Journey to the Heart of the Gurlesque

With the MLA in town, it's been exciting to reconnect with friends I rarely see and to meet some new folks in the flesh whom I only know from online or from their reputations. I was particularly curious to meet Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson. To my surprise and delight when I met Joyelle and Johannes for dinner last Saturday they brought Lara Glenum and her husband, Josef Horacek along with them. I've been curious about the poets associated with the Gurlesque, and here Kevin and I were suddenly dining at MLA Gurlesque headquarters—actually Annabel's, the restaurant attached to the Hotel Mosser at 4th and Market.

Lara Glenum and Joyelle McSweeney

The poets of the Gurlesque are, according to Arielle Greenberg, women poets brought up in the second wave of feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. They were literally children then. Thus none of them are over 40 now. In a talk she delivered at Small Press Traffic here in San Francisco, Greenberg described the tone of the Gurlesque as "tender and emotionally vulnerable but also tough, with a frank attitude towards sexuality and a deep, lush interest in the corporeal." She further characterized their poems as "'dolled up' in a specifically girly kitsch: this work seems to share an interest in the 'femme' side of feminism." Since Greenberg's originary formulation of the Gurlesque, the movement's been complicated in various and sometimes exciting ways. It's still controversial and some women writers refuse to be associated with members of a group that has the word girl in it, no matter how it's spelled. Is it feminist, counter-feminist, post-feminist?

I found my dinner companions to be charming and generous in their intelligence. Joyelle was a riot, her snappy rejoinders worthy of Mae West. She amused and flattered me, as she thinks I'm much more famous than I am. I said to her, "I wish I were living your version of my life." Lara Glenum is co-editing an anthology on the Gurlesque with Arielle Greenberg, and at dinner she discussed her theoretical take on the movement, and her interest in the female grotesque. She had some fascinating things to say about women burlesque troupes of the Victorian 1850 era who pushed gender envelopes while giving their audiences strong doses of social and political satire.

A few months ago Lara asked me to contributed to a special feature she's curating for the winter issue of the online quarterly Action Yes. Other contributors will include Lara herself, Johannes, and Aaron Kunin, who I recently ate dinner with in LA. Even though I come from a different approach than these younger women, I feel sparks of sympathy moving back and forth—particularly with their interest in the female body and the female grotesque. I'm reminded of how I first connected with Bhanu Kapil, over our shared interest in the monstrous female. It's affirming to me to meet others who can see the rich potential and—dare I say empowerment?—in these areas many dismiss.

Swedish-born Johannes Goransson, poet, translator, and an editor of Action Yes and Action Books.

Josef Horacek from the Czech Republic.
Josef is working on his doctoral dissertation on avant-garde translation practices.

Being part of a movement is a mixed bag. It's wonderful advertising, and when a grouping catches the imagination of readers and critics, those associated get noticed. (Indeed, I've seen many pockets of poets declare themselves a movement only to be ignored.) But then there's the "I'm an individual" feelings and the resistance to being lumped with others who may say and do things that make you cringe. Having come out of the whole New Narrative thing—and not yet escaped it—I empathize with the delicacy and difficulty of Lara and Joyelle's positions. During our dinner I sensed teeny fissures in the group consciousness, and I was like, yeah, I've been there.


We had to run because Kevin was moderating a panel, but before we left Kevin asked if he could take some New Narrative style pictures. "Lara," he said, "pretend you've never met Joyelle before and you're feeling awkward. Joyelle, pretend you're attracted to her sexually. You're both in a story, and yet it's real life too. That's the New Narrative way." In the story in Kevin's head the red fire extinguisher on Lara's right makes an important appearance.

Spicer Cake

Here's an image of the Spicer cake sent in by John Sakkis. It's the cover to a booklet featuring Stephanie Young and Larry Kearney. Photo by Margaret Tedesco.

Birthday Cakes

Around the corner from where I live sits a triple-X rated bakery now known as the Cake Gallery. Click to their website and check out their generous samples of pornographic birthday cakes, including Sit on my Face, Missionary Position, Pussy Cake, etc. The Hand Job one is great: pearly white icing/semen dripping down pink flesh. We have been going there for years, always disappointing the jolly owner Jerry by not getting the X rated cakes and instead going for G ratings. They are marvelous about reproducing whatever image you bring in on a photo or drawing or screen capture and turning it into the icing on your cake. (And the cake is pretty good too!)

There are bakeries that actually reproduce images photographically, resulting in a mass produced snapshotty look. But this bakery employs art students to render by hand (or by pastry bag) an impressionistic ambience of what you're bringing in. Where else could you get a hand-painted color portrait for $50?

