Anthony Madrid, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, Canarium Books, 2012.
Poetry. Allusive, oracular, heretical, brash, learned, apocalyptic,
astronomical, funny, lustful, and deceptively wise, Anthony Madrid's
long-awaited first collection, I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY, is a
book of ghazals that assault conventions while often reading like
deranged love letters
I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say is a masterful book. Subtitled or retitled 580 Strophes: Libri Sex,
the book states its structure: hundreds of couplets in six books—which
is exactly not to state its unity. Unity and identity are in fact the
questions at stake both within and across poems; and as the title
promises, turnabout is fair play. The language itself is both master and
slave, and the book as a whole both begs our attention and commandeers
our consciousness.
Perhaps the first thing one notices is that the poems don’t make
sense. Generally composed of six to ten couplets, they begin in the
middle of things, stay in the middle of things, and exit with a parting
shot, generally a mocking commentary from an invisible bystander. What
is one to make of a poem that leaps from the cost of subway trains to
the release of “that eerie torchlit blackbird” to an “eleven leggéd SUN”
which is told to cease “threading needles with camels?” And this just
halfway through the first poem! One makes, through patient attention, a
play-space and a space in play. It is not just that anything can happen
in these strophes, but that lyric enclosure no longer applies. And
endings are not meanings; they may “sum up” in off-sides banter, but
they do not provide coherence.
List-poems are a good analogue, such as Whitman’s, and certain songs
in the Bible; so are analocuthons like Christopher Smart’s paeon “To My
Cat Geoffry.” The book’s speaker calls its pieces ghazals and is clearly
admiring of and invested in Arabic poetry, but the ghazal’s rhymes and
repeated words have been excised. The couplets are all disjunction, all
the time. The poems leap from long-limbed declarative sentences to
asides, statements of fact and opinion, invitations, exclamations,
questions, and apostrophes: So that the effect of all these leaps is not
only constantly to create and destroy universes, but to give the
shimmer, across the Bedouin desert, of metaphor (the identity of
disparate elements) by way of constant juxtapositions.
Sometimes the poems explicitly weave metaphoric or harmonious unities
that depend upon the subterranean connections of ambiguities (leaves,
poems, books), even while disavowing them: “See how the stubborne
damzell doth deprave my simple meaning”(8)! And sometimes a relatively
clear pseudo-biographical narrative teases itself out; more often, one
strophe picks up the subject of the previous, and proceeds as it were by
error. The non-Western music of the single note, multiplied to a kind
of infinity, creates its own space, and the ear that can hear. The poems
give and do not give themselves up, mounting a “voluptuous
resistance”(44) to our mastery and understanding, all the while
dispensing accessible “Golden Advice”(3).
Madrid’s book sets out to be a new sacred text, referring, for starters, to the Devil’s Dictionary,
and ending with the Apocalypse: “For my mission is to alter the course |
of human personality. // Babe, don’t touch the curls”(104). “Speaking
gorgeous English into [our] glasses”(62), the language in these poems
stands out for its unusual embrace of ancient idiom, as if to encompass
the entire history, not just of poetry in English, but of poetic
traditions everywhere, especially of pre-industrial societies. Trusting
perhaps that everything important has already been thought and said, all
traditions are fair game: “HINDUISM! That fractal religion with gods
sticking out of the gods!/ Every time you open the faucet, you get a
sink full of gods”(66). The speaker, as full of questions as answers,
intent on earthly embrace, confides, “you’re seeing me after the
accident”(38). The book, despite its rangy habits, is seamlessly,
carefully put together; it has the shape of spiritual quest.
If unity and coherence are subverted within the poems, the (same)
question of formal identity appears as the problem of the speaker. And
it is not as simple as a certain wandering; no, there are onlookers,
questioners, wise men, and gamines in the works, and some of them are
us, and the speaker is most of them. Furthermore, if we ventriloquize or
animate the text, mirroring the kaleidoscopic fragments as we turn
them, then who is addressing us? Who calls us “you?” And if we inhabit
the “parting shot” of the final couplet in most poems (for someone calls
our speaker “MADRID”), we are standing somewhat outside the drama our
attention begins.
As if our own participation is not complicated enough, the poems
rapidly shift ‘persons’ very like Ashbery shifts pronouns, undermining
and multiplying the subject; a Madrid poem moves, say, from third person
plural (“These were not born to be lovers”) to first person plural (“We
have no word for the provocative dimples”), strophe to strophe, thence
to a “you” which toggles from specific address (“O traveler”) to the
more general “you” of ‘anyone’ (“you can have it either way”)—which is
an implied first person—moving toward an explicit first-person “I” (“I
am free to play Lady Godiva”), thence pivoting toward an apostrophe
(“Oh, violet thong underwear”), and finally landing nimbly, one foot on
the third person (“It’s about time MADRID turned a few heads”) and one
on the second imperative, “Just look at him”(70). Such deft and complex
movements are, perhaps miraculously, never confusing; we innerly speak
this way, self-dramatize this way, and the demotic and the classical
rhetoric are one.
The speaker, in various states of address, is complex, multiple,
ironic, calculating, and sincere all at once. The speaker’s “I” or “we”
speaks to no one, or to us, or to himself. Someone else calls him
“MADRID.” Unless he himself calls himself that, standing aside. Who
poses? Who opposes? This doubling is reminiscent of Berryman’s speakers
in the Dream Songs: Henry, who talks to himself, and Mr. Bones,
who comments on the proceedings and addresses Henry, and whom Henry
sometimes answers. But while these devices somewhat transparently
separate Berryman’s speakers from Berryman, some poems in Madrid’s I Am Your Slave
complicate matters by either presenting a straightforward, unnamed “I”
in the mainstream lyric vein, or declaring the identity of the “I” with
MADRID. Except that the name’s been changed, as if garbled in a dream:
“I am the invincible poet MARDUD”(85). The poet’s triumphant
self-naming (in the poem at hand) is both entirely sincere and
justified, and entirely undermined by the fact that “I am to be
destroyed by a seventeen-year-old girl”(84).
Whitman said “I” and meant ‘all of us’; Dickinson said “I” and meant
‘each of me’; and ever since, it has grown very hard to say “I” and mean
a subject understood as single, private, self-determining, and factual.
As one poem puts it, “The cracked ego cannot be patched. It is too late
for the individual”(98). Madrid’s speakers get to say “I” by being
fictive, ironical, swift, kaleidoscopic, and dependent upon our
attention (readerly). These are the true poems of sincerity, as
piercingly sincere as Byron and Dickinson, as knowing as Catullus and
Frank O’Hara. “And now MADRID is wearing a spacesuit. He forged it in
this poem’s first couplet”(97). And he’s a self-loving cross-dressing
transgendered bisexual beauty queen when he isn’t starring as an
historical Arab poet, the Buddha, or a minor Hindu prince. As his
speaker puts it, “let the foundation of my fame be my
openhandedness”(15).- Melanie Hubbard
I listen to a lot of punk and hip hop in addition to being a
voracious reader. As such, I’ve encountered a lot of slam and spoken
word. I struggle with these genres because they quickly fall into tropes
of form and rarely have any life on the page, yet every time I see punk
and hip hop groups perform I think, “What if poetry were more like
this? More energetic, more urgent?” Inevitably, though, that urgency is
lost on the page, or seems trite when performed. Anthony Madrid’s new
collection I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books,
2012) is carefully composed, while maintaining an element of the
improvisational. Madrid has managed to cram the intensity and rhythm of
the music I love onto the page, without losing any power. In fact, these
poems are so energetic they seem to leap off the page, demand to be
read, and then wrestled back before you can move onto the next.
Early on in the collection, Madrid—who uses himself as a character in
the poems—says, “Whoever reads more than a dozen ghazals at a time will
be overstimulated.” Indeed, these poems, which Madrid calls ghazals,
can be overstimulating. Though the energy of these poems is such that
you want to keep reading, taking the collection slowly is best in order
to fully appreciate their strength. Handily, Madrid has broken the book
up into 6 sections, each with between 10 and 12 poems. There are no
section breaks between poems, so you have to pay attention to the poem
numbers at the top of the page: 1:4, 3:9, 6:1, and so on. Though not
easily identifiable, sections have themes that hold them together, a
mark of Madrid’s ability to craft a whole book, not just compelling
individual poems.
Madrid’s diction in these poems is an odd mix of highly colloquial
and oddly archaic, often within the same line. Phrases like, “MADRID,
you effervescing piece of fuckass magma!” are highly surreal, yet by
virtue of being so specific, very real. The effect is that Madrid
becomes a sort of street preacher in a busy city, mixing his already
jumbled metaphors with the language of the everyday, a performance you’d
see at the bus stop or subway platform.
Performances can bring nuance and double meaning to a piece that is
lost when the text is written down, though, by the same token, line
break can alter meaning in much the same way. Madrid has employed a
number of tricks to suggest ways of reading the piece to the reader,
bringing some of the performative nuance back. Traditional moves like
line break and rhyme are used to great effect throughout the text, but
Madrid also uses vertical bars to force a caesura into his lines,
creating a softer break than the hard enjambment of a line break. This
typographic trick is used throughout the book, but is especially well
done in “Rhymes” whose last three stanzas read:
You’re on your own and off your meds. Greens and yellows, blues and reds. It’s only with certain groups of friends | you dare undermine the uplift.
So, purple-orange, yellow-blue. Polly, gimme your answer true. I order demand and require that you | tear it, little parrot.
So, let’s hear it all for the CASH MACHINE. Purple-orange, yellow, green. Dirty Bomb and Laser Beam | are here to collect the rent.
The vertical bar acts as a crux around which the lines turn, causing
the reader to pause before moving to the end of the phrase. Also used
throughout the book, and demonstrated here, are words set in small caps
that call focus to names or objects differently than full caps or bold
letters. Finally, Madrid also uses accent marks to lightly emphasize
words, but not so much as words in italics. Using these varying levels
of emphasis, Madrid brings more layers of nuance to his poems than is
usually possible.
In I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, I found the energy and
exuberance from rap and punk, with the carefully crafted line break and
typographic elements that can only be found on the page. Without a
doubt, Madrid’s book is one of the most exciting collections I’ve read
in a long time, and he has already become a poet whose tricks I’ve tried
in my own poems. As a writer, finding a poet whose work teaches you new
things is exciting, and I couldn’t be happier to have found this book. I
have to respectfully disagree with the lines in one of the last poems
in this book, “anyone can see / How much better this poetry would be if
it were written by a twenty-five-year-old punk.” More punks should write
poetry, but you’re doing fine on your own, Mr. Madrid. Keep ‘em comin’. - www.hazelandwren.com/
Andrew Morgan, Month of Big Hands. Natural History Press, 2013.
In Month of Big Hands, Andrew Morgan creates a stunningly beautiful
world of violence, loss, and need. This book is a masterfully written
prose poem which is as mysterious as it is engaging. The poem focuses on
the ephemeral connection between three main characters, Elly, Herzog,
and Robbie. As the story of the poem unfolds, their struggles and the
savage world around them takes shape. Much akin to the tattered diary of
a lost soldier, this book is a type of meditation. It is a gorgeously
drawn portraiture of how we function within uncertainties and
devastation.
door of thin skins, a hybrid collection of poetry and prose,
deconstructs the nature of psychological power through the
deconstruction of traditional narrative and language. The book, narrated
by a woman in psychotherapy, does not unfold in chronological sequence,
but uses recurring phrases, images, and events to unify and deepen the
narrative as well as mirror the process of psychotherapy. As the
relationship between patient and therapist becomes dependent and sexual,
resulting in a precarious blurring of both patient and therapist’s
boundaries, the book alternates between the straightforward and
syntactically disjunctive. Visual poems comprise another nonlinear layer
in this book, depicting one of its recurring themes, a fracturing of
the narrator’s sight and simultaneous and conflicting perceptions of
reality.
door of thin skins is a perfect title for Shira Dentz’s
latest work. In this fever dream of a book, Dentz’s language is like a
spirit who can pass through the scrims of time and perspective, but not
unscathed. These poems are the toll. She sings what fails to kill us. —Cornelius Eady door of thin skins tracks the misuse of power in a
patient/doctor relationship in shattering detail. A patient is cut off
from her body and the doctor imposes his. Her senses have dispersed as
if to escape the troubled site. In these poems, the experiences that
tear the mind and the mind’s language must be recollected in language,
which becomes a reenactment of the wounding. What the poet must do, and
does, is let language be torn apart so that the senses (sense) may
re-collect in beauty, in the body of the poem. —Eleni Sikelianos
Here is David as a 21-year-old confused girl in boyish clothes
and Goliath as a golden-credentialed 60-year-old psychotherapist in
orthopedic shoes who jeopardizes his career when he sexually crosses the
line with his young patient, then continually questions the reality of
her perceptions. Shira Dentz’s brilliant poetic amalgam of circumstance
and the mind’s second-guessing, door of thin skins presents a
contemporary David and Goliath tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist’s
office, a state prosecutor’s office, and the crystalline mind of the
poet regarding it all. Poetry itself becomes the slingshot in this
face-off. The poet’s clever innovation of an edgy and oddball brand of
avant-garde song-and-response tells this tale through a mix of thought,
feeling, fact, history, and personal history and a riveting pastiche of
rhythmical poetry, visual poetry and prose poetry. Dentz triumphs in her
dazzling and fractured narrative; door of thin skins startles and
astounds. —Molly Peacock
Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins is not only an intimate
narrative of seduction and abuse, but a tour de force of assemblage.
