The Color of Night

The Color of Night - Madison Smartt Bell

Mae: a lone wolf, who got raped by her brother as early as 11. Her relationship with her mom and parents in general is non-existent. She seems to scorn her mother. She is in a sort of gang: the people, the One; they steal, they kill and do piggedly-diddedly, while on drugs. She is obsessed with 9/11 and seems to want to understand the destruction. She nearly escapes with her life several times (for example she avoids the raid that takes in the One). Her purpose is to tell her story. 

Terrell: Mae's sadistic brother who uses Indian lore to torment his sister and rape her. He impregnates Mary Alice in high school, marries her, has two kids and goes off to the army. He comes back with honors, but eventually, he ends up being shot by the SWAT. he has already killed his whole family by that time.

Laurel: She is Mae's lover, though she drifts off with other people such as D, Ned, O... She is Mae's accomplice. In the end, she has a job as a secretary but she is dying of ovarian cancer; maybe due to her past life. 

O: seems to a modern day Orpheus and his Eurydice is Eerie. He is always writing songs for her, and after her death he doesn't stop, which leads to his death by Mae and Laurel. He is beautiful, and he has a stint with Laurel in Malibu which leads to her having a child.

Ariadne: O and Laurel's daughter. She is in her 30s by the end of the book, and is very pretty.

Eerie: she is O's girlfriend and he seems serious about her; he is upset when she sleeps with someone else, and when she dies in a not so innocent accident in a motel, he is crushed. She is of an unimaginable beauty, unapproachable.

D: The boss of the operation, who enjoys debasing others, making them sleep with anyone (such as Ned), making them kill people. His eyes capture Mae, but she knows she and everyone in the group is just a pawn in his twisted scheme. He ends up being arrested.

Mary Alice: Naive schoolgirl who ends up being Terrel's wife. He kills her and the two kids after he goes crazy.

Mother Thing: only seems to be referred to by Mae as a woman who doesn't care much of anything, smokes and doesn't do much; she makes Mae feel dirty as if everything were her fault.

Constant references to Greek mythology; Mae always refers to other people as mortals. She brings up the myths of Persephone, Acteon, Selene.....

Serial Killing in America After 9/11 - David Schmid

The serial killer and terrorist roles merged with each other. Before 9/11, the serial killer was predominant in American culture, but the creation of the terrorist allowed America to see itself as a victim only--> America and the Other. The serial killer, as demonstrated by rise of movie genre franchise, offers a perverse comfort for people to avoid thinking about implications of terrorism. Freud suggested the popularity of serial killer movies is a coping method for people to deal with their own death via fiction. 9/11 was first considered an act of terrorism and then an act of war. It justifies the offensive on terrorism and the countries being attacked as a result. By using the term of terrorism and making it a product of a diseased mind, it allows America to ignore that terrorism may be provoked by some sort of legitimate reason to the Arab world. The DC sniper case made confusion between serial killer and terrorist even bigger. Led to creation of term "domestic terrorism". Baton rouge murder cases show mentality regarding the two terms, how it's ritualistic and falls back into pre-determined categories in people's minds. Despite shift in culture after 9/11 of serial killer as being a tribute of Americana it led the people to think that other culture is embodied by violence, per Zizek's statement of "the other being a distilled version of our own essence". The last statement in the article summarizes the whole issue: "Serial Killers are Us but only in a way that reinforces the Gap between Us and Them."

• 

David Lynch

Pervert in the Pulpit: The Puritanical Impulse in the Films of David Lynch” - Johnson Jeff

He explores the concept of innate depravity; a Zoroastrian notion of good and evil. His villains are drawn from archetypes of American fiction. Spirit of reform and inverse Protestantism; focus on individual battle. Guilt and sin are main preoccupation of American writers. Lynch uses idea of American Gothic: nostalgia, irony and cliche. Lynch uses form of Calvinism; Romanticism where Man has a dark relationship with the world. Artistic intensity in Lynch's world, but there is a Manichean ideal of two opposing worlds of good and evil. Simple structural codification which critics have a hard time analyzing; either they get too hung up on imagery and aesthetic quality, or the moralization of the work. Some critics argue Lynch infused his works with Sincerity and sentimentality, that moralizing was just a bypass. Lynch executes Abrahamic justice against villains in works. He is anti-intellectual, cleanliness is an image/ideal of a corrective for love and strife. His films disrupt narrative linear form, but he uses familiar material to challenge viewer. His characters who escape traps of logic must still resist assimilating with a culture who restrains their identity. His characters both crave and resist assimilation.


http://www.theopedia.com/Manicheanism
Because Manicheanism is a faith that teaches dualism, in modern English the word "manichean" has come to mean dualistic, presenting or viewing things in a "black and white" fashion.

