Beef up your art history skills. (via @misskatewatson)
Hemingway was a spy for the KGB?
Garfield Minus Garfield (highlighted by our own Rick Moody).
Dolphin inspired personal submarines: for when you have both way too much money and freetime.
A collection of completely awesome optical illusions. Why? Why not!
American scholar arrested in Iran.
A few days ago, Morning Coffee dispenser Dan Weiss mentioned Medieval POC, a blog examining the appearance of people of color in European art history.
The blog’s creator, Malisha Dewalt, recently participated in a roundtable chat with other art historians and medievalists for NPR’s Code Switch.
Their conversation is eye-opening, ranging from the way art textbooks crop paintings to exclude images of black people to common portrayals of Biblical figures as black.
In light of Plush, Marilyn Minter’s new book of pubic hair photography, Vulture looks back on the history of the female bush in Western art. Like the women who owned them, pubes through the ages were nearly invisible:
Of course other artists had painted female pubic mounds aplenty, but these works were strictly pornographic. Indeed, what was most shocking about the Goya, the Courbet, and the Modigliani was their eliding high and low art. A chick’s pubic hair will do that to an otherwise respectable painting.
The future of the Warburg Institute, one of London’s most influential and strangest libraries, is examined at length in this week’s New Yorker. Adam Gopnik covers the history of the center, from its founding in pre-Nazi Germany through the height of its influence on the world of art history, and attempts to articulate the particular properties of Warburg, the philosophy and aesthetics and modes of scholarship, that make it unique. After a recent victory in court granted Warburg a reprieve from being swallowed by the University of London, Gopnik seems hopeful that the library will adapt to a new century and preserve what advocate Brooke Palmieri describes as its signature investment in “the methodology of serendipity.”
BOMB Magazine continues its Oral History project: a collection of oral biographies about New York City’s African-American artists. This week, Alteronce Gumby’s subject is Stanley Whitley:
Stanley told me once, “There are many art histories … and many art worlds.” The more I talked to him about his work and influences, the more I found that statement to be true. Every artist creates their own history, their lineage through other artists and practices that lead them to this “thing” called art, and it takes place in their studios, their world. It takes more than just a BFA or MFA degree to arrive at a place in one’s practice where subject, material, and image project a new idea and perspective of the world around us.
I was completely blown away when I first read Karrie Higgins’s essay, “Strange Flowers,” which was recently listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2015. “Strange Flowers” merges various kinds of texts—transcripts, childhood drawings, photographs, even texts that seem imbued with magic—in order to talk about her strong connection to her brother, who molested her throughout her childhood. The story unfolds in the documenting of evidence; by presenting the facts, Karrie allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. The resulting texts evoke, without being sentimental. They challenge, perplex, sadden, frustrate, and ache, without telling you to feel any particular way. In a world where narratives recounting trauma are flattened into stories about resilience and healing in order fit into a particular market-niche, Karrie’s work reminds us that our experience of trauma is deeply complex, and that chronicling our stories is not just about finding personal redemption. It’s about making sense of what’s left of the evidence of the things that happen to us, and it’s about waiting for the universe to reveal itself, or tapping into the magic that allows that world to be cracked open.
***
The Rumpus: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today about your work. I’ve been such a big fan since I read “Strange Flowers,” which was recently listed as a notable essay in Best American 2015.
Karrie Higgins: Thank you for inviting me and for the kind words.
Rumpus: Of course—one of the features of your work that I was especially interested in is the way you fuse different genres. Could you tell me a little bit about your writing process?
Higgins: Sometimes it is hard for me to separate my writing process from my lived experience because so much of what I do is immersive research or experiment. My process is rooted in place, so it starts with psychogeography. I take long walks, make maps, investigate histories of blocks, and treat graffiti as prophecy. I let cities convert me. I mean, that’s the reality of the body: it is not a ‘black box.’ Place changes you epigenetically, alchemically, atmospherically, and imaginatively—and likewise, you change place, too. Even epigenetically, if you consider the city grid a genetic code.
I’ve been writing about that a lot lately for Salt Lake City, as city planners attempt to alter the grid to make it friendlier to biking and walking: these are epigenetic changes to the holy grid. Or how Utah built that Union Pacific Bridge across the Great Salt Lake and wound up dividing it into two distinct ecosystems. That’s an epigenetic change.
