Emily Books

elanormcinerney: Imogen Binnie | Nevada | Emily Books

emilygould — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:57:51 -0400

elanormcinerney:

Imogen Binnie | Nevada | Emily Books

skysquids: maria and piranha hate everyonefan art for...

emilygould — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:10:00 -0400

skysquids:

maria and piranha hate everyone

fan art for Nevada

Nevada is our June book club pick! Buy it here. Then make your own fan art.

"Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light,..."

emilygould — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:12:40 -0400

““Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars.””

-
Imogen Binnie, Nevada

Yow.

(via peninsulamamoenam)

Exciting announcement coming soon!

"How can the book follow the messy course of real life but still exist as a narrative?" Chris Kraus interviews Ann Rower

emilygould — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:19:00 -0400

Chris Kraus is the author of several books, most recently Summer of Hate. Her work is one of our favorite things about being alive, and if you have never read her books we implore you to do so immediately. She interviewed her friend Ann Rower about Lee and Elaine, whose setting she’s intimately familiar with, via email. They discussed Ann’s response to a negative review, the challenges of writing fiction around real people and events, and how the death of artist Hannah Wilke catalyzed the writing of Ann’s novel.

Chris Kraus: I remember your book went through several reincarnations. I remember one of them took place at my house, the house in Springs Sylvere Lotringer and I had on Squaw Road in the early 90s. At that time, as I recall, you were somewhat diligently researching Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning’s biographies, while the events with the student were meanwhile unfolding. At what point did you decide to ground the narrative in those real-time events?

Ann Rower: Well, the yellow house, the house on Squaw Road, was really the star of all the incarnations. It also, incidentally, changed my life and deepened my love and admiration for you and Sylvere. It was my first ‘winter rental.’ The first thing I wrote there was the failed S/M sex scene, though, originally, it took place between Lee and Elaine but that too was really about the house and the whole real estate situation out there. As such it was supposed to be the centerpiece of the ghost story I told everyone I was writing about Lee and Elaine coming back as lesbians after years of being married to those big hot-shot art stars. Also, it was mirroring my life. You’re right. I was really trying to research Lee and Elaine to find out if they were friends during their lifetimes. I felt like a detective, which I love, but the ghost story was more of a conceit than a real narrative in my mind because in my mind I don’t write fiction.

CK: The heart of the book, for me, seems to lie between those events and the narrator’s occupation with the question of why Lee and Elaine couldn’t be friends. How did that reality – the way women of that era, for various reasons, could not be friends – affect you, and what was the spillage into the narrator’s present-time story?

AR: Actually, I talked to a lot of women, older women, who were part of that scene, who knew both Lee and Elaine, and it seems to me that maybe Lee and Elaine were a special case. A lot of these women seemed to be friends, good friends, and had their own little community both in the city and on the Island, and were not gossips or mean-spirited about each other. I think Lee and Elaine, partly because their husbands were so competitive and they were so loyal to their husbands, did not get along. But also, according to my sources, they just didn’t like each other.

CK: I remember you saying, or writing, that “[W]hen you’re writing in real time you have to revise a lot – “ Like a lot of your work I found that really profound and hilarious. Because of course everything keeps changing, and sprouting new heads, and and how can the book follow the messy course of real life but still exist as a narrative? I guess that’s a rhetorical question. But does that describe your experience, writing Lee and Elaine? How long did it take for you to define the book’s temporal boundaries?

AR: Yes. Though a painful moment for me was when Patsy Southgate, who, in the book is ‘Betsy Westlake,’ died while I was still writing. I had decided to change the names of all the characters who were based on real people who were still alive but to keep the real names of those who had died. But Patsy was so important to me and so hard to get to, and she had so many connections especially with Elaine and also with Frank O’Hara (who, according to Gary Indiana, was the only woman Frank ever fucked) – and she was so pretty and brilliant like Elaine – that I was torn about leaving her name in a fictional limbo when she could have been more ‘real’ like Lee and Elaine. The part that turned out to be surprisingly fun was when I added the elements of the ghost story to the narrative, the book’s temporal boundaries disappeared.

CK: Catherine Texier’s 2002 New York Times review of Lee and Elaine somewhat missed the point describing the artists as “shallow and obsessed with themselves in the art world.” Were people angry with you because they did not like these characters, or because the book wasn’t, in fact, the tell-all Hamptons biography suggested by the title and cover?

AR: I got the impression that Texier thought that I was shallow and self-obsessed which hurt my feelings. One of the things that was terrible for me was seeing the cover for the first time with the phrase “Pollock – A Wife’s Tale” on it which I knew nothing about and which I believe mislead readers and trivialized the book. Some of my friends were angry with me because they felt I was cruel to my characters and, looking back, I see that a lot of rage fueled this narrative. But the real theme of the book is friendship. A funny thing happened right after the review came out. I was sitting on my stoop reading the Sunday Times when Catherine Texier, who was my neighbor, passed by. More serendipity. I knew who she was, of course. She’d lived on my block for years, had co-edited Between C & D, and in the East Village was a minor literary celebrity, but obviously she didn’t know who I was. I figured this was the moment to introduce myself. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Ann Rower,” holding out my hand with her review in the other. “Oh,” she began to stammer apologetically with her heavy French accent, “I’m so so sorry. I didn’t realize that was you…” and I ended up having to console her. It was only then I realized what a bad review it was but I didn’t care. I was just happy to be in the Sunday Times.

CK: The book was written in the wake of Hannah Wilke’s death. She was buried in Springs, like her art antecedents. How did her death affect you? What connections did you make between Hannah’s art world, and the art world of the 1950’s and 60’s?

AR: I went to Great Neck High School with Hannah who was then Arlene Butter, lived across the street from her on Greene Street in Soho for 20 years, and taught with her at SVA, so I wasn’t just a fan of her work. The day before I went out to the yellow house was Hannah Wilke’s funeral at the downtown Riverside Chapel on 2nd Avenue in the city. They gave out directions to the cemetery where Hannah was to be buried the next day. Even though I was already in East Hampton I felt shy about going to what I thought would be an intimate family affair. Coincidentally, for years I had been curious about the cemetery. It was an East Hampton landmark but I never knew exactly where it was. Now that I had the directions, I found out that the yellow house where I was going to be living for the next four months happened to be practically around the corner and I went to find Hannah the next afternoon. Her death affected me profoundly as did her last show Intra-Venus. She was dying and all her vanity disappeared. Hannah had been very competitive and always felt neglected by other women artists especially those who thought she was just too pretty to be taken seriously. Well she showed them. It was Hannah who led me to the cemetery and I ended up writing a book about it. They were all connected there. She knew I was a writer ever since high school and whenever we bumped into each other on the street she would say, “Write about me,” but I never did because I never thought I could because I’m not an art critic. But then I did.

"Then spring came. I was more mixed up than ever. I could still hear Alex ranting about how horrible..."

emilygould — Fri, 31 May 2013 11:35:30 -0400

“Then spring came. I was more mixed up than ever. I could still hear Alex ranting about how horrible it was, saying how first there’s this horrible yellow period and then everything is that bright young new green and then the worst of all, the pink. I found the most painful part wasn’t the yellow and pink even, but before, the very first signs. Everything’s still bare and muddy but things poke up, like little dicks, purple dicks, little yellow shoots and some bursting red sexual buds on things. It disgusted me and distracted me and I realized that things change and I was still stuck.”

- Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower (via marginalutilite)

elanormcinerney: Ann Rower | Lee and Elaine

emilygould — Sun, 26 May 2013 16:53:05 -0400

elanormcinerney:

Ann Rower | Lee and Elaine

Baby

emilygould — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:58 -0400

an excerpt from Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower

One of Iris’s pictures of Hannah didn’t come out right. She needed to reshoot it. She insisted on coming back for a second visit. The next morning we went to Green River for a little while but by the time we got back to the house, though we were hungry, the kitchen was a mess of dirty dishes from last night and more than that, cemeteries, like I said before, always made me hot.

I nixed the cuffs, though. I liked the stainless steel, the clicking sound of them closing bit by bit, tick tick tick. But I didn’t like the looks of the key. It didn’t look like a key. It was just a little bent piece of metal and though I tried it on my own wrist a few times and it worked, the thought of being handcuffed to the bedposts in this yellow house scared me, even if the people who owned it edited radical books. I felt a little bit old for this, but we went with the scarves. Iris had a bunch of scarves she’d stolen from an old lady she worked for who, like so many women of her generation, had a huge collection of scarves they never wore anymore. Iris pulled them out one by one like magic, bad magic, cheap magic, coming out of her sleeve, her hat, her mouth.

“Lie down,” she said.

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna tie you up, baby.”

Since Iris was my student, her wanting to tie me up was a reversal. Good, I thought, to flip the power. The power switch. I was so tired of the way things were.

“Don’t you want me to?”