"David Lynch Keeps His Head" - David Foster Wallace

Ambiguity in his movies about morality and identity is purposeful. That is what makes viewers so uncomfortable.

Blue Velvet

Recyclopedia

Recyclopedia - Harryette Mullen

"Trimmings"

Objects



"S*PeRM**K*T"

Foods



"Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T" - Deborah Mix

Relationship between Stein and Mullen; how Mullen got inspired by Stein: prose/poetry form, the woman space and domestic space/consumer space. Mullen used critiques of white femininity from Stein to make her own critiques about womanhood and consumerism in all shapes. She perpetuated and brought to life African American style of experimentalism in post-modernism and modernism. Mullen's poem "A Petticoat" is compared to the "Olympia" painting by Manet. Makes a point about showing how white femininity is superior to black femininity which hovers in the background with "bright white colors", while the white nude woman stares at the viewer. Mullen also strengthens role of ink in her poem by using flimsy adjectives to describe the white woman. She gives more concrete power to the woman made of "ink". She teases the social and literary conventions at the time. Arguments about Stein being racist despite her claims that she isn't. (she supposedly subjugates black women to white writing). But Stein through her very identity as a Jew and a lesbian makes that issue even more complicated. Mullen tries to deconstruct stereotyped and racist words. Some of her poems follow several threads denoting fusion and conflicts between white and black culture: "one thread of the poem follows traditional American signifiers", " But in another thread, jingoistic colors edge into other kinds of coloring", "And a third thread traces again the (dis)connections between black women and traditional femininity", "And a third thread traces again the (dis)connections between black women and traditional femininity." Makes an argument that Mullen is trimming away the scraps of Stein's style and content, and using the scraps of marginalization to make them central in her poems. She also uses trimming offs of history, letting complex relationships between cultures come to light. Mullen explores "contradictory pressures on women" in several of her poems; she also uses words and themes laden with contradictory connotations, making readers think on the role of feminity as a whole, not only by race. Also "Mullen provides an illustration of this conflation of violence and femininity" in poems like the pocketbook. In S*PeRM**K*T, Mullen uses material and sexual desire and pleasure and pain to show the commodity of the marketplace and the place of the woman in it. Then the article explores topics of advertising and consumer appeal: the image of consuming the 'perfect' food to become perfect; the image of the desirable white baby on products. Yet she also hints at less desirable images like goo . SHe unveils the culture's obsession with "surface order and control" while showing forces that break that control. The control is directed to people of race and women. Talks about the contradictory nature of how Western culture views sex---> commodity of women and grocery store allusion. Women need to be sanitized,men don't. Women's sexuality is focused on cleanliness and home, men's sexuality is not contained. The article also mentions the people who refuse to consume: anorexics and their marketed image in the media yet there are starving people in the world. The consumerism also alludes to white and black relations under slavery.

Venus

Venus -Susan Lori Parks

First scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_KCCd_GO4Y

Disappearance of identity : Venus is rarely called by her name Saartje. Always either as the Girl, or the Venus of Hottentot.

Critics: they say that Parks softened version of true events; instead of having an addiction to chocolate Venus became an alcoholic. Also, her greed for money, “being her own accomplice” to her condition is implied. Instead of going to Paris, she was exhibited in a shed. Greg Miller tries to show how Parks’ works show a theatre of potentiality, rather than of derivative being. In minor literature, everything is political.

Critics and style: She doesn’t simply talk about colonialism. View of Parks’ works are “collective assemblage” or minor language where her language is more meant to convey, sensations, coexistence of view points than anything else. Point out examples of  the Chorus, the Negro Resurrectionist, the Venus and the Showman….Depending on who is saying the lines, a different meaning is given through the context.