I research compulsively and constantly, especially scientific studies. I’ve always been this way, so I don’t know why I started it, but it is part of my process. My brain is like a scientific curiosity cabinet, and it gets into the writing because I can’t help but connect things. I subject myself to experiments, which might seem performative because they arise out of the writing process, but they are also sincere and true. I learned to make inks, age them, and forge handwriting, which I did to get inside the mind of this Mormon forger I am writing about, Mark Hofmann. Except it started to change me. The first thing I wrote in my homemade iron gall was: What would I forge if I could never get caught? The answer is my brother’s confession. I wrote myself into a forger!
I took a lie detector because Hofmann did. I underwent hypnosis because he was a master at self-hypnosis.
I’ve learned ancient magic because Joseph Smith was into ancient magic. I call them experiments, but they are really compulsions. Even as a little girl, I did that. I took blood samples from dead birds in the yard or friends when they got hurt and looked at them under my toy microscope. I keep little investigation notebooks with rough notes, maps, diagrams, magic spells, experiments, etc. It takes a very long for them to start to feel like I’m “onto something,” and that’s when an essay begins. When I’m actually in process on writing, I obsess over structure and tend to rearrange the little fragments over and over. I work in total and complete chaos, often running in circles with new experiments and research. I’m always down the rabbit hole. No outlines. Outlines are my nemesis; my brain literally cannot process them. I know when the structure is right because… it’s right. Basically, my process is also my life. They’re not separable
Rumpus: I get that sense when I read your work—that it is a visceral experience, in addition to an intellectual one.
Higgins: That’s a good way to put it. I don’t try to explain it or in any way make meaning out of it for the audience. I try to convey what it’s like to process the world this way.
Rumpus: Have you always approached writing in this way?
Higgins: Definitely not. Well, maybe that’s not true. I used to write mostly poetry, and an undergrad poetry workshop at the University of Iowa ganged up on me and told me I was an essayist, not a poet. It intrigued me, so I turned my poems into essays. That was my process at first. I remember when I first started doing this forensic process. It was my second creative nonfiction essay that I ever felt like I “finished,” so I guess I did always do it. I was writing about a woman who went missing when I stumbled across the art of forensic facial reconstruction, and I realized: This is what I’m doing. I’m trying to put flesh on this skull, and I’ve got so little to go on. I became obsessed with the idea of writing as a forensic art—a liminal epistemology between science and art, evidence and speculation. I started to build my process around recreating this internal adversarial process on the page. It felt like what happens in criminal cases, and I wanted to eliminate the logic and just let that process do what it can do.
I modeled it on Karen T. Taylor’s textbook Forensic Art and Illustration, and to this day, she is one of my biggest influences. I took her forensic facial reconstruction class recently, this time with a more magical approach to it.
Rumpus: How is it a more magical approach?
Higgins: Well, when I first started writing “forensically,” I thought forensic science was going to be THE way for me to understand the world and convey what was happening inside my head. This constant push-pull and intense desire to expose reasonable doubt—a kind of confidence in doubt as the only viable narrative. When I got to Utah and started embracing the more magical elements of Mormonism, I started to think differently about forensics. I began to conflate belief and knowledge, 
the way the Mormons do with their concept of “testimony.” I started to think of forensics alchemically. During my sculpture class, I kept thinking, “I am doing what Ezekiel did in the Valley of the Dry Bones. I am giving flesh to bones again.” When it was over, I said to my husband, “Do you know what I got out of that? Empathy for God.” And I don’t even know if I believe in God, but that’s what I felt. I mean, this isn’t exactly a “scientific” approach to forensics. And that’s the space where I am working now, with the ancient scientists and alchemists, who aren’t so different from me: I am trying to create a magical forensics. The only difference is, the science is more advanced, and magic is not accepted as “real” in our time.
I guess what I’m saying is, I have co-opted the machinery of forensics for magical purposes. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, it feels true to how I experience the world.
Rumpus: It sounds like your approach is very self-taught and built of more organic experiences in the world. Did you ever think about getting an MFA, or do you resist more “traditional” approaches to writing?