Each gallery-worthy page is meticulously arranged, prose overlain with
lyric sequences, visual space with visual density. From every angle, door of thin skins is a chilling and exquisite document. —Karen Brennan
Shira Dentz’s hybrid poetry/prose memoir, door of thin skins,
opens on a scene with Dr. Abe in his “watering hole,” the New York
penthouse apartment-turned-office where the 60-year-old psychotherapist
sees city patients. Here, too, we are introduced to the poet’s
remarkable eye as it surveys her surroundings: “art in a precise
geometry along the walls like cut hedges around a house,” “black wooden
masks, quick meadows, the slight and tarnished,” “[a] woman’s torso with
flowing breasts, blue and gold, coat of thin skins” (3). Here is a room
“fashioned according to Freud” and a poem cataloging objects of decor
grouped around the towering totem of a capital
A,
the initial of this “whale of a man,” Dr. Abe: analyst and collector
of capital-A art. The scene vibrantly evoked in this first poem, while
poking lightly at this “lover of the primitive” ensconced in an office
of “[n]othing truly rare, unusual or exotic,” appears to begin the
collection innocuously enough, introducing Dr. Abe as “[v]ery friendly.”
Then you turn the page and read “[l]ater, his claim I made everything
up” (4). You read “[f]ive years later I watch his lizard tongue flicker
at the curb of my mouth, into which it disappears” (5). Suddenly, the
book lists, lurches nauseatingly, like the deck of a ship in rough seas.
You will have to go back to the opening and read the scene differently;
now, the carefully arranged pieces of art in “cut hedges” form a
screen, a shield—what lurks behind them? Later on, when you read that
Dr. Abe calls the speaker at night to keep him company, how they “[w]ind
up in the usual: Him in his large recliner, me in his lap crying, him
fondling my breasts” (32), it is no longer possible to view the Dr.’s
recliners as merely “water buffalos placid in their hole” (3). Of the
“woman’s torso with flowing breasts” that Dr. Abe says is “[a] gift…from the painter, a former patient,” you now have to wonder what was a “gift”? The painting, or the painter’s breasts?
Reading door of thin skins, you will not be able to keep
your equilibrium. You will flood with rage, but this rage will be
punctuated with displays of dazzling language and interludes of humor.
You will find yourself trying to catch your breath over and over as it
spills from your spinning head.
^
Plunges into the visceral, the sensual, are indispensable anchors in
Dentz’s text. Sight—and not just sight, but visual texture—engages you
at a bodily level. The text on pages 51-54, comprised entirely of
variants of the word sense and its sundry definitions, explodes
across the white space in distinct clusters and fonts, producing a sort
of eye chart on speed. Though this comparison may suggest that the text
on these pages has been randomly placed, the opposite seems true. For
example, the only word on the entire 4-page spread rendered in quotation
marks is “feel,” buried near the bottom of page 53 in small font. This
lone use of quotation marks is subtle, yet heartbreaking, pointing to
the way the speaker’s feelings are qualified and questioned over and
over again, how “the way it was on the inside” (16) is both put in
quotation marks and deprived of speech.
Marks of punctuation, in particular, highlight how text is not merely
a transparent vessel for meaning; they have distinct shapes, and these
shapes have visual cognates and connotations. The poem titled ? begins:
The way a raindrop leaks downward then nests, stark white paper & small
black type. Still, on a window pane; before digressing on (73).
The path of a raindrop is released from the shape of a question mark.
Sometimes, though, not even such purely visual components of text
provide enough release, and the poems must break into more abstract
lines and shapes (see 11, 16, 37, for examples). In these moments,
however, Dentz does not allow you to assume that abstract shapes are
immune from the brain’s restless search for meaning through language.
(Consider, for example, that classic experiment in psychology, the
“Bouba-Kiki Effect”1 and compare those shapes to the examples above). The poems in door of thin skins ultimately use language as a supplemental organ of sense.
^
A is for . . . (a partial catalogue)
analysis, adoption, aesthetics, adultery, A.P.A., authority, autopsy,
accountability, accusation, anger, addiction, alarm, attractiveness,
affair, appointment, asynchrony, alienation, abnormality, admission,
alogia, autocrat, assault, Artist, attorney, anonymity, airy-a,
anti-depressant, abuse, anger, appetite, abstraction, asshole,
anaesthesia, absolutes, alternatives, anecdote, ammunition, acuity,
alpha, affordability, actualization, adjustment, antagonist, answer. . .
An A for afterwards.
^
What is the afterwards of sensation? The dot nesting beneath the curve of the questioning senses?
Interpretation. No experience of sensory data is free from
interpretation; the brain, for example, automatically interprets the
binocular data relayed from the eyes into a unified field of vision. But
sometimes the mechanism of this interpretation breaks down, as in
“Heart,” when the speaker has “surgery for a spontaneous detached
retina. // Afterwards, double vision for a year, don’t know if it will
heal back to single” (22). What happens when you are forced to question
not just the interpretation of your senses, but the very mechanisms that
provide a platform for this interpretation?
Interpretation. Staple of psychoanalysis and grossly
over-appropriated realm of Dr. Abe. Bolstered by his bloated pedigree,
Dr. Abe strives to discredit the speaker’s interpretations at every
turn—questioning her interpretation of events (“You think this happened // with me, but really it was someone else, for god’s sake,” 5), her interpretation of art (“You’re supposed to be an artist? I thought you were going to tell me things // about the artwork!”
35). But what Dr. Abe does not count on is that the speaker, a true
artist, is uniquely equipped to reclaim speech from his attempts to
impose silence, to activate the opportunities and embodiment of white
space. White space is not a void; though the speaker’s voice may be
“mute,” it is “the white of all-color” (71).
^
Everywhere throughout door of thin skins, the project of
reclamation is under way. In another of his manipulative moves, Dr. Abe
reads aloud from the report mailed to him by Dr. Nick, a smarmy,
“low-cost” psychiatrist to whom Dr. Abe has referred the speaker: “She’s
a SOCIALIZED SCHIZOPHRENIC and should be INSTITUTIONALIZED” (59).
Interestingly, a salient symptom of schizophrenia is schizophasia2
(word-salad), a random tossing together of words into an incoherent
jumble, a symptom that is involuntary and compulsory. One of the most
striking and compelling features in door of thin skins is
Dentz’s ingenious re-patterning of language into “jumbles” that are
anything but random, anything but involuntary. One interpretation:
symptom. A truer interpretation: poetry. In the fracture of language,
Dentz opens the door to brilliant possibility, activating recombinatory
arrangements of striking power and beauty. I will close with an example:
Photographs. Or The Way It Was
on the Outside
By this time photographs of the boy’s
face superseded spontaneous memory. It was important to see him without
them. The big cupcake that school gave out on birthdays that he saved an
entire afternoon to share with me; the Abraham Lincoln book he brought
home from the hospital library; the name of a girl, Candy, he met there.
A charcoal blue wool hat, the matching scarf with small snowflakes sewn
onto his snowsuit, the dresser drawers that were his. The carnival
horses wallpapering their room: how I’d hold the lines of their contours
in my eyes, then, as if they were pick-up sticks, let them scatter;
however they’d land I’d see, at the very least, one brand-new figure, I
made believe it was deliberate, that I was the artist who’d drawn the
figure, and look away determined to see it on the wall again; each and
every time I’d lose its whereabouts . . .Our yelping at pigeons in the
tunnel we passed through on our way to the supermarket; their voices
came back two, three times in different shades, and the black, plump
birds would move a little. But not the sound of his voice nor his way of
talking; not his laugh either. The shape of his nails were different
from mine; I reconciled their difference by deciding his were boy’s. I
didn’t care for his thumb—it was particularly wide. I tried to find
something good about his thumb. Shapes on people’s bodies told things.
Their width like the width of a smile. Must have been something very
fine about his smiling, especially with his lids purple-black, their
sheen like that of worn cloth; in a very short time, too short to notice
beginning, his head got bigger, his five-year-old face pocked with
teenage acne; a midget man-boy. The Florida t-shirt our grandmother
brought back for him was extra-large. He became more and more
elusive—shapes on him changing and rearranging.
(42).
their width like he saved
an entire afternoon to share with small snowflakes sewn onto his smiling,
however they’d land I’d hold things.
reconciled
their different shades
I was the artist who’d
drawn the tunnel we passed through on our way to the sound of his voice
by this time I lost its whereabouts. . .
(43).
2 An associated symptom, “clang
associations,” refers to the practice of grouping words by patterns of
sound (like rhyme or alliteration) rather than logical sense. -Brenda Sieczkowski
The retina is brain tissue that lines the inner surface of the eye,
captures images of the visual world, and communicates them to the brain.
Retinal detachment is a disorder in which the retina peels away from
the eye. It is often caused by an injury or trauma to the eye or head
that breaches the barrier. That breach that allows fluid to seep under
the retina and to peel off the way wallpaper peels from a wall.
Initially, the person might initially see clouds in their vision often
called “floaters.” As detachment progresses, a moon-shaped shadow
appears in the periphery of the visual field and starts to billow like a
sail in the wind.
Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins narrates a fairy-tale-like story, “perhaps / a fairy tale,”
of a young woman’s trials with her shapeshifting psychotherapist, Dr.
Abe. Part lizard, part whale, part Macy’s Day balloon, Dr. Abe is a big
man with narrow tongue, “but really it was such a narrow tongue.” Dr.
Abe’s office is a veritable forest with its brambly hedges, placid
buffalos, quick meadows, and spider plants. It is “fashioned according
to Freud, lover of the primitive.” Trained at the White Institute along
with Rollo May and under the tutelage of Eric Fromm, Dr. Abe also
fashions his practice after one of the institute’s major influences,
Sandór Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst and contemporary of Freud.
Both Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank broke from Freud in the 1920’s to
collaborate on the development of a different form of psychotherapy.
Claiming that Freud’s requirement for emotional detachment on the part
of the psychotherapist leads to “an unnatural elimination of all human
factors in the analysis,” they endorsed a type of “here-and-now”
approach that emphasized the clinical importance of attachment, intimacy, and intersubjectivity, encouraging more countertransference and mutuality between patient and doctor.
Ferenczi is also widely known for his “confusion of tongues” theory
of trauma. In his essay on the topic, he explains that when children
playfully communicate the desire to be the spouse of a parent, they are
speaking with a infantile and tender tongue. “We find the hidden play of
taking the place of the parent of the same sex in order to be married
to the other parent, but it must be stressed that this is merely
phantasy; in reality the children would not want to, in fact they cannot
do without tenderness…” According to Ferenczi, the danger lies when the
pathological adult misinterprets this call for tenderness as a call for
passion.
In fact, in the 1920s, Freud broke from himself and repudiated his
theory that female hysterics really suffered sexual abuse. According to
Judith Herman, he did this because he could not cope with the truth that
sexual abuse was pandemic and therefore repressed it. In my thinking,
the same sort of repression may have occurred with Ferenczi in his
“confusion of tongues theory,” for according to him, the confusion is
still based on mutual dialogue, on the innocent participation on behalf
of the child. Perhaps like Freud he couldn’t cope with the fact that
many children do not participate in the conversation. They don’t call
out for tenderness in some sort of spousal fantasy. Instead they cry
angrily for safety while the “pathological” adult ignores these calls
and forces the “pathological” tongue upon the child. Certainly this is
true of Dentz’s child.
Here, Dentz speaks to the event in the third person. When she
screams, when she articulates her infantile and angry tongue. Her voice
is detached from first-person self, for the “I,” could no longer bear
witness to real world but instead is left floating in a world of chaos.