Style of Parks: Usually her plays are abstract, but Venus is a little more real based ex: notes read out loud. "Rep & Rev," short for "repetition and revision," is a term Parks uses to

describe a style in which characters repeat phrases throughout a given play. She uses jazz as inspiration.

Different characters are played by same actors; through time the characters come back together. She enjoys writing about holes; of cramped space; wherever Venus goes, it’s in a confined space; even when she is with the doctor, that space is spooky to him. Also, holes in a more physical sense: her butthole, her vagina is alluded to so often by the people regarding her.

How Parks wrote the play as a mirror; although the narrative itself is in chronological order, the scenes are in backward order. Time is convoluted. The future was written before the past…

The theatre of Suzan-Lori Parks suggests new "lines of escape," new ways of  addressing the destructive desires of colonialism and its heirs.”

Complexity of oppressor/oppressed: multi-meaning in her plays including this one. There is no clear cut villain and hero. “double function of writing”. How the audience as well is complicit in the events that took place; they took objectify Venus and desire her. Colonialism capitalism through past and present. Venus is the desired object yet, she is “dominated by gaps, holes”.

She blurs the line between spectators: there are spectators in the court, at the freak show, at the Academy.

For all the mention of love (Venus, goddess of love, and the doctor’s insistent “I love her”, there is an absence of love. “The Baron Docteur's version of "love" proves merely another gesture of

oppression, a perverse fann of desire that injects death into love's hole and so hastens the Venus' decline.” There is space teeming with lust and desire, but no love. The desire is multi-faceted like all else: capitalist desire, fascist desire, bureaucratic desire….

Colonialism shows how it perverts Love: anything pertaining to love is destroyed eventually; the pregnancies, the liaison with the doctor. Sex is linked with death: “masturbation/maceration/mastication - wherein desire and death intermingle.” Colonial depersonalization: she is referred by the doctor briefly as a girl, but in his notes, she becomes a creature, a thing, her body verbally dissected for all to see. Despite the fact that she has talent, the doctor, to reassert his male and white power, dumbs her down to the chorus. Mother Showman did it too. Even a little glimmer of humanity needs to be made up by depersonalization.

Reason for the use of chocolate: Chocolate functions within the play as a drug, as a symbolic “profession of love”. → refer back to historic event where postcards were sent with coffee, depicting languor, refreshment. The chocolate also shows the decline of the world via colonialism: how the chocolate was lightened, how the “nipple of Venus” was enslaved,

[Backstory of the beginning of the play: Venus’s temptation and degradation; the Negro Resurrectionist, the 9 Wonders, the trial where Venus herself lets Mother Showman off the hook for money and hope. The love affair with the doctor coupled with opportunism; the blackmailing, the sickness, the death. ]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE2lIZwMx2M

