Clompch MAG @clompchmag - Tumblr Blog

A high school aged Toni Morrison reads over a classmate’s shoulder.

Queen Victoria (1844). Robert Thorburn (Scottish, 1818-1885). Watercolour on ivory. Royal Collection.

Thorburn’s miniature portrays the contrast between the Queen’s professional and personal life: wearing the ribbon and star of the Garter whilst reading a letter simply attired in black wearing a miniature bracelet on her wrist and the treasured crystal locket that had been an engagement present from Queen Louise of the Belgians.

postcards-from-downtown

“Emotion was the only thing that gave a contour to her days, and emotion was completely formless.”

— Torpor by Chris Kraus

rachelcrummeyrachelcrummey

Chris Kraus on "confessional" writing

Asked whether she liked having her work described as confessional:

“Confessional” of what? Personal confessions? There’s a great line from a book we published by Deleuze: Life is not personal. The word ‘confessional’ is not a good descriptor of my work. We were talking about the New York School poets – they were the ones who pioneered this use of this “I,” an active “I” that’s turned out onto the world. “I” in this case isn’t the point – That would be memoir. The story of “I.” And mostly I hate that – everything else becomes merely a backdrop to the teller’s personal development. It’s an utterly false, uninteresting view.

Writing I Love Dick, I understood that women have been denied all access to the a-personal. Look – the “I” in Celine’s Journey to the End of Night – it’s an “I” that’s scabrous and hilarious and personally revealing. But is Journey read as a confession? No, it’s one of the great books of the 20th century. It’s an idea I picked up later on, writing Aliens & Anorexia – chronicling the career of the philosopher Simone Weil through the reception of her writings. She was a crazy modernist like Artaud, Celine, Bataille, but as a female her “I” has been pathologized – she can’t get fucked, she’s manipulative and anorexic, she’s ugly and she dresses badly – her “I” was never read as universal and transparent. That, to me, points towards this great disgust with female-ness. As if a revelatory female self cannot be anything but compromised and murky. It’s a very Catholic word, “confession.”

hardtoreadings

From the diaries of Kathy Acker. After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus’s biography of the late author, is one of our Ready-to-read F/W’17-18 “Currency” themed selects.

beautravail

“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean?”

— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

arterialtrees

chris kraus, emotional technologies

hazelcills

“I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

— - Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

beautravail

“I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined. If I agreed to be female. There was so much evidence on the screen and in books. I read Doris Lessing in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated reading work by women or about women because it always added up the same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation even as the female was trying to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man. A Marxist guy, perhaps. When would it end.”

— Eileen Myles, in her foreword to I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

allslost

““The body- a prison, perhaps? But as Weil wrote, the wall that separates two prisoners is also, when they tap on it, their means of communication.””

— Palle Yourgrau’s introduction to Aliens and Anorexia

jo-no-mercy

“Let a girl choose death – Janis Joplin, Simone Weil– and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female still means beng trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as a discipline, as form.”

—

Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

(I’ll stop quoting it when it stops being phenomenal.)

fifidunks

Ready-to-read F/W'18 is now in stock @eckhaus_latta’s rEtail shop. Our theme this season is “Currency,” as in money, flows, nowness (fashion). We’re selling:

The Fashionable Mind by Kennedy Fraser (1981)

Beauty and the Beast by Michael Taussig (2012)

Color Me Flo by Florynce Kennedy (1976)

After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus (2017)

Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation by Eva Illouz (2011)

Economy of the Unlost by Anne Carson (1999)

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu (1979)

Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun, trans. Ariana Reines (2012)

The Real Wealth of Nations by Riane Eisler (2007)

To the eternal now 💸 (at Eckhaus Latta Retail Store)