Dignity & Tenderness

Dignity and tenderness should apply - The Modern Lovers

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Researching Louise Fitzhugh for an essay I'm writing, I realized how much she likes to draw people curled up like onions---at top, Harriet M. Welsch is dancing (as an onion), and at bottom, Hugh and Marcia, Suzuki Beane's parents, are sleeping. "I want you to feel," says Miss Berry, Harriet's drama teacher, "that one morning you woke up as one of these vegetables, one of these dear vegetables, nestling in the earth, warm in the heat and power and magic of growth, or striving tall above the ground, pushing through, bit by bit in the miracle of birth, waiting for that glorious moment when you will be... "

"Eaten," Harriet whispered to Sport.

" ...once and for all, your essential and beautiful self, full-grown, radiant." Miss Berry's eyes were beginning to glaze. One arm was outstretched toward the skylight; half of her hair had fallen over one ear. She held the pose in silence.

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The state of my ideas today leads me to prefer not the essay (and that amount of peremptoriness that it allows) but the dialog genre, a real dialog, in other words discussing with a non-fictional interlocutor, but at the same time still a fictitious dialog, in other words written while pretending that it is spoken.

- Italo Calvino, 1974 (more)

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that coda.

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I just can't understand why you don't write, Mali. Don't take this the wrong way but when I listen to you talking I feel as though I'm reading a nineteenth-century novel. I'm almost certain, too, that if you'd written your story, it would have ended differently. I'm not saying better but differently. Maybe whatever it is that's stopping you from writing is the same thing that stopped you from leaving Farid? If I had your talent, do you know what I would have done? I'd have left Farid right away, blindness or no blindness, and made him the hero of a great saga. You know what it is you really lack? Cruelty. You have to kill to create. You have to go to war, make up your mind, be decisive, turn the page. You have to be megalomaniac and you have to be fair. It's not megalomania you're lacking, Mali, it's the courage to show it. Take any of the authors you admire, and tell me if they aren't killers. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens, Proust, Conrad, Kafka . . . their weapons are different but the fact is they're all responsible for a thousand deaths. Do you know why the world they invent holds up? It's because the ground of the other one is strewn with corpses. In their work, tears and blood flow and dry like ink--thick and fast. In a good novel, everything is plucked from real life, plucked mercilessly, everything, absolutely everything, a nose, a hat, a colour, a tree.

- from Dominique Eddé's Kite, trans. Ros Schwartz

And Acker and Duras and Bernstein Sycamore and Rodoreda and Lispector. Still. This book, people. Phew.

images: (green) from Spectropia at the Morbid Anatomy Library, (skeleton) from the Rider-Waite tarot.

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don't you want to help? go over there and get in the box.

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above: from Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, Daniel Clowes)

The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or dencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence. - Alex, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I ordered french fries and a large milk. It was a down time between buses. There weren't any other customers. The station was small but with very high ceilings that made sounds echo. The hanging lights had the longest pull strings I'd ever seen and there were flies hanging on them, swaying in the weak little breeze made by a dying fan. 

The milk was ice-cold and I drank it so fast I got a stabbing headache. I was pushing on my forehead hard with both hands and the waitress's face got a little softer. "Thirsty, huh?" I nodded. "Where you headed?" I shrugged.

"Your uncle said Dentsville. Did I hear him say he was your uncle? You have people out that way?"

I said, "Can I have another milk?"

She put it down in front of me and I went for it. I couldn't put it down. She started laughing when I asked for a third one. She said, "Good lord. I hope you don't drink your liquor like that!"

I said, "No." - Roberta Rohbeson, Cruddy by Lynda Barry

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The first installment of my monthly book column, MAINTENANCE - named for Mierle Laderman Ukeles, pictured here - is up now at Bad at Sports.

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Even if you just set up a video camera on a tripod and push record randomly without making a decision about what’s in front of the camera or when, you and the camera are making edits. – Wynne Greenwood in Colouring Outside The Lines, 2008

Something’s missing that was once essential to me and is so no longer. I don’t need it anymore, as though I had lost a third leg that until then kept me from walking but made me a stable tripod. It’s the third leg that’s now missing. And I’ve gone back to being someone I never was. I’ve gone back to having something I never had before: just my two legs. – Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., 1964

2000: more shows in olympia.   all the shows where i’d make the video the day of the show, like when cola first talked and was wearing the same outfit as tracy and said ‘anybody can do what you’re doing.’ – show archive, tracyandtheplastics.com

So Tracy + the Plastics (1999-2006) is Wynne Greenwood’s band. The sounds are Wynne, on drum machine and disc sampler and mic. The performances are Wynne too, singing and acting as Tracy, live, and standing in front of a video with the Plastics—Nikki and Cola—in it.

The Plastics are Wynne too, and they exist only in the video (and also, in a choose-your-own-adventure murder mystery movie Wynne wrote. In that version, the Plastics are a girl group, a girl gang who operate a pawn shop and replace parts of their bodies with electrically-colored pieces of plastic that fell from the sky sometimes). Tracy and Nikki and Cola talk to each other—like, Tracy will tell Cola there’s peanut butter on her face, or Nikki’ll be checking email and somebody wants her to do something terrible, and she’ll say Tracy, what the hell?