Higgins: I have an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, from Antioch Los Angeles, and while I got some pushback in workshops about my experiences as an epileptic, I had the most supportive mentors. David Ulin let me go nuts with my process and didn’t mind when I submitted revisions over and over. If anything, he pushed me harder to let my freak flag fly. He is very much part of the DNA of my work the way the best teachers are, and even to this day, I will ask myself, “Would this disappoint David Ulin?” If the answer is yes: TRY AGAIN.
On the same token, I don’t understand traditional forms, at least not from a process standpoint. I “get” what they are doing, but my brain doesn’t think that way. I can write those kinds of essays, but they don’t excite me or fulfill me.
The way I approach my work very much comes out of my art historical background—Fluxus, the Situationists, Abstract Expressionists, De Stijl, Malevich. All of those movements influence me because I don’t tend to see writing as “writing.” I tend to see it as an arena for “performance” of a process. So to me, when I am writing, I am not trying to fit the work into a traditional, textual form so much as I am trying to make the text perform something. The forensic process works there, too, because all forensic processes are a type of performance—an agreed-upon process for settling on “truth,” even though it’s highly questionable at best. I have a background in criminology studies as well, so I draw from that. I wouldn’t say I resist more traditional approaches to writing, though to me, they feel alien and strange, which I think goes to my weird neurology, too.
I think the performance aspect also accounts for why I use so many visuals. I don’t tend to think, “How can I write this?” I tend to think, “How can I get this into evidence?” Like in court. I want the immediacy and not too much logic connecting things. Let the readers be a kind of jury.
Rumpus: I get that sense from your work as well—you allow for a lot of ambiguity, so that the reader can “make sense” of the evidence and also read into and interpret the text in myriad ways. I was especially interested in this as a way to approach writing about trauma.
Higgins: I live for ambiguity. That’s what makes a story come alive. I am always suspicious of certainty… Like HOW can it be so clear to you? And then I have a million questions. Because nothing is ever clear to me. I think it makes people uncomfortable when I convey that about traumatic experiences because it’s not the “accepted” narrative, but there it is.
Rumpus: One thing I’m wary about for trauma narratives in particular is how mainstream media sometimes picks them up as PSAs, which obviously kind of flattens the experience quite a bit.
Higgins: Oh god, yes.
Rumpus: Do you think there is a single “accepted” narrative for trauma?
Higgins: I don’t know if there is a single “accepted” narrative, but I am learning there is a single “acceptable” way to process it: writing as catharsis and healing. I not only resist it, but I find it totally alien to my experience. For me, it’s neither cathartic nor healing, and I don’t want it to be. I am not in this to be fixed.
Rumpus: Do you hope that readers gain something from reading your work? Or does it simply feel like a necessary task?
Higgins: I actually feel nothing when I am writing. My brain is like a wind tunnel, empty … nothing. The only exception is when I’m manic and I think I’m picking up signals from Saturn or something. Then I’m hyper-emotional, but I consider it my “alter ego.” I spend a lot time “translating” her wild ramblings into semi-coherent things. Because those manic states are memories. They are experiences. They are part of me… But the writing gets done in the wind tunnel. I write because it’s compulsive. I can’t help it. It’s how I research, too: totally compulsive. I don’t know what I hope to get out of it except that I know it’s the only way I have ever been able to make sense of anything.
Rumpus: So this comes back to the idea of logic in your work. Presenting evidence.
Higgins: Exactly. I am always down some rabbit hole or another of my alter-ego mind, finding these strange connections from the compulsive research cabinet in my brain. Looking for evidence.
I pretty much treat every experience as a crime scene.
Rumpus: I know something that you’ve been working hard to raise awareness about is the need for greater inclusivity in the writing world—for those who aren’t neurotypical or who have a disability. Your unique way of seeing the world really seems so foundational in your ability to create amazing art. Why do you feel there is push back to embracing these different ways of seeing and experiencing? Do you think it’s possible that the culture will change?
Higgins: I think it comes down to a couple of things. First, people with a more “typical” neurology may not even realize their biases. For example, I wrote a piece about the history of one block in Salt Lake City, and I wrote it as prophecy, so all these magical things were happening. It was completely fact-checkable in the old newspapers, every single detail. And yet, I connected things in a way that seemed “magical” or “prophetic.” Editors suggested I seek psychiatric help. Finally, one accepted it.
