections and conditions? “The poems contained are a splatter of my body that is infected with cheap academic “complexity,” racism, patriarchy and consumerist wastefulness. I jiggles its fleshy war-nodes. They break into a thousand thousand perceiving sexes [ . . . ] The field writhes into itself and, in turn, upholds the tower. I writes a poem to turn the tower into the shadows in the grass that are filled with sexing worm tongues.”
%) If we could shadow each other’s shadows and worm into each other’s perceiving sexes.
&) “The darkness, the darkness” (70) as an inversion of the horror in the Heart of Darkness, this poetry is darkness within and without, as the subject is implicated in the systemic horror all around us. The dark tentacle in the poem that reaches out to the dark tentacle in you. From inside to inside, bleeding form to bleeding form. The poems between the reflexive prose-blocks are where affective flashes collide, vulnerably, democratically extending their sense-tongues to you, an invitation to deep touch, to love, to “fuck-hands.”
*) I <3 -="-" b="b" book.="book." this="this">Feng Sun Chen

 

Aaron Apps, Parrhesia, Lulu, 2011.

Apps:
I'm currently co-editing an anthology titled "Unbecoming: An Anthology of Posthuman Poetry" with Feng Sun Chen.
For more information go here.
Call for Submissions:
Unbecoming: An Anthology of Posthuman Poetry
In the twenty-first century poetry interfaces with animal-machine. The “human” is not a given concept, but rather is one that is made in an ongoing technological and anthropological process. We hope to publish an anthology of poetry that participates in technological, biological, representational, sexual, political and theoretical post-humanisms. We’re looking for poetry that engages with or is written by animals, beasts, monsters, creatures, aliens, cyborgs. How do bodies that are misunderstood, misfitting, ugly, failures, etc., challenge western, enlightenment figurations of the “self” and “human”? We are interested in poetry by rhetorical bodies that exceed definition.
Any contemporary work in English (domestic or translated) that addresses the post-human is welcome. Please send up to 20 pages of poetry, in standard format (*.doc, *.docx, *.rtf, *.pdf) to Aaron Apps & Feng Sun Chen via [submishmash].
Previously published work is welcome; please include acknowledgements (if any) and a brief bio with your submission. If you have any questions please contact us at posthumanpoetry[at]gmail.com
Please feel free to forward this call via your e-mail, blog, facebook, tumblr, twitter, etc. We look forward to reading your work.

I just completed a collaborative art project with a group of fellow artists from the University of Minnesota.
Description:

“Subterranea” is a collaborative art project with the general aim of bridging the everyday and the political by uncovering and making explicit the growth of microorganisms in unexpected contexts. While much of our work was process oriented, our final project involved projecting a time lapse video underground in a garden bed. We hoped to create a visceral, bodily connection to hidden worlds that are both technologically and bureaucratically mediated. Our project is both about our inability to see clearly all that constitutes the earth we live on and eat from, as well as our need to have a more intimate relationship with that earth both physically and conceptually.

You can view images and videos of the project here: http://subterraneaproject.tumblr.com/ And here is a video of the installed piece:

Queer Fat

The body. The body is born, is born into a pool of sacrificial blood and artificial fat the color of rainbow sherbet stirred until weirdly brown at the base of a thin egg containing a throat-like vibrato of corruption and entropy.

The body. The body is in the shit with the feathers and rot, is in the pink blood and orange organs, in the half-tones of half-formed bird feet.

The body. The body in the translucent glint on the flaking keratin of overgrown claws made of the same material as rhino horns, in the hook-shapes peeking their form up from the strange blend of neon foam.

The body. The body is born inside of the body like a bubble vibrating up into itself, like a horse trying to fling its rider to the ground, that is, a horse whose musculature cannot fling anything downward, cannot because there is little to distinguish the heavens, the atmospheres and goddesses, from the shit, from the perception of inhuman eyes and wormy compost.

The body. The body is atavistic in the sinew and syrup of the Cadbury Cream, in the yellow ooze where the shame foams, in the yellow within the yellow within the shamanistic sense that vibrates against the habit of pointing fingers and yelling names like a 13 year old boy with an unendingly stupid erection.

The body. The body is all fat and covered in boils shaped like eggs such that each contain the misfortune of stars, such that each contain the pointing upwards of a broken compass that happens when the center of the earth is the center of the universe when the earth is the dumbest link on the chain of being, the shackle of form, the expectation of spherical beauty. The earth that is the last dangling sphere of soap on rope fitted nicely into the ass, beading upwards into digestion to wash out the idea that there is this grotesquery behind shells.

The body. The body is a thinking being ugly in the confusion of the ground, in the guillotine of motherliness, in the dull axe of patriarchy, and everything is fed on goat’s milk out of form of human tits, tits formed, ultimately inhuman, like large egg shells, like spheres out of thin sugar, and that thin sugar is filled with vomit and shit and the body’s own sense of beauty.

The body. The body has a strange aesthetics, maybe, has a weird sense of beauty, maybe, has a slimy sense that is a cruel contortion always against an abstraction, against a false futurity, against an immortal construction of skin and muscle like a Greek torso that’s lost its limbs, that’s lost the weirdness of its paint.

The body. The body is oil shit, and the sugar is too, is dead matter made out of corn syrup made out of dead matter, is the fat bubbling with shame in the shit, in the corporate folk-tradition of motionless and steely paranoia.

The body. The body is worm paranoia too. Behind every shell is an inhuman rot, a half-grown chick flooding its birth sphere with small red worms.

The body. The body is behind the eyes, behind their egg-like form, and is a viscous sludge of unfillable dreams, of enforced pastiche realities where all of humanity points from the scaly skin of their ape joints out into a murderous expectation.

The body. The body is a force that pushes the worst formed of the eyes into a shameful state of tears behind coke bottle glasses and a desiccated face. Behind fat. A force that forces fatty shapes into their bloody and polychromatic rot, into the premonitions of half-formed chicken bones and brown feathers freed of the possibility of flight.

The body. The body is a force that throws the shit out while keeping it always viciously inside the thinness of the egg’s form.

The body. The body is the always collapsing thou, collapsing like the center of an undercooked soufflé within the egg, collapsing like a dead lung.

The body. The body is.