I knew, even as Iris picked a blue scarf and a leopard one and waved them up for me to approve, that classroom teaching would never be the same.

“Yes.”

“Lie down.”

Iris tied my arms and legs to the bed posts. I was still in my jumpsuit, but Iris didn’t undress me or say take it off like I thought and hoped she would. It was a one piece leopard-print sweatshirt-type material. It had snaps. Iris just began to unsnap it. Pop pop pop. I felt so good, tied to the bed, without choice, chosen, legs and arms spread; I hovered above myself, seeing my fantasy of the student’s experienced fingers opening the teacher’s clothes, unsnapping teacher, spreading her, sliding inside the material, over her breasts, around her shoulders, down to her navel over her belly and down into her bush, which was not as bushy, of course, as it had been when she was a student herself, much to her sorrow. I returned to my body and gazed up at the face on top of me, close, intent, the curly gray hair getting curlier from dampness. I started to thrash.

“Your chest is bright pink, baby. Why are you so red? Are you feeling something?” said Iris, a nasty tone in her voice, a taunting reference to my old Lucky Strike confession that if she ever came out, if we ever had sex, that I wouldn’t feel anything.

“Talk to me. Tell me what you want.”

She sounded hostile. She was not playing.

I wish I’d thought to say, Gag me, baby. There were plenty of extra scarves. But I kept my mouth shut. Frozen again. What was I supposed to do? A moment ago it had felt too good to talk.

“You gotta tell me what you want.”

I still didn’t get it. I felt like a baby. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t much of a talker, never could think of a thing to say unless I had a funny story to tell. My style was so anecdotal. I couldn’t think well on my feet, or, evidently, on my back.

“Talk to me.”

I tried to think B-movie. “Oh, baby,” I said, feeling like a fool. I forced myself by imagining Iris was forcing me.

“It feels good.”

“Good what? What feels good, baby?”

“Uh,” I was whispering, “to be tied up?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“It feels good to let you.”

“Let me what, baby?”

“I don’t know …”

“Tell me, baby.”

“Explore me.”

But funny how when I said it I felt a rush of lust. Iris had been right, as usual. It made a difference. Words. Then my head was rocking from side to side, my body pulling on the scarves, pulling the knots tighter and tighter. I felt so spread. Then suddenly Iris stopped.

“What? Why are you stopping?” I whimpered, could hear a little catch in my own voice between gasps.

Iris didn’t answer me. She tugged at the last snap. It wasn’t a real snap. It didn’t really open. It was welded shut and then I realized that because of where the snaps stopped Iris could not really get a good feel any farther down without undressing me completely, and of course she couldn’t get my arms out of my sleeves because they were tied to the bedposts.

It was so ridiculous. I’d assumed that Iris, though a student, would be able to teach me about the really important things I’d missed in twenty years of tame monogamy. I assumed, from how she dressed, from her paintings, her writings, her carriage, and how she talked about herself and her girlfriends that Iris was experienced, had a clear and kinky and interesting sexual agenda. But things were going wrong again.

Like with the massage oil. After Iris left, I’d pulled off the little Henry Moore plastic bottle and tried to scrub the stain off, but it stayed. And why did Iris tie me up without undressing me first? I was beginning to get annoyed, not a sexy feeling.

Iris stood up. She bolted from the room.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back.”

Lying there tied to the bed alone was not a turn on.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I listened to Iris opening and shutting drawers, imagining pots and pans, once neatly stacked, being toppled and strewn.

“What are you looking for?”

“Scissors.”

I felt scared. Pleasantly.

“Come back.”

Iris opened the last closed cabinet. Was it the one with the bottle with the bit of booze in the bottom?

“Damn. I can’t find the scissors,” Iris muttered loud enough for me to hear her.

A better fantasy! I thought. Maybe Iris could just rip my clothes off even though the jumpsuit was from Bettina Reidel. My well felt like it was starting to fill up again with the thought. But Iris returned without scissors, and with a faraway glassy look. She went down to the bottom of the bed and loomed over me, scowling.

“I’m gonna have to unite you.”

All the air went out of my balloon. The whole heated scenario deflated, taking my desire with it. This was not it at all. Iris started to untie one of the scarves.

“No, no,” I cried, for the first time really expressing feelings.

“No what?”

“Don’t untie me. Please.” I was almost crying, but not quite. “Don’t.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to tell Iris to rip my clothes right off me and leave me tied up. I tried to say what I wanted, like she’d wanted before, but the words wouldn’t come. I was mad she couldn’t figure it out.

“No. Don’t.”

“Yes. I want to put my mouth on you. I can’t reach.”

The knot was really tight from when I’d strained against the scarves, in an almost frenzy; it seemed like hours ago. Where was that lust now? Iris finally got the knot loose and slipped one arm out of the jumpsuit. At first it wouldn’t come but by shifting me into a really awkward and, I was sure, very unflattering position, she wrestled the arm out of the jumpsuit and tried to go down but it still wasn’t loose enough so she untied one of the leg scarves, too.

I was feeling something now: disappointment. Nonetheless I tried. I closed my eyes and spread my legs open very wide, trying to pretend they were still tied to the bed. Then I opened my arms wide and grabbed on the bedposts and tried to hang on and pretend I couldn’t move. Iris knelt over me and began to move her tongue around. One of my hands was still knotted to the four-poster bed. It felt good to pull against it and then it just felt good period, first there and then all over. I pushed up against Iris, my free hand on back of Iris’s neck, then backed off. I breathed into it. I waited, concentrated, stopped concentrating, let go. I felt like I had, at last, without trying, told all my secrets.

Iris was on her knees. Then she rolled over onto the bed. I was all spread out, head to one side, eyes closed. After a while I opened them and looked at her.

“Now you,” I said.

“Wait a minute. I want to tie you back up first,” Iris said.

First I kicked and then Iris helped pull the jumpsuit from the remaining arm and leg, and left me naked at last. Then she tied me back up. Tight.

“I’ll be right back.”

Iris came back into the room with her regular Polaroid. It flashed. I got anxious. Iris disappeared again.

“Where are you going?” I said, pretending to be exasperated, but really I was still purring too much to care. I twisted my head and caught a glimpse of Iris hurrying down the hall disappearing into the kitchen. She was fully dressed. I lay there, wondering about it all, half listening to Elaine, I mean Iris, thrashing about in the other room. It made me laugh. She was so ridiculous sometimes. I wiggled my toes, like a baby. They pushed up against the footboard of the wooden four-poster that was the prize auction item, the pride of Alex’s downstairs decorating scheme, her latest, most costly acquisition.

I laughed. Loud enough for Iris to hear.

“What?”

I didn’t want Iris to think I was making fun of her for trying to fuck me while I was tied up without undressing me first. She was very sensitive about criticism.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right there.”

She sounded possessed, but not by lust. Maybe she was looking for the bottle of booze. I’d hid it. She’d never find it. I was pleased. I’d felt. I’d gotten wet. I’d come. I wondered if my happiness had something to do with my corny s/m fantasy not going so smoothly, that there were kinks in the kink that had to be worked out, hitches in the knots that had to be undone by the two of us together. Plus my Bettina Reidel jumpsuit was still in one piece.

“Oops!” Iris said. It sounded like she banged her head on the open cabinet door. Then she dropped a glass.

“Are you all right?” I called. I was beginning to feel something different, helplessness, even panic as I imagined that the kitchen now like the rest of the house. Thank goodness Alex would not be back for months. I’d have plenty of time to clean, maybe even have the floor by the bed resanded. Get a maid. The works.

“Oh no!” Iris croaked. “Oh my God! What’s that?”

It sounded like the words got stuck in her throat.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

She was sort of gurgling. I wondered if she’d found the vodka I’d hid.

“What?”

“It’s a car,” Iris choked.

My pulse rate went up too. Had she been in the process of swallowing too big a swig when she saw something? Someone?

“What kind?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shit.”

“Big. Something in the driveway. It wasn’t there the last time I looked.”

“What if it’s a realtor?”

“Shit.”

“They’re supposed to call,” I said.

“I didn’t even see it pull in. I was thinking about you.” She sounded slurry, maybe just scared.

“Are you drinking?” I couldn’t keep the rage of accusation out of my voice. How had she gotten me into this mess?

“Just a little. I almost dropped the bottle.”

She was trying to make a joke, but I had no humor or sympathy. I was furious and scared. I pictured it shattered and vodka and chips of glass falling all over her and the sink and the floor and the room reeking. I wondered how long the car had been sitting there.

Iris raced down the hall to the bedroom where she’d left me tightly retied to the bedposts, yelling.

“It’s people. They’re getting out. There’s someone here,” Iris said. She did not sound cool anymore, almost begging, like she needed me to tell her what to do.

“Go see who they are,” I commanded, faintly. I already knew what was coming.

Iris raced back out of the room.