Those first editors probably didn’t realize their own bias in assuming insanity. They probably thought, “WTF is this? Some conspiracy theory whacko?” Without realizing that I was, in fact, directly translating a way of seeing history—a completely legitimate approach to history. I mean, that piece had stuff like the Angel Moroni and the devil stealing a skull from the excavation site. A skull actually did disappear from the site, but do I believe the Angel Moroni and Lucifer stole it? No. Do I think it is true? Yes. And I think that because I first experienced it in intense mania, and now that’s how I see the block. The more narratives that approach reality “differently” get treated as “insane” or “unreal,” the less readers are exposed to them, and the more “unreal” or “insane” they seem. It’s like a feedback loop.
I also think there is an element of controlling the narrative. If I am constructing a narrative in a way that resists being “fixed,” it’s threatening to the status quo. It suggests that neurotypical brains are not, in fact, superior. I don’t think this is conscious on editors’ or readers’ parts, but if they cede control of “acceptable” narratives it does usurp some power.
Rumpus: What upcoming projects are you working on?
Higgins: Right now, I am writing a grimoire/environmental memoir entitled Superman is My Temple Recommend, a twist on the ex-Mormon saying, “Jesus is My Temple Recommend.” It’s a textbook of magic that draws from Mormon theology, pollution science, environmental epigenetics, alchemy, Saturn Death Cult cosmology, theodicy, psychogeography, ancient magic, criminology, memory research, and of course, forensic science.
The ultimate goal is to write my brother into eternal life (which I sometimes believe in, and sometimes don’t) by incanting a magic spell for his atonement for his crimes. It’s an Isis and Osiris story, my own personal Book of Breathings: I am gathering his corpus delicti, like Isis recovering Osiris’s body parts along the Nile. The Book of Breathings, of course, is a huge part of Mormon theology because Joseph Smith owned papyri portraying this funerary text and “translated”
it into the Book of Abraham. Technically, he got the translation wrong, but in many ways, he got it so right.
I see myself as very much like Joseph Smith. He built a whole religion around grief for a lost brother. His big brother Alvin died in 1823, not long before Joseph got the golden plates. Years later, Joseph had a vision of Alvin in the Celestial Kingdom. How could that be, if he died before baptism into the restored Church? Soon came the revelation of posthumous baptisms and the priesthood keys to seal families together on heaven as on earth. Some people speculate that Joseph Smith was a temporal lobe epileptic, and it makes sense to me because I am one, and part of my “symptomology” is an obsession with religion.
Joseph didn’t want to lose his brother, plain and simple. Neither do I. I “get” what Mormonism is about, at its core, and that’s why I almost converted, as I portrayed in my essay, “Strange Flowers.”
I got into ancient magic because of Joseph Smith, but I got there circuitously, through the forgeries of Mark Hofmann, who attempted to embarrass the Mormons with forged letters depicting the Prophet’s money-digging activities. I got to Mark Hofmann because of Ronnie Lee Gardner’s firing squad execution and articles in the local paper about blood atonement. Blood atonement fascinates me because it’s a way to take atonement into man’s hands. It’s physical, alchemical even—or at least in the theology I’m creating. This all happened very shortly about my brother’s death, so timeline-wise, it’s all the same event to me.
At this point in the process, I am working on an epigenetic magic resurrection spell, which also stems from Mormon thought. In his Mormon theological text Rube Goldberg Machines, Adam S. Miller wrote,
The body, despite its motility, has no clean edges, no hard lines. Instead, it bleeds out beyond this fragile, porous shell of skin and hair into the fabric of the world around it, just as the world around it simultaneously bleeds back into the flesh, fiber, and blood of the body itself through respiration, digestion, and sensation. Disconnected from air, food, water, and sensation, a body is not a body. As a result, to successfully resurrect a body, one would have to successfully resurrect a world.
So I set about resurrecting a very particular world: It started with my forgeries. I am forging my brother’s confession, and I started to think about the chemistry of the inks and how to make the magic happen there, physically. Then I took it into my body with my tattoos, which are a kind of personal Mutus Liber, an alchemical text. The inks contain the same pollutants as the air in Salt Lake City, and they inflict the same sorts of damage, epigenetic and otherwise. Like my asthma, it’s the Kingdom of God inside me. My rose tattoo reproduces my brother’s and it actually contains pigments used in automobile paints, as well as the same pollutants spewed from car tailpipes. Since my brother was a total mechanophiliac about his Pontiac GTO, it means I am the embodiment of this object of his fascination. Porous boundaries again: no distinction between inner and outer worlds.