Part memoir, part poetry, part
line-art, Dentz explores a world of chaos where the limits of genre
disappear. One page is filled with punctuation that has been abstracted
from the previous page. Transcending the modes of the poetic
confessional, she also transgresses therapeutic confidentiality: “At group,
Jeffy and I are chummy. Short and balding, he tosses and rolls jokes.”
But it’s Dr. Abe, the looming analyst, part lizard, part whale, who
traverses the criminal boundary and positions himself in the gray area
where psychotherapy itself, which could be said to engage compulsive
voyeurism as a theoretical means to healing, becomes perverse. “I match
breaches with numbers from APA’s Code of Ethics.” It’s Dr. Abe he
who manipulates himself into “the gray airy-a / of boundaries between
patient and therapist.” It’s his pathological tongue that “flickers at
the curb of [her own] mouth, into which it disappears.” And it is he who
places himself “halfway into the heart” for some sort of “reparative
experience.” The tongue-tied words she subsequently swallows become a
worm in the mouth of a bird. Then, in a dream, her head goes missing.
This morning the top of my head was gone. What was left was a porch, the
one from childhood, at my grandmother’s house – and Dr. Abe standing on it.
Because door of thin skins is chronologically kaleidoscopic,
it’s difficult to parse exactly when Dentz suffers a spontaneous
detached retina. It seems to be at a time when Dr. Abe verbally abuses
her, criticizing her harshly for not being attracted a guy named Seth
with whom she is in a quasi-relationship. “Dr. Abe, very impatient,
cries, You are being pychotic!” Distrustful of her very sense of
self, she has “sex again and a relationship with Seth,” who knows,
because she tells him, that she’s not turned on. Soon after, she loses
her sense of sight. “A black rim at the tip of her vision.” Then,
The detachment of the self and of sight manifests is enacted in the
visual imagery throughout the entire text: “Two trees compete for the
same spot, twisting around each other.” It is also enacted by the
graphic positioning of the text itself.
Most exquisitely, she explores this detachment in the impossibly tragic poem, “Circumflex,” excerpted earlier.
Dentz’s door of thin skins is a book to be devoured repeatedly. It is an important book from which to learn. - Sandy Florian
NIN ANDREWS door of thin skins
is such a powerful book, and very disturbing. While reading it, I
wasn’t sure whether it would be classified as memoir or poetry. And
then you also added a visual component. It works so well. I was
wondering if you could say a few words about why you chose this hybrid
form? SHIRA DENTZ
I aimed to articulate, as best as I could, an experience that was
confusing to an exponential degree—like a Tower of Babel. In my effort
to give voice to this experience, the book’s structure became as
important as its language; in effect, I built its structure as a
language too. I wanted the book to evoke a state of being in the reader,
for it to be not just a record clearly divided from the reader, “out
there.” For the world that this book inhabits to be carried through
sensation too, to the reader. One’s reading experience of this book
necessarily includes body shifts; turning one’s self, or the book’s
position, this way and that. Generally speaking, movement on the page
leaves body traces as well as psychic impressions. I tried to calibrate
this movement to enact an experience, to incorporate a phenomenological
dimension to its reading.
CavanKerry Press’ crew, including their graphic artist, Greg Smith,
did a phenomenal job with the visual components of this book, faithfully
respecting every nuance that I had deliberately constructed. The
published book, as an object, is more beautiful than I had ever imagined
it would be. In effect, the book is a body now, a beautiful one at
that. I have not yet settled into this surprise, as the book’s content
is at odds with the character of its materiality.
Back to how the book’s shape functions as a language, albeit not the
verbal kind. Silence needs a translator. As Wittgenstein famously
observed, there are limitations to conventional language, and these
limits are part of what I grappled with in my effort to articulate.
Silence is being resisted. Such grappling happens when one attempts to
articulate most any experience that falls out of the
mainstream/normative, including traumas.
Since the experience portrayed in the book defies categories, I think
it fits if the book eludes this too: “memoir,” “poetry”; “prose,”
“poetry”—naming is impossible (back to the aforementioned Tower of
Babel). “Discipline” and “boundaries” work at the level of the book’s
poetics (word/image) and simultaneously at the level of the narrative
content’s context.
I’ll also add that sight is one of the book’s recurring motifs and as
such needed to have a visceral presence in it. All written language has
a visual component to it, and I needed to use all the means of my
medium at my disposal—even its sub-elements; shapes, at their outer
limits. NIN ANDREWS
I was so enraged at times while reading your story. I don’t know what
angered me more, the sexual abuse or the mental abuse, the way the
doctor questioned the reality of your perceptions. And yet, out of this
nightmare, you created a beautiful book. Were you writing the book as
this was happening? When did you start writing it? SHIRA DENTZ
I most certainly did not write the book as it was happening. In fact, I
stopped writing altogether at a certain point while it was happening and
didn’t start writing again until years later. One day, soon after I
began writing again, it occurred to me that I had this idea that this
experience wasn’t appropriate subject matter for poetry, and realized
this was ridiculous: no one can say what is or what is not subject
matter for poetry; it’s what you do with it. This recognition spurred me
to write the first of what I came to call “Dr. Abe poems.” I wrote a
number of them, and showed them to a poet with whom I had just started
doing a tutorial, and to several poet friends. Their strong positive
responses encouraged me to keep going, and I wrote a few more—maybe
about ten all together. I never intended to write a “Dr. Abe book.”
Often when I write a piece that I think has a good moment in it but the
rest isn’t as good, I feel driven to work on the piece so that this
“good moment” has a home. I didn’t feel satisfied that the series of Dr.
Abe poems that I had written were a complete enough articulation, and
decided that I’d tackle writing a Dr. Abe book. To do this I needed to
be in an environment in which I could delve into the difficult feelings
that writing this book was necessarily going to conjure, so I applied
for a residency at MacDowell Arts Colony and completed the first draft
of the manuscript there.
I worked on what eventually became door of thin skins and my previously published book, black seeds on a white dish,
at the same time over a number of years, and coincidentally both
manuscripts were accepted for publication by different publishers within
the same month.
From the first Dr. Abe poem to the fourth and final revision of the manuscript, door of thin skins took ten years. It was accepted for publication four years ago. So, we’re talking about fifteen years ago I started writing it. NIN ANDREWS
Was it healing to write? SHIRA DENTZ
That’s complicated; it was painful to write but I felt driven to complete it. Writing—making art—has always been my way.
Writing, for me, has always had a social component, and one of the
traditions in which this book can be placed is that of writing as
witness. The book’s dedication reads, “To healers of themselves and
others.” NIN ANDREWS
This could not have been an easy book to write. Are there any books or authors or mentors who served as role models for you? SHIRA DENTZ
There are many books and plays that articulate painful experiences and
have contributed to furthering public discussion geared to effecting
change, so I had many role models in this way. When I was working on the
first draft at MacDowell, it turned out that Lucy Grealy and Spalding
Gray had been colony residents in the cabin that I was in (there are
wall plaques in each cabin on which each resident signs their name). I
thought of the endurance these writers had in writing their stories, and
this helped me with my own endurance and persistence. I did research to
find other texts as models—I looked at H.D.’s Tribute to Freud
and Sexton’s Dr. Y poems, among others, at contemporary book-length
narratives in verse, but could find nothing that fit as a model; I was
on my own. I had writer friends who were writing about difficult
subjects too from whom I drew support, and encountered poets and
teachers through workshops at the 92nd St. Y and the Writers’
Voice in New York City, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale Foundation, and
MacDowell’s Arts Colony who encouraged me to continue with this project.
While I didn’t look to them for writing guidance in regard to the Dr.
Abe book, there were writers I met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where I
later went, and at the University of Utah where I received my doctorate
afterwards, whose support was invaluable. Molly Peacock gave me input
on the first draft and second revision. Because I had experience writing
fiction, I had an approach to writing narrative that came in handy. I
remember emailing my good friend, Jessica Treat, a fiction writer,
drafts of revisions for her input as I worked on the third revision of
the manuscript—besides that she was very generous in this way and I
admire her writing very much, I knew she had a good ear for what I was
up to in my narrative style. I was in the midst of the fourth and final
revision of the manuscript (during which I changed its title to door of thin skins)
when Joan Cusack Handler, the publisher of CKP, called to accept it,
and I finished this revision without any input other than my own. NIN ANDREWS
What writers have influenced you? SHIRA DENTZ
I’ve had different stages as a writer, and feel there are different
types of influences—writers whose work inspires me to write even though I
don’t write anything like them; writers whom I feel give me permission
to do things in writing; writers/teachers whose sensibilities influenced
me; and writers from whom I learn.
Writers who influenced me when I was first developing as a writer
include Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich,
Denise Levertov, Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, William Carlos
Williams, e.e. cummings, Fyodor Dosteovsky, Yuri Olesha, Nikolai Gogol,
Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Ralph Ellison, John Ashbery, Lorrie Moore,
Lydia Davis, Diane Schoemperlen, Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Saurrate,
Jonathan Baumbach, Armand Schwerner, Christian Bök, the authors of the
Bible and fairy tale writers including Grimm and Anderson; Guillaume
Apollinaire and Barbara Guest are among the writers who influenced me
later on. In short, my writing is influenced by many writers as well as
artists working in other mediums. I’m sure I’ve been influenced by
writers I don’t even know about when I’m influenced by any single
writer, since they’ve been influenced by other writers too, and so on. NIN ANDREWS
I would like to close with an excerpt of your choice from the book.
10. Hands
He splayed his fingers apart, their
movement a Japanese pure, make-a-vacuum style, allowing them to twitch
in all directions, implying cherry blossom petals dangling from boughs.
He was a tall and fat man, his fingers incongruously refined, long and
sculptural. Of course the fingertips flipped up. I say of course because
even at rest he gave the impression that he covered everything; above
and below.
How the very signal of that gesture
enveloped to the point of obfuscating my senses. This is why it is
nearly impossible to communicate, to hand over the experience.
He did it when he tried to make a point,
but I tell you whenever he did it all I was aware of was the portrait he
made with his hands. At their widest opening on their way down they
were bird wings flapping—and the hole between the wings, where there
should have been a body, was me.
“Cassandra Troyan goes for the throat, and once she's in the throat she
goes for the gonads, then the brain. No sex is safe, as is no being. Let
her re-teach you how to cower.” - Blake Butler
“Troyan's is a voracious language that gurgles itself, spits back up and
swallows again only to become a new hungry hole, always phoenixing,
always being born, never finished filling. In her 10000 rebirths we can
finally see our own wants clearly: stained, wetdreamt, slit and sticky,
but innocent in never having been informed why we are alive. This book
is very dirty and very, very pure.” - Melissa Broder
“This book will disturb you to the same degree that you should have been
disturbed before you read it. Cassandra Troyan's aphoristic poems
reminded me that things are grimmer and life is sadder and filthier than
I have will to believe, no matter how often I hear about Jersey Shore.
Troyan fills her cup with blood and mucous and says "take, drink." She
says, "The body is meat. The meat has feels." Her narratives form a
feedback loop with the sound a human brain makes as she squishes it
under her boot. She can be as abject as Bataille or as sick as Cèline,
but through it all, maybe best of all, she is also funny.” - Adam Robinson
Throne of Blood makes
me believe Cassandra Troyan chews razorblades and has freezing skin and
needles for fingers, but for some reason, I don’t feel like shying away
as she comes closer. Maybe it’s because I sense a sort of hidden warmth
she has for her demons. They’re like dozens of hands reaching out that
scare you, but don’t mean to.
I wet myself over the thought of roses
of making love to a hospital bed.Declarations of sex to bags
filled with liquids substituting
organs now present as witnesses.Walking into the divide an abyss the possibility
of apathy calculations of sentimentality amiss.Ripped out my vein limbs
overgrown.
Love makes you grow.
Honey drips from a sloe-eyed doe.Get cocooned in the sickness
a sweetening sludge.When the IV tubes get sugar clogged
it is obviously because you are selfish
and I am dead.When weighted I materialize.
Let’s just hover until this distance retreats.
(From “YOU SEDUCE COLORFUL ANIMALS ABOVE THE SKY”)
When I first started reading fiction as a method of learning about
writing, I was obsessed with the grotesque, but it feels like Troyan has
leveled up the concept here. For roughly a third of the book, I read
the speakers as being inhuman simply because they seemed so far removed
from humanity that I refused to believe they could be like me (which
sounds like a pretty fine accomplishment to me).
She gets so manic as a child even as a
small child who can’t tear herself away from the heat of light into
sleep struggles inside with her body damp with fear her gutbrain keeps
churning. “everybody wears just about the same shade of distain rusted by
mire a scab a caw like a brokenness born inside a baby. A sickness from
the innards she can only be cold. Gutted and raw.” (“IF YOU LEAVE YOU’LL GO TO THE POUND AND NO ONE IS EVER GONNA WANT YOU EVER AGAIN.”)