“Look out the window and tell me from there. Don’t leave the window. Stay near the front door.”

“Three people getting out of the car, a silver-haired very butch woman from the driver’s side and two very unbutch men getting out of the back seat wearing identical cable knit cashmeres and loafers.”

“Loafers? What kind?”

“Oh, God. I don’t know. They’re looking at the house.”

Iris raced back into the bedroom.

“I told you to stay out there.”

“I don’t know who they are. She looks like a dyke. Maybe it’s just her haircut. Her hair’s the color of her car,” she shrieked as she disappeared again.

Now I was sure it was the realtor.

“You locked the door?” I called out, unsure.

Iris whirled back down the hall.

“Didn’t you?”

Too late. I could hear the front door opening. I felt like I was going into shock. In my mind I saw the the haircut woman peeking in, waving “her” key.

“Helllloooo!” she called in a chipper crisp voice. “Are we interrupting something? I’m Sandy Cross, from Pony Realty. I’m showing the house. Mr and Mrs Germaine said I could come anytime, I didn’t know anyone was here.” She was starting to race, having an inkling that it was not a good time, perhaps. Perhaps she’d gotten a look at the debris strewn all over the house and sensed that she was not going to close any deals. Still they’d driven all that way in from the city.

“Aren’t you supposed to call or something,” said Iris said in a loud voice, trying to match Pony Girl’s assertive tone.

I’d explained the drill about showing the house to her one time in the car.

“Well, we tried,” said Ms Pony Express, “but there was no answer.”

I remembered we’d unplugged the answering machine when we came back from the cemetery, remembered how it scared me to do it, but I felt brave and excited. But I did not want Jack to call, to hear his sweet voice leaving a recorded message.

I could hear Iris babbling now.

“Well, you see, I mean, my friend, the person who’s subletting the house, I’m just visiting, is sick and we just didn’t get a chance to clean up and, I mean, maybe you’d better come back …”

I called out. This was my cue, but I wondered if she could hear me. The door was open a fraction which, when I realized it, scared me more.

“Iris …”

“Excuse me,” said Iris. I could tell by her voice she was moving away from the front door and coming back to me. Don’t leave them alone, I thought. I don’t pray. My voice was silent but sharp, picturing the mystery threesome peering into the kitchen, the broken glass still on the floor, the dishes piled in the sink, the drain choked with artichoke leaves.

“Watch the glass,” Iris called back over her shoulder as she ran out of the room, down the hall and slipped back through the crack in the bedroom door. I was flailing as much as the restraints would let me.

“Iris, for God’s sake, untie me.”

She began to struggle with the knotted scarves. She had tied them really good this time, planning to have a second go at me now that I was naked. The knots held.

We heard the agent calling her. Iris dashed back out, slamming the door. It sounded funny to me. Sometimes it didn’t catch. I heard the second click as it unlocked and opened a crack again. At least I could hear her, hear them, coming. How would that help? I heard her run back in to where the woman and the two men were. I could tell they were standing in the middle of the kitchen.

“Is there a dishwasher?”

“No, but why don’t you look upstairs first, the upstairs is beautiful, it’s just been added, there’s a balcony and a skylight.” Iris was doing a pretty good job, I thought. I didn’t know if I could do better. Still, I was scared, straining to hear, pulling on the scarves. Doesn’t old silk tear?

“I’ll tidy up,” Iris muttered to the woman with the beautiful haircut. I wondered if she got it done out here or in the city. It sounded like Iris was trying to pretend that she and this woman were in cahoots, that she walked in on people whose houses looked like this all the time with clients who just drove three hours from the city.

“Send them upstairs,” Iris said.

Good girl, I thought.

The upstairs was the one room we hadn’t yet had sex in and so it was still neat.

“Later,” said the agent. She liked to be in control too. At least on the job.

“Isn’t there this cute downstairs bedroom?” the agent asked. “Come,” she said to the men, who hadn’t said a word yet. I pictured them glued to the floor, probably a combination of something we’d spilled and their own disgust, not moving anywhere near the stairs where Iris was trying to steer them or in the direction, toward me, that the agent was pushing. They liked to be in control, too. It was their money. I was grateful for that.

“It’s fabulous. I remember that room from last summer,” the agent babbled on.

I could hear her voice getting closer.

“Great for guests. Can we see it?” she said to Iris. “It has the most wonderful four-poster bed,” she cooed to the boys.

“No,” Iris yelped, then tried to bring her voice down an octave. “I mean, not really, not now, that’s where my friend is, she’s not well, like I said, that’s why it’s really not a good time, we didn’t even have a chance to straighten up or do the dishes, as you can see. The doctor just left,” she improvised. I could see her pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, a habit she had, which would look good now, like she could do a bit of light housekeeping on herself.

“Well, we’ll just take a peek. Come.”

I heard them start to walk down the hall, heard a shuffle of feet, almost felt the silent struggle as Iris must’ve stepped out to block the hallway, trying to distract them with the one piece of good art in the house.

“That’s a real Sue Coe.”

“The bed is to die for,” the real estate agent said.

“She might be contagious,” Iris shouted. “The doctor said— ”

Did they hear a howl from behind the not-quite-closed bedroom door, the four-poster creaking and groaning? I couldn’t help myself. The sound slipped out. I was ready to pass out. I heard Iris lurch again, throwing herself in the agent’s path, then pulling the door shut and standing against it. I heard it click shut, muffling the hushed sound of leather soles twirling on the shiny hall floors as they turned back, walked, heels clicking away down the hall, and took another look around the bare living room. It had almost no furniture, just a stereo, a chair, a Duraflame log, a TV and a filthy flokati rug.

“Very Shaker,” the realtor said, a last pitch to the men. But they were already out the door.

“Bye,” Iris waved.

I pictured the agent, wiggling her fingers, Iris wiggling back. I knew she’d never done that in her whole life.

I heard the car doors. That dead sound really good cars make. Then I heard Iris lock the door. My whole body was already locked up, still tied hand and foot with her silk scarves to the bedposts. It was too late to laugh. I heard her walking back toward the bedroom. First she stood in the doorway. Then she moved down to the foot of the bed where I could see her. Her eyes were glazed. We weren’t really looking at each other at all. I was frozen, terrified, sunk. Why did this feel so personal, like I was undesirable? The way the men spun on the heels of their fucking Gucci loafers and waltzed out the door? Like they didn’t like the house.

Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower is our May pick and it is so good.

emilygould — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:35:37 -0400

Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower is our May pick and it is so good.

The Wall

emilygould — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:02:43 -0400

by Sara Renberg

“I did a reading at Bluestockings in New York City about four years ago, and there was a big discussion afterward about how frustrated I was that younger lesbian writers are not having lesbian content in their work. I know why they’re not doing it: because you can’t have a career if you have it. But unless people keep submitting that material, it’s never going to change. What we see is really bad-quality work, because the most talented writers are escaping the content. The literature gets destroyed.”

—- Sarah Schulman, interviewed by the Believer

I started off my creative career firmly outside of the closet. I felt like straight people had enough art by and for them, and since I was queer, then by god, my art would be too! I thought the distinction between “gay artist” and “artist who is gay” was irrelevant because I thought it was nonsense to rank aspects of myself. I named my band “The Dykings.” I wrote songs with queer narratives, queer references, she and her. At the time I was living in Chicago and buttressed by a strong gay community.

I remember I did not want to tell my mom the name of my band.

I decided to move to Portland in the summer of 2011 and left my friends and community behind. I did not know anyone in Portland. I drove across the country with the bare minimum amount of personal effects, and had the remainder delivered three weeks later once the moving company had obtained enough westward shipments.

The truck driver showed up at 10:45 on a Thursday night. He said he knew it was late, but he’d like to get one last load in. He said I would have to help him unload, which I was surprised and annoyed by. But I was eager to sleep in my own bed so I agreed.

Once he got inside he surveyed the extent of my belongings. I had three guitars, a laptop, a cat, and a pile of blankets. “Do you play guitar?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “I play guitar.” “Are you any good?” I said that I was. “When we’re finished,” he said, “I’m going to play a song for you.”

Oh great.

It was midnight by the time we were finished unloading. I hoped that he would forget his earlier declaration but he did not. I told him that I didn’t really think it was a good idea because my neighbors had asked me not to play guitar past ten o’clock. “I’m just going to play one song,” he said.

He played me a song, which I will charitably describe as “not my taste.” Then he handed me back my guitar and told me to play one.

