posted by Heather McShane

I have been involved in a number of collaborative projects recently and have surprised myself in the process. For example, I sang in the video below, which is something especially surprising if you know how shy and quiet I can be at times.

The song, the video, are in response to a poem by Laura Schell who wrote a poem in response to a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. I like this response begetting response begetting response begetting—

So here is Laura’s poem, followed by my video (which, I warn, you might want to watch only once):

The Travelers
by Laura Schell

They keep their promises in a jelly jar.
It rocks in the glove box of their rusty car.
The tires swell into the tar of the road,
They haven’t gone far.

Two who are changing.
Two who have yet to live their day,
But are not sure of when to start
And what they are going to pay.

And praying . . .
Praying, with eyes shut and fingers crossed,
They grow accustomed to the smells their upholstery has arrayed
of library books and gum and trash and Windex, soda
cans, plastic and mold.

And the video:

posted by Caroline Picard

Last Thursday the Green Lantern went off to the Northeast. We landed in Boston in order to do a reading at Whitehause Family Records in Jamaica Plain on Friday night.

Nate ended up playing acoustic in the beginning of the evening. I read a little something from the Gazette, Chris played a set, as did Luke and then Devin King read the response he’d written about the Gazette; the same one he read at the Whistler a few months ago. Some of the photos are kind of dark, but hopefully you’ll get a sense for the ambiance of the place. There seem to be a bunch of folks who live there; the house itself is large and leggy with numerous door to other rooms which, from the glimpses supplied, seem to boast their own largess. The people there were really nice, though we spent the most time with Kate and Brian. Otherwise, housemates appeared to enter the front door, come in the living room, spend some time watching out show, and then leave quietly–in what direction, I’ve no idea.

I really liked thinking about how the Northeastern architecture might influence alternative exhibit/art spaces–namely because they seem so undeniably domestic. Even the apartments I happened upon during my trip felt more like mini houses inside of larger houses. In any case. Whitehouse Family Records was decorated with years and years of detritus, art project and collective inspiration. There were Jimi Hendrix flags in the windows, paintings dedicated to the Beatles. There was a chandelier decorated with drift wood and horns and glass beads. An orchestral noise-machine composed of similar materials stood in the corner. We sat on a carpet in the living room, lights dimmed, and listened. It was great.

As all this was taking place, I was also installing a show in Providence, at AS220. That meant that every day, Devin and I drove out to Rhode Island to install the show, “Isolated Fictions.” “Isolated Fictions” is a group show featuring the work of Deb Sokolow, Jason Dunda and, in this manifestation, Rebecca Grady. As well, of course, as the Gazette. Neal Walsh was of great help–he had just opened up a small room in the AS22o’s project space; that room is to be dedicated to print projects. Thus it was a good match. In addition to helping us with the installation process, he also brought us to the Atheneum Member’s Library in Providence, where we got to see an original copy of the Gazette.

This library is awesome and feels totally haunted in that way that old places filled with old books and old wood feel haunted. The library was allegedly built in 1828, at the same time that the state built its first prison. The library was built with the intention to educated new immigrants who came to the region for work. It was believed that if the state provided the illusion of power (via education) the emerging lower/working class would not revolt. In the event that they did revolt, Rhode Island also built a prison.

Of additional note is the card catalogue: at a certain point in the 1900’s, a woman went through the library by hand, copying down library cards for all of the books, by hand. In that elegant, spidery script of our forefathers. Her index cards are still prevalent.

This is Providence at Night: On the Night of the Opening

The Main AS220 Space:

Our Show at the Project Space:

The Academie Française

Publishers Weekly recently announced their Best Books Of 2009 list. Of their top ten, chosen by editorial staff, no books written by women were included. Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW confidently admitted that they’re “not the most politically correct” choices. This statement comes in a year in which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker.

“The absence made me nearly speechless.” said writer Cate Marvin, cofounder of the newly launched national literary organization WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts), which, since August, has attracted close to 5400 members on their Facebook web page, including many major and emerging women writers. “It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.”

WILLA’s other cofounder, Erin Belieu, Director Of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, asked, “So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for  ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—writers and readers–who don’t feel good about it at all.”