Those that are human are twisted with desires to lash out, to be
scrubbed clean or wholly disfigured, or to be filled to burst, all in
hopes of finding some connection to the real. Sex, one of the only
avenues of release available to the people of ToB, is so vital that
other icons and symbols of vitality become commingled with it into a
form of life slurry that fascinates the speaker.
I’m well read but sucked dry. I will grow a thousand thrones before I
recede. I will allow small advances before I creep through the slit of
your time.
I guess I could grow a fondness for the taste of blood.
My nose it bleeds from lack of use.
Every touch is a wound and the test to smear.
(From “LET’S GET LIFTED”)
The disgusting people of ToB, all wounded in the head but still hard
to pity, build their world around you as you read, and eventually force
you into their frame of mind, as is the result of the best grotesque
literature. The building anxiety becomes more concrete until
transforming into a nightmare where any similarities to reality only
heighten the terror.
The architecture of flesh a building
with a building segmented as a scorpion; thickness
as presence rather than protection.
(From “FRAGILE KINGDOM”)
When you have the darkness, you have to play with it in some
constructive way or it’ll come out how you don’t want it to. Plenty of
this play is in action in ToB as people both fearfully obsess over and
fulfill their most primal fantasies. Cassandra, you wild, loving mother
to these fucked-up babies, I hope you can bear more, because I could
read this forever. - Shaun Gannon
Throne of Blood begins with a Preamble. The Preamble
sets the tone for the book, just like the Preamble to the United States
Constitution is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s
fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Presumably, the poem would
provide some of those for this book, Throne of Blood.
• “the drained lake muds with the girls of winter bloated and tangled at the bottom in the wreckage”
• “the smell of dead meat.”
• “the scent of rotting bowels”
• “Myafhhhauckingancaeetchesss, arrreuu stheyismines myown FEEUUCKING MEAAT!andTTTthisisfeeuucuuuckibngMINE!”
• “I slammed his head into the concrete floor”
• Edith Piaf
The Preamble begins with lyrical horror. The narrator is unbothered
by dead women crowding the drained lake and the house, even when their
bodies are used for decoration or masturbation by the male character.
The narrator’s point of view changes when it becomes clear that the male
character is the one making women into corpses.
The horror and violence, more specifically, violence against women, casts a long shadow over the rest of the book. Where the Preamble takes
on horror in a narrative mode, the rest of the book inverts that
formula and approachesit in a more figurative or linguistic or
speculative way:
“If there could be a moment of self-realized terror,
where everyone in the world kills his or herself at the same time.”
While, the possibility of horror, fear and dread, are not explicitly present in the rest of the text, the Preamble
works as Chekov’s gun, even though (spoiler alert) there isn’t really
anything to foreshadow since the remainder of the book is considerably
less linear and narrative. Even though the rest isn’t what I would call a
story, the poems are still haunted by the dead girls.
I think the book manages to do a lot of things very successfully, from the disgust, horror, and repulsion of the Preamble, to a candid and intimate lyricism that comes later in poems like Fragile Kingdom.
That poem could stand as a synecdoche for the work; it seems like text
and the design are hardly holding together, dreadfully balanced, about
to collapse. The work is annihilating itself, as are most of the
narrators. Narrator is maybe a funny word to use since it seems like the
concept of narration is not dismissed, but damaged in the work.
The theatre is a fiction
that I have writ myself true to.
Even the layout lends to the reading of the text as flung open, with
the words left and right justified on the recto and verso respectively.
The titles are on the lower outside corner oriented perpendicular to the
rest of the text, reading from bottom to top, which make it
particularly easy to simply continue through the text as if it were one
long work.
There will always linger a quiver as we repeat the
affair again, and again. Rise up on our throne of blood call it CORPSE
MOUNTAIN built from what intangibles uncertain.
Search for Throne of Blood, and you find a Japanese film based on MacBeth, which makes a lot of sense. It takes an awful lot of corpses to make a book.
Actually just look at my face please and let me sit on yr chest.
I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
Sometimes the blood stops flowing, or maybe it doesn’t. This is from The Castle That Only God Knows. There
are multiple distinct tones and voices in the book. While some come
from a sort of dream horror world others come from a world with MacBook
Pros. Then there are dry lakes full of bodies and head smashing. Then
there are poems that are possessed by lyricism. Then there are klonopin
poems, lists of side effects, lists of substances consumed.
YOU’RE GONNA BE SO FUCKING HAPPY
You’re in an artist loft in Brooklyn in a room full of people drinking
coffee on a Sunday afternoon and you answer the phone and
start speaking Czech and for a moment you almost forgot what it
means to be dead.
Sometimes the least lyrical moments are the most plaintive:
Please don’t tell anyone I’m crazy.
I couldn’t bear for people to be collectively and overly concerned.
Overall the book is harsh, not gentle. It arrives at a sublime
through violence, horror, and decay. It is still interested in the
sublime.
Reigning over the sublimity of one’s impassioned distance.
Throne of Blood is an impassioned distance. It’s not a thing that can be attained or obtained.
I’m a true romantic so I need you to hit me.
Negation of this disaster
is the only thing that can save it.
Throne of Blood is an explicitly hard work because the hard
thing it is doing is trying to approach the sublime through annihilation
of the self. This isn’t always an easy thing to do or read. Where at
one point the annihilation of the self would have been through the
experience of “Nature” or “God” or “Love” here it is the experience of
horror, banality, language, sex, and yes, CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICHES. - Leif Haven
Cassandra Troyan's Throne of Blood
deterritorializes genre in the most beautifully messy manner
imaginable. It simultaneously behaves like fiction, nonfiction, poetry,
sci-fi, splatter punk, gorecore, sixth wave, blinker freak, and
unapologetic porn. It mutates, squirms, quivers, convulses, never
settles down, never behaves, and never offers respite for the reader.
The lusciously disgusting opening passage, which modulates between prose and numbered poetic lines,
He's sucking the marrow out of a girl's femur so there's enough space to fuck it. It's really too hot for it to be spring. 2. I'm a little dry
evokes a very Bluebeard-esque scenario
of chopped up girls dangling from meat hooks. By the fourth page, the
text opens up or rather sinks itself in mud as words begin to come
unglued from their sentences:
The mud gets so thick and tight on my chest pushing it to explosion my nose filling up with the sandy grit and
I
can
almost see
my bed
Words then begin to trickle like
blood droplets across five pages, visually conveying the sensation of
falling to the point where one page houses only the word "down," before
coagulating again into prosaic imagery of fucking, choking, gargling,
howling, and the suggestion of immanent death.
And this is merely the PREAMBLE.
Pages later we read, "To be a real
person is to not be alive." And I whisper that line into the laundry
room when nobody is home so I can hear it echo and reverberate against
the machines. I wish I was closer to the Grand Canyon. I wish I could be
atop a roller coaster in Denver Colorado so I might shout that line as I
plummet. "To be a real person is to not be alive!" The speaker might be
one of the monster's victims. Or, the speaker might be the monster.
Perhaps the speaker is both? Many monsters accumulate trophies. Many
victims report moments during their experience where they desired death.
To be alive is the briefest of moments in the cosmic scheme of things.
And from the perspective of the artist producing challenging work, as
Troyan most certainly is, the gratification of the present provides
little comfort. This speaks to one of the many commonalities shared by
monsters, victims, and artists.
Reports and interviews and scientific
studies indicate few monsters find pleasure in the acts they perform.
Instead, the pleasure comes from the anticipation and the reflection.
The before and after. Similarly, the moment of trespass marks a
threshold for the victim, which demarcates the before and after of the
unthinkable event. For the artist, too, these observations apply. Most
importantly, the before and after are what matters according to Throne of Blood.
In the present, we the living are not only worthless, we are not real.
We are fakes, phonies, pretenders pretending, performing, acting,
mimicking as unauthentically as any horror film.
A quizzical predicament, which only
becomes more beautifully confusing as our reading progresses. "If you
love someone," page forty stares back at me, "fuck the world. / I don't
believe in love because it is real / And I am tethered to the hope
through spit." So, in this complicated calculus Troyan creates the idea
of aliveness equating with fakeness, and deadness equating with
realness. Love is real, and therefore dead. Ergo, loving someone is akin
to worshiping death. Indeed, the seething lava of Hades seems to beckon
us from every page of this book. The drunken Dionysian jubilee Troyan
parades before us entices us to succumb to the forever middle, the
before and after that tricks us into believing in the existence of a
now: the uncertain, unstable, violent thrashing of existence from moment
to moment, alone, afraid, in the dark, surrounded by wolves snarling
and snapping at our frail bodies like they are merely juicy slices of
meat.
"The real," she tells us, "must be
fictionalized in order to be thought." This is the title running along
the left-hand margin of page seventy. The question Throne of Blood
seems interested in provoking is not the basic ontological question,
"what does it mean to be," but rather a more rabidly black and potently
nihilistic question: who gives a fuck about being? Or, put in the form
of a statement rather than a question: to be is not to be, forget the
question.
"IF I COULD JUST NOT BE A HUMAN, LIFE
WOULD BE GREAT," says page seventy, nuancing the earlier preoccupation
with death, shifting our attention toward becoming other rather than becoming nothing. Of all the moments in the book, this moment seems the most intriguing cri de coeur.
Radical alterity: transforming the desire for non-being into the desire
to be something other than human. It is hard not to hear theorist Donna
Haraway mumbling posthumanist incantations behind this text's meat
curtains. To become other, to blur the boundaries between human and
machine, human and animal, material and immaterial is what Haraway
famously calls becoming cyborg. Troyan's cyborg, however, is a sex
machine with a broken pleasure button. Too much pleasure, not enough
pleasure. All pleasure and no pleasure. Wet, gyrating, flustered and
contorted. Where ejaculation and blood mix with spit and shit to form a
greasy, smelly lubrication for ontological transformation. Where
resolution is no resolution. Where the truth of falsity and the falsity
of truth shine brightly in the face of sheer brutality and gore.
As the end approaches, I can't help but
notice how the book acts like what happened never happened, "…to roll
over in such / luscious sludge / … / to leave us as sacks / of skin side
by side. / so empty and so full." Or, perhaps I am mistaken: maybe it
has happened, again and again, so many times we have no choice but to
think of ourselves as little more than lost climbers on Corpse Mountain.
The swollen bloated flesh of that revelation unsettles me. We are all
loosely collated yet chaotic meat sacks with appetites, I know. Objects
interacting with other objects. What this book does better than most
other books is engage with this experience we call living in a way that
never reduces or summarizes, but instead makes more complex, elaborate,
and intense. So, while I am reading it in the cold, shallow bathtub
after a lightning storm, as I am typing these words in my florescent-lit
office cubicle amidst the rousing conversation of medievalist scholars
debating the relative merits of Henry VI's attack strategy during The
War of the Roses, I feel compelled to go outside and dig a hole the size
of a lunchbox in the front yard of the nearest sorority—the Chi Omega
house, where in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978, Ted Bundy
entered the bedroom of 20-year-old Lisa Levy and beat her unconscious,
strangled her, tore one of her nipples, bit deeply into her left
buttock, and sexually assaulted her with a hair mist bottle—in order to
bury Throne of Blood without watering it. There will be vomit
and urine, I am sure of it, someday placed upon its topsoil, for the
space assigned to sorority front lawns seems amenable to those fluids,
so it holds that someday this book will find another audience as it
transforms into the earth and grows like a weed for the killing. Because
then, and only then, will it become real. - Christopher Higgs
i'mma sell my guns
By Cassandra Troyan
(Illustrated by Stephen Michael McDowell)
THE CASTLE THAT ONLY GOD KNOWS
How strange to love a thing like mouthwash.
I would like to gargle your cum.
I want to fuck in the park.
I want to piss on yr chest.
I will smash my clit into yr sternum.
Actually just look at my face please and let me sit on yr chest.
I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
Go to the bathroom with me.
Come in my mouth in my esophagus
impossible
repetitive sexy failures.
It’s so easy to feel that adulthood
is closing in on something
rather than opening up.
The wants of our bodies to all meld together
this one doesn’t like a hip touch
another one no hair tug
because his father used to pull
him by his hair
but you are the only person
who has hurt me how I wanted
and then more than I wanted
until I wanted more.
IMMA SELL MY GUNS AND THEN TAKE YOU TO VEGAS
I dreamt of being with you in bed
but I couldn’t see the bed.
Every time I closed my eyes to try to see,
I was bombarded with an image of a flower
exploding again and again
shivering its path into my vision.
A hatchet forced into the ground
becoming a flag.