I sighed and agreed. I tried to think of something that was complex, guitar-wise, so that I could prove to this asshole that I was a good guitar player, but also not too long, since I wanted him to leave. I settled on a song called “The Function of Lilith and Eve.” It was a good representation of my work at the time, and was often the song I sent to people who were in charge of booking. I began singing. There’s a reference in the second verse to the Songs of Bilitis, which is a coded gay reference, but I wasn’t too worried about him picking up on it. Then, as I hit the bridge, I realized what I was about to sing, which was something that was blatantly gay. It was, in fact, the gayest thing I’d ever written. I realized I was about to sing the gayest thing I had ever written for a truck driver who had consistently made me feel unsafe and uncomfortable, alone in my house well after midnight, in a city where I knew literally no one. What would happen when he found out about my gayness? Should I stop singing? What if this gets ugly? Was he going to murder me?

He probably wasn’t going to murder me. The momentum of the song carried me along and I kept singing.

He did not murder me. “You have a beautiful voice,” he said. He decided he needed to play me another song. This one, I will tell you was horrible. It was an unfocused, interminable love song whose single unifying hook was a woman’s name. It might have been Pearl, to take advantage of the rhyme with girl. I felt like I was imprisoned in my own home by terrible music. When he finished, he wanted to play me another. “My neighbors really don’t like me playing after ten,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

****

I remember volunteering for the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls and feeling like I couldn’t play a lunchtime show for the campers because of the name of my band and because of the content of my songs.

****

That fall I entered the poetry certificate program at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. I was looking forward to gaining poet peers, and to improving my own writing. The workshop process was more difficult than I expected. My poems didn’t ever seem to land. I remember writing a poem exploring the bondage of gender roles and feeling it was strong, and the disappointment when no one seemed to connect with it. “The baseball imagery is a little much for me,” someone said. “I don’t understand why this is a poem,” someone else said.

After class, one of the girls in my class offered to give me a ride home. She also happened to be queer. I told her about how upset I was. “I definitely got the feeling it was about the butch/femme dynamic,” she said. I didn’t understand why she didn’t say something about it during workshop.

I remember at some point I felt tired of writing about my life. I felt tired of people complaining that my work was narrative. I was tired of describing important things from my life and people not getting them at all.

My style evolved radically over the semester break. I began exploring non-narrative and non-linear narrative spaces. In one poem, called “Emergence,” I had a straight couple as characters. It was the first time I had written about a boy and a girl in at least five years. I felt weird about them being in there. At the same time, I relished the elegance of differing pronouns.

Our final project was a chapbook. I was proud of how my work had developed over the course of the year. I wrote about the relativity of reality, of the strangeness of intermediacy, and a recurring dialogue with a cranky saint. I did not write a single poem with gay content.

****

A year passed. I struggled with my creative work. I participated in several more workshops and found a writing group. I was producing, but not very happy about what I was producing. I felt restrained. I felt alienated from the things I was creating. People liked them! People said things like, “I think this is terrific,” and “I really enjoy this,” and I would graciously nod but be inwardly disappointed. “I feel like there is a wall I am afraid to write around,” I said to people. I did not know what the wall was. My therapist suggested that the wall had to do with being vulnerable. I said it was possible. My mentors accepted the existence of the wall, and suggested I needed to write through it. I said that was good advice.

I talked with several people about dropping the name “The Dykings” and performing as something else. “I think you have to decide whether you’re a gay artist or an artist who is gay,” someone said to me. I did not want to decide this.

I began reading Sarah Schulman’s book Gentrification of the Mind and a slow realization crept into my consciousness. I was afraid of my own gayness. I had become afraid of exploring my gayness in my work and people not being able to connect with it. I was afraid of people ignoring me or wanting to harm me if I wrote about being gay. I was afraid of never being reviewed by a major publication. I was afraid of never being published at all. I was afraid of being stuck in the Purple Room in Powell’s. I wanted to be “normal” and I wanted the opportunities of a “normal” person. I would even settle for the opportunities of a “normal” woman.

It became clear to me that even though I had been out my entire adult life, the response I had received was not that of unconditional acceptance and love. The response I had received was, We love you exactly as you are but never tell anyone about it.

It is a kinder, gentler closet. At work, one manager asked me to be on a diversity panel for new hires. Another manager used gay as a pejorative and my peers advised me not make a fuss about it. When I came out to my grandmother, she said, “I figured as much,” and told me I shouldn’t have to hide who I am, but my aunts and uncles have long ceased to ask me if I’m dating anyone. I am consistently well-liked at work, and I have an active role in the holiday ruckus. But I play by certain rules so that I don’t make people uncomfortable.

I thought about how many times I’ve said to people in the last few years that “being gay hasn’t made much of a difference for me.” This is absurd. I have a lot of privilege as a cis, white, middle class, mostly feminine presenting lady, but being gay drastically altered the course of my life. I am not a stay-at-home mom with a nice Catholic husband and four children. My lived reality is pretty different than that. The only reason I say that I haven’t had many problems is because on some level, I want to assimilate into the mainstream. I want that access to power. I want that access to attention. I want a baby and I want a bungalow and I want to be “normal.” And you can almost get it back, if you play by the rules. The price of assimilation is silence.

The other price of assimilation is forgetting. It is not comfortable to know that people you unconditionally love, respect, and admire have conditions for loving, respecting, and admiring you in return. It is not comfortable to remember you have struck a bargain. It is far easier to lock the door and then to forget you locked it.

After finishing Gentrification of the Mind, I picked up Schulman’s book Empathy. I felt like parts of myself were waking up. I had no idea how much I had wanted to read a formally interesting book with a lesbian protagonist. I’d forgotten I could even want that. For so long, I had assumed that I could have representation or quality in art, but not both. I read two more of her books in the next week. I was in a state of perpetual astonishment. I felt less alone. I felt more alive.

I catalogued all the fear and alienation I had experienced in the last few years and contrasted with this feeling of awakening. That fear was not unbased, or imaginary, or outsized. The fear was not going to go away. But this other feeling — this clear and heady curiosity — was beginning to tug me in a new direction. I wanted to see what was on the other side of that wall.

Sara Renberg is a Portland-based poet, musician, and programmer. She is the author of a chapbook called Victory Guide. Her work has appeared in such publications as Two Serious Ladies. She is the sole constant member of the Dykings. You can find her on tumblr and twitter.

Manjula Martin runs the important and revolutionary site Who...

emilygould — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:49:00 -0400

Manjula Martin runs the important and revolutionary site Who Pays Writers, which asks and answers that important question. She also does many other things, which are detailed here, and has excellent taste in music and vintage photos of Justine Frischmann. (!!) We love having her as a subscriber.

EB: What are you reading right now? (Bookwise, otherwise.)

MM: I try not to read more than two books at a time because I have trouble focusing since the invention of the Internet. Right now I’m reading Bough Down, by Karen Green - I love her art, and her writing is fantastic, too. As a physical book it’s such a beautiful, palpable object. It’s not something that could ever be matched in digital form. I also just started Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Some of the periodicals I subscribe to are Zoetrope: All-Story, The Believer, One Story, and Maura Magazine, and there are always tons of articles in my Instapaper to catch up on. I’m always looking for thoughtful pieces about the business of publishing to re-post on Who Pays Writers.

On headphones, I’m mainlining Samantha Crain’s “Kid Face” - she’s a fantastic Americana singer/songwriter from Oklahoma. John Vanderslice produced her album in his analog studio in SF and it’s perfection, aurally speaking. Mount Moriah’s latest is on constant repeat lately, too. (I’m sort of in a country-girl rut.) At home, I listen to a lot of vinyl records; lately jazz composers/pianists Abdullah Ibrahim and Mary Lou Williams. Some friends of mine have started a record shop in Santa Barbara (Warbler Records and Goods), and on a recent visit I forced them to sell me the original Elastica LP off the wall. My friends wanted to keep it for themselves. The record came with this amazing insert/booklet full of hot, dated pictures of Justine Frischmann. I know Elastica ripped off Wire so hard, but they did it so well…

Over the last month I’ve been trying to see all 24 hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which is currently at SFMOMA. I haven’t watched much tv lately but I do watch Nashville (see “country girl rut,” above).

EB: Where do you live and what is the purpose of your existence? What do you do for a living (if different)?

MM: I live in San Francisco (in a rent-controlled apartment, which means I can never ever leave). Purpose of existence tk, but yeah, I’m a writer. I make a living as a freelance writer, editor, and communications consultant, which means on any given day I’m doing content strategy for nonprofits, editing memoir manuscripts for authors, copy editing, or writing on assignment. I write creative nonfiction and fiction, mostly about music, the West Coast, and myself. I also run the blog Who Pays Writers? (for free) and I’m in the process of launching a new periodical with Jane Friedman. It’s about the business of being a writer and the evolving economics of the publishing business, and we’ll tell everyone more details very soon…

So I suppose within this very specific world (“arts and letters”?) I’m a bit of a generalist. Being a generalist has pros and cons — one con is that I think the current ‘market’, especially online and especially for nonfiction, relies a lot on expertise and specificity — but that’s who I am. I contain multitudes, dude.

EB:What has been your favorite Emily Book? Least favorite?