The Gurlesque

Pop Corpse - Lara Glenum

 Allusion to original mermaid myth : her suffering is trivialized and yet becomes the emblem of stuff we as a society judge important, but is artifice. "ornament and excrement". The mermaid is a half breed , all she can do is live poorly, and die. She presents the mermaid as being utterly unsexy, as being a cut off of a human body. She wishes she were human so she can have sex. XXX seems to be the daughter of the Sea and is depicted in a very negative way. The Seawitch sends obscene memos to the mermaid. She meets the Smear, who is a very handsome human man; he and the mermaid seem to fool around. Later he doesn't recognize her.
Vision Machines are a sort of obscene theater made to gain money. The King and Queen of the Sea choose the gender of their kids for political reasons. Tragedy of mermaids having breasts but no vaginas. The Disaster implies loss of real sexuality? XXX wants her own sex instead of being blank. Before the Royal Disaster Party she cuts herself a snatch and dreams about it. Her parents sentence her to the Slice Ward; her mutilating is well known throughout the kingdom. At the party she sees the Smear again and no one really likes him; he is as sick as she is. Then XXX goes to the rehab Slice Ward.She talks about her body, how she cuts it, how other people look at it, and its deformities. She claims dead girls are the best. She gets the treatment of the Gate of Heaven and then gets out of rehab. She goes to the Sea Witch and asks for a real crotch. She goes see the Jizzler who says he can give her one, unmermaid her, but she won't have nerve endings. A little unwillingly, she agrees. As she's walking on her prosthetic legs, she moves too much and everything comes off. It's all superficial. She talks to her father, who reserves an orgy for her, more suitable to her desires he feels are the best. XXX makes a deal with the Seawitch who says that as long as the Smear is interested in her, she can keep human form. As soon as he loses interest, she is iced; she loses her life. Her impressions of humans on land are grotesque. It is illegal for mermaids to be on land, and to make matters worse she goes to the Meat Brothel. She is taken in by the police and put in a re-education camp for the sexually deviant. The Smear, unbeknownst to her is also held in the same camp. The Orphaned Nihilist Society is used to put them on the "right track" but in reality, they turn them into freak shows, sex slaves. The Smear's crime was that he was dating a hermaphrodite.The Smear talks with the guard (the latter which presents XXX to him) and talks about the Meadow, which is a rarity considering the degradation of the natural world. The Smear states he is "cockdead" incapable of really feeling desire, despite the guard's attempt to pimp out XXX to him. She ends up on the sea floor with her tail cut off, watching seal porn. The Sea Witch finds her and gives her back her tail. She asks her to kill the Smear, and she can keep her life and her snatch. XXX goes to the Orphaned Nihilist Society where the Smear is, putting on an operetta. XXX goes up to the Smear and kisses him, uncaring that she is interrupting the televised show. Then the theatre is attacked. The Smear asks XXX to meer him at his castle. Her friends are concerned that she wants him, because the rumors say he's a porn freak and a sadist. They consummate their 'love' and XXX grows a real crotch and his dick stays up. They go off together to indulge in art and crime.

Lara Glenum reading : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fqP20pA3QE





Lara Glenum Welcome to the Gurlesque The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics

It's a feminine genre which takes a leaf from the burlesque genre. "Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends." In performances, gender was purposefully mocked and subverted. Anything absurd could happen. The Gurlesque is a performance of self, there is no true identity. "Notes on ‘Camp’” writes, “the essence of Camp is the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” The Gurlesque makes fun of the Natural which is in itself contradictory: such as how women are associated with Nature but are also inclined toward artificial stuff. The kitsch element in those types of writings are meant to dominate stylistically. The kitsch or "The Cute" is destructive as much as it is ridiculous. The very sappiness and cuddliness of the subject implies helplessness, lack of power and invites harsher powers to take control of it. Cuteness if deformity. Gurlesque poetry features writing and characters that are always changing; no fixed identity, no fixed gender, no fixed desire. The Gurlesque also under its quest for equal female rights in society and politics is actually a quest for sexual satisfaction. Women put their sexual pleasures at the center of their poetry as well. "Gurlesque poetry thus investigates the collision/collusion of fantasy and ethics at the core of Western cultural battles." The Gurlesque takes its distinct flair from many different previous genres for ex: in the way of deconstructing the male gaze, of using implicit violence to make a point, of blurring the line between genders, the monster as cultural object, the abject... etc The Gurlesque is even inspired by Dickinson!

Selections from Macular Hole - Cathy Wagner

My what to replace my favorite  trick; wanting to please but fighting against it, against God's injunction