I will destroy myself so I won’t need to kill.
To have the strength to stand for your own selfish hate.
To run against a stream of something like disaster.
Look at me, I have a body
and it moves in space
for when the heart gets blunted
head is foggy.
I want to be in a way of thinking that is only feeling.
There is never a time when anything doesn’t matter.
Nothing is inevitable.
Even a wound is a child.
What do you fear?
No tears for the creatures of the night.
They rest in gold milk.
It’s melancholy at golden hour and all we have room for is
Black Bile
Black Bile
Black Bile
It catches your lungs then your wrist like a shackle
as all I really want is for a peacock to stand on my chest.
Is that really too much to ask?
I don’t want children
I just want to be your mother.
I want to hold a rock in my mouth
and offer it you as an egg.
To put grapes in your mouth
and drool through the fruit.
To feel contented by the idea of not thinking, not just
not thinking in the syrup of a want.
I really believe in absolutely nothing except everything
as it’s easy to be afraid of something true.
How To Become Invisible
Looking out the rear car window, my head tilted back, the sky reminds me of a disappointment that I’ve seen before.
Being here makes me think of what it would be like to be very quiet and slowly pick out my eyes.
I would be willing to do it if it makes you stop talking.
If I never have to see you or anyone ever again.
To the right, there is giant riding lawnmower driving into the distance and disappearing over the hill into a cemetery.
In the morning my mother tries to wake me.
Instead she crawls onto my inflatable air mattress with me in
the basement and I can’t remember the last time something felt so real.
I can never return I can never leave
If there could be a moment of self-realized terror, where everyone in the world kills his or herself at the same time.
Moving in the language of blood.
What it means to know how one can feel a sick dig of the helpless into one’s skin.
When you didn’t know the war is over.
When you feel like another one has just begun. There is a long
hunger to not die in the ways that we want to. To experience the
accident of loss.
The impossibility in knowing that any life you choose is absurd.
The insatiable has product the glitch is proscribed and this
fucking entitlement like a line slant, the lever cancel and I can see
that what you really want to make is pasta.
To be a real person is not to be alive.
There is distance in a hope for tranquility, to know that if you pull long enough you can become your own enemy.
I feel every method of attraction is only there because there is no other option.
I will teach you to hurt yourself.
You have a blood with wants.
I BOUGHT MYSELF A SHOTGUN FOR MY 25TH BIRTHDAY.
I bought myself a shotgun for my 25TH birthday.
That’s better than something else.
It’s the joke that isn’t funny until you cry, when you smear wet and needy on the dirty fringed rug.
When you laugh you knock the cum plug out of life.
Keys strike each other like a gangbang and on the high chord I notice how everything is unimaginable.
ce sentiment, sentiment ce sentiment de l'amour
The impossibility of knowing someone in a time where they don’t exist.
Its always hardest to lift one’s self from the ground.
If we fuck, let’s end in a position that is good to die in.
I Was Going Down On You, But The Birds Were Just Coming Up
The awkward alterity,
animated in bloat
as a Russian woman turns heads
in the café. She is leaning
in and spraying
another woman.
She is
enthusiastic.
I wish I would have let myself lean and let go,
feel that same warm subtle foam,
when we were
caught in the
bathroom making out
confused, the visibly
distraught freshman
alarmed by two women
pressed against the full-length
mirrors, which were asking for
a body to
validate their form.
How your promise to fuck me
but refusing to fuck my life
was most endearing in its hope,
as if fucking me,
and the fuckedness of
my life are not
somehow intertwined
still,
I complied.
800
I’m terrified of tongues over 50 speeds of grow sandpaper hands and lizard tongue
the need to wraggle dry whip into any opening recoiling countenance no no but
whatelse can I do it presses and peee-ewww-trefies to viscosity frozen and petrifies
into rings and rings arboreal engagement macking racks on racks on racks and we
get faded into fresh forms of heart attack.
Information is held in terms of entrance how to hold resistance in the face of the
lack of knowledge. The ungrammatical as rawness and science is the grossest god
that makes no sense
pushes matter to a new jump. I like animals against tongues
and conceptual forms of hatred
potential methods of pizza chomping
and saliva portals
science as received cultural knowledge
and aesthetics or organization seeds an atmospheric
question
why why does it need to be
this text?
what is content but not science
yet only natural history
what is a laboratory and a generation of meaning slam the body up against
the mind
oh shit
this is getting heavy handed
one’s limits aren’t limits always so apparent based on physical harm and the need to
build boundaries out of fear and what it means to get close to spaces of unwell
unfathomable darkness and all the shame that proceeds it but still a need to get
blackened charred in a ruined flesh of idolatry divoted with injury.
this blood is a curse a curse beyond all rogue repression and you can piss in bottles
and hoard them all around you but still never face that bilious puke that revulsion is
sterile and so are you. what is that object? what does it mean? is a weapon a prop
more than a gesture no the gun just signifies she is fed up. the want to enter
to traverse the male world
and all that must be conceded
of what to give up
to tie yr breasts with twine
sugar sapped notions
in a rotisserie hate crime
but I
I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO DIE
Men make history women get fucked and that is why I walk away with
these blow-job cheeks asking you to check my credit score. I know you’re
impotent better get extra wedding photographers to better manufacture
the tragedy. But first let’s get back to life after jesus to find who
bears the real face of the deranged in an amnesiac christening wearing
the slip slime as a replacement death mask.
thanks
how are you
wanna fuck?
at the Starbucks
do not ever hide yr
cruising urge
tumble to
verify a new codex for
The Magna Carta of
riff apology
as up my alley
is one thing
my urethra is the other on my side of the plant planet
we are swirled to full misery
you say no feelings just chemicals
because all you can eat is salt.
you want no living particles
no calories
or commitments
just minerals.
Crystalline food courts
‘til you swing low and grunt timber
to the pharmacist you make good mixology
lab coat humanoid I still hope to be dead by 50
and rise into the other world conscience
of kindred ignorance
I only like ugly animals that hate the bright.
We are the only animals here
and in no need of feed
that grizzled kind
bypassed by gristle.
I am so much an animal
I want nothing to do with them
instead cull the gunk laws
and prepare new energy
new stigmas of meaning
the hegemony of indifference
to almost cutting
a catchphrase from yr
busted distaste but I ain’t finna be nobody’s harlot
and I don’t wanna die
no no not just yet
but I am going to find a way
to continue writing until I hear you say good morning sunshine how’s yr fever?
and you say, I would call you a cunt
but you don’t have the depth
or the warmth cuff
puffed up on that we the hunted
we the branded stuffed up elbow deep
with the rest of
roped throttled
cattle
as my brain recedes
this cellulose wad that smells the coffee burning
takes comfort in a wasted
crust
char makes my head hurt
in a way that’s not unpleasant
just demanding and all I can think of is where can we find the pioneers?
to search at the risk of finding nothing
as you sit above me
and demand the things I’m too afraid to give
even though
I know you’re not drunk
I am fully willing to play the role of
male rage right now. Make some,
friendly little slime gal fuck the lady
save the whore
they’re be more mercy down the windpipe
be sure to crunch
then crouch
I’ll tell you once with splendor
I forgive not
an apology. Detracted.
Redacted.
I’m sorry
but I didn’t really try.
Artist Statement
Everyday
we are met with the impossibility of ourselves. The separation that
exists between the meaning we wish to make, and all the quotidian
hinderances that prevent our efficacy in the world. My work seeks to
investigate the supposedly hidden structures of our desires by rendering
visible the daily ways we make meaning in the world, and find ourselves
in relation to others. Dancing with people. Coming with people. Smoking
or drinking or walking or fighting or crying or talking or standing or
sitting together in silence. I am not interested in creating my own
micro-utopia. Plenty already exist. I am interested in creating scenes
for emotional encounters through the clarity and contradiction enabled
by polarities. I focus on embodying the moment of inarticulateness. I
believe that in my body of work the aspect of collaboration becomes a
material in of itself, or how the seemingly disparate medias at play
resemble the friction between the desire for immediate intimacy and
recognition for the viewer; and the inability to fill, or reconcile that
feeling.
Following
the belief of Deleuze and Guattari, if all we have is desire, it can be
tempered through different sources and means. Sometimes we wish to
transcend the mundane through absurd and pleasured realms with “a
nascent subjectivity, which we will continually find in dreams, deliré,
creative exaltation, or the feeling of love…” (Guattari, Chaosmosis, 6). Other
times perhaps relinquishing delight in materiality can lead not to
escape, but the palpable. The hope of putting ourselves and words into a
space of action as pleading for enunciation.
THE NEXT "BIG THING": THRONE OF BLOOD
Hi everyone! David Peak,
the author of Glowing in the Dark asked me to follow him in this chain
letter tagalong blog post because if I don't I think your hair falls out
or no one will every love you again. Here's the the rundown: It's
a blog series in which the tagged author answers 10 questions and then
tags another / other authors who will then do the same thing. There are a
lot of writers participating in this series. For a place to start check
out: Michael J Seidlinger's post here or Jamie Iredell's post here, and let's not forget Robert Kloss OR Ben Spivey OR Nick Antosca OR Christopher Bundy. (If I forgot someone, apologies!)
7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
The more prose-like moments are from
a text I wrote 8 years ago, and had been thinking of ever since. Most
of this though was written in a whirlwind winter of desperate hell.
8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
In terms of the affective register,
rather than purely based in form, I would say: Ariana Reines’s “MERCURY”
means quite a bit along with Blake Butler’s “There Is No Year,” and
Lauren Berlant’s “Cruel Optimism.” Kathy Acker’s “My Mother:
Demonology: A Novel” and Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts”.
9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Indebtedness to a feeling of the familial, and how being out of control is the only way to make one feel sovereign.
10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
There is really little held back, and with that comes a rawness to be appreciated and dwelled in.
Thanks for inviting me David! And please peruse this block of link filled text.
Next up to thrash it out is Natalie Shapero. She was one of my TA’s for a
creative writing course at OSU, and she is no doubt a stunner through and
through. Her collection of poetry, No Object, will be released by Saturnalia Press, March 2013 (which I know, is not a novel, but we gotta keep things rolling, especially with the female influence.)
INTERVIEW WITH CASSANDRA TROYAN on the occasion of the second printing of her book, THRONE OF BLOOD Tell me about the genesis of THRONE OF BLOOD. What did you start with, and how did you shape it into a book?
The manuscript had a long and varied development. I started
writing the Preamble and Interludes when I was around 18, and finished
shortly after. I had an amazing mentor and friends who introduced me to
Bataille, Guyotat, Mirbeau, Barbusse, de Sade, etc. when I was fairly
young. I found myself writing out of this historical sentiment, yet I
wanted to find a language attenuated to the violence of being female,
and what a world-making project involving those dynamics would look
like. In terms of an audience, or understanding what to do with the
work, I was a bit confused. It almost got lost in some folder until I
returned to it years later.
Tell me about how the book is constructed—you
start out with a “Preamble,” and then cut back and forth between poems
& occasionally more narrative “Interludes.” This frame ends up
giving a form to the book as whole instead of just reading as
unconnected poems. Was this your intention?
Maybe not initially, but I feel even when I try to compose a
collection of just poems, it falls flat for me. I’ve been thinking
recently about the notion of an “exploded novel” or as I sometimes call THRONE OF BLOOD,
a “poetic novella”. So many forms of narrativity can deliver the
transfer of one’s aesthetic ideals, and I believe finding the right
construction is one of the most essential parts. These arguments though,
of against conceptualism, or against affect seem so stilted and
backward. I consider my project to be both simultaneously, as since when
did the realm of feeling become detached from thinking? Utilizing these
influences has great instinctual powers that shouldn’t be denied,
especially when guided through functional and mediated forms of
structure. You’re also a performance & video artist. How does all of
your work intersect? Do you consider one medium (writing, performance,
video) more “important” than another, or is the work you produce in each
medium an extension of the other, creating a network of thematically
& conceptually similar work? I’d say it’s really easy to link it all
together, being familiar with it, but I’m curious as to your approach
to it.
I made a feature length film for my graduate thesis, called THE SACRIFICIAL TEMPTATION OF THE VOID: (AS NIGHT SLOWLY FALLS, WE MAKE LOVE), which could some day ideally be seen in a larger context or suite of works with THRONE OF BLOOD.
These varied elements are all part of my practice at large, and the
propulsive force to attempt to have a vision without trying to wrangle
everything so hard that the pleasure of the confusion gets destroyed. It
is also a good way to feel inadequate, or insatiable. You do all the
right moves in one medium, yet they do not necessarily transfers to the
knowledge or form of another. I mean this superficially and otherwise.