MM: I’m a recent subscriber, so I’m still catching up. I am a former indie bookstore worker (Green Apple and Logos represent!), and hence was a bit reluctant to adapt to e-books. Emily Books are the first e-books I have ever read or purchased. So congrats for popping my e-book cherry. Empathy is really interesting so far— I lived on the Lower East Side in the mid-to-late 90s, so in reading this book I feel like I was walking on the ruins of these characters during that era. And although it’s a bit more conventional in form than other Emily Books, I appreciated Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth. Her work is so crisp - she strips away the b.s. and reveals her own vulnerabilities in ways I admire as an essayist, even if I don’t always agree with her choices as a character. Basically, your taste is impeccable. And identifiable, which might be more important.

EB:What has been your favorite non Emily Book you’ve read lately? Least favorite?

MM: Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins looks like a smallish book but it’s not. It’s huge. Really fucking powerful. I also just read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which is just… rad. It’s so difficult to pull off that kind of structure without it taking over, and she can do it. I don’t know how, but she can. Least favorite… how about Rick Moody writing about music? I just went to an event put on by the (generally excellent) music/lit journal Radio Silence, and their new issue has an essay by Moody in which he footnotes an old essay of his own about Sleater Kinney. I sometimes feel like he is personally trolling me with his music writing. I am a big fan of writing about music through personal experience but I feel like Moody always manages to elevate himself over the songs in a way that feels selfish to me. I’ve never met him - I’m sure he’s very well-meaning and has vast musical knowledge and all that, but… there’s just something about the way that guy writes about music that makes me want to go hug an Ellen Willis book. Or, uh, perhaps talk trash about him without provocation on the Emily Books Tumblr…

EB: Cats or dogs? Or both, or other?

MM: Cats duh. I’m just coming out of a relationship with a man who has a sweet old dog, and I adore her, but ultimately dogs are too codependent for me. I am tragically allergic to cats (and not dogs), but that doesn’t mean I won’t awww over them like some people awww over babies.

"Her broken heart had something to do with the collapse of culture."

emilygould — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:19:00 -0400

Freud, existentialism and Empathy

by Caty Simon

“Most gay people find out about gay things from the mainstream media.”

-from “What I Learned About Empathy” by Sarah Schulman, in the Arsenal Pulp edition of Empathy

I was one of the last generation of queer teen girls doomed to library lesbianism. I searched yellowed index cards (index cards!) for any mention of homosexuality, looked desperately for all that stuff that dares not speak its name in the subtext of modernist novel after modernist novel. Here’s what I found out about being queer from these Freud-inflected texts: being a lesbian was juvenile. Being a lesbian was penis envy. Being a lesbian was narcissistic. Being a lesbian was the inability to have a vaginal orgasm and be a Real Woman.

I found scant consolation in scandalous footnotes about Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf. When I discovered The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing at the age of 12, I thought I’d found a feminist and socialist bible I could really identify with, but even Lessing wrote about Lesbianism (with a capital L) as a last resort that desperate women were reduced to.

Reading Sarah Schulman’s Empathy almost twenty years later, I felt that I had finally found a book that takes on feminism, lesbianism, radicalism and psychoanalysis and allows the queer woman to emerge triumphant, simply by deconstructing these old tropes and exposing them to the light of scrutiny.

As Schulman wrote later in her afterword to the 2006 reissue of Empathy, she wrote this novel against the same lack of canonical queer women that I discovered in my adolescence: “I had…a great books curriculum that included only one [lesbian] woman, Sappho.”

Empathy, Schulman’s fifth novel, is an examination of one disaffected lesbian’s solitary life and her attempt to put herself back together after a breakup by consulting a “street corner psychiatrist.” These sessions, or rather, this self-examination—we discover at the end of the book that the protagonist Anna and her analyst “Doc” are the same person—lead her to introduce herself to her lover’s mother, confront her errant ex, and finally, fall in love with another dyke, that is to say, a woman who isn’t just a heterosexual out to experiment or a woman too afraid to admit to her lesbianism.

Schulman writes that the core of Empathy is juxtaposition: “relations between ideas, word fragments, genres, lovers, and relational existence as a fallback position for people whose reality is not acknowledged.” Most of the novel is composed of lyrical word salad, streams of consciousness that end with harsh contrasts—trains end up rushing through people’s veins, sweat becomes holes burned into a sheet which become hot black tar. Empathy also cycles through eight different genres, among them recipes, personal ads, screenplays, and a term paper Schulman wrote as a college student using Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to prove that she was gay. Form follows content to portray Anna’s experience of coming out as “not a story, but a constant clash of systems…a traveling implosion.” Images that both relate to and contradict each other are used to demonstrate “relational existence”—the existence Anna has assumed because as a lesbian and a woman no one sees her as herself. Instead, everyone constantly compares her to men.

Schulman wrote Empathy in the early 90s, and Freud wrote his work from the fin de siecle on into the forties. But sadly enough, Empathy’s raw depictions of homophobia still resonate. I felt like I could recite the breakup speech that Anna receives from her straight girl lover word for word, having heard the same spiel from the bi-curious girls I dated in high school when they gave me my walking papers. This is also the speech that the heroines in the D.H. Lawrence novels I read gave when they became “well-adjusted” and properly feminine again and repented of their Sapphic missteps:

I realized that I’m not a lesbian anymore. I realized that women don’t have fun together. I realized that that’s not love. I realized that men are heroes after all…A hero is someone you can be proud of…To be proud of someone he has to be bigger than you so you can look up to him. You can feel safe when he is near you…Fun is when you get what you’ve always imagined. When you’ve always known what you want and then you get it. With a woman you can’t have this because you’ve never imagined what you’ve wanted. There’s no gratification. No gratification at all.

Anna is so destroyed by this rejection that she takes on another identity, becoming the figure who has the most power in this dilemma—a male analyst. After all, being a lesbian means that she has been perceived as someone who competes with men, hates men, and wants to be a man simultaneously, so she may as well reap the benefits of this condemnation. Anna’s question, which recurs throughout the book, is: “How can I be a woman and still be happy?” As “Doc”, she analyzes herself and accomplishes the opposite of what a traditional Freudian would attempt—each of her breakthroughs come when she further accepts her orientation.

The question asked throughout the novel is a version of the question Simone de Beauvoir documents women who dare to aspire to anything beyond a normative feminine role asking themselves in her seminal feminist existential text, The Second Sex: “[H]ow many times can a person be told in a multitude of ways that she will never be fully human because she is not a man?” When a society’s idea of the norm, and of the Subject, is male, then a woman must always be the Other and an object. When Anna tires of having her life interpreted as always relating to men, she attempts to become the male interpreter par excellence: the psychoanalyst. “The logical conclusion is to become a man to herself, simply to retain the most basic self respect.” It is no accident either that Simone de Beauvoir was also the first feminist theorist to challenge Freud, his sexism, and his relentlessly sexual interpretation of people’s formative influences.

As the child of analysts, Anna/Doc is a microcosm of a 20th century America in which Freudianism is more than a school of thought—it is a religion, a way of life, a cult. “Freudians have managed to penetrate culture and affect it in silent and unspecified ways,” Doc muses. “They have managed to be bizarre but seem objective,” and convince an entire culture that lesbians want to supplant their fathers, become men, and fuck their mothers, and that child abuse victims are really just fantasizing all that sex with their parents, or else are talented little seductresses. In Doc’s therapy practice, he rejects this “family religion”, and yet he retains the one vital element within it: the idea that there is meaning behind people’s behavior. Using this key, Doc and Anna attempt to make sense of themselves and a world in which the first section of the newspaper they read is the obituary page, to catch up on the AIDS deaths of their friends.

In Anna’s psychoanalysis with herself, dream analysis becomes her victory over a literature in which her sexuality is erased or dismissed. Anna dreams that she takes William Burroughs’ “feeble” penis—that mighty engine of the cut-up—ties it up with piano wire, and hangs it like a painting. She has J.G. Ballard drown in streams of women’s urine, while girls mow him down in their cars and refer to his book Crash to have orgasms while he screams. This female chorus then declares, “You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not…” Anna skewers a bohemianism in which even autocannibals and automobile accident fetishists are more acceptable than homosexuals. “Some people have sex by inserting fishhooks in each other,” one of the prose poems the novel is composed of informs us. Indeed, and even those people get to meet their lover’s parents, the way Anna, to her chagrin, cannot.

Doc/Anna’s psychoanalytic process is also subversive in how it challenges some of the method’s dullest, most harmful cliches. Doc is uneasy with the power dynamic between analyst and analysand, with the shrink’s role as authoritative blank slate. Instead, he/she focuses on listening over analysis and the accountability of the individual over the therapeutic dogma of Mutual Blame, and tries to move away from “the generic practice of blaming victims for being alive.” Not far into her ‘analysis,’ Anna is ready to give up on being the identified patient, the one whose own behavior is the neurotic source of all her interpersonal problems. She’s ready to accept the interpretation her next lover gives for her failed relationship with her ex: “She needed you to prove she was heterosexual.”