PW also did a Top 100 list and, of the authors included, only 29 were women. The WILLA Advisory Board is in the process of putting together a list titled “Great Books Published By Women In 2009.” This will be posted to the organization’s Facebook page and website. A WILLA Wiki has also been started for people to share their nominations for Great Books By Women in 2009. Press release to follow.

WILLA was founded to bring increased attention to women’s literary accomplishments and to question the American literary establishment’s historical slow-footedness in recognizing and rewarding women writer’s achievements. WILLA is about to launch their website and is in the process of planning their first national conference to be held next year.

(Note: until recently, WILLA went under the acronym WILA, with one “L.” If you’re interested in the organization, please Google WILA with one “L” to see background on how this group was originally formed.)

For more information contact:

Erin Belieu

ebelieu@fsu.edu

Cate Marvin

catemarvin@gmail.com

Jac Jemc sells books at Women & Children First.  Her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2012.  In the meantime, she has work that will soon be out in Alice Blue, Barrelhouse, Front Porch, Pank and The Rome Review.  She is the poetry editor of decomP and a fiction reader for Our Stories. Mostly though, she blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.

Following her 30 minute reading, Jac will take questions from the audience.

As always, the event will be recorded and published on-line for your repeated listening pleasure on iTunes and at www.theparlorreads.com

All readings take place at 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor

For more information, please visit www.theparlorreads.com or contact theparlorreads@gmail.com

The Parlor is a monthly reading series sponsored by Bad At Sports Podcast (www.badatsports.com).

A few days ago I received the following correspondence with regards to a fantasy I’ve been having with more and more frequency for an “art motel”—an abandoned roadside motel that has been converted into an artist’s residency site (rip up the parking lot and put in a vegetable garden)—from a lawyer friend of mine currently in her last year of school at The University of Oregon.  Her name is Jilian Clearman.  I feel it sums up in an eloquent manner the general sense of pervasive anxiety accompanying the particular phase of human devolution that’s been in the air lately, as well as offering some useful advice.  In any case, for your reading pleasure:

“I want to reiterate how enthusiastic I am about the art motel idea.  In part because it sounds like a wonderful creative scene and a worthwhile experiment in community, and also because I want everyone I love to make it comfortably through the bad shit that’s going to happen sometime between 2012 and 2020.  I’m not talking about the Mayan calendar end of the world stuff — I don’t discount that, but it’s not why I’m worried.  I’m talking about peak oil and accelerating climate change.  I can tell you in more detail what I think is going to happen and why.  I can recommend things I’ve read by climate scientists and environmental lawyers that have convinced me.  I don’t think anyone knows exactly what’s going to happen, though.  In my opinion the best case scenario involves a lot of ordinary, middle class people waiting in line for charity and government rations for a while until our food system readjusts to the new price of oil.  The worst involves a Mad Max-style total breakdown of law and order, possibly lasting a long time.  Here’s the take-home: stay out of major cities and establish a reliable food source.  I’m dead serious about this.  I think a year’s worth of stored food and the means to grow more is a good goal to work toward.  And you may want to think about an alternative power source, or at least a way to cook properly without gas or electricity.  And you’ll need a gun.  I’m buying a shotgun when I get to Wisconsin.  Northern California looks like it’s going to continue to be a pretty easy climate, so that’s a good place for you guys to settle.  I know that this sounds a little crazy, but it’s not some hippie survivalist fantasy I’m entertaining myself with.  Maybe it won’t be all that bad, or maybe it will be very bad, but either way we are in for some kind of rough transition, when the way we’ve been living finally becomes unsustainable in an immediate rather than an abstract way.

Take a moment to consider the lot of an environmental lawyer at this stage — to understand these issues (and to understand the pitifully slow and inadequate means that our system provides for trying to address them) is to understand that we are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  There’s genuine debate within the community about mitigation versus adaptation — whether it’s useless to try and stop climate change at this point and we should put our energy toward trying to protect the most vulnerable people from the worst of the bad shit that’s already starting, shit that’s too far along to stop at this point.  And there’s the constant temptation to give up and build a little solar-powered compound in the mountains and take care of yourself and your loved ones.  Currently I’m sort of trying to do both.  It makes me wish I was doing this work ten years ago, though.  Or even five.  There was still time then.

