August 2014
« Previous Month
Next Month »
Whenever I get a tattoo I want to quote Kathy Acker, who says it’s important to make your own signs. Signs can be hard, because you have to sit still to make them. I laid on my back for the tattoo, looking up at the Chicago Metallic tin ceiling and already feeling nostalgic about it. “I’ll miss ceilings like this,” I told Andy, and he said “What, don’t they have ceilings where you’re going?” “Well I know,” I said. “They do, but,” and “You’ll be fine,” he said. Joel Craig’s The White House begins with Matta-Clark too: “Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form—confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.” When I sat up there were circles in my wrist.
by
Mairead Case
Though the Habsburgs lost a lot in the War of Spanish Secession, their remaining empire was still one of the largest in Europe. It's hard to fathom the former strength of the Habsburg Empire today, when the family has none of its land, power or prestige. As recently as 2005, Karl von Habsburg filed a suit before Austria's constitutional court to reclaim former Habsburg family properties. He was unsuccessful. I'd never even heard of Karl before a Google search ("Are there any Habsburg's left?") led me to him, yet the history of the western world is largely a history of Habsburgs.
by
Mary Mann
"As for overt-versus-covert surveillance, I think the line has been so blurred as to be almost meaningless when it comes to delusion. The CCTV cameras, observable to all, and the unseen cameras that do exist both in reality and in the minds of our deluded patients, both contribute to an environment where privacy is a shrinking concept. In either case, we contend that this culture of continual watching and being watched contributes to the feeling that we are being controlled. In those with psychosis, this feeling might take on delusional proportions. And while I'm no conspiracy theorist, mightn't the knowledge that we (or our emails, or our phone records) are being watched in some fashion, a fact that is beyond dispute, impact our behavior, if only slightly? Is this not a form of control? As for those who are on the cusp of psychosis..."
by
James Orbesen
"I have continued to work on this in different ways. Dare to have trust, dare to open up for emotions, dare to feel. To descend from the head, the ideas, where Johanne lives, and down into the body. Where the heart actually is placed, and where sexuality happens."
by
Nic Grosso
"I have an interest in understanding why people do horrible things to one another. What compels us to do the worst? The interest is driven by a desire to change this behavior. The best way I know how to do this is to tell you about it. For those who haven't quite been able to say it, I would like their suffering to be reduced by hearing it told by filmmakers, journalists, fiction writers, or Picasso giving us Guernica."
by
Danielle Sherrod
"In The Polygamous Wives Writing Club, I focus on what twenty-nine wives (all married to different husbands) wrote about their marriage relationships. To me, this is where the real story lies: details about conjugal love, relationship balance, spirituality, back-breaking work, religious duty, beloved children, moves from place to place, survival. Collectively, the twenty-nine wives left plenty of material (although there are gaps and silences, too) to tell their stories. At the same time, as any diary writer can attest, personal writings are more 'literary texts' than 'documentary histories' because writers craft stories that may be 'true' to them, but, as bell hooks writes, sometimes 'evoke a state of mind' more than 'accuracy of detail.' But that's what we want to know -- the state of mind, right?"
by
Danielle Sherrod
"Cookie Mueller raised a child on her own, intentionally on her own. She had a girlfriend, but wasn't necessarily a self-identified lesbian, and she dated men and married a man. One of the people I spoke with said she was like a postmodern woman. And I think while she embodied this idea of a free spirit which we identify with the 1960s and 1970s, she also was someone who was in the moment. She really followed her heart. This was something which was revealed to me about Cookie from the process of doing this book. Which I didn't know before, was that she wasn't only that tough-as-nails, tough, hard chick in the movies. She also had vulnerability, and she also had tenderness. She had a lot of tenderness which she shared with the people she loved, and who were close to her. She was an empathetic person, and a very gracious person. It was quite remarkable how loved she actually was by so many people. Someone said to me that in a city like New York in the 1980s, especially where everyone is just scratching on everybody else, everybody is just trying to get to the top, nobody would say a bad word about Cookie."
by
Corinna Cliff
"Our own 'social signifiers' stress the smile (we smile in recognition, at feeble jokes). Roman texts simply do not allow us to see how the form of the mouth went. They must have 'smiled' (so I think) in terms of curling the mouth or lips, but they don't write about it like that. So there we are, face to face with the problem! The issue is what Romans would have done when a joke was mildly amusing. We don't know -- but they didn't (or wouldn't or couldn't) have called it 'smiling,' with all its modern connotations. There really is no sign of the idea of the "smile" as we know it."
by
Will George
"One of the tasks of a writer, if there are any tasks at all, is it to examine what was and what is, and to find possible causes for social phenomena, how they exist in the respective present, and to make those causes visible and to present them. People expect a diagnosis from their doctor that reflects the reality of the situation and not a fairy tale that sugarcoats this reality even if it might be reassuring for the moment. It is the same way in literature, at least in the kind that I care about. [Bernhard and Jelinek] do nothing else but to give a diagnosis about the Austrian conditions, especially in regard to Austria's way to deal with the past, with minorities and so-called fringe groups. I consider this attitude as necessary, and if one wants to speak of a tradition in this context, then I feel related to it."
by
Corinna Cliff
"I actually live only feet from the site of the real-life 1978 crash in San Diego that I write about in my book. The San Diego Airport is particularly difficult to navigate -- skyscrapers hug the landing field -- and PSA Flight 182, a 727, was coming in for a landing and lost sight of a Cessna with a student pilot that was also in the air space. A warning went up in air traffic control, but nobody believed it and the two planes crashed mid-air over the North Park neighborhood. Everyone on the plane died as well as seven people on the ground -- 144 people total. Twenty-two houses were wiped out, and plenty of others were damaged. I lived in North Park at the time of the crash, but not in the same house I live in now. It's eerie, hard to imagine something so huge like that just coming right out of the sky at you."
by
Mary Akers