That next lover’s name, by the way, is Dora—after the famous hysteric who dumped Freud mid-analysis. Freud identified Dora’s desire for Frau K as but a juicy deviant detour on the way to the real issue of her disgust for Herr K as evidence of her raging secret desire for him and for Freud himself. It seems the perfect novelistic revenge on the analyst to have the famous patients, Anna O and Dora, run away together. Even after all her efforts to analyze herself, it is Dora who truly “cures” Anna. “You don’t have to compete with men when you’re here with me…I want you,” Dora reassures Anna, and finally, Anna accepts that she does not have to be a man just because she wants women. “How could you possibly think you were a man,” Dora asks Anna O, “when you have such a big, hungry, pussy?”

Anna’s great breakthrough is in the realization that being Anna is not about anyone else. Essentially, Empathy is an existentialist novel, despite its fixation on Freudianism and its postmodern, surreal style. Anna/Doc seeks meaning in his/her own choices. The novel is an exercise in interiority, Anna sitting alone in her apartment with her magazines, or else in psychoanalysis with her two selves, attempting to define herself. Only existing, in the culture’s definition, in relation to men, means that “the end result was that I, Anna O., could not exist.” The novel concludes with Anna’s existential revision of the world into one in which a lesbian woman can be a self and a subject:

She did not have to be Doc. She could be loved instead. She learned that what she had been taught about right and wrong was created for a world that no longer existed and actually never did exist…She learned that every single individual has to rethink morality for themselves and at the same time come to a newly negotiated social agreement.

Anna rewrites and renegotiates her relationship to a world in which Freud and the heterosexist literature of modernism he influences—a literature referenced throughout the book, from Joseph Conrad to Delmore Schwartz—have defined her lesbianism up until that point. This Great Books syndrome, pre-internet, inundated each young lesbian with all the relics of Homophobia Past, and combined it with a lack of actual lesbian voices. “I had no openly gay teachers, and only a handful of openly gay students on the entire campus,” Schulman writes of her college experience. GLBT community online has its own problems, but at least there, precocious queer teenagers can actually learn about being gay from gay people.

Schulman was justifiably outraged by the gay ghetto created by big book chains in the mid 90s for queer novels:

The chain booksellers, like Barnes and Noble, began to dominate the market, and they instituted a “gay and lesbian” section in many of their branch stores. This section was never positioned at the front of the store with the bestsellers. It was usually on the fourth floor hidden behind the potted plants. What this meant in practical terms was that those of us who had the integrity to be out in our work found our books literally yanked off of the “Fiction” shelves and hidden on the gay shelves, where only “gay” people wanting “gay” books would dare to tread. It was an instant undoing of all the progress we had made to be treated as full citizens and a natural, organic part of American intellectual life.

But behind that potted plant, sitting crosslegged and getting coffee stains on the books, I was in comparative queer nirvana. The GLBT sections at B&N and Borders, with their cheerfully tacky rainbows, were refreshing compared to the dour library, and those potted plants were a place I could hide reading piles of trashy lesbian romance novels and Advocate magazines (before I learned from my elder radicals that the Advocate was an assimilationist pile of shit and learned to avoid it accordingly.) Even being ghettoized by the bookstores was a step forward from the crypto-mystical Freudian references that the canon had thrown at me about the insidious perils of Lesbianism. Even the further commercialization of the gay movement was an improvement over invisibility.

The Gay and Lesbian section was still closeted up on the fourth floor, yes, but at least it wasn’t the same old self-hating Well of Loneliness it was before. Maybe it was just a tiny step forward from Radclyffe Hall to Collette, maybe I wasn’t quite at the riot grrl stage yet. But it tided me over until the Internet could reach me, till I could meet my own Doras.

Tonight! Moderated by Topside’s Tim Léger. To prepare us...

emilygould — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:45:11 -0400

Tonight! Moderated by Topside’s Tim Léger. To prepare us all for this conversation between Barbara Browning and Sarah Schulman, I’ll be posting relevant quotes all day here and over on the Emily Books twitter (if the quotes are short enough.)

I googled “beach volleyball” to find an image for...

emilygould — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:56:06 -0400

I googled “beach volleyball” to find an image for this post. Guess what: people love butts.

Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen, who now goes by the name Penelope Trunk, continues to be one of our most controversial Emily Books picks. It’s about beach volleyball, bulimia, incest, and finding yourself in books and writing. It’s the story of a young woman developing as an artist despite her best efforts to destroy herself. It’s nauseating in parts and very, very funny in other parts, sometimes on the same page. It’s on sale this month for 30% off with the code ADRIENNE at checkout.

Read it!

Congratulations to Tamara Faith Berger, whose novel Maidenhead...

emilygould — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:05:17 -0400

Congratulations to Tamara Faith Berger, whose novel Maidenhead has won the Believer Book Award! This award is given to a book the Believer editors think is “the strongest and most underappreciated of the year.” Exactly. Buy Maidenhead from us here.

Shit My Cats Read: UNI: “It’s a regular Spring awakening over on Greene Ave…We’re...

emilygould — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:41:48 -0400

Shit My Cats Read: UNI: “It’s a regular Spring awakening over on Greene Ave…We’re...:

shitmycatsread:

UNI: “It’s a regular Spring awakening over on Greene Ave…We’re juggling a nervy and titillating novel by Tamara Faith Berger (thanks, Chris Kraus!) with a collection of essays by Eileen Myles, three novels by Colette, and a shiny-covered collection of poetry by Ariana Reines. …

These cats need a subscription to Emily Books, stat.

If you’re in NYC on May 13, come celebrate Sarah...

emilygould — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:30:24 -0400

If you’re in NYC on May 13, come celebrate Sarah Schulman’s novel Empathy, our April book club pick, with the author and Barbara Browning, who’s also the author of two Emily Books picks. We’re also thrilled to be cohosting the event with literary event crowdfunding resource Togather, which is buying everyone’s first drink (Thanks, Togather!)

By posing a big, unanswerable question we hope to spark a conversation that will leave everyone with more questions. We’re also excited to host a conversation between two novelists who, in very different ways, dazzle and tantalize readers and provoke lingering thoughts about identity.

We hope to see you there, and if you can’t make it, we’ll catch you up afterwards right here!

elanormcinerney: Adrienne Eisen | Making Scenes | Emily Books

emilygould — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:46:40 -0400

elanormcinerney:

Adrienne Eisen | Making Scenes | Emily Books

slaughterhouse90210: “Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a...

emilygould — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:44:08 -0400

slaughterhouse90210:

“Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.”
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

What I've Learned from Empathy

ruthcurry — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:19:00 -0400

This essay is from the appendix of Arsenal Pulp Press’s reissue of Empathy, which is our April pick. (Buy)

by Sarah Schulman

The MacDowell Colony, August 15, 2005

I’m trying to remember when I first got interested in juxtaposition, which is the experience at the core of this novel: relations between ideas, word fragments, genres, lovers, and relational existence as a fallback position for people whose reality is not acknowledged. Homosexually, it probably began in my 1962 nursery school class. Our young teacher was getting married, and she organized us into a mass mock wedding. The four-year-olds had to couple up boy/girl, boy/ girl and march down the aisle. I refused. I said I would be the photographer, and ran around with an invisible camera, snapping nonexistent pictures. I existed, in that moment as a lesbian and an artist, relationally. There was no girlfriend and no apparatus, yet I survived as myself, a not-bride.

Artistically, Jean Genet and Joni Mitchell, who I adored all through high school, modeled the strength of unusual word relationships creating a third space of depth. In college it was Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They helped me grasp and romance the work of Patti Smith when I returned to New York. There was Robert Altman’s Nashville which I’ve seen fifteen times. It taught me the excitement of a story you can’t understand until you’ve finished it. Then, suddenly, you need to go back and read/see it again. In the early 1980s, I was a waitress at Leroy’s Restaurant, the only coffee shop in the still-industrial Tribeca. Meredith Monk lived across the street and she used to come in for breakfast. Meredith decided to do her new piece, Turtle Dreams (still available on CD) cabaret style, so she hired a bunch of us to serve drinks to the audience. I had never seen a work of art like this one before. I recall it as a hopeful, optimistic collection of syllables (my favorite song had the refrain “Wella Kalay, Wella Kalay”) accompanied by precise arm and leg movements similar to Charlie Chaplin’s factory gestures in Modern Times delivered with panache. Although this was a new language for me, after waitressing many performances, the ordered sounds crept into my heart. When my first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, was published by Naiad Press in 1984, an interviewer asked about my use of “pastiche.” I didn’t know what that word meant. I guess I had already learned postmodernism organically.