I'm Total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake ; she gives power to a reader but it is not taken; talks about power and life, choices ; the necessity of the individual
The Divinity of Man: talks about the mundane stuff we humans do, then goes into discourse of why certain drugs were used in certain decades; the answer is to bolster the human spirit.
I was at Congress with myself: talks about being in control of one's life; making crucial decisions like in Congress
I Walked in the House: talks about how the narrator did everything she could, both detrimental and beneficial to her to get the house; it's about money. She pays for everything; she wants to be outside the 'exchange' yet there still will be a transaction
Kill so we feel Safe and Comfortable: killing is directly related to sex. It is asked for.
Freely Esposa: Dating advice about attracting yet repelling man. themes of image to other people through the house and its cleanliness.
Wrought in Filigree and wrought in Granite: describes the ships that come into the forbidding sea ; have a different facet to them at any time of the day. they are women, and swim ashore. The young boy is wrought in filigree, he is scared and is trying to escape a barbed fence. contrast between sexes.
Scary Ballad: girl is lured into taking cold medicine through a pie she eats. No one knows what really happened or who did it.
Song: The sick talented boy cannot ask for compliments but he wants them. but when the question is asked, it is harmful: different imagery of rotting and harmful processes.
A Bash and I wanna look Good: The narrator feels ugly, and compares herself to another person who is pretty ; makes it clear that if that person were ugly, she would use her as a fool.
San Francisco Ballad: The narrator has a problem and doesn't know what to do with he/she sees. The song lyrics try to convey comfort. Narrator mentions sleep and then things will be fine.
An hendy hap: seems to talk about a bad marriage; how the wife views the husband as a tyrant, but when she is in her space it is fine. The end mentions how it's useless to blame someone for it.
There was a place in the brain, a red knot: talks about the past catching up to narrator and she births a big child. She asks questions to 'the Delver' about life
Big bang: like a strange sort of Frankenstein animal that is reanimated, reaches its peak and reforms to rot again.
Who admitted you: animosity towards life and mother; questions who let her in life.
Song: Scary Several light: talks about pregnancy and a certain Wagner character. mentions the fear and progress of pregnancy; like a lullaby.
Perfect Love: talks about birth and how we as humans come from 'bags'. she seems to resent baby's presence, her time is no longer hers. she writes a poem to feel better. she mentions exhausting herself for him is not perfect love.
Inmost: talks about relationship between the skin and the outside world and vice-versa. Talks about inner reaction to pregnancy which is natural, and outer reaction to pregnancy which is surprise.
For you everywhere Phoebus the fields of song are laid out: talks about how a baby got poked; but it was still alive, and she helped it, fed it, with his head in a glass jar. Not clear whether he's real or not.
Imitating: narrator hopes she is kind and good, but her jealousy and hate is inimitable. She is alone.
I harnessed my powers, I didn't have time not to burn myself (she mentions how she messed up), she dances and mentions how happiness is energy and capability. narrator realizes she is imitating someone in that she is making movements other people do. A jealousy fit attacks her and goes away. she mentions how god is a questionnaire but she finds the answer: herself and a man. She is greedy for something, and digs a hole in herself. She is hungry for something and frightened, and she tries to stay awake. I think she is hungry for information.

