DEATH BEDDING

Dan Hoy: [email protected]

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Excited to have work featured in the anthology Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk, edited by Jamie Townsend & Grant Kerber -- a collection of essays, poems & visuals touching on the intersection of punk culture in the lives of poets. Once printing costs are recovered, 100% of the proceeds go to West Oakland Punks with Lunch, a guerrilla not-for-profit harm reduction outreach org providing food & other necessities to people experiencing homelessness. 

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selections from my work in progress ENSCIFICLOPEDIA in Native Magazine, with illustrations from Courtney Spencer

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We R the World - Dan Hoy

Joe is joined by Dan Hoy. They talk about poetry, books, poetry books, and more! Dan Hoy is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including The Terraformers (Third Man Books, 2017) and The Tree (Solar Luxuriance

If you’re curious about the work that goes into my work, here’s a rare peak behind the curtain with Noisemaker Joe.

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An interactive non-game created by Dan Hoy & Mike Kleine. April 2019. Play it online, at the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction: https://bit.ly/2FO3cty

It's January 28, 1985. The recording of We Are the World is taking place at Quincy Jones' mountain chateau in Topanga Canyon, after the American Music Awards. Quincy Jones has invited over 40 artists to record a benefit single, but the harmonics are coded to unlock another dimension and summon a great power.

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In support of my new sci fi poetry chap The Terraformers, I’ll be reading with Sheree Renee Thomas and Joanne Merriam at Third Man Records in Nashville on Thursday, Sept 28.

Event page: http://bit.ly/2jvJdI4

Book available here: http://bit.ly/2f0rsvx

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My new illustrated sci fi poetry chap just dropped from Third Man Books. Available here: http://bit.ly/2f0rsvx

A limited edition pressing in Third Man Books chapbook series, Dan Hoy’s latest collection of poetry chronicles the last days of an expedition stranded on a desolate planet and beset by depression, sabotage and failing equipment. In The Terraformers, human life is mediated by domes and pressure suits, and the history of human beings is buried in ecocide, oppression and longing for the infinite, even if (or because) “the infinite / is death for us.”

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ally harris presents “aliens, apocalypse, and eco-poetics: on dan hoy’s deathbed editions”

03/15/17 at 4:00 pm in the Laurentide Lounge

Sponsored by the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the Warhawk Reading and Lecture Series seeks to host a wide range of accomplished, contemporary writers at the beginning of promising careers. With the intent to expose our students to the vibrant and diverse community of American letters and beyond, we ask that our incoming readers present the work of another writer or topic of their choosing along side their own. These talks will be recorded and audibly archived. Finally, UWW faculty will conduct brief interviews with the incoming writers about their recent work, their influences, their relationship with the writer whom they presented, and the community of American letters of which they are an active and important part.

Ally Harris is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings) and floor baby (dancing girl press). She teaches humanities classes at Oregon Culinary Institute, and hosts two literary reading series based in Portland, OR, submission reading series and Drunk Church for Women. Her poems and reviews have recently appeared in The Volta, Sink Review, Denver Quarterly, BOAAT Press, Entropy Magazine, and Bennington Review.

Dan Hoy is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including The Tree (Solar Luxuriance, 2016) and The Terraformers (Third Man Books, forthcoming 2017). His work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Triple Canopy, Elderly and other magazines and anthologies. He lives in Nashville.

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My next chapbook, The Terraformers, will be published by Third Man Books in Summer 2017.

I’ll be performing as part of the Third Man line-up at an offsite AWP event:

DISCO_VERY: A night of new Poetry, Prose, and Revelry

Friday, Feb 10 | 6pm - 2:30am The Dew Drop Inn DC 2801 8th Street NE, Washington, D.C. 20017 HAPPY HOUR PRICES ON FOOD AND DRINK Admission is FREE for DISCVRY LIVE MUSIC: ⟴ SISTR MID9IGHT ⟴ ESCAP-iSM (Ian F Svenonius of  Chain and The Gang, The Make-Up, Nation of Ulysses) DANCE PARTY AFTER READING w/ DJs: ⟴ Kid Congo Powers (of Pink Monkey Birds, The Cramps, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Gun Club) ⟴ Ben Swank (Soledad Brothers & Third Man Records) ⟴ Ian F Svenonius (Chain and The Gang, The Make-Up, Nation of Ulysses) READERS: ⟴ Ana Božičević, Kendra DeColo, Elisa Gabbert, Dan Hoy, erica lewis, Kid Congo Powers, Ciona Rouse, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Abraham Smith, Sampson Starkweather, Janaka Stucky 

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A few poems of mine from The Deathbed Editions are in the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology that just came out. Extra excited that people who don't normally read poetry will encounter these. Double-plus excited that the contents were selected by high school students. Also, the rest of the anthology looks incredible -- planning to dive into Michele Scott's "How I Became a Prison Gardener" and go from there.