Sex also brought me fragments. A relationship with choreographer Susan Seizer (who I met in bed with a third party in 1979), introduced me to postmodern dance. I also had a simultaneous relationship with filmmaker Abigail Child, who introduced me to experimental film in an intense and intimate way. The lesbian culture of this era was very rich sexually, and as I re-read Empathy, I see evidence of many different kinds of sexual experiences I had with a wide range of women. The three-way in the opening pages is absolutely accurate. An alcoholic cowgirl (who I had sex with) said the words, “the subway makes speeches under our feet.” My girlfriend while I was writing this book (who I met on the subway), Debby Karpel, a singer, was the lovely office temp whose co-worker complained to her about a gay man sitting too close to him. “How would you like it if some butchy woman was in your face all night long?” Anna O.’s femininity was partially hers.

I was working, on a daily basis, interdisciplinarily with composers, dancers, filmmakers, choreographers, designers, performance artists. From 1979 to 1994, I was involved in fifteen collaborative shows as part of the Downtown Arts Movement located in the East Village. In 1986, Jim Hubbard and I founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now called Mix), so I spent many years watching gay artists express their realities far from the world of realism. There I found a deeper, truer story than anything available on television or in the movies. As the AIDS crisis crashed into our world, fragments became more and more the only authentic conveyor of lived experience.

Yet, in the late eighties, when I started to write People in Trouble (Dutton, 1990), I chose classic realism. I remember this process very clearly. I was embarking on what I thought would be a new kind of American literature: witness fiction. The AIDS crisis had been in full force since 1981, and had produced shocked, desperate, half-baked books by grasping, dying people, or shattered lovers of the dying anticipating their own inevitable demise. I was none of the above, and yet lived in the eye of the hurricane, and I wanted to write a book that would explain the disease in dynamic relationship to the political movement it spawned. Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts. The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

I had a complex moment to convey. I remember re-reading Zola’s Germinal, and realizing that my story, too, needed a flat surface texture to be understood. So I wrote clear, distinct sentences. Crafted a conventional narrative structure. I cleanly divided the novel into three characters’ individual points of view, neatly indicated by whichever name appeared at the top of each chapter. It was an exercise in restraint towards a larger goal. That novel did its job (for a lot more juicy information about the fate of People in Trouble see Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, Duke University Press, 1998), but I was very unsatisfied artistically. The book was effective in its moment, and I know that I made the only choice I could make. But by the time Empathy came around, I was exploding with impulse towards the mysteries that experimentation can express, which are often lost in the conventions of naturalism.

Now for the materialist side of this story.

I probably started writing Empathy in 1989, a good time for me professionally. I had had a great victory with my 1988 novel After Delores (Dutton), the first modern lesbian novel to be published by a mainstream press and gloriously received on its own terms in the New York Times. People in Trouble was also treated with respect and decency, and artistically I was feeling quite confident. So confident, in fact, that when my editor for both novels, Carole DeSanti, was temporarily fired from my publisher, Dutton, I was able to get in my contract for Empathy that she was to be hired on a freelance basis to edit the book.

The earliest piece of Empathy was a term paper I wrote for Professor Bert Cohler at the University of Chicago in 1976, where I used Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to show that I was a lesbian. He gave me an A-. It was a brave thing to do on my part, and an extraordinary act of kindness on his. Homosexuality, especially one’s own, was considered inappropriate classroom subject matter at that time and place. I had no openly gay teachers, only a handful of openly gay students on the entire campus, and a great books curriculum that included only one woman, Sappho. This was why many people of my generation who wanted to be out in their work left the academy. Many of those who stayed often had to do closeted dissertations or first books in order to get jobs and/or tenure, and then were able to come out in their scholarly endeavors. Ironically, that same semester, I took a course called “Images of Women in French Literature,” in which the female professor said that “whether a writer is a lesbian or not is as important as if she’s right-handed or left-handed.” I also had a course on “Freud and Literary Criticism” in which the professor said, “We all know that female students contribute nothing to a classroom situation,” and forbade us to write papers on feminism. Cohler’s decency was so unusual, and so enormously helpful in allowing me to become myself. I dropped out of that school and went to Hunter College to study with Audre Lorde. But thirty years later, I returned to the Chicago campus and actually saw Professor Cohler, now elderly and emeritus. I was able to tell him how much he had helped me, and thank him. He told me that he himself was now openly gay, and that his gay students now have much more freedom to discuss their truths in the classroom. He was concerned about their difficulties with relationships, and how much pain that causes them. I was moved again by his compassionate heart.

I suppose the original study for Empathy was my one and only published short story, “The Penis Story” (which is anthologized in Chloe Plus Olivia, edited by Lillian Faderman), in which a sexually seductive but withholding straight woman does so much psychic damage to a lesbian that she wakes up one morning with a penis. This puts her in high demand sexually with other women, but the way they make love is called “glancing.” The story was written in 1979, but rejected by literary magazines for years. In fact, I received rejection letters signed by Adrienne Rich for Sinister Wisdom, and Dorothy Allison for Conditions . It was eventually published by Susie Bright in on our backs, which was an odd trajectory for me because I’ve never been this supersexy or sexually performative person; that is not my way of being outrageous. This story just came a bit too early for the zeitgeist, three years before the infamous Barnard College Scholar and the Feminist Conference where the internal pornography debates exploded and fractured the community into warring factions for decades. I was very much on the outside of those battles, not identifying with either position. I’ve always been turned off by the various “sex radical” factions that have waxed and waned over the years. They often seemed rather grim, and weirdly repressed. We all have sex, after all.

I started writing this novel from a very deep place of authority within myself. I did not know what the book was about, I did not “know” what I was grappling with. I just really believed in myself and with this, my fifth novel, felt very comfortable writing. In fact, I was the freest I have ever been as a writer, in that I was able to write without needing to predetermine the script. The discovery was, literally, in the writing. To help the book I read transformative literature: two Metamorphoses are cited, those of Ovid and Kafka, who wrote “Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams,” and who gave me the existence of Herr K. I looked at Georgia O’Keefe (“A red mask. A red egg. A moonscape made of glass.” - which I used again in Rat Bohemia). Other influences I can see as I re-read: James Schuyler (“boxy trucks”) and Wilhelm Reich (“the basic function of all living creatures is to expand and contract”).

I did twelve drafts of Empathy. The book contains, I believe, eight different forms: screenplay, short story, play, recipe, personal ad, advertisements, term paper, poem (my first of only two). I did not realize that the collection of multiple forms was, itself, part of the statement of the novel about the state of lesbian existence. And I can honestly say that I did not know that the book was about the desire to exist until the tenth draft. I wrote for at least two years, just trusting myself. And then the revelation was unveiled. The “secret,” or narrative twist revealed near the end of the novel, was something I myself only learned on draft ten. Then I suddenly realized that I had been writing in a deeply truthful way, directly from my unconscious, facing issues that I was personally not ready to grapple with consciously. Only by giving myself enormous permission to not have clarity in the piece for so long, was the ultimate clarity able to be achieved.

I was very excited by the book. I felt that there was a new maturity of voice that could only have been realized as a consequence of having written so much already. At that point, with five novels, several plays, and many journalistic works, I probably had invented more lesbian characters than any writer in the history of the world, and had more experience with lesbian representation than any of my predecessors. I had a deep knowledge of the mechanics of that representation and I felt it was flourishing into an exciting new sophistication both literary and social. Pre-publication was interesting as well. The original title, Empathy, The Cheapest of Emotions had to be changed because the marketing department at Dutton felt that it sounded like a selfhelp book. The cover was my first computer-generated graphic, and I loved that. The blurbs started to come in, interesting comments from interesting people. Kate Millet called this stylization an “American thought sentence,” which I loved, not only because she correctly identified that third place between speech and feeling, but because she called my writing “American,” taking it out of the second-class position of being considered special interest. Fay Weldon sent in her blurb, “The lesbian novel comes of age.” I hoped that this revelation, of gender position as a state of mind, would begin a whole new discourse, an exciting conversation in which we would have some control of the ways we understood ourselves. I wanted formal authority. My dear friend Rachel Pollack, a novelist, tarot card master, and transsexual heroine, loved the book. And her praise meant so much to me. She particularly responded to the words “a lesbian trapped in a woman’s body” as both a statement of truth and a refutation of the reductionist phrase “woman trapped in a man’s body” that transsexuals had had to endure. But she also knew that it was a response, as well, to the provocative statement of genius Monique Wittig: “I am not a woman, I’m a lesbian.” The future seemed full of promise.

But.

