I’D LIKE TO DESCRIBE AN ORDINARY ENCOUNTER WITH GENDER. Which is fiction. I walk into a hardware store and I ask where the spray bottles are. He directs me. He-seeming person. I grab one and walk back to the register. I shove it toward him and he goes “three-oh-mmph.” I don’t know what the mmph is. I say what. He says if you give me four cents (as I hand him a five) I can give you back two dollars. I know how it works I explain. He hands me the two dollars and then says thank you ma’am. Now
Now I would like to acknowledge that I also feel a responsibility to write for puppets. I have five puppets in my life, they are not ten feet from me in two small cardboard boxes on my desk. They deserve better.
TRISTRAM SHANDY sailed into eighteenth-century literary history alongside such bawdy picaresques as Tom Jones. But unlike the rest Laurence Sterne’s creation is an antinovel: It starts and stops, has entire pages that aren’t even text—blank or solid black or marbled or filled with lines and swirls that indicate the wayward shapes of the narrative (at such moments it seems like what Sterne really is is a concrete poet). On the occasions when the author doesn’t want you to know what naughty thing he’s saying (though he quit being a minister to write, Sterne was still a modest man) there are
Nineteen years ago, at the age of twenty-six, Qiu Miaojin, a much-lauded Taiwanese novelist, killed herself. At the time of her death she was living in Paris—leading a lively and queer intellectual life very much like the narrator of this 161-page epistolary novel. The sensational quality (and here I mean the sensations one feels when encountering a book by an author who killed herself upon its completion) of its content in relation to its seeming parallels with Qiu Miaojin’s life is an inextricable part of the reading. The book is an entirely postmodern act. It is as if Goethe killed
One of the things I’ve always noticed about movies about writers is that nobody knows what writing actually looks like. Usually the author is shown failing to write, balling up pieces of paper and throwing them in the wastebasket. I remember a movie about Lillian Hellman where she actually threw her typewriter out the window. I think language is the problem. Since our tools are the same ones most people use (language, a computer), there’s a suspicion we might be doing nothing (except maybe being crazy—remember Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining), and then a book appears like a secret
As Ernesto Cardenal asserts in Incantations, poetry has a wider latitude for power in a culture where it is understood to be “the first speech.” It proposes joyfully that what’s read this afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club shares a magical link to this book’s poems by illiterate women in Chiapas. The urgency of such a connection (for them and for us) is what animates for me this inaccrochable collection of poems by Mayan women.