One year it was Kevin's birthday while he was in the thick of his obsession with Kylie Minogue and I brought in a poster for Kylie's Body Language LP (the one where she imitates the look and style of Brigitte Bardot) and voila!



Then another year for Kevin's birthday I smuggled in a photo of Jack Spicer, and the cake came back looking excellent, though I forgot to take a picture of it until it was nearly all eaten.


I like the look of the one piece left, the wedge, as though the eaters were afraid to eat the face--for good reason methinks.


When Tariq Alvi was here in California, and Lee Plested and Erik von Muller threw a birthday party in his honor, Kevin and I decided to shock him by getting his cake at the X-rated bakery. I brought in a head shot and then asked the baker to go wild in his imagination for what Tariq might look like underneath his sharp suits and London sophistication.


It all seemed to tie together because Tariq had only recently completed his wheelchair piece for the Capp Street Project (2005) in which he had an actual wheelchair frosted (or "iced" as they say in England)—every inch of it—and he had candles mounted on the seat and lit them ablaze during the opening. And now, for Kevin's birthday this past Wednesday, we went for another sophisticated look. The doorbell of the bakery chimes when you go in, and the baker's brow furrowed as he smoothed down this photo (of a drawing by Raymond Pettibon of these four adorable penguins). "You don't have to do the whole thing," Kevin said. "Just do the penguins' faces all looking around at each other and the wintry Arctic landscape and looking puzzled."


And then through the miracle of the culinary arts the cake came to life! When we went in to pick up the cake, Jerry stopped us saying, "You mind if I ask, who did this drawing? He's a good artist!" "A friend," Kevin mumbled, "and yes, he's super talented, and so is your guy here." Again I forgot to photograph it until the candles were blazing but this will give you an idea:

There is stuff enough to tell you
What hours are
And no more.
You have hours
There are
To use them. Choose your
Cake.

—Jack Spicer, from A Birthday Poem for James (and Jim) Alexander

Christmas Corsages

For my contribution to Christmas dinner at Elliot Anderson's and Wayne Smith's, I followed London friend Tariq Alvi's recipe for Quick Cauliflower Curry. Tariq wrote out the instructions for me in longhand, and I push-pinned them on the side of my kitchen hutch. It took me over a year to try the recipe because it called for crumbled bay leaves, and I'd never crumbled or crushed a bay leaf—I'd always put them in whole and removed them before eating. I had a cultural crisis over eating bits of bay leaf, like what if they were poison or something. But they're actually delicious, chewy flakes in the stew.

Kevin came with me to the potluck, and we brought the Christmas corsages we had gotten in the mail from our Canadian colleague, novelist Derek McCormack.


Derek's glamorous grandmother collected these 50s/60s pieces and wore them until her death, and then she bequeathed them to Derek. What a treat to open up this package in the days before the holiday and ooh and ahh at the workmanship. They are so old they don't even have pins or Velcro... I remember women wearing them in my childhood, but not much beyond that. The women pinned them with long hatpins, the kind that had pearls on the non-working end. At Elliot and Wayne's apartment there were no hatpins, but luckily Wayne had some regular pins handy and somehow with the help of friends we got them attached.

Cliff Hengst took these photos, one as an "art study," a tight closeup a la Cecil Beaton, then stepping back to get our faces in the photo too. Merry Christmas to all!

Will LAX ever end?

I’m sitting in a food court at LAX, passing time waiting for my flight which thus far has been delayed 2 hours—who knows how long that will actually turn out to be. That the flight is only an hour long adds to the frustration, like it’s somehow more unfair than if I were on a 6 hour flight that was delayed. It was Kevin’s idea to seize this limbo time and come up with a post. But it’s hard to focus when in limbo. Thinking of Agamben’s point about airport duty free shops being outside the juridical system. But that’s just the beginning of the sense of outsideness at an airport. All these families in their red sweaters waiting and waiting. I’m so fucking tired, so tired it feels like I’m peering through squinty eyes, but then I always seem to be tired at airports. I’m facing a Starbucks decorated with green and yellow Christmas ornaments and white paper doves. The doves look homemade and awkward, reminding me of the turkeys we made when I was a kid—by tracing a hand with a crayon—the thumb was the turkey’s head and neck, the other four fingers its feathery back.