I tracked down my brother’s childhood, high school, and other friends, and I am keeping an experience notebook where I attempt to recreate his experiences: teaching myself parachute landing falls, reproducing his rose tattoo so I have the memory of tattoo needles cutting that shape into me, learning his secret nicknames, learning everything I can about the Pontiac GTO, all of it.
Ultimately, this all builds toward an epigenetic/body forgery that I hope can lend authenticity to the confession I forge and save my brother’s soul. I can’t go into certain aspects of it yet, but it can only be completely finished when I die. I have plans for my body that will complete this magic spell.
Rumpus: That sounds like a great deal of research. Is it painful or confusing talking to those people who knew your brother?
Higgins: Memories have epigenetic mechanisms, so I am making myself more like my brother—genetically, physically—by stealing his memories. That’s where it gets super confusing, because the more I inhabit his world, the less I am sure about mine. Is it my brother or I experiencing something? Is it his memory or mine? Is it his rationalization or mine? I mean, I invited him to possess me, in a way.
Sometimes, I feel like I am grooming myself. For example, I am in touch with one of my brother’s best friends, and we have the most bizarre dynamic. I mean, I found myself wanting to text him sexy pictures because he asked for them, so that says a lot. But it’s not what it seems. He and I are projecting all kind of things on each other: To me, he is so much like my brother that I will listen to anything he says, even stuff that should be infuriating, and it’s the most amazing feeling. Like I’m whole again. 
And he will say things like, “You laugh like your brother” or “You’ve got a little of your brother in you” and I can’t stand it how happy it makes me.
Or I have a performance coming up where I re-enact my brother’s death, and having seen the crime scene photographs and read all the reports and interviewed a whole lot of people, I know the Medical Examiner narrative is questionable. So I sewed a costume of fabric printed with his police booking photograph, and I’m going to roll off the couch over and over the way he supposedly did. I have superimposed photos of me in his body’s position as found in his apartment with his actual death scene photos. It’s… I mean, there are no words for that. Seeing our bodies that way.
But that’s part of memory, too. Nobody really knows but him. So I am trying to figure it out. If I know the ultimate secret—how he died—how can I be distinguishable from him?
But then I find myself having these thoughts, like, “Wait. Was I really just confused? Did my brother not actually abuse me?” And the further I go down this rabbit hole, the more I have those thoughts. Which means: the magic spell is working. So I guess I am learning there are consequences to resurrection, and that if I resurrect him, I have to accept his world. I can’t do it on my terms. What does that mean for my experiment? I don’t know.
I’m also working on stuff about Mormon forger Mark Hofmann, who I adopted as a proxy brother, and a project about my resemblance to Virginia Woolf. A Zion Tarot. A weird theory about the Saturn moon Titan—that one came from “alter ego Karrie,” who keeps me busy.
Rumpus: These sound like such interesting and important projects. Do you talk with your family about your writing at all? I know different families respond so differently to sexual abuse, and your brother, even after his death, is such a major person in your life, if I understand correctly.
Higgins: He is a major person. I don’t talk very much with my family about my writing, or anything at all. Sometimes, I do share documents or other things with my sister, though. I did tell my family right away when I found out my brother had died facing trial. I texted my mother and sister, and they both responded, “How old was the victim?” We had waited a long time for that kind of vindication. I considered keeping it secret, but I couldn’t.
I do share with my husband, who is incredibly supportive in spite of how strange the work can be. I don’t know how he puts up with me sometimes.
Rumpus: You speak about writing as a kind of compiling of evidence.
Higgins: Yes, exactly!
Rumpus: I know you aren’t interested in writing as catharsis. Are you interested in justice?
Higgins: That’s THE question, I think, because if I am treating my work as this performative arena for forensics, isn’t it a little like a vigilante trial? I think I am seeking justice, in a way, but not the kind people expect.
It’s not about my brother getting demonized (and I never wanted him in prison) or even about me being believed. I feel like it’s about a bigger kind of justice, and that’s why I latched onto this epigenetic forgery. I want my brother to be redeemed, and I don’t know any other way to do that but to drag this stuff into the light. I’m forging his confession not to exact revenge but to save his soul. (And yet, I don’t believe in God. Or maybe I do. I don’t know.)