Anyway, enough of that.  I’ve made my point.”

Thanks Jil.

Posted by Lily

Last Sunday, I wrote a book, a short book, but it helps. And before I wrote it, this poem came to me in the night—

I can’t sleep because
I’m in love, having
only just learned how
to write. The shad-
ows move across
the walls, blink
branches.

And I’ve begun another book, a collection of encounters with so-called strangers. Here are some possible inclusions in the book—

A stranger said “beaten and robbed” and then asked me for money. I pointed across the street to the fire department, but the stranger didn’t go.

A stranger complained to me that the bus was traveling slowly. I said something like, “The movement of the bus makes me sleepy.”

gracefully, albeit unwittingly contributed by Catherine Borders

Stolen from here: http://eidetictraces.wordpress.com/

Sometimes I guest blog on Nurturing Narratives. This is my latest.

As of right now, historians believe that Halloween (shape-shifted from All Hallows Evening) is the step-child of Samhain, a Celtic festival, which roughly translates to “summer’s end”, held at the end of the harvest season. But, as with most celebrations of the harvest, Samhain also honors the deceased members of the community. It is believed that this festival of the dead was carried over to North America during the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, and that the present day Halloween, the traditions of trick or treating, bobbing for apples, and spooky costumes were all remnants of those darker, and more superstitious, times.

With that in mind, I thought the Brothers Grimm’s terrifying Hansel and Gretel was the story to look at this month!

Hansel and Gretel combines several important and spooky motifs: the wicked step-mother, the evil witch, the abandonment of children, the edible house, the tricking of the witch, and the triumph over evil.

During the times of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, fairy tales were much, much darker than they are today. Now, because they are so frightening, some parents won’t even consider telling a tale from the Brothers Grimm.

But sometimes a good scare is exactly what a child wants. Though unlike Halloween, the Brothers Grimm deliver a moral lesson, one that every child must learn, andHansel and Gretel may help the child prepare for it along the way.

In the beginning, Hansel and Gretel’s family “had very little to bite or sup, and once, when there was great dearth in the land, [their father] could not even gain the daily bread.” Much to the father’s chagrin, the step-mother (which was actually the real mother in a much older version!) tells him that, in order to save themselves, they must abandon the children out in the woods.

According to Bruno Bettleheim (whose favorite fairy tale happens to be Hansel andGretel), the Mother represents the source of all food to the children which is why they still want to return home after being deserted. This psychological interpretation is about dependence, in fact, Bettleheim says that before “a child has the courage to embark on the voyage of finding himself, of becoming an independent person through meeting the world, he can develop initiative only in trying to return to passivity, to secure for himself eternally dependent gratification.” (The Uses of Enchantment)

But, regression and denial will not get poor Hansel and Gretel anywhere, they must overcome their primitive desires to return to their Mother, the womb, or to a time when they were completely taken care of and did not have existential dilemmas of their own that they had to solve.

Stranded in the woods, when the children come upon a house, albeit a house made out of candy, they immediately and without thinking of the house as shelter, eat the house, satisfying their uncontrollable hunger.

“So Hansel reached up and broke off a bit of the roof, just to see how it tasted, and Gretel stood by the window and gnawed at it. Then they heard a thin voice from inside,”

When the witch asks them who is eating at her house (in a voice that could be misconstrued as the children’s consciences), they answer that it is the wind, knowing full well that they are stealing, and worse, eating this witch out of house and home, something their step-mother feared, leading to their abandonment.

Such unrestrained greediness cannot lead to anything good, especially in the morally structured world of fairy tales.

At first the witch is kind, “she took them each by the hand, and led them into her little house. And there, they found a good meal laid out, of milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. After that she showed them two little white beds, and Hansel and Gretel laid themselves down on them, and thought they were in heaven.”

Just as the children gobbled up the gingerbread house, the witch is equally determined to gobble them up!