Besides rare crossover, some people know that I make films/videos, but
not about my writing or performance, or vice versa.
I often engage the negation of something like a practice of
stuckness, by finding ways to let that complacency become a positive
notion. Recently I was very struck by this talk of Sara Ahmed’s called “Things that get Stuck: On will, walls and willfullness”.
In re-attenuating one’s self to objects and materials this practice
provides the basis for a queer narrative of attachment and world-making,
and as Hannah Arendt says, “the will is the organ of the future”. I see
everything in my praxis as a very interwoven and complicated process of
attraction and rejection. Severing and attaching the necessary
pull/pulse I do several things at the same time, and it usually doesn’t
feel right unless it is maddening. Before I can go to sleep at night I
need to work myself into a frenzy of exhaustion if I even hope to still
my compulsions. As Janey says in Kathy Acker’ s Blood and Guts in High School,
“Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness. Dreams
by themselves aren’t enough to destroy the blanket of dullness. The
dreams we allow to destroy us cause us to be visions/see the vision
world. Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut
away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy,
images, and accumulation.” The title of your book is also the title of an Akira Kurosawa film. Any connection/inspiration there? Why did you choose THRONE OF BLOODas the title of your book?
Yes, very much so. Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD
is actually an adaptation of Macbeth, which is literally covered in
blood. The Queen who cannot wash the stains of guilt off her hands as
the entirety of the play becomes a metaphor for the lust of power
through the stain of hypocritical arrogance. The retaliation for the
murders of the women in the beginning plays like a refrain throughout
the entirety of the work as a guilt-ridden pain courses through
familial, medical, and psychological trauma. Much of your work seems to be about bringing a sense of
gravitas to something absurd, whether it’s the horrible fucked-up
reality of existence, or something as banal and pervasive as pop
culture. As I am someone generally opposed to contemporary cultural
referents in art (as I often find they immediately date a work or sit as
shallow gimmickry), I find your use of pop culture refreshing. Your
allusions & direct references aren’t the subject of any of the work,
rather they pervade the word in the same way they creep into the world
at large, and they speak in your work as pure fucked-up absurdity. How
do you approach pop culture?
Pop culture is the endless circling cesspool that desecrates as
it revives. As much as I feel Capitalism has destroyed the possibility
of contemporary life, and how that pains me, I cannot ignore it. There
is no “away”. It is the sensorial theater of the absurd. During the
whole twerk-apocalypse, if you looked at google statistics for searches in the US,
Miley Cyrus was trumping Syria hard, which is insane but sadly not
surprising. Yet even for me there are some days where I read Al Jazeera
and Huffington Post or OMG! in equal parts. This quality of seepage, or
the transfer between high and low, I think Janice Lee touched on it a
few days ago when she discussed Glenum’s and Klaver’s work in relation
to Lauren Berlant’s ideas about the juxtapolitical. Too much seepage is
toxic, and still maintains the prominence of hegemonic culture, unless
it gets queered enough to complicate and disintegrate the work of
commodification or the reproduction of the status quo. Since I know you are constantly working on things, can you tell me what you’re working on right now?
Right now I am editing a manuscript called “Kept In Lacerated
Light (KILL MANUAL)” which is a combination of fiction, non-fiction,
poetry, clinical trial results, operational procedures, and biblical
verses. I’ve realized my project will always involve violence to some
degree, but the dynamics are constantly fluctuating in terms of
intensities and affective registers. I’m also writing on a longer
novel-ish piece that is a sort of “cunt-up” (in reference to Dodie
Bellamy, of course) of Fifty Shades of Grey, and re-writes the work as a schizo-remapping of submission to late-Capitalism and consumption as the 21st
century romantic model. In terms of film/video work, I’m working on a
new series called A CURE FIT FOR A KING, which I describe as “A
hysterico-environmental dreamworld set at the edges of capitalism, A
CURE FIT FOR A KING, cycles through endless rabbit holes of Midwest
despair and absurdity only to find further economic collapse, failure of
masculinity, and the ever-present bee plight.” And I have a show next month in Malmö, Sweden with my collaborator and friend, Ola Ståhl at KRETS
where we will have a multi-channel video installation and several
hand-bound books as a part of interdisciplinary project that we have
been working on for the past four years. The project is based in
translation, immigration, opticality while exploring narratives
around migration and itinerant labour from the unpublished memoirs of a
Swedish immigrant in the US during the first decades of the 20th
Century. - Intervew by Mike Kitchell
Coup de Foudre, Part I of The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy.
Cassandra Troyan,
my erstwhile roommate, collaborator, and friend, is a filmmaker,
performance artist, and poet who has just released a chapbook with her
brother, Cody Troyan, called Big Bill and the Lonely Nation. At the Wexner Center earlier this year Ron Green,
an Associate Professor of Film Studies at OSU, dedicated his lecture on
the emergence of the film loop to Cassandra, as well as to other OSU
alumni Stacie Sells, Randy Hunter, Karl Baumann, Matthew Swift, and Nicolette Swift
for pursuing the realization of experimental film and video at a
university that doesn't even bother to offer a program for film
production. But don't fret, Cassie has since transcended such dire
circumstances and now finds herself a MFA candidate at the University of
Chicago.
I interviewed her almost a year ago about the three-part film she made with Stacie Sells entitled The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy. That interview, partially updated to reflect time + reality, is after "the jump."
James
Payne: The form your art usually takes outside of film is what one
might call “performance” in that it involves the body. It seems like
much of what is inside your films is body-based as well. In the two
films that you’ve done with Stacie Sells, which are called…
Cassandra Troyan: The first is Part I called Coup de Foudre and Part II is Je M’en Fous. They are both part of what is called the Ascent of the BehemothTrilogy.
JP: And what would they translate as?
CT:Coup de Foudre is
a pun that means love at first sight but literally translated it means
lightning strike or lightning blow. That meaning is also a play on coup de foutre, which can mean “fuck blow” or “cum shot.” Je M’en Fous can mean “I don’t give a damn” or “I don’t care.”
To
what you were saying before, with Part I, a lot of it does consist of
performance tableaux and they are present in Part II as well. They can
be seen individually or they can be shown as a collective piece. Part
III, which is pretty much done now, still uses performative elements but
it changes perspective so that it is almost like how we perform in the
real world. Part III looks at the world in a performative sense and how
color, light, music, and movement can all be ways of projecting this
alternative vision and language.
I’m interested in a new feminine discourse that I consider to be exemplified in the work of Pipilotti Rist.
She is a feminist and her work is exploring those modes but not in a
predictable way. Her work doesn’t follow the protocol of 1970s feminist
film theory or that of filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer or Carolee Schneemann.
She isn’t doing things as they should be, in terms of refusing to be an
object of the gaze, and using her body in possibly desirable ways.
JP: What interests you about feminism or a feminist discourse?
CT: Well, I would consider it more of a feminine
discourse, meaning that it is not just about feminism but what it means
to be a woman and what the supposed inherent qualities are of that. Yet
my particular vision is colored by thousands of different facets that
expand beyond just about being a woman - all of my different relations,
experiences, thoughts, and ideas play into this vision. Being a feminist
is a part of that but there are many other things involved as
well. There are larger constructs at work in society, such as the
structure of power, which can either constrain or enable and possibly
empower women through its recognition and use. My interest is in
continuing this conversation and seeing the different ways it can be
expanded by opening it up in a joyful, playful way.
JP: What do those terms, “feminist” and “feminine,” mean to you in particular?
CT:
Feminism is important to me in the sense that we still live in a
patriarchal society where women are not equal to men. For me, that is
something I feel strongly about because a lot of my recognition of the
world comes from that first initial difference. Everyone has their
unique experiences and I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be a
working-class Latina woman - I’m a white girl that grew up in the
suburbs. But feminism is something that I feel strongly about and I can
actually have some real sense of what I am saying through what I have
experienced without diverging into essentialist claims; my subjectivity
is strongly rooted in this idea.
JP:
Are you interested in working inside that discourse because the rest of
the critical social lenses aren’t as authentic for you to comment
through? That you couldn’t say anything important about being poor or
experiencing the brunt end of racism as much as you could say about
sexism?
CT:
Yes, I feel it is being more honest. For me, it is addressing feminism
but doing it in a way where it is more than intricate theory - though I
am interested in using critiques of spectatorship and The Gaze and
breaking it down from that history so that it can explain an idea
beyond itself. In terms of feminism, it is also about being honest while
at the same time recognizing my white privilege and white guilt. My
family’s socio-economic situation is different now but I did grow up in a
white suburban middle-class family.
JP: The Gaze is complicated in the Ascent of the Behemoth
since you - a female filmmaker - are using your body, constantly making
the choice to film it, choosing to film it in ways that are sadistic,
masochist, possibly sexual, and in a language that is not exactly clear
in its intentions. Why does that approach interest you?
CT:
That is what I am talking about in terms of a new feminine discourse
and I think a lot of these questions are really relevant to feminism
today and that they are the reason there is not a currently defined
stage or wave. Even though I am a feminist with the ideas I might have
about spectatorship and the objectification of women, I cannot ignore
that I am still a sexual being and that I am a sexual being as a woman.
The figure that is used in Behemoth
is not quite a character but rather a manifestation of the idea of
feminine desire called the “Behemoth of Desire.” That figure is where I
am usually dressed but naked from the waist down and wearing a jackalope
plaque as a mask. This is all in reference to what you were saying
about being sexualized but simultaneously that character is the
manifestation of these ideas of being a woman and how I don’t want to be
overly sexualized or objectified but I still want to be desired.
This is similar to someone like Pipilotti Rist
as she uses the female body specifically because it is overly
sexualized and that becomes her way of addressing it - by recognizing
it. That is opposed to older generations of feminist filmmakers where
the body just dropped out of their work or it became a very static body -
like Carolee Schneemann’s
work. She stopped using her body because she felt it became too
commodified within society. I want to perform the body and enliven it
through ideas of desire and action.
The "Behemoth of Desire" character.
JP: Why is it that the Behemoth of Desire is signified by a jackalope?
CT:
The jackalope is a character that is entirely man-made. It does not
exist in nature, meaning that it is on the fringe. It’s a sort of
monster so it becomes grotesque in its inability to be defined. The
character then uses this as a way to deal with the juxtaposition of
being a woman and wanting to be desirable while not being objectified.
JP: Where did you find it?
CT: It’s my father’s.
Troyan at home with her father.
JP: Why did he have it?
CT:
He’s strange. A lot of my work comes out of this relation to objects
and found images and sounds which personify an idealistic American
aesthetic, or what it means to be an American, which relates to my
project “the American Anthology.” In other pieces with fencing masks,
bull horns, the jackalope, and in the end of the Trilogy, Part III, my
father himself is present as he plays Russian folk songs on his
accordion.
JP: Would a viewer of Behemoth
have to be educated within the discourses of feminist history to
perceive that the use of your body has more meaning than “just” a
half-naked woman wearing a jackalope mask?
CT: This is really important - I was just speaking to someone about this the other day. For example, Lady Gaga says she is a feminist
and she is using her body in these weird ways as a cyborg-like
creature, and through these bodily mutations it could be said that she
is doing the same thing - how do you know if it is purposeful? I don’t
think she knows what she’s doing and I don’t think it’s the history of a
discourse that needs to be fully known but greater attention needs to
be paid to the intention. I question some of Lady Gaga’s motives for
suddenly associating herself with Feminism.
My work hinges both ways. For example, when I ask my collaborator, Stacie Sells,
to push my head back down into the water again and again, it becomes
the linchpin of the action that allows it to turn back and forth and be
interpreted in different ways. At times it could appear to be
sadomasochist but then it is me who is requesting the gesture. It is
never that I am blatantly naked or that I am presenting myself, it is
usually juxtaposed with a confusing, awkward, or tense situation that
makes the readability indefinite. I am ok with interpretations of sexual
fetishization: with the “Drowning Piece”
people have mentioned autoerotic asphyxiation and I think that
reference is there. I’m not against those references but it takes
looking beyond that initial image to see the other place markers that
are there. There is something else going on.
JP: Why do you think so much Body Art,
at least the kind that is now canonized, hinges on pain instead of
pleasure? When you are asking to be strangled or drowned it seems to be
in the same vein of much of Chris Burden’s or Marina Abramović’s work…
CT:
That approach was used in Part II and now Part III focuses more on
pleasure. The trilogy is by no means narrative but it moves through a
chronology of ways in which we are socialized in our gender through the
bombardment of images in society. Part II focuses on actions, which I am
usually performing, but still plays against societal boundaries
creating a sense of conflict. Part III, along with the other work I am
doing now, does focus specifically on ways of looking at a pleasured
female embodiment and that it doesn’t necessarily have to be painful
self-infliction. Hannah Arendt
talks about the idea that violence and power never go hand in hand and I
think some of the performance work in the 1970s tried to be empowering
by utilizing violence. Marina Abramović’s
work, though violent, was more spiritual and about pain to the point of
endurance that would push one into a new spiritual state, so I think
pleasure was still involved in an interesting way.