Rumpus: That’s an empathetic vision of justice: Where we help the people who hurt us to redeem themselves.
Higgins: I just can’t stand the thought of him in prison. I know that sounds weird, but that’s when I get emotional, thinking of him with his chronic pain locked up somewhere. I can’t stand it. And it becomes a way to redeem myself, too, because I am getting what I need, too, even if it’s confusing. I suppose that’s the grief speaking, too. It always comes back to grief.
***
Images provided by Karrie Higgins.
For Hyperallergic, Allison Meier takes a look at the image management of Louis XIV’s reign as told through the medium of elaborate and intricate medals that traveled across late 17th and early 18th century Europe. On display at the British Museum are the plans, designs, and final versions of these medals celebrating Louis XIV’s reign, as well as medals made in other countries to mock his grandiosity.
In his review for Hyperallergic of a new MOMA exhibit, Thomas Micchelli writes about the work of artists during and immediately after their experiences in World War II. In the exhibit, Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War, Micchelli claims that the 20th century art historical record finally will be reconciled with the inclusion of figurative art from this period. Figurative art, according to Micchelli, has been largely left out when discussing the art of this period due to the post-war era’s need to portray the brutality of war with realistic form, at the expense of the figurative art that features in this current collection.
Joseph Nechvatal writes for Hyperallergic on the Musée d’Orsay’s “splendid but miserable” collection of art from around Paris’s Belle Époque, a collection that focuses specifically on the representation of prostitutes in the period’s cultural climate.
At Hyperallergic, Chris Cobb explores new photography exhibits featuring over 200 color photos from a recently rediscovered collection by Gordon Parks. The collection dates from 1956, when Parks was commissioned by LIFE magazine to capture the day-to-day of black families in segregated Alabama. Only about thirty of the original 200+ color photos ever made it into the magazine.
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier reviews a new collection that gathers posters for productions of Shakespeare from around the world. This collection has posters from fifty-five countries, ranging from the earliest advertisements for Shakespeare’s plays into productions from the present day.
For Hyperallergic, Claire Voon tours the New York Public Library’s collection of historical erotica, ranging from 15th century illustrations of eroticized mythological scenes to risqué 19th century photographs kept safe by owners in the pages of their books.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Janice N. Harrington about her new collection Primitive, the challenge of working with a real-life subject’s language, and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here.
This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.
***
Camille D: So, Janice, when this book came across my desk, I fell in love with it immediately. For one thing, that cover. And then another, the subject, and then, you know, I’ve long been a fan of your poems.
Janice N. Harrington: Yes, I think what I’ve learned as a result of studying Horace Pippin’s paintings is the importance of our perceptions. What we see or choose not to.
Camille D: I’m always interested in form, and you are clearly interested in Pippin’s form and tools as well. Can you talk a little about your decisions in some of these poems to do things like use a numbering system, or some of your other organizational strategies? “Losing the Way” and “In a Painted Room” are two poems that come to mind as astonishingly inventive and engaging in their form.
And of course,”Why O Why the Doily.” That poem is fascinating.
Janice N. Harrington: Okay, since the computer is not asking me any questions. I have decided to panic. I’ll pretend that the computer just asked: How did you begin this project? I’m so glad you asked, Camille. In the late 1990s, as a children’s librarian, I developed curriculum kits for classroom teachers on African American artist. The work of Horace H. Pippin fascinated. His story stayed in my mind, but especially his commitment to art.
Camille D: I’m happy to follow up on the thread you started in panic. (But I also hope that the question about form and tools has since revealed itself.)
One of the tricks of this platform we use for the chat is that there is always this delay while people are typing, where it looks like nothing is happening. I think we can make this into a question. You say you started thinking about Pippin in a dedicated way in the 1990s. How long would you say you were actually in the process of writing this book? By which I mean, what was the delay between your curriculum kit and these poems going to BOA?
Janice N. Harrington: Form? Yes, one of the challenges of working on Primitive was how to work with the language taken from Pippin’s war notebooks. I think trying to integrate his voice with my voice pushed me to consider the visual form of my poetry. With “Why O Why the Doily,” I thought about the openness of doilies. I wanted to make leaps and challenge space as I feel doilies do.