Obscene Cut-ups

Kathy Acker - Blood and Guts in High School

Janey and her father are sleeping together but when he starts sleeping with Sally she is afraid he will leave her. She talks to Bill, who he is treating poorly, and she introduces identity crisis. Bill tells her it's because John is trying to find out who he is without her.
She talks with John and he tells her he needs a break/ aside with Mexican tradition about maleness.
John wants to sleep with Janey and yet tells her he feels very strongly for Sally. She refuses his suggestions to dine with him. Bill advises her to get out of his way because he's trying to hurt her. / divergent flashback to the ruins in Merida, where great art is done with great destruction. Father and daughter go to dinner together and they talk about Sally, which he regrets and fires her jealousy. At home, he explains to her  why he hates her now and she realizes he staged the situation with Sally to break up with her.
She goes to the USA to treat her pelvic inflammatory disease and he tells her he wants her to go away. he doesn't tell her it's because she terrorizes him.
He sends her to New York because he's sick of her. But he tells her he'll still keep paying stuff for her. When Janey goes to school she sleeps with as many boys as possible to forget her loneliness and gets pregnant. she gets an abortion and is very cold about it. She is very analytical about the process and the light it sheds on modern women. She talks about how she is so desperate for love and is willing to sleep as much as she needs despite the risk of pregnancy and the pain of it. She describes drugs, pain of second illegal abortion, and how she ends up stealing and wrecking stores. She takes up residence in the hotel where her father and Sally are staying, and she lets men abuse her sexually and physically. She knows how far she's fallen. Then she works in  a hippy bakery where she mentions how money is the omnipresent fact of American life/ aside of transaction in a bakery where customers are obnoxious and claim salespeople don't care for them. The salespeople seem to find their job boring. She is rebuked by a customer that she is acting like a hypocrite by not enjoying the job, and she alienates everyone around her. Her father stops sending her money and she meets Tommy who only wants to use her. She loves him though and states loving him turns her back to crime. They kidnap children, wreak havoc in every way possible, very violently. The sex gets out of control. Episode in rock club where there's pandemonium and then Sally is there, acting dirty. There is a car accident and everyone dies except for Janey and Monkey.
Aside with bear and beaver and monster. Ironically the monster is scared of the bear and he successfully avoids bear the first time. In bear's second attempt to come in, there is an interesting point mentioned by the monster when he thinks the bear is a bill collector; mentions injustice of society and profiteering people. The monster's pet Fritzy is caught by the bear and she bargains her way to freedom in exchange for the house. The ploy works, but the bear doesn't end up in the house.He turns into an elephant. The bear has visions of blackness, of people who have failed in some way in society. He makes a song about life and not caring about the world and its troubles.
Then the story goes back to Janey and the people in the area; all kinds of people and how they regard each other. Janey mentions in her diary how she is sleeping with this 80 year old writer and how their sex is violent. She wants sex yet she doesn't know what she really wants. At one point two hoods break into her apartment and beat her and carry her off to become a whore.
Mr. Linker talks about how a healthy body leads to a healthy mind; reference back to history. To him, culture comes from disease; poverty is beneficial and detrimental to the human race. He is Persian and became a lobotomist, ironic, considering he's brainwashing Janey to be a whore. Janey talks in her diary about the messed up society she lives in; she references Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter and how wildness and non conventional women are cast away by society. Janey mentions how she wanted to be a good woman like Hester Prynne, but her father cast her off, just like Hester was cast away. Janey mentions how teaching is intellectual but terrible at the same time, and how people who scream the most at outcasts are immoral themselves.
Then we go to Persian poems Janey invents of herself and offers very interesting cut ups of her life, of the Persian city, of the prison she's in. Through vocabulary words, through verbs and adverbs she describes herself, her body, and how people see her.
Janey goes back to talking about Hester in The Scarlet Letter and her child Pearl; how the child is a social outcast because she's wild and doesn't stick to the physical and psychic roads of society. She mentions the people who keep those roads intact, how being a couple automatically make you respected, how the world is hell. The end finishes with a plea to a person she badly wants, she doesn't know how to satisfy and who left her hanging. No doubt she's talking about her father.


William Burroughs - The Cut up Method



method in which the surrealists used computer generated poems in composition; many examples through the years where authors have used different computer generating methods to produce text, then was later edited by a human hand.

Tristan Tzara first introduced the idea by proposing to do poem on the spot by pulling words from  a hat (1920s)
Minutes to Go done by Brion Gysin with cut up journal articles. Argues that any art is spontaneity, and cut ups are the very symbols of spontaneity. Cut ups allow poems to be accessible to anyone. poems can be made 'alive' again with cut ups.Argues also that writing is in fact cut ups, like any art: cut ups of ideas, words...



Christina Miletti - Violent Acts, Volatile Words, Kathy Acker's Terrorist Aesthetics



culture of terrorism demonstrated by Stockhausen ; terrorism is related to art.... Acker uses terrorist prose style in her work. her power lies in the language and how it's used. she uses tactics of guerilla warfare in her language in order to change concepts in society. Acker plagiarizes and embodies the concept of literary terrorism; she considers the rational mind has caused many shockwaves in the course of history and so she wants to challenge it. the very term terrorism has changed in our culture: it used to mean analyzing the Western world with different eyes; since 9/11 it means violence and intolerance to the Western world. she uses power, language and sexuality in order to make a statement.  her bombs in literature consist in spurring subjects to action. Terrorism is a term used to protect as well as disenfranchise. Acker loves exploring fluid definition of terrorism: who it used against, how it's used, what the goal is.... in her works she examines different goals. She uses society biases (particularly Arabs linked to terrorism) to twist and break them in her literary challenges. Her prose is performative. she views the reader as a desirer and her language must be visceral in order to overcome clutter of grammar, syntax, and patriarchal influence of writing. she uses concept of theater of cruelty in order to aggressively interact with the reader. "stupid writing" is a terrorist form of writing in order to connect with reader on basic level. she explores link between prohibition and power; like sex and how it's exploited through its taboo-ness. Acker plays with gender; she considers gender to be a purely biological thing; she even subverts biology by using characters as 'constructs' or cyborgs. the issue of whether the shock of Acker's texts will stop working on the reader is not an issue: it will prove that she succeeded. but due to society's prohibitive nature, it is highly unlikely Acker's works will stop disturbing on some levels.