JP:
Do you view the distinct performance parts in Part II as documentation
or as inherently part of the film? You said you show them alone on
occasion but are they still parts of the film? When shown alone are they
titled, “an excerpt from Ascent of the Behemoth” or is it addressed as performance documentation?
CT:
I have shown the individual pieces at a gallery before and I considered
it an excerpt from this larger piece. Those pieces were specifically
done in mind for the video that we made but I was still concerned about
the performative element and that it only is done one time. Something
can be lost with repetition, even though I consider most acts
experiments. They are still performance pieces but I view them in a
filmic way as they relate to one another - the suffocating piece, the
drowning piece, and the choking piece.
JP: Do you storyboard your films first or do you execute different ideas and then arrange them together in a cohesive way later?
CT:
No, we don’t storyboard. Sometimes things just happen. There is usually
something that we know will be an event, which is a pinnacle, and then
there are different images, music, and colors which are pulled in by
that event and it weaves itself together. But towards the end,
especially for Part III, we had all these parts and it was about seeing
how they fit together. It becomes about playing around and seeing what
things work in relation to one another and how they speak to each other.
That is where pleasant surprises may emerge.
JP: What is the ideal viewing situation you have in mind for the trilogy? If, let’s say, Mr. Film Festival,
asked what you would like - considering what you’ve said about possibly
separate tableaux, a possible modular arrangement, and the lack of
narrative in the succession of the three.
CT:
I’d like to see them together when it’s completed, especially since the
whole trilogy is only about an hour. I think it’s watchable but with
experimental film that can be challenging at times. When I watched Part
II with Chris Stults, (Assistant Curator of Film and Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts)
at the end he said, “Oh, that didn’t feel like 23 minutes,” where if
you are watching experimental film that is bad it can feel endless, even
torturous.
JP: Did you do any film before this?
CT:
Artistically, it is my first film. Prior to this I learned how to edit
on Avid and Premiere but that was in relation to telecommunications and
journalism.
Troyan with Nicole Langille as VITALForms. At The Statehouse. 2009.
JP: You make films with Stacie Sells and perform with Nicole Langille.
You have these two different partnerships and rarely work without a
collaborator. What is the appeal of working collaboratively?
CT:
The body of my work is performance but a large part of my practice is
collaboration, which I consider to be a material itself, and the
different discourses that arise out of that. Stacie and I have been
working together for almost two years. Nicole Langille and I work
together as VITALforms and we deal with ideas of love, desire, intimacy,
and how those relate politically to the relation of bodies in public
space. I also work with Red76 and Zefrey Throwell.
I sometimes do actions by myself but I find it more interesting to see
what work comes out of different collaborative relations and what
aspects are similar and how variable interactions are with each person.
And I recently started writing poetry again which led to releasing a collaborative chapbook with my brother, Cody Troyan.
JP: Inside your working relationship with Stacie Sells - what is it that she brings and what do you bring?
CT: When we first started it was very specific. I was studying film with Ron Green,
an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the History of Art Department
at OSU, and I wanted to start actually realizing experimental video
work and he suggested talking to Stacie.
From that point we started talking and we began to propose ideas we had
and started working together. The first video, which, not that I hate
it now, but it is extremely didactic, and heavily theoretical, and there
is not as much of a synthesis between the aesthetic and theoretical as
we each wanted. I was theoretical and Stacie’s vision was aesthetic and she also provided the technical skills.
But
with Part II we had a blended process where we equally shared in the
direction of the project and we knew where our strengths were. In Part
III, most of my aesthetic ideas are motivated through motion, action, or
songs, and Stacie is inspired by more abstract and color-induced
visions, reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s experimental film, like Stan Brakhage or Paul Sharits.
We both do everything together but in the beginning we didn’t really know what we were doing.
JP: Where have you shown Behemoth and is it available to watch online or to purchase?
I have a Vimeo site and so does Stacie
and we make everything available to watch there. The aesthetics of
display are important but I feel that it is more important to actually
share the work and make it readily available to everyone.
JP: That strikes me as different from most of the filmmakers that you are influenced by. You have to go to university, or now, Ubu.com, to even see some of their work since so much of experimental film is criminally difficult to access.
CT:
I hope that people use Vimeo, Blip.tv, and YouTube, and find ways to
utilize these sites beyond social networking - as a means of displaying
and sharing work. But I’m serious about being an artist so I guess I
have to find some way to make money from this.
JP: Grants. Or you could just sell DVDs.
CT:
Well, most people just sell the hard-drive and projectors. That becomes
the way that galleries sell multi-channel video installations.
JP: But you don’t want to do that. You would likely have to take it offline.
CT:
I know. I am more interested in selling DVDs for $5, something that is
reasonable and affordable. It’s a problem for me when I see a video
piece that is on sale for $25,000.
JP: No one will ever see it again.
CT: Exactly.
JP: There is that difference. It can’t be easily reproduced on a postcard or put it into an art history book, or just a small…
CT: Video still?
JP:
Well, not the same. I don’t think a video still really tells you much
about someone’s work even if it is covered in every book on avant-garde
film. If you haven’t seen the whole of a film it’s basically impossible
to comment on it.
CT: Like Robert Beavers,
who pretty much refused to show anywhere except this outdoor screening
in Greece and people who are serious Beavers enthusiasts make these
pilgrimages to go there. I think there is something amazing in that.
JP: But how would they have even known about his work if he had always done that?
CT:
This situation is very specific to film and video, cinephiles are some
of the most insanely obsessive collectors or followers, in the sense
that they think viewing a work in its ideal or finest form of
presentation is the only way to view it. But I don’t think of my work
like that.
JP: Do you only use video?
CT: Just digital video, SD and HD.
JP: What is the reasoning behind restricting most of Behemoth to black and white?
CT: Part
III is very much infused with color but the choice for the black and
white is partly aesthetic but also relates to and creates the ambience
of the film…
JP: Is it that signal, “This is an Art film, it’s in black and white, there are French inter-titles, you can hear Hitler speaking…”
CT:
No, no, no. I mean, I am interested in the idea of playing with the
lines of art film prototypes, or the stereotypes of the genre. I love Godard and
thinking in those terms, like in the beginning of Part II when there is
Russian music and a gauzy perception which pulls in and then almost
becomes a flicker film that calls to mind an early filmic Romanticism
yet disassembles it through the disintegration of the image. Part II is
in color and it leads into Part III which deals with this grandiose
voice that is constantly shifting. So it is this conflict between insane
laughter, but then it drops out into silence, and then when it comes
back it brings the color with it.
A flyer I made for the premiere of Behemoth at SAIC in Chicago, Illinois.
JP: What are your inspirations? Or how did you get interested in video?
CT: Well, when I took Ron Green’s
class that focused on women’s experimental cinema - that is what really
influenced my work today. But I have always loved film, even from a
young age. In terms of the women’s experimental canon: Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich…
CT:
Yeah, that great book. Those filmmakers inspired me to begin creating
but before that I had been a pretty heavy filmgoer and film lover,
especially in the last five or six years. I mean, of course the French
New Wave, early silent films by D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, Carl Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Yasujiro Ozu, Erich von Stroheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin,
etc. I have always admired the ambience of those films, the great
contrast in the images, the extreme drama and sense of urgency. German
Expressionism, Russian cinema, everything within contemporary Eastern
European cinema. I love the dreary soberness created in the atmosphere
in Bela Tarr, Andrzej Wajda, Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova, Milos Forman, Krzystof Kieslowski, Jan Svankmajer, Dusan Makavejev,
but within all of the believable and unbelievable worlds created by
these directors, there is usually a prevailing sense of play and
witticism that escapes from the bleak, all except Tarr, for him there is
no escape.
JP: What role does sound play in your films? What are you thinking about in terms of it and how is it being realized?
CT:
In Part I the sound usually matched the cacophony of the images without
directly relating to them, making the viewer think instead of the role
of the images we are submersed in on a day-to-day basis. Much of the
audio was from television, movies, literature - references to pop
culture. But now, music is really important. I don’t know what it is or
what it means exactly but I think that is what is amazing about the use
of music. Intuitively I might feel that there is a relative purpose,
whether it is personal, or possibly even nostalgic. Especially in Part
II with the use of “Moon River.”
The juxtaposition of me appearing as the “Behemoth of Desire” character
in a canoe and slowly paddling into the scene and exiting the screen
while the song is playing enters into the narrative that the song
suggests. But the fact that I am going off into the sunset and then it
cuts out and then enters in again at the end when it layers over itself
again and again - it destroys this expected beauty through the
destruction of the voice and the climax of the song deteriorates as it
drops out.
JP:
And you used the Hitler voiceover to invoke what exactly, what were you
trying to accomplish in Part I with that selection of voice?
CT:
I know it’s an extremely loaded reference and I wasn’t trying to use it
as a low blow, or an easy target, because it’s almost too easy. I
wanted to use it in an archaeological or historical sense, that it is
this artifact from the past, which personifies human suffering and
struggle. It was not so much specifically about Hitler, but rather, an
iconic male voice of power, but it is extremely difficult for the viewer
as you can’t or shouldn’t detach him from his violent context - it’s
not possible.
JP:
It was very blunt as you had all these other messages going on that
culminate with the image of the lava and the burning of Joan of Arc and
then suddenly you hear Hitler’s voice and you go, “whoa.” It is strong. I
can understand why you would pick for that effect, but I wasn’t sure if
that was what you were going for.
CT: What do you mean by that?
JP:
Were you drawing a straight parallel or was it more of an atmospheric
allusion linking it to the idea of male repression or was it neither of
those?
CT:
The idea of male repression is definitely linked but I’m not trying to
distinctly say it’s just about Hitler. There is Hitler’s voice but there
are also other cultural references; there is a line from a James Bond
movie where he says, “the job is done, the bitch is dead.”
Obviously, I was specifically using Hitler, but it can go both ways.
Some people think it’s a cheap shot and others have been offended.
Recent collage by Troyan for a mail-art show at Skylab gallery.
JP:
Do you view your work through the lens of activism? Does it have an
activist component to it, in terms of enlightening someone towards some
goal? Or are you just “investigating?”
CT:
I wouldn’t say activism so much as I would say that it is political.
Most of my work is political but I don’t necessarily know how much my
work is propelling others to act. I am very much making statements, that
to even watch this video initiates a conversation beyond itself by
re-presenting everyday ideas and images in a less obvious manner. I hope
that through my investigations I am informing people and making a
statement and that it’s not just completely obvious and inconsequential.
I want people to realize the power of these images and the ways that we
use them and how we are affected by them and how we can be more
conscious of the ways they are used against us or persuade us.
JP:
If making statements is one of your goals, wouldn’t it help the
comprehensibility of those statements if your films weren’t in such an
aesthetically radical vein? It seems that only a certain subset of
people would actually be interested in watching it.
CT:
I think the way in which they are created helps, even though they are
not narrative, they all move pretty rapidly, and have stimulating
variety. I have shown these to people who have no background in
experimental video or film, and they actually quite like them. Maybe
they don’t see everything that I see but that is alright with me. There
are multiple levels of understanding, even if you only find it
intriguing on an aesthetic level, there are still a lot of political
elements even in the aesthetic portion. That is also my interest for
making it readily available by putting it on the internet and making it
accessible to more than just the extremely classified experimental genre
of filmmaking. I show these to my Grandmother and she likes them and
understands them.
JP: What do you view the end goal of feminist thought to be?
CT:
The point and conflict in the structure of current feminist thought
comes from the fact that there is no single unifying goal, we don’t have
suffrage or basic reproductive rights to fight for. I think feminism is
much more of an abstract construct now since it isn’t specifically
goal-oriented, which makes it more confusing. Now, for me, it’s about
initiating a new feminine discourse and the different ways that the body
can be articulated through this performing of the pleasured female
body. There needs to be more representations of this embodiment, showing
the body in the way that it doesn’t have to be in pain, or making it
the alien, distant object. One of the people who I think is succeeding
and doing this best is Pipilotti Rist.
JP:
So to clarify, for you it’s about the idea of regaining the body as a
site of pleasure and not regarding it as something that’s alien?
CT:
It’s also about looking at desire and how it can be a part of the body.
There is a tendency to examine the body intellectually until it is
theorized to death but in the end we still have to face that we have
bodies.