Tracy and Nikki and Cola talk to you too—like, they’ll start clapping and singing together, and ask you to help. “Everybody should mean everybody,” says Tracy. “That should mean you, and you and you, and everybody.” Her voice sounds young and sarcastic, a little birdlike at the edges. Straight truth to power. “Maybe pretend that you are in the grocery store, having to defend your queer body or your radical politics. Pretend you’re trying to figure out an accessible language for you to use together. Don’t stop. Just don’t stop.”

There is a moment on the Women’s Liberation Rock Band comp that came out a couple years ago, it’s the audience at a show after a song, in the 1970s, and they’re screaming “play it again!” They don’t want a new song, they don’t want to go home, they want the moment again. When Cola interrupts Tracy’s monologues and asks her to “sing the song about being gay,” Wynne holograms that moment—not “sing it again,” but “don’t stop singing,” and “don’t forget the other song,” and break down the walls behind and in front, then suddenly we’re all on stage and we’re all trying to sing together. Cola probably still has peanut butter on her face, but that’s OK too.

P.S. These are Tracy + the Plastics’ albums: Muscler’s Guide to Videonics (Chainsaw, 2001), Forever Sucks EP (Chainsaw, 2002), Culture for Pigeon (Troubleman Unlimited, 2004), Real Damage Split EP w/ the Gossip (Dim Mak, 2005). “Henrietta” is my personal favorite Tracy + the Plastics song, so maybe start with that one if you’re looking for a place to start. The “heyyyyy hey heys” on “What You Still Want” are stunners too though, especially if you like deep-bending your knees when you’re dancing.                                   

P.P.S. These are some of the bands I saw play with Tracy, in case like you want to hear more from that time and headspace: The Gossip, Sleater-Kinney, The Need, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Jackie O Motherfucker, Le Tigre, Erase Errata, Peaches, The Quails, Mika Miko, and Anna Oxygen. There’s a full list on her website.

IMAGES: (red) Wynne Greenwood by Stephanie Mitchell, (blue) Pintura Habitada by Helena Almeida

LOVE: I wrote this because my dear Christy LeMaster asked me to. She featured Culture for Pigeon at April's Crimson Glow, and printed this mini-essay in the program. Love also to Crimson Glow's Claire and Latham, and to the Whistler for hosting.

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Veil paintings by Morris Louis, 1954

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Kraftwerk, "Autobahn" from Autobahn, 1974

Now here is something really interesting (to me), something you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million three thousand two hundred ninety-five words used by the Eskimo for snow. This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed--English among them--that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. Or, if you are blessed, they will be heard by someone who knows you and loves you and will be sorry to hear the sentence end. 

When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: "That's a lot of semicolons!" He is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry), you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being--an Italian as a matter of fact--that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated. - Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

Generally I'm on Richard Hugo's team--semicolons are ugly!, he said--but then again, how great is the one Ruefle uses up there, in her second graf? She's absolutely right too.

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You better get over it. Because soon you'll leave town, and then he'll miss you forever.  Rebecca Curtis, "The Witches"

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I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.

The Poetry Foundation's hosting karaoke for National Poetry Month - I did Elizabeth Bishop's "Keaton," and unlike other times when I've read this poem aloud to myself in the kitchen, ha! I didn't even cry.

You go next? Here's how, it's truly easy. You don't even need a fancy microphone or computer.

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Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. - Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

Call it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet on the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA’s Cassini mission describe how the storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself like this anywhere in the solar system. - Bruce Sterling, Wired

Chevalier and Gheerbrant say a snake biting its own tail symbolizes a closed cycle of development and, at the same time, motion. Continuity. Forever leaving home, and forever coming back to it. It's the point when a line breaks into a circle. It's a revolutionary death wish.

I have a little silver ouroboros ring, once I was eating a BLT and it snapped in two. Now it's soldered back together. I wear it every day.

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Rest in peace, Jane Henson. I love how she's usually standing next to Jim or next to their Muppets, not behind or below or mirrored. I love how here, filming a Wilkins Coffee commercial, she is the knight not the princess. You can watch the full commercial here, starting at 2:55.

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I wrote a personal essay about Judee Sill, Julian of Norwich, Mia Zapata, and love and death and my early twenties, for Bookslut. 

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. . . sexuality theory (which I seem to picture as something like a skull, oddly asymmetrical, rich with the traces of both ontogenetic and phylogenetic process, full of sutures and cavities and outcrops, soft spots where the bones haven't fused yet and thick spots where an early fracture has over-healed). - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, News from the Front (newspaper article from The Rochester New York Democrat and Chronicle, August 15th, 1982 (AP))

I love this image of Sedgwick's--it's from her essay about Jeffrey Guss's "The Danger of Desire"--first of all because the skull is still alive. 

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The car that brought you here still runs. The money you buy lunch with, no matter where it’s mined, is silver

I was lucky to be interviewed by the great Abby Sheaffer for her Chicago Tribune blog, Chicago Literati. We talked about heroes and cities, and Harold and the Purple Crayon, and the Richard Hugo poem above, and and and. Read the whole interview here. Thanks, Abby!