The witch’s kindness, and then inevitable transformation, are symbolic for the inadequacies and betrayal of the Mother.

When a child is first born the Mother completely takes care of him, but even then, the Mother cannot possibly satisfy all of the child’s needs like she once did before the child was born. At the moment of birth the separation between Mother and child begins. As the child ages, the Mother no longer serves the child unequivocally, but begins to focus more of her energy on herself. For the child, this leads to rage and frustration with the Mother, as well as feelings of abandonment.

For the child reading Hansel and Gretel they are understanding everything on a symbolic level. Meaning, that in some way, they process all of this.

It is important that the first time Hansel and Gretel are abandoned Hansel saves them, but it is Gretel that pushes the witch into the oven. Hansel and Gretel is one of the few tales that stresses the importance of siblings cooperating and rescuing each other because of their combined efforts. The children move from depending on their parents, which will only lead them to a life of regression, to depending on each other, on people their own age. (This last step is key to understanding Roald Dahl’s children’s fiction.)

In order to stand to their full height as separate individuals, children must overcome their desire to return to infancy. They must also learn to face their fears, their anxieties, and their misgivings, as embodied in the human-like appearance of the witch. In Hansel and Gretel, both the step-mother and the witch must die for the children to transcend their immature dependence.

- Written by Cathy Borders.  Posted by Lily

Last night at Café Lapon, a Finnish restaurant in the 17th Arrondisement, somewhere a few blocks from Place de Clichy, a woman asked me if we celebrate All Saint’s Day in America. I replied that, yes, in a way, but it’s called Halloween. The woman replid, “Well, that’s not really the same thing, is it.” Embued with one or two or several glasses of wine, I took up arms, “It’s the same basic idea, I told her. The same principal.” And being French of course, she was hell bent on making me look like a fool or at least contradicting me endlessly until I relinquished in exhaustion (which of course I had no intention of doing of course) and instead launched into a diatribe about how completely misguided it is to try to conceive American traditions along the same axis as European Traditions.

We don’t have traditions, I said, we have SIMULACRA of traditions. We have greeting cards with jack-o-lanterns. We have plastic child sized broomsticks at K-Mart. We have poisoned fun-sized Mars bars. We have the apocalypse. You… you Europeans, you could never understand Halloween.

- written and posted by Lily

Green Lantern Press Foreign Correspondent

OMNIA VANITAS

the newest hottest thing in cliterature and literary erotica is now available. 

This edition’s theme:  The Invisible Corset.  Featuring works by Catherine Borders, Marissa Ayala, Meg Nafziger, Lily Robert-Foley, kristen cerda, Jane Agnes Quinn, Scott Hess, Chandra Smith, Rebecca Serle, Caroline Picard, Katherin Cox, Michael Sidman, SarahS, Circadies, Matthew Dexter, Brian Burton and Ryan Block.  Compiled, edited and fabricated by Catherine Borders and Marissa Ayala. 

Omnia Vanitas is available for purchase on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Corset-Omnia-Vanitas-Review/dp/B002T9TQ0K/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256374260&sr=8-8

Or visit the new, astoundingly beautiful website (designed by Isaiah Dufort):   http://www.omniavanitasreview.com/

Omnia Vanitas is also accepting submissions for forthcoming editions. 

Contact the Omnia Vanitas editing team at:   Omnia.Vanitas.Review@gmail.com

Mexico City February 2009

Kelly and I lay on the floor surrounded by books.

“What question should we ask next?”  Kelly asked, aware of the absurdity of her question, as though asking a question can only ever be preceded and followed by an infinite loop of questions about the question itself:  “What is the question?”  “What was the question?”  “What is the answer to the question?”  “What does the question mean?”

We had been asking questions about God, and existence, the nature of nature, the mind-body connection, problems of philosophical methodology, reflection, and language.  But our limbs had fallen slowly to the ground like petals.  I had not found the post office.  We were becoming younger.

“Should I go back to the Marxist?”

“No…”

“No, I’m not asking you, I’m answering your question.”

She opened a book.

“Shall we ask Freud?  Or perhaps Pessoa?”