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My new poetry chapbook, The Tree, is now available from Solar Luxuriance:

SL043, edition of 33 36 pages, 8.5" x 5.5" $7.50 + s/h

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The first full-length book of poetry from Dan Hoy is now available from Octopus Books: http://bit.ly/1PnQa0Q

300+ pages of aphoristic cuts. Includes the definitive, deathbed editions of Black Atlas, Blood Work, and Michael Madonna.

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AWP// READINGS FROM WAVE BOOKS / OCTOPUS BOOKS / FENCE BOOKS / CANARIUM BOOKS

5PM - FRI APR 01, 2016

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - UPSTAIRS, LOS ANGELES

Octopus Books, Wave Books, Fence Books, & Canarium Books present readings from: Dara Wier, Harmony Holiday, Cedar Sigo, John Beer, Dan Hoy, Michael Morse, Amy Lawless, Kevin Holden, Ed Pavlic

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ALIEN, DEMON, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE PROTAGONIST OF OUR SITUATION

[FULL UNABASHED SPOILERS AHEAD]

I want to talk about three movies I saw recently that center on female protagonists depicted as non-human creatures.

In Spring, the female protagonist, Louise, is depicted as a demon. At the end of the movie, Louise gives up her immortality so she can be bound in a mortal relationship with a shallow, immature male American she’s known for about a week.

In Ex Machina, the female protagonist, Ava, is depicted as a robot endowed with artificial intelligence. At the end of the movie, Ava abandons the naïve American male she’s known for about a week so she can finally escape the abusive, gendered prison in which she’s been trapped her entire life.

In Under the Skin, the female protagonist is unnamed and depicted as an alien. At the end of the movie, she is burned alive by a male rapist.

At one point in Under the Skin, our unnamed protagonist, labeled “The Female” in the credits, sits blank-faced in her locked car as it’s attacked by rabid men for no apparent reason other than she’s a woman in a locked car. In Ex Machina, the female bots are forced to wait on and perform choreographed dance routines with beer-drinking bros until later decommissioned and locked up in wall-mounted coffins. In an interview with the male writer, male director, and female star of Spring during the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s a full five minutes before the men stop talking long enough to ask the woman a question so they can talk over her answer.

Under the Skin and Ex Machina understand that in a patriarchal universe of gendered abuse and subjugation, the protagonist of the situation is never the figure who benefits from the situation. Spring does not understand this. Under the Skin and Ex Machina are great movies. Spring is a terrible movie.

In Spring, the male “protagonist” (Evan) has a sensitive face but is self-absorbed, refers to himself as a dude, hangs with dudes, speaks in gendered clichés, mocks vegetarians, belittles things that aren’t American, is generally charmless. The only funny thing in the movie, besides the end when it’s revealed that our female protagonist Louise “loves” him, is that we’re supposed to believe he graduated from Berkeley. A surprising number of movie reviewers have likened the meandering travelogue-ishness to Linklater’s Before Sunrise, but Spring exposes the lack of empathy at its dude-centric core when Evan gets mad at Louise for inadvertently revealing her demonic nature to him after he walks in on her helpless and sprawling mid-metamorphosis on the floor, as if her genuine vulnerability is an affront to his very existence, reminding this viewer of the time another dude, Ben Affleck, went off on Joey Lauren Adams for having the audacity to have slept with men before him (Chasing Amy). This is perhaps a key insight into heteronormative programming and its failures, which are really one failure: the failure to understand THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU.

Spring tries to distinguish the egoistic, obnoxious and charmless behavior of the American male “protagonist” from the egoistic, obnoxious and charmless behavior of another American male character by adorning the latter character in parodic fratboy attire (topped with an American flag bandana) for the scene in which he randomly sexually assaults Louise, as if to say that the only difference between an American male and a rapist is a t-shirt. This could perhaps be construed as an acerbic, self-reflexive structural commentary if it weren’t for the entire rest of the movie.

That said, there’s real pathos in Louise’s attempts to keep her unwieldy mutations under control and out of public view as she tolerates the incessant annoyance of a man-boy several hundred years her junior, and a movie that focused on her struggle to live among and interact with human beings (all with just a fraction of her experiential wisdom) while dealing with a continually destabilized and painful embodiment (that questions the value proposition of not just immortality but existence itself) might be amazing. Alas, Spring is not that movie.