Poems by Ai, Dickey and Bidart/ Analysis of Ai's James Dean

The Sheep Child - JAMES L. DICKEY

Young boys curious to explore and discover anything (even couple with!) , elements of nature; museum in Atlanta with this half creature that isn't quite a sheep. creepy turn in the poem where the boys themselves might be sheeps; relics of memories, like the sheep. Are they safe, are the sheep? The sheep is anthropomorphized and starts talking: about his mother who carries him inspired from another world, she experiences love. The sheep's eyes are more than human, he is like a portal between the natural world and the world of men;he is half sheep half man. He eats milk and dies. Though he is now dead and preserved in his dusty father's house, his presence and memory lives on in boys' memories; is he incarnation of wisdom, of suffering of life until they marry.

"In Dickey’s case, examining the dirty side of sexuality reveals that the deep root of all such encounters is the urge to connect and create, and that earthly immortality will always have a necessary hitch in its inexorable gait."

Almost Human reading: This is a poem in woodcuts, American Sign language loosely based on James Dickey's "Sheep Child". The half-human/half-sheep speaks of its conception,birth, ecstatic vision and death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB1-JOBcxF4

Ellen West - Frank Bidart

Ellen loves sweets, but wants to be the typical thin elegant woman. The docs tell her it's impossible but she doesn't care. Her husband married her " as meat". Scornful tone in that. She says that being a girl is torture because of the beauty implications. Now she's 32 and anorexic, using laxatives, looks like a skeleton. Different scene to where the woman is at a restaurant alone (she's alienated herself from other people because of the food). She sees a man and woman; the woman is very pretty, the image she wants to be, and the man is also very handsome. She feels disgust as she realizes they're a couple; probably from jealousy of the relationship and also from their physique. Also horror at the fact that they're feeding each other. Another scene where she wants to "defeat" Nature; aging, weight. In the hospital where she gets treated she writes poems to forget, but eve that fails. She becomes friend with thin female patient (longing to be what she isn't). Then we skip to Callas, a singer who had  a loud strong voice and big body; how she deteriorated, lost weight and lost her voice. (tapeworm of her soul). Narrator muses on why Callas decided to lose weight and changer her voice;to better her art? To avoid society's demands? Patient is discharged from hospital. She knows her fear of food os childish but she is a prisoner of her hunger. Odd scene on the train where the man sees her looking down at the orange peel but not taking it. Embodiment of temptation? She scorns how everyone on the train is hiding their flaws despite "normal" bodies. Mentions how she disappointed husband by not killing an ideal in her suicide letter. She's like the example of people at the height of their prime before dying. She kills herself.

Herbert White

 crazy man who killed a little girl and regularly goes out into the woods to piss and masturbate on her. When he killed her, he remembers how funny it was, hitting her. Yet in retrospect, just like the pissing and jacking off, he thinks somebody else must have done it. Flashback to when he visited father at a motel; insight into separation/divorce of parents; then Herbert describes seeing the little girl, picking her up in his truck and killing her, then raping her dead body. He buried her in the motel garden. He explains how he wants to feel things, he believes in fate. Believes that the motel was there for him. Then there is a flash of lucidity as he refers to "the bastard that hurt a little girl". Childhood reminiscence of intercourse with a goat, as he orgasms the goat dies, and the next day, he comes back again to masturbate on the corpse. Very bitter resentment towards father as he hangs around with young wife's kids, and it inspires crazy Herbert to drive away and pick up a girl he sees walking out of the movies. The end of the poem drives in the narrator's realization that HE is the one who really did kill and rape the girl. He hopes he goes to hell, for he can't stand seeing who he is anymore.....