Camille D: Wow. That’s very cool to think of the poem as a doily. The laciness of both your poem and a doily. And since you bring in the Bishop poem, that sense of the delicate appearing in space that is perceived a muscular and dirty.
Janice N. Harrington: Primitive was a long, complicated project that has taken years to complete. You mentioned “Losing the Way.” As I studied Pippin’s paintings, I thought not only about the painting itself, but what was happening historically at the time the painting was made. Pippin has a series of paintings that are known as the Holy Mountain series. He paints images that comment on historical events in the background. So, his paintings made me think about the foreground (now) but the background as well (history).
Camille D: Is this part of why you didn’t want to “channel” Pippin? That you wanted to make clear the divide between his time and yours? His perspective and yours? There is so much (often quite good) poetry written in the voice of major figures. But I also understand the hesitancy to appropriate a voice that wasn’t yours. Can you define some of the sources of your resistance to direct autobiography and particularly to adopted voice that might not be related directly in the poems?
Janice N. Harrington: I absolutely didn’t want to “channel” Pippin. I think Primitive is actually a hybrid: biography, art history, and autobiography. I wanted to respond to Horace’s life and paintings. I wanted to look for the connections and seams between his life and mine. I also knew that I couldn’t tell the entire story of his life. I performed archival research, visited his hometown, his home, found his grave, and I read the major works about his life. I recommend Judith Stein’s I Tell My Heart especially.
Camille D: Do you think of this book as a kind of docupoetic text? I loved that long list of further reading you include in the book. It provides such an invitation for a continued conversation.
Janice N. Harrington: Docupoetic? I think it may not quite fit that category either in intention. I tried so hard to hold to the historical record and to respect Horace Pippin. But even with the most scrupulous intention there’s always distortion—or maybe uncertainties. The book is a doily-poetic.
Camille D: I’m also interested in the way that the inclusion of that five-page notes section seems to serve both to cast you as an authority on the subject of Pippin but not the final word. This seems important to me. I am always wrestling with what it means to cast oneself as the final, individual talent. What does that mean especially for women and for people of color (for black people in particular) to be allowed to say that they aren’t going to have the final and last or only say on a subject. It seems important NOT to claim to have the final and last and only say on a subject when the subject is one that has been too frequently erased or diminished.
Janice N. Harrington: I’m glad that you enjoyed the list of readings. I want readers to want to know more about Pippin. If readers respond by searching for more about Pippin’s life or googling his art, I’ve accomplished what I wanted.
Camille D: Doily-poetic! Once again I have fallen in love with Janice Harrington’s use of the language. You’re a librarian, and a poet, and a professor. I see all of that in play in this book. A care for the archive and the primary texts, and also an ability to transcribe those materials into something newly creative, and ALSO, a way to engage while you instruct. That’s not a question, really.
Janice N. Harrington: I would never say the I’m an authority on Horace H. Pippin’s life. I would say that I’m a student and an observer. The sources are there because I wanted to know more, and I wanted to present an accurate response to Pippin’s life. Unlike a historian or a biographer, I searched for details, stories, images that would trigger poetry, an imaginative response.
Camille D: Here’s a way to cast that as a question. Can you talk about what decisions went behind choosing all the quoted material you use before each section of the book? That seems to me to be an example of this synthesis of librarian/archivist, poet, and professor.
I think you may have been answering my question even as I typed it 
Janice N. Harrington: I wanted the book to give a full picture of Pippin’s life. I want readers to hear what his contemporaries said about him, what scholars say, what the journalist said. Re-reading the book, I’m pleased with the quotations because they expand and enrich the reader’s understanding of Pippin. It also gave me another way to bring in Pippin’s voice and use his actual words.
Camille D: To follow another path set in this book: love. The poem “Commitment” tears me up (both pronunciations) every time I read it. I love how you describe this love. And the pain that must come with it.
Another poem I keep returning to is “Surface, Decoration.” Again, I am interested in the form of this poem and the way that certain aspects of the language are highlighted as a result of the form. How long did it take you to discover the form/shape of this poem?