The success of After Delores allowed my editor Carole to publish more lesbian novels, and she developed a significant list of good writers willing to engage lesbian content with integrity. Lesbian subjectivity was increasingly present in the mainstream book business, primarily due to Dutton, and occasional titles from St. Martin’s and a few other houses publishing such exciting novels as Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine , Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnny, plus British imports dominated by the work of Jeanette Winterson. But an unspoken, and I now believe unrecognized, discomfort with the normalization of lesbian life started to become expressed through marketing techniques that firmly, though surreptitiously, re-relegated these works to second-class status. The chain booksellers, like Barnes and Noble, began to dominate the market, and they instituted a “gay and lesbian” section in many of their branch stores. This section was never positioned at the front of the store with the bestsellers. It was usually on the fourth floor hidden behind the potted plants. What this meant in practical terms was that those of us who had the integrity to be out in our work found our books literarily yanked off of the “Fiction” shelves and hidden on the gay shelves, where only “gay” people wanting “gay” books would dare to tread. It was an instant undoing of all the progress we had made to be treated as full citizens and a natural, organic part of American intellectual life.

While community-based gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstores had always been the backbone of our literature, devoted to books published by independent presses, I had - at this point - been a mainstream author for years. I felt very strongly, and still do, that authentic lesbian literature should be represented at all levels of publishing, including taking its rightful place as a natural organic part of mainstream American intellectual life. The corporate lockdown went into overdrive just at the moment that this integration was beginning to take place. This positioning is essential for so many reasons, least of which is the right of writers of merit to not be excluded from financial, emotional, and intellectual development simply because they have the integrity to be out in their work. Second is the right of gay people to be in dialogic relationships with straights - where they read and identify with our work as we are asked to with theirs. And finally, that even at the height of the strength of the lesbian subculture, most gay people find out about gay things through the mainstream media.

In this crucial year, 1992, Dutton, and perhaps other publishers of gay male literature, hired gay people to market their gay books to other gay people. In other words, they created a two-tiered marketing system. When After Delores had been published, there was no gay substructure inside mainstream publishing, so the book was treated like a book. It was reviewed by a heterosexual man, Kinky Friedman, for the Times. At the time, Dutton didn’t even collect review clippings from gay newspapers. Now, with an iron-handed containment system starting to be put into place, gay books were increasingly reviewed by gay people. And reviewing publications clearly had unarticulated but lethal quota systems for how many lesbian books they would review. So that authors were competing against each other for review space, simply on the basis of being out in their work even when the books had absolutely nothing else in common. Gay authors were, in turn, often asked to review gay books with which they were not aesthetically compatible. The fact of being out in one’s work became the single most determining factor in how a woman’s career would be allowed to develop. Empathy was published in 1992. That same year, Dutton published a novel by an openly lesbian author, but the novel had no primary lesbian content. It was called Bastard Out of Carolina. And the two books were put on different marketing tiers. I was put on the newly created gay marketing track, sold only to other gay people. Bastard was treated like a regular book, one that straight people would be offered. An experienced book promoter, with four US tours and British, German, Dutch, and Japanese book tours under my belt, I was rather shocked to see the press list I received from the well-meaning gay Dutton publicist newly hired to sell gay books to gay people only. Almost all of the interviews were with gay venues. I had one straight radio interview, and the fellow asked me what it was like to be “a lesbian who doesn’t hate men.” When I called Carole, we discovered that that phrase had appeared on the Dutton press release. It was the advent of niche marketing, which basically guaranteed that the brief window of being treated like a human, when in fact I was actually just a lesbian, had come to an end.

I have to say honestly that in that moment, I did not exactly understand what was going on. I also had my own agenda which was not immediately thwarted by the permanent shift towards containment marketing. 1992 was also the year that myself and five other women founded the direct action movement, The Lesbian Avengers, an anarchist explosion that went from a few New Yorkers imagining parachuting into Whitney Houston’s wedding, to twenty-two chapters on four continents within two years, and then crashed and burned. (See My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, Routledge, 1994 for more information.) At that time, I was a particular kind of person. I believed in the Marxist dictum, “Each according to their ability, each according to their need.” Often, I was the one with the ability, and so I gave hugely and consistently, believing that if the day should come when I was the one with the need, it would be reciprocated. I did not yet understand the consequence of oppression on people’s emotional lives. And I also did not deeply accept that in many ways I am an exceptional person, able and willing to do things that others won’t do. This has been a very difficult lesson for me to learn. I am willing to be uncomfortable for a higher purpose, and that is not a capacity shared by many other people, which is a source of great pain to me. After all, it was the willingness to write in the discomfort of unknowing for two years that allowed this novel to come to be. But in 1992, this had not all been revealed, and so I decided according to my ability to use my Empathy book tour to recruit Lesbian Avenger chapters around the country. I requested a tour of all the gay bookstores in the US South. Actually, I requested the tour budget, and constructed the tour myself. I read from Empathy and tried to start Lesbian Avenger chapters in Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Huntsville, Greensboro, Raleigh/Durham, Austin, and a number of other locations through to Los Angeles and up to San Francisco. Some of these chapters took hold, others came to be through second starts some months later, and others didn’t take at all. But in the end, it was a very successful tour for the Avenger movement.

While the Avengers resonated with people’s needs and interests, the doors that I thought that Empathy would open about gender turned out to be entirely out of step with the historic moment. Instead, the zeitgeist was pointing in other directions. Judith Butler, someone who I like and respect, published Gender Trouble, which argued persuasively for gender as something presentational. My book tour of Germany coincided with hers, and every place I arrived, she had just departed. People kept asking in German accents, “But isn’t gender performative?” I found her followers to be sort of annoying. Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg also published significant books which extended the discussion of gender in the direction of body modification, dress, pronouns, and science, i.e. exteriority. The transsexual/transgender revolution was happening in a big way. Usually, when I would go on a book tour, I would ask audiences what lesbian books they loved. The previous year it had been Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan. Suddenly, every other dyke was reading Stone Butch Blues. The tide had turned in exactly the opposite direction from my own private revelations about the lesbian self. And the shift seemed permanent. Some years later, I heard Judith Halberstam speak at the Whitney Museum on her theory of “Female Masculinity.” I was very confused by her thesis, and raised my hand to ask, “Why do you say that butch is masculine?” I’d always experienced it as a highly feminine state. Everyone seemed to understand but me. The group conscience was going the other way. As Sun Ra said, “You’re on the right road but you’re going in the wrong direction.” In the subsequent decade, more women have decided to transition and become men through body modification. As Empathy expresses, I have never personally experienced any similarity between lesbians and men. To me, lesbians and men were on opposite ends of “the continuum.”

Even years later when I fell in love and experienced mutual sexual ecstasy and joy with a woman who had a transgendered identity, her maleness did not express itself in public presentation or body-modification. It was only in her soul. I gave her Empathy, but she never read it. Neither, apparently, did many other people. Empathy was my worst-selling book, the least reviewed (the Times ignored it), and the least translated (three foreign editions: Sheba, UK; Argument Verlag, Germany; Alfaguara, Spain). It has provoked the fewest Masters theses, doctoral dissertations, and chapters in academic books of any of my work. It is rarely taught. In short, it flopped.

But I love it. Empathy is my free, wild child, the book I wrote from my deepest most optimistic place with my greatest skill. And I am so grateful to Arsenal Pulp Press for rescuing it from the recycling bin. Maybe this time around, it will make more sense to someone other than me.

Today’s featured subscriber is the delightful UK-based...

emilygould — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:08:59 -0400

Today’s featured subscriber is the delightful UK-based Emily James. By the way, only 13 people named Emily subscribe to Emily Books, which seems low considering how many Emilies are in the general population. If you are an Emily, consider subscribing. These books are yours, too, not just mine.

EG: How did you find out about Emily Books?

EJ: I’ve always liked your writing and have been reading your blog for years - I read about it there.

EG: Why did you decide to subscribe?

EJ: A number of reasons, the main one being that I think what you’re doing is really important and I wanted to support it in whatever way I could. There’s also something nice about the community aspect to it. I’ve been a member of several failed book clubs (I’m always the strict one who gets cross when other people don’t finish the book) and it’s nice to know that other people are reading the same thing that I am, and I’ll be able to read about what they think. Finally, I think I first subscribed when you were a few books in and I was confident that the kinds of books you were choosing were to my taste, so I knew I was going to have something that I would look forward to reading every month - £100 a year isn’t a lot to ask for that. Oh - I also liked the name because I’m called Emily too and it meant I could get a tote bag with my name on it. I then unfortunately left that in a hotel room in India in November, but that’s another story.

EG: Thank you, this is very gratifying! To be fair now please tell me some non Emily books you have liked lately,

EJ: Non-Emily books I’ve read this year include Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (which I read as I loved Lightning Rods) and Light Years by James Salter. They were all brilliant in their own way but I wouldn’t pick any of them out as a favourite - I read a lot but am very picky and it’s rare that I find something I really love!

EG: Where do you live and what do you do for work?

EJ: I live in London and I work for a talent agency, in the comedians and presenters department. My job is mainly to work with the young up-and-coming comedians, and to go to gigs a couple of times a week to search for new talent.

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