Link-o-rama

Blog posts feel naked without an image, so here's a sculpture on the campus of SF State.  I think it's a tiger, but I'm not sure.  It looks so desolate.  Like, hey grounds people, even a mosaic beast deserves some grass.

I haven't been posting lately because in every spare moment I've been doing non-blog writing.  It's good, like I've finally got to the top of some metaphorical hurdle.  I feel very happy to be a child playing alone.  As often as possible, which is never often enough.  My excitement over the impending summer break is embarrassing.

Recently a few announcement-worthy things have come out.

On the print side of things, Elizabeth Hall's interview with me has come out in the Denver Quarterly.  I worked hard on my answers.  Elizabeth asked some tough questions.  When I met her at the beginning of April she was wearing a very swanky, sexy red dress.  I wish I had seen her in that before the interview; it would have been exciting to imagine this mysterious red-curved woman while I was toiling away.

On the cyber side of things, Sarah Todd's insightful and stimulating interview with me has been posted on the Girls Like Giants literary blog.

And in two dimensions simultaneously, Christopher Breu's scholarly article "Disinterring the real: Dodie Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker and the late-capitalist literature of materiality" has recently appeared in Textual Practice.  I'm assuming there's a print version of this journal, but maybe I'm wrong.  Chris is a wonderful scholar and writer and friend.  Don't let the title scare you, check this article out!  I was able to download it for free from the SFSU library website—after a couple of tries.  Now that I've overcome my resistance to figuring out now to do this, I'm going to be downloading articles like crazy.

Kaplan Harris sent me the text of the paper he delivered on April 14 in Philadelphia at the Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent conference, about Mirage, the (maga)zine Kevin and I edited.  His paper is entitled "Vampire Editing: Dodie Bellamy and Mirage." It covers the entire Mirage project, not just the women's issue that I edited.  I guess Kevin is left out of the paper's title because it's supposed to be about individual talent, not couples talent.  But everybody knows Kevin's the real genius behind Mirage.  I'm more of the sidekick in that venture, a thrilled sidekick.  In his paper, Kaplan makes a convincing case for the literary/historical importance of Mirage.  As I was reading it, I was simultaneously blushing and saying to myself, "Fuck yes!"  In a footnote, Kaplan quotes from an email I wrote him, including a playful jab I made to him about his "ocd scholarliness."  The sentence with the jab concludes the quote and could have been easily left out, but I think Kaplan left it in as a sort of in-joke.  Which makes me wonder if that's a common thing in scholarly papers, to put in-jokes in the footnotes, a transgressive thing.

Speaking of Kevin, his long-awaited novel Spreadeagle is just out from Publication Studio.  Kevin and I will be reading in Portland on May 30th to celebrate both our Publication Studio books.

And, oh, yeah, I wrote another column for SFMOMA's blog, on Wayne Koestenbaum's super fabu slide lecture on Harpo Marx at the SF Art Institute.

Red Bonnet

After a brief hiatus, I decided to finish Frederika Macdonald's The Secret of Charlotte Brontë.  Where I picked up, Macdonald was talking about the tradition of the Sunday bonnet for Belgian schoolgirls of the 1860s:

"To save one's best Sunday Bonnet, in the garden, one might go about in a hat, and in the bosom of one's family wear a pinafore to save a new dress; but in the same way that one did not go into the drawing-room with a pinafore on, one did not, in those days, pay visits in a hat: and to go to church in one would have been thought irreverent."

A bit later she continues: "Sunday Bonnet meant that childish ways were done with, and that one had attained the age of reason. Like a barrister's wig it imposed seriousness on the wearer, who had to live up to it."  I think of the Irving Berlin song:

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,
You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. 

And I wonder, what's the difference between a hat and a bonnet, and if there is this big difference, what is a bonnet?  And then I remember Blue Bonnet margarine from my childhood, with the picture of the lady on the front, and I think it must be that cloth hoodlike thing she has tied under her chin.  So of course this led to a Google attack.  I eventually found a site called "Hats and Snoods" where you can still buy made-to-order bonnets, as well as other retro women's headgear such as snoods, Leghorn hats (popular in the 1860s), and "ladies riding hats."  I noticed that the main site was called blockade runner, so I clicked to that, and it's a site where you can purchase firearms, with a prominent link to the Tea Party.  And I'm all oh my fucking god, thinking about all the recent right wing attacks on women's rights, and now here's this arsenal-building right wing site selling Victorian Era hats—it's so Handmaiden's Tale.  I have this fear that surfaces every now and again, that Margaret Atwood's book isn't really fiction, but a revelatory text, that Atwood went into a trance and had a vision of the future, and Handmaiden's Tale is merely a transcription of what she saw.  Things certainly seem to be moving in that direction.  Take the vaginal probe legislation and the attacks on birth control, which are beyond disturbing—we can say these people are too extreme, too crazy to win—but crazier things have happened, and even if these nutbags don't take over with the next election, they're not going to quit.  I look at this ridiculous plum-colored bonnet and imagine it as an American burqa, and I'm scared.

Here's another contemporary bonnet I found:

This child should sue for abuse.

Noble Passions

Here's the link to my latest post on Open Space, the SFMOMA blog.  It's about the artist talks and conversation of Catherine Lord and Moyra Davey at UC Berkeley last month.  It was a difficult piece to write in that I wanted it to be both straightforward and nonconventional, and I wanted to talk about Charlotte Brontë's Villette, which I finally finished, and which seemed to fit intuitively but in no way rationally with the work of Lord and Davey.  So, technically, it was a difficult maneuver, and I'm happy with how I managed it.  I sent the link to the article to both Davey and Lord, and Davey wrote back that she'd just finished reading Villette.  This marvelous coincidence I consider a Charlotte Brontë miracle.

Now I'm reading The Secret of Charlotte Brontë, by Frederika Macdonald, which was published in 1914.  I'm reading a facsimile edition by the University of Toronto I bought on Amazon for $20.99.  The text can also be downloaded for free, but I found that version to be rather difficult to read.  Anyway, Macdonald was a student at the school in Brussels that Brontë based the location of Villette on—17 years after Brontë studied there, and she studied with the same professor, Constantin Héger, that Brontë fell in love with and based Lucy Snowe's love interest on.  Macdonald's interpretations of Brontë's hopeless, unrequited love for a married man are fascinating.  She sees it as a noble passion, citing the theory that unrequited love is a noble love because it asks nothing for itself—plus any passion that could inspire Brontë's creative genius has to be noble.  I'm oversimplifying like crazy here, but Macdonald goes on and on about it, and I love it.