Frankenstein vs. the World

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“I don’t think ‘curate’ or ‘curation’ are the right words for editing CHICAGO. I edited it. I did soliciting of manuscripts, selecting of work, layout, typing, collating, mailing. ‘Curator’ is a pukey word suggesting someone in an expensive suit with a chunky amber necklace; I think of myself in a state of late pregnancy in one of my two wearable garments nonetheless walking about the page-strewn room collating. Please PLEASE let me be the editor, you know like Harold Ross with the The New Yorker. Look up ‘curator’ in the dictionary; everything about it is awful.” — Alice Notley

Tags: alice notley.

Tags: daniel johnston, jeff mangum.

Sunday, October 16th is National Feral Cat Day. Observe the occasion in style by participating in the Teal Nail Project, which is asking people to paint their nails teal for the day. “Your manicure just might inspire others to get involved.” Details and list of cruelty-free polishes at Teal Cat Project.

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Tags: bernadette mayer, mimeo, poetry project newsletter.

The fifth issue of Kyle Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham’s fantastic MIMEO MIMEO is out this week, & available over at Small Press Distribution. I am particularly excited to see James Sullivan’s essay on Ed Budowski’s long-lost The Gallery Upstairs Press. Other features include a special by Paul Blackburn, interviews with Lyn Hejinian and Larry Fagin, an essay on Alice Notley’s Chicago, etc. etc. A formidable & spirited bunch.

Tags: Ed Budowski, james sullivan, jed birmingham, kyle schlesinger, mimeo mimeo.

Tags: joanne kyger, poetry project newsletter.

Tags: steve jonas.

Maxi Kim has written a fantastic review of Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs over at HTMLGIANT. Maxi’s double-review (which also favorably discusses Sara Marcus’s history of Riot Grrrl, Girls to the Front) contains an incisive argument about the way that the “belligerent” (love this term) origins of local art spaces and music scenes are often nullified in histories via a lazy veneer of academification:

the problem with many texts on the history of punk music is the degree to which certain authors tend to overestimate the influence and importance of theory, both on the development of punk and its relation to other para-utopian currents. Academic texts like Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) and Dave W.’s The End of Music (1978) have a tendency to highlight and play up the avant-garde connections that bands like The Sex Pistols had to situationist theory, while simultaneously downplaying or totally ignoring the belligerent and non-intellectual origins of punk . . . Given Kraus’ affinity for Dick Hebdige and Sylvere Lotringer, it would’ve been easy to excuse Kraus had she overlooked Janet Kim’s work in favor of a more theoretical approach to LA’s subculture. Luckily for us, Kraus sticks to the facts even when those facts seem to contradict the explicit aims of Tiny Creatures . . . [T]he degree of intellectual honesty with which [Kraus writes] about [her] subject matters from a warts-and-all position is instructive . . . Throughout Where Art Belongs [Kraus] generously assumes that the reader understands that while the cultural projects [she is] writing about situated themselves in opposition to America’s celebrity culture and consumer capitalism, they also emerged out of consumer societies based on such modes of ideology and thus do not entirely escape the logic of celebrity.

Tags: chris kraus, maxi kim.