I’ve been in the LA area since December 12—teaching at the Antioch Los Angeles MFA program. Even though it was a full trip—dinners, readings, art opening, and teaching teaching teaching—what I keep thinking about is an HBO documentary I watched the end of late one evening in my hotel room—Cat Dancers, which is about a ménage à trois of wild animal trainers—two men and a woman, a kind of low budget Siegfried and Roy. The story consists of video and still clips, along with an interview by the surviving member of the trio, Ron Holiday. His wife, Joy, and their young “protégé” Chuck each were killed 5 weeks apart by a beautiful white tiger named Jupiter. The film is brimming with bad perms, facelifted gym-toned aging bodies, and animal grace. It’s beautiful, tacky, heart-wrenching. I keep thinking about the emotional potential of tackiness, its aura of unmediated seduction. When Ron cries in his bubble wig and mascared eyes, I so believe him, so want to cry with him. The most moving part of the film is his attempts to describe his love of the tigers, how all three of them so loved the tigers. A great antidote to the image of the cruel animal trainer/abuser image.

I was experiencing lots of animal trauma before I came here, as my mother’s cat Quincy, who came to live with me a year ago, became seriously ill and was in the hospital. Her condition kept escalating and they kept extending her stay, and I was about to lose it, having to leave for 10 days, with her in this life and death state. Was able to get her stabilized, and Stephen, Kevin, and Sonia, a nurse from our vet who paid some house visits, have done a great job to keep Quincy ticking. When my mom was dying, I promised to take care of Quincy and this was a great comfort to her. Quincy’s crisis brought the final weeks of my mom’s cancer come rushing back to me. Not a state conducive to blogging or working or anything in the “normal” world. A pervasive sense of outsideness, and then 9 nights in a hotel and now this woman sitting across from me, bone thin with huge fake breasts and the teeniest tank top, wearing a bright red and white Santa-type hat. Poking from the top of her hat is a long pipecleaner curled into a coil, with a red pompom attached to it. The coiled pipe cleaner/pom pom extends above her head at least 8 inches and bounces when she turns her head. Half-inch long fake eyelashes. Maybe she has her own white tiger act.

When I get home it will be great to pet Quincy, who is doing well from all reports. She's so wonderfully uncomplicated, you pet her she purrs. Kevin claims she has no personality at all. But I adore her.

Quincy at my mother's feet, luxuriating in being foot-scratched.

10,000 Dresses

We are terribly proud of our friend Marcus Ewert whose first published book came out today! It is a story for children called 10,000 Dresses from Seven Stories Press, and it has spectacular illustrations by San Francisco's #1 graphic designer Rex Ray, in his first attempt at pure illustration. Tonight was their launch at Books Inc in the Castro, and just when I was about to get ready to go my cat Quincy came down with some alarming symptoms and I had to drive her to the vet, so I asked Kevin to go and take some quick photos so I could see all the glamor and share it with you.

Here they are, Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray, pens in hand, ready to sign more books.

One reading looks very much like another but in this one, Rex held open each spread page so all could see, while Marcus read from another copy.


I have known Marcus since he was eighteen or so and very much involved in the evolving queer homocore scene in which he was actually one of the central figures. He acted in films by Sadie Benning, GB Jones, Gus van Sant; he enjoyed close relationships with many genius writers and artists including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Dennis Cooper; he edited a seminal punk comic journal called Ruh-Roh. But he always wanted to become a writer and now he has made that happen through the power of positive thinking.


In 10,000 Dresses, a little child Bailey dreams night after night of one spectacular dress after another, but when she tells his family about these dreams, they try to set her straight, kindly or unkindly to varying degrees. "You dream of dresses, Bailey? That's gross. You're a boy!" Bailey is gender-fluid, a girl "trapped in a little boy's body" as it were, and doomed to being misunderstood and lonely, except her dreams set her free.

Marcus with his brother Chris whom I have never met!

Among the crowd of fans, an old friend, Laurence Roberts a/k/a "Larry-Bob"

Braithwaite in Quill & Quire

Montreal novelist and art writer Peter Dube sent me a photocopy of the article Jason McBride has published about Lawrence Braithwaite in the current issue of Quill & Quire—Canada's version of Publisher's Weekly. It's great to see Lawrence's death—and his work—getting some acknowledgement in his own country.

McBride has done his homework and interviewed a number of people who knew Lawrence well and/or worked with him—Brian Lam of Arsenal Pulp Press, Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books, writers Derek McCormack and Aaron Vidaver, and most revealingly, Lawrence's older brother Jack. According to Jack Braithwaite, Lawrence was a happy teen until the death of their brother Joey in a bike accident. Lawrence never got over Joey's death, and perhaps it is significant that he died on the anniversary of his brother's death—July 14. The facts about Joey complicate the murky picture of Lawrence's last days, which Aaron Vidaver has done to much to shed light on. The best part of the article is McBride's description of Lawrence's writing as an "ecstatic, deliberately confounding fusion of street slang, porn, typographical trickery, and song lyrics" that account for the resulting "speed and disorientation."

Sorry these scans aren't very good. I highly recommend chasing down the original article.