JP:
Are you viewing feminism strictly from personal interactions or through
a political context or a media-viewing, spectatorship perspective?
Which “level” of feminism are you referring to? I feel you are not
talking about distinct political goals but of an idea of being able to
get to a point where you can reclaim how you view and are viewed - or is
it that this personal viewing is a larger political metaphor?
CT: It is very much a personal is political idea but it is cultural politics as well. I really love and admire the work of Judith Butler
but her texts almost stray away from the physical body at times through
the terse language of academia. I think there needs to be something of
the sensual, like in the work of theorists Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. I want
to articulate the problems of the body through the body, with video.
Much of my thought is based in a theoretical discourse but I am
interested in the different possibilities that the body can enunciate
better than the written word.
JP:
So you are not speaking of feminism in the sense that we need to pass
such and such legislation, which relates more to the first and second
generation of feminists.
CT:
Right, I would say that I am invested in the instance of change, where I
think it can exist beyond legislative means - the other places where it
is more likely to occur. Most of the problem is that women’s bodies
have been dictated to us by so many other people and organizations for
so long that we haven’t had a chance to speak for ourselves.
People,
especially pop-culture icons, then choose to perform certain ideas
through the body, by coming forward and saying that they are feminists
or particularly strong women, but they are saying it with their bodies
in really sexualized ways. To me, that becomes concerning in that we are
now in this weird limbo where the word “feminist” doesn’t mean anything
and many of the women who I know who are feminists are too afraid or
confused to say so and don’t know - are we third wave, are we fourth
wave, what’s going to happen? Do we need to completely drop out and
begin again? Some of these media figures seem to be strange scraps of an
empowered moment. Now all we have is, “yeah, look at me, I’m so
empowered with my razorblade sunglasses.” Bizarre fetishism is not an
answer to the question and who is it that they are performing for
anyway?
JP:
I wonder how much of that confusion comes from the cloistering of
political thought into hyper-specialized departments, like Women’s
Studies or Peace studies. And perhaps the way to differentiate yourself
in that environment is to make experimental films or other esoterica for
people who “already know” – like maybe the isolation is not as
productive as one may think. Perhaps it would be good to have an
anarchist in Fisher Hall. Or at least there needs to be some
non-specialized articulation of feminism in the public sphere that isn’t
so amorphous as to include everything or so specialized as to be
indecipherable so people in the mainstream media can’t pass the “Lady
Gaga is a feminist, she wears weird clothes, she must be empowered.”
CT:
I mean, that is what she said about her razorblade sunglasses, she said
they made her feel strong and sexy and empowered. Or another pop
culture figure like Megan Fox,
who also claims to be a feminist by claiming that she is a bitch and
she knows it, which is strangely transforming into this embracing of…
JP: Girl Power.
CT:
Yeah, exactly! This empowering through the act of “girling.” This Spice
Girls resurgence of female identity is coming back in a frightening
way, since it is the essentially the same. It’s only a façade.
JP: You were a History of Art student?
CT: Yes and Film Studies minor.
JP: You have always lived in Columbus? Grew up in Gahanna?
CT: Yep. Born and raised. Except for living in Paris, France and Berlin, Germany for a while.
JP: Are you going to continue doing film as you leave for Chicago and Stacie stays?
CT: Yeah.
JP: Are you going to work without a partner?
CT:
I do other projects by myself. I just recently traveled to Scandinavia
for the summer and did a lot of filming there. I’m working on a piece
from footage taken in Sweden. I am also collaborating with Ola Stahl who is also a member of Red76,
and we are doing this multi-disciplinary project with several people.
Ola is a writer and sound artist, Kajsa Thelin is an archivist, and Jesse Kauppila Boardman
is a printmaker, and I’m doing the video portion. Each of us is
enlivening the written and translated text of Ola’s great uncle who was a
journeyman in Sweden and the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th
century. The journal is being used as an experimental template for
utilizing the poverty of this uneducated man’s language in an abstract
way, through multiple translations.
CT:
My blog is a reflection of my practice, which is largely collaborative,
and highlights that and links to work that I did last Fall at CCAD as I was the Bureau for Open Culture Correspondent for the show Descent to Revolution. There
were five artist groups who were in residency, from Germany, Denmark,
Sweden, Mexico, as well as Red76 who is pretty international. I
performed a text for Learning Site, workshops and collectives, such as MFK, the Malmoe Free University for Women, which was held at 16beaver in NYC.
An Interview with Cassandra Troyan about the EAR EATER Reading Series
Cassandra Troyan & Sara Drake run a
(somewhat) monthly reading series out of their apartment in Chicago.
Having attended a few of the readings myself, I found myself
particularly interested in what Troyan & Drake have accomplished:
each reading series brings together (mostly young) people from various
backgrounds (though mostly related to the arts/humanities) into an
enclosed space to hear 4 or 5 readers. The events straddle the line
between house party & art opening (and indeed, at one event there
was art displayed on the walls), but it’s the words that get center
stage here. I sent Cassandra a few questions through Facebook about the
reading series, and hey here they are:
M: I am always interested in the way that people
who take a D-I-Y approach to life manage to turn private spaces (the
home, for instance) into public, communal spaces. Living in a “college
town,” as I’ve spent my entire life doing, it seems more likely to find
people at a huge house party than a bar or “club.” When it comes to
event spaces, I also often find the non-affiliated to be more
comfortable, even more rewarding. People have art shows in their
apartment to escape the realm of an institutionalized sense of curation,
people have bands play in basements to crowds of many to avoid booking
agents and dealing with venue crap, and now you & Sara Drake have
opened up your apartment as an area for readings, something that seems
to happen most often at bars or academic spaces. What circumstances
found you guys deciding to start the Ear Eater reading series? Cassandra: Much of the circumstances you mention are
similar to the experiences and situations shared by Sara and I, which
all influenced the desire to create EAR EATER. I went to undergrad at
the behemoth institution, Ohio State University, in the notoriously
college-run town of Columbus, Ohio. I think precisely because of this,
most of my social interactions turned more traditionally private spaces
into sites of collectivity.
Sara and I both came from a specific mid-west DIY/punk mentality,
based in communal living or punk houses. We often say we don’t trust
anyone who didn’t go through a “punk stage.” I’ve spent a lot of time in
basements.
I think much of our desire was precisely to find a way to bridge
across the realms of stilted boredom in more traditional academic
settings, or the kind of distracted drunkenness of readings in bars.
People are often more interested in getting their next drink rather than
the reading itself. And yet, I don’t think trying to ignore the social
register by inserting the situation into a lecture hall with a podium
helps either. Having it in our apartment allows us freedom in creating
an appropriate structure and atmosphere. There is still drinking, where
one particularly infamous EAR EATER was kind of curated around this
drink that Megan Boyle invented called “the Tully Bomb,” a shot of
tequila dropped into a glass of Four Loko named after Stephen Tully
Dierks, dear friend of mine and editor of Pop Serial. What happened
after that is a bit hazy besides eating numerous bananas with Sam Pink
and talking about Lacan and waking up in a pile of Dada books, but
basically what I’m saying is that the home provides a space for
experiencing the lived-in chaos of the everyday. It becomes a space that
is auto-poetic, in that through its’ organizing it also continually
produces and reproduces itself. M: In a sense, you (& Sara) are “curating”
the authors that you have read during the Ear Eater events. In my
experience, a majority of readings that are held tend to be tied to
either presses or magazines, and, in a sense, they serve (whether
indirectly or directly) as promotional events. Do you feel like having
carte blanche to try to get whoever you want to read allows more of a
focus on the communal aspects of literature? Do you think it helps to
highlight the individual authors themselves as opposed to presses or
magazines (not that drawing attention to presses or magazines is an
inherently bad thing)? Cassandra: Yes, I do believe the carte blanche
aspect is simultaneously freeing and challenging, yet that is the fun of
it. The particular curating guidelines I see as getting increasingly
specified, or allowing them to provide an alternative perspective to the
work itself. Such as for the last EAR EATER, which existed within the
concept of “performance,” I was intrigued by readers applying their own
definition of the term, and possibly even taking it upon themselves to
do something truly performative in the truest sense of the word. Yet,
for someone like Jac Jemc, I wanted her to read for the sheer
performativity of the language in her poetry. I think investing in
intensities provides a much more exciting dynamic for viewers, myself,
and even the reader. I think seeing one’s work in a new context is
beneficial in a communal sense, in terms of connectivity, and bridging
something basic, like the overly specific terms of even allowing poetry
and fiction within the same reading event. I am a fan of the anything
goes model, yet within a certain frequency, if that makes sense.
For example, I read at the first EAR EATER, and during the event, it
was also Mexican Independence Day, and as we live in Pilsen, there was a
festival that basically went non-stop on the street right in front of
our apartment for three days. I felt I didn’t want to fight against the
Mariachi music, so when I performed/read I used a megaphone and went
outside and had children read the poetry through the bullhorn to the
audience inside. I also played a T.I. song and carried in a light-up
Virgin Mary statue with a broken head that Tao Lin put his hand inside.
Opening up the aperture for absurdity lets authors explore outside their
comfort zone by changing the framework of what is expected of them, and
expanding beyond the specific aesthetics of a journal, or the type of
work they normally produce. For future EAR EATERs, I am thinking of
guiding the curatorial choice with more abstract decisions. Such as, an
evening based on the idea of stuttering or stammering without just
mimicking the tropes, but rather thinking of what language could sound
like that, potentially anything resonating in the historical mode from
Thomas Bernhard to Gertrude Stein. M: And to continue with the idea of a “total
freedom” in terms of inviting authors, you guys also regularly have
readers attend the events via Skype. This allows a sense of exposure
across the country (hell, even the world is possible), and in a
way, mediating via digital technology, we can “hang out with” and
“interact” with someone who could not physically attend. I feel like
this is something that an event organizer who felt like she had to take
herself “more seriously” or “professionally” would never do. What made
you decide to incorporate readers via Skype? Cassandra: Well, you have nothing to lose when you
have no one to impress. I feel there is no investment of potential
failure for myself in my endeavors in this community. I am currently in
graduate school at the University of Chicago studying Visual Art, so
even though I have been writing for years, my practice has always been a
multidisciplinary jumble of video, performance, poetry, curation,
music, sound, etc. I am always drawn to the wrong thing to do. It feels
strangely more comfortable. Or at least I feel that the art world proper
where I am expected to reside feels so stilted, and limited sometimes,
that to make EAR EATER happen is the release. I just want to share the
work of all these brilliant people through the U.S. and potentially
beyond, and this is the most financially feasible way to do so. Plus, it
is also engaging in a kind of fantasy hour, or indulgence. Some of the
people I have asked to read via Skype I might have had slight internet
interactions with, but had never really talked to, or let alone met in
real life. It brings admiration into a new space, as the assemblage of
the indie lit community is not spatial localized, so why should the
presentation or readings be either? And for the Skype readers, if
possible we let them hang out for the entirety of the evening as well.
At EAR EATER #3 Christopher Higgs stayed for the entire evening, and
many people commented on how they loved going over to the laptop and
talking to Chris if he looked bored on his couch, and they were able to
talk to him as if he were there. M: The Ear Eater events have traditionally
maintained the comfortable feel of a small house party, yet when people
are reading the crowd is very attentive & quiet. This is something
rare, as even in bars there is often a surplus of white noise brought to
the room via customers who are present just to drink, or even from the
staff of the bar itself. Similarly, six years ago or so, when I lived in
a party house, we actually invited a puppeteer to perform at one of our
house parties, and much to our surprise, a group of 50-60 drunk college
kids sat down and stayed quiet throughout his entire performance. Do
you think the casual environment that a cozy apartment offers helps
people to focus? Cassandra: Absolutely! I think it helps that since I
usually serve as MC, I am not shy in telling people to shut the hell
up, or sit down, or put out their half smoked cigarette on the back
porch and come inside when someone is about to read. If people are on
good behavior they do get breaks in between for drinks or snacks. The
intimacy makes you responsible in a different way too. Even if you just
come to listen it is never passively. Everyone is an active participant
just by the fact of their being there. Plus, what is better than live,
personal entertainment? Hearing poetry in someone’s living room, you
can’t help but feel that it’s actually for you. Or that the pleasure of
reading or being read to is so much a part of that. If you’re in the vicinity of Northern Illinois this Saturday, check out Ear Eater #4: The Apocalyptic Absurd,
featuring Lindsay Hunter, Blake Butler, Richard Chiem, Emily Jones
& Me. Cassandra & Sara’s apartment is located in Pilsen in
Chicago, click the link to the Facebook event for more details!