“Pessoa,”  I answered.

She leafed through the book

“To think about God is to disobey God,/Since God wanted us not to know him,/Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us.”

“What does that mean?”  Kelly and myself elegantly and imperceptibly becoming of one mind, a woman talking or thinking to herself.

“It means you are conflicted.  That you are caught between two impossible halves of a division—like a Chinese finger trap.  You cannot know God without betraying God, but you cannot know not to know God without first knowing him.  Therefore you are in constant betrayal.  There is no option that does not lead to betrayal.”

“Did I not know that already?”

“You can’t ask Pessoa these things.  You want answers, you must go to someone who gives answers.”

“Who, like God?”

Kelly made a chiasmic facial gesture, raising her eyebrows and lowering, cocking her chin, her face splitting, breaking open, apart, like the earth, over time.  An expression that indicates both possibility and direction.

She reached over to my copy of the English bible laid out next to the Spanish one on the coffee table amidst my drafts of translation.

“Dear God, please give this poor young woman the strength to make a choice in this most infuriating dilemma.  Please guide her by giving her quick and easy answers so that she will not have to take responsibility for her own decisions.”

I grabbed the Spanish version off the table and threw it at her mouth, where her words had come out.  She raised the English version just in time to block her face and the Spanish one collided with it mid-air, and fell to the floor, open faced, it’s onion skin pages curling and bending.  Kelly laughing, the books scattered around us like the rests of a Bacchanal.

“Old Testament or New Testament?”

“Who cares, god is God, right?”  Jubilation.

“And Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments.”

“What is that supposed to mean.?”

“No idea.  Joshua sounds like a dick, though. Try the Spanish version.”

“El cadaver de Jezabel sera como un abono que se esparce y ni siquiera se podra decir: “Esta es Jezebal.”

“You opened to the part about Jezebel?  Unbelievable.”

“Let’s see…”  I rifled through my papers.  “The cadaver of Jezebel will be like a dispersed interest payment and not even the most insignificant shit will be able to say, ‘this credit card statement is Jezebal’”

“Your Spanish is really crap, you know.  How are you going to translate the bible if you don’t even speak Spanish?”

“Shut up, I’m working on it.  Besides, it’s the language of God I’m translating, and God speaks directly to me.”

“You’re fucked up, you know?”

“What’s it to you?  What does the New Standard Revised have?”

“Oh here it is, The English version says, ‘the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.”

“What are yout talking about?  It’s practically the same as my translation.”

“Joshua and Jezebal sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”

“Oh shut up.  I’m asking Bolano.”

“Bolano!”

“Bolano!  Our saviour!”

“Oh shit, I opened to Cesaria Tinajera’s poem.”

“You know, sometimes I think 2666 is actually based on the bible.  Like the Satanic Verses is based on the Koran.  The Satanic Verses of Mexico.”

“There is no doubt that Mexico needs its copy of the Satanic Verses.  There is also no doubt that we must do more to expose the tyranny of biblical dissemination in Mexico.  That it was the most heinous of the weapons of the Conquest, and remains to this day the principal instrument of oppression, never ceases to astound me.”

“Perhaps Bolano was trying to do that.”

“Perhaps… but Bolano has his own dialectic—or his own dialogue, I suppose.  Don’t you think?  He would never construct such a simple allegory without destabilizing its structures of correspondance…”

“To think about God is to disobey God.”

“Don’t think about God!”

“Ah!  I’m thining about him, I’m thinking about him!”

“Sinner!  Sinner!”

And at that I lunged across the room and began to wrestle with Kelly the two of us sisters, locked in a linguistic battle over the truth of God.  Our arms moving through each other’s, around each other’s bodys, our hands holding onto each other’s hair, our  mouths in flight, two angels, the wandering interpretation of texts.

“Oh what’s this?  This book of fairy tales opened all by itself!  Let’s see what it says”

They unraveled and laid flat on their bellies on the cold tile floor.

“Close your eyes and point.”

“ ‘Go West in a week,’”

“Now that’s some advice I can follow.”

- transcribed (loosely based on reality) and posted by Lily.