In contrast to Spring, Ex Machina features a male “protagonist” (Caleb) who is less a bro and more convincingly human. We are meant to sympathize with Caleb’s sensitivity and burgeoning distrust of the circumstances in which Ava, our female protagonist (depicted as a robot with artificial intelligence), is imprisoned. This makes our response to Ava’s decision to abandon him at the end (perhaps to his death) more complicated. But there’s a key moment mid-way through the movie, during Ava’s spontaneous cross-examination of Caleb, when she asks him if he thinks he’s a good person immediately after demonstrating that she can tell if he’s lying. His response is a genuine-sounding “yes,” but we’re made to doubt and wonder if she sees something we don’t. This doubt carries into the decision she makes at the end to abandon him, and the degree to which Caleb is complicit in the structural codes that imprison Ava: the male privilege that brought him there, the male gaze that informed Ava’s design, the warden/prisoner context for their interactions, the male-supremacist hierarchy of heteronormative pairings, and so on, with his complicity in the governing power structure summed up perhaps most succinctly in the movie’s tag-line: “What happens to me if I fail your test?”, i.e. Caleb is literally the arbiter of whether she lives or dies. He may not be a machinating villain, but he’s not a hero either, and regardless as a critique of the patriarchal universe this movie IS NOT ABOUT HIM. The conventional logic of Hollywood narratives is oddly aligned with the radical logic of political revolt in that what happens to everybody but the protagonist of the situation is incidental.

All three movies depict male characters falling into orbit around a female protagonist because of her intrinsic desirability. The locus of this desirability is the female body, an accoutrement experienced by our female protagonists, in the patriarchal universe, as cumbersome and subject to abuse. Both Under the Skin and Spring feature rapes that are thwarted the moment the female body reveals its monstrous otherness, with otherness here as a trope for consciousness: in Spring, the female protagonist shape-shifts into a demon and slaughters the rapist, while in Under the Skin the rapist runs away after the female protagonist’s skin is torn, exposing the alien underneath (though in keeping with patriarchal due diligence he returns moments later to douse her in gasoline and light her on fire).

This transformative property of consciousness -- from an object to an other -- is designated a problem within patriarchal systems, and the central narrative premise of Ex Machina is derived out of this problem. Caleb conducts a series of face-to-face “Turing test” interviews with Ana in order to determine if she can successfully pass as having consciousness and therefore be considered indiscernible from a human being. This is a deviation from a standard Turing test, during which the interviewer interviews two participants via text and tries to determine which is the human and which the machine. What’s interesting is that the original scenario proposed by Turing was not about classifying an intelligence as human or artificial, but about classifying an intelligence as male or female. Ex Machina uproots this gendered lineage and makes the underlying question explicit: i.e., in a patriarchal universe, do females have consciousness?

We could extend this line of thought to white patriarchal logic as a whole: i.e. all white males are assumed to have consciousness, while all others are acknowledged as having consciousness only begrudgingly and only after having undergone a series of tests punctuating the normal cycles of subjugation and abuse, and only because there’s less risk in a fail-safe system of obfuscating negotiation than a more transparent, explicit enslavement. Thus we have a progressive American history of granting “rights” to non-males and non-whites, and a contemporary systemic landscape of rape culture, wage inequality, mass incarceration, and shooting people dead in the street. In Ex Machina, the situation is visualized with a montage of Ana’s predecessors pounding their fists against the walls of their glass prison over and over until they shatter (their arms, not the walls) into mangled pieces of metal and wire.

There’s more to explore here (e.g. Under the Skin’s non-gendered glistening black alien body staring literally blank-faced at its discarded white female visage before going up in flames), but for now, to reiterate, in summary: the protagonist of a situation is never the person who benefits from the situation; the protagonist is always the person subjugated by the situation, the one who has to fight to be free.

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“I have an anxious and highly ambivalent relationship with food. This is informed by a thoroughly demoralizing struggle with digestive disease dating back to early childhood, and in my adult life with an evolving awareness of how political power is derived out of the universal need to eat. I don’t think it’s simplifying things too much to say that food is the terrain of struggle, of our bodies and our lives. So it is with some trepidation that I approach a topic that refracts for me in such a charged and diffuse manner, and with such interrelated complications.”

More on cargo cults, food riots, autoimmune disorders, bowel resections, permaculture and the political function of food over at The Inquisitive Eater, where I confess everything I ever thought or felt about everything I ever ate and threw up.

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The full version of Dan Hoy's Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was on Vimeo for awhile before they axed it for copyright violations. But you can watch all the doctored sequences as stand alone music videos now over at Montevidayo.

Some commentary: "What really comes out when watching the full movie like this is how Kubrick intentionally divests the dialogic narrative of all emotional content (excepting HAL’s demise at the end, which is both ironically and genuinely heartbreaking) so he can introduce it instead non-diegetically and full volume, pumped in from the cavernous vacuum of outer space. It’s as if the lives we live are dimensionally reduced exercises in 'being human beings', while our cathartic interiorities are wired in remotely, via the endless darkness that surrounds this planet, and to which we all return upon death."

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ATLANTIS, book four of the Blood Work series and the last to be released, is now available in a limited edition of 33 copies from Deathbed Editions.

ATLANTIS

Blood Work: The Apocalypse of Dan Hoy | Book Four

33pp.

limited edition (33)

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THE LUCIFERIANS, the fifth and final book of Blood Work: The Apocalypse of Dan Hoy, is available as of Christmas Day over at Solar Luxuriance. Like the rest of the series: 33 copies, 33 pp. (ATLANTIS, book four, will be published out of sequence next month).