The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Race/Mixed Media Performances in Ai’s “James Dean” - Catherine Irwin

Ai bio: she constructed an identity out of herself; was considered black yet wasn't and she rejected/was rejected by/in that group. She constructed herself a Japanese ID, hence the name. In monologue about James Dean she toys with media identity about this dead white hetero man; how different portrayals of the identity can abjectify a person. Critical mimesis: where other cultures imitate deliberately the white hetero-normative culture. "In other words, technology’s role in the development of an identity can be revealed by exposing through art what has been made abject by a systematic or mediated mode of enframing." In her monologue about James Dean she uses vivid cinematic language to describe his body, his death and how the media keep on wanting to film him after death. Allegoric body in ruins: description of James Dean as a lover, yet is decapitated; castration symbolism, perhaps of the white hetero-normative identity? Different identities explored here: straight James Dean, a bisexual James Dean, and a mixed race James Dean." She abjectifies image of white male as being desirable and by extension the white female as being sexually desirable as well. Disidentification in order to discover herself and avoid the 1990s media blitz of hiding mixed race. "reversed ventriloquism".  Ai's method is like “the stage” to be “a laboratory in which to construct new, nongendered identities." BUT Ai seems aware that because of the nature of the stage (must always keep up the act), and the nature of people, this disidentification she attirubtes to James Dean won't make people more open-minded overnight.

Ai poems

Nothing But Color: slicing open Etsuko ; memories of loving someone, and eating a bit of flesh (masochism?). Failed suicide attempt. Nothing really mattered; false but consuming passion of love and death. Yukio Mishima killed himself; Ai immortalized the moment.

Lesson Lesson: about this little boy who is more perceptive than he should be (sun isn't green in drawings). Very blatant allusion to wood and erection; out in the field like his daddy, with wood in his pants and wanting to drive it home.

Jericho: Girl is pregnant. Lover puts on black mask. She starts eating peppermint he brings; obviously a sexual side to it. SHe adresses her lover like he is afraid of something, apologetic of something and that's why he brings the sweets. SHe tells him to dare to make it to the top.

The Mortician's Twelve Year old son: twelve year old fantasizing about this woman in a long green dress whose breasts were covered. When she dies, he sees her corpse under the sheets and he executes his fantasy --> touching/kissing her nipples. Necrophilia in a way.

The German Army Russia, 1943: peasant talks about the hunger that no one can feed; about drilling his way to a goal, although he knows he probably won't make it. He talks about the Russians burning their crops instead of feeding their army. Hitler beckons him but he is gone.

Talking to his reflection in a Shallow Pond: Narrator lives on chrysanthemum and nightshade; envies the other that can breathe. He wanted himself to die, then he wanted himself to suffer. He drops a rock into his reflection and wishes he would sink. He starts to rescue himself, then pulls back. Then he realizes that they're the same and he likes it, likes that he can die without dying. Sadomasochism.

Go: Narrator talks about lover/killer (Ted Kennedy). he survived as she drowned and bears no trace of her.Everyone wants to defend him, and the narrator wants recognition of her role in the scheme. He dove for a woman the media misinterpreted and didn't recognize freedom when it stared him in the face. Narrator talks about lover realizing he's wasted his life, sometimes recognizing it, sometimes not. She taunts him in the end of poem: if he'd died, he'd have garnered fame along with other 2 brothers. She puts him on stage with a strip-tease with his "jelly rolls". 


The Resurrection of Elvis Presley: Elvis talks about how he used to practice dance movies, lube his hair like a Black, and aspire to be Tony Curtis . He describes how he goes through life and goes through everyone's hands until the Colonel grabs him and he follows like a dog. He lets him win because he promised resurrection. Conflict between what the Colonel wants and Papa wants. Colonel wants him to be quiet and Papa wants him to enjoy life while it's there. Elvis wants to listen to the Colonel but he remembers that in the end he is a country boy who likes singing, and dancing in the dark.

Last Seen: Alfred Hitcock doesn't die. He is locked out of Paradise. Narrator talks irreverentially about him ; how he was boring and all that mattered to him was the next scene, the next film and publicity. Creation likened to depiction of necrophilia.  Ends on questioning note.