Janice N. Harrington: It seems that Pippin and Jennie Ora had challenges in their marriage. The record is riddled with gossip and misconceptions. But regretfully his wife was committed to an asylum. In fact, she would die there. When I look at Pippin’s paintings, I believe that I also see Jennie’s art: her doilies, her cut flowers, her order. I have to resist commenting on their relationship too much because I can’t rely on accurate records. But I found a newspaper clipping which describes the two of them dancing on their wedding anniversary. It’s not more than fifty or so words, but it breaks my heart. There is a heartbreaking letter from Pippin about his loneliness and difficulty after his wife is committed.
Camille D: That line: “Now I know how you feel alone” in the poem after “Commitment.” Is that from that letter? Wow.
And even the play of the title “Commitment” to commit his wife to the asylum, but also to remain committed to here. The doubleness of so much of the experience you portray in this book.
I meant committed to “her” not committed to “here.” But I think here works too in this case.
Janice N. Harrington: Yes, I like “Surface, Decoration” as well. I might still tweak it a bit, but I’m a poet. I found this really cool graphic layout, which I cite. I saw how the visual form permitted me to draw attention to Pippin’s words and created an energy in the lines. Also, I liked what the form suggested about Pippin and his art. Self-taught artists are often obsessed with texture and detail. Pippin invented. He created pyrographs, and I wanted to express that inventiveness.
Yes, Pippin writes “Now I know how you feel alone.” There are three poems that address their relationship, and I tried to be respectful to both. I also tried to write Jennie into Pippin’s story. She has received an unsympathetic reading in some accounts, and I suspect it should be questioned.
Camille D: Hmm. I’m thinking about this idea of inventiveness, and its dangers as well as its rewards. The ways we must question what it means to be inventive. In “The Subtlety of Blue” you do such an interesting job of pushing against the criticism that he has not created worthy art. (As defined in that poem’s cutting epigraph.) The risks (and, yes,) rewards of using what you find/create. There is so much you question in this book about the readings we give/have given to Pippin and his life and art.
You say you might still tinker with a poem. Do you feel like you have said what you want/need to say about Pippin? If so, what’s next?
Janice N. Harrington: This is an odd way to answer your question, but somehow this addresses the concern for me. I respond to Pippin because he had every reason not to make art. He wasn’t wealthy. He had a handicap. He didn’t have an art’s degree. He lived during a time of vicious racism. Yet despite all of the challenges—he made art. I wanted to critique the label of Pippin—and of many African American folk artist—as primitive. Clearly, Pippin’s paintings show his perceptiveness and his resistance to demeaning images of African Americans.
Camille D: That is a fantastic way of answering that question! I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about this book, Janice. Thank you for writing it, and thank you for sharing the hour with us.
Janice N. Harrington: No, I didn’t say everything I wanted to say about Pippin. There are many poems that I didn’t include in the book. But I also feel that I want readers to search for Pippin on their own. What next? More poetry… better poetry… more writing and re-writing.
Camille D: We’re at the close of the hour (spilled over a little because I wanted to squeeze out the last drops), so I’ll let you get back to your life, your poems. Thanks so much, as I say, for this book! I am ever grateful to have come to know your work.
Mallory Ortberg is one of the Internet’s more beloved voices. Ortberg began publishing at Gawker and The Hairpin, two now-defunct outlets known for championing writers new to the business of writing, then founded The Toast, also now defunct, known for an idiosyncratic mix of humor and seriousness.
Ortberg has published so many hilarious pieces that choosing one to quote here is impossible. In 2014, they published Texts from Jane Eyre, an affectionate parody familiar to any of The Toast’s loyal readers. Since 2015, Ortberg has been Slate’s “Dear Prudence” advice columnist.
Tomorrow, Ortberg will publish The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, a collection of short stories. Ortberg’s fans will recognize the stories’ wry, bemused voice, as well as their command over the texts of Western civilization, which the author gleefully remixes into fairy tales that resonate in the current moment, as fairy tales are meant to.
“This book is really different from my first,” they told me. “It’s not necessarily the follow-up you would expect, and it wasn’t exactly difficult to convince my agents or my editors, in part because the first book sold well. I earned back my advance, and then some.”
Ortberg’s candor about the business of writing—money is something few writers discuss publicly—is unsurprising. They are candid about essentially everything, and our conversation was marked by the honesty and intelligence I’ve always considered key to actual humor. We talked for an hour; I laughed much of the time.
***
The Rumpus: Are you a writer? Are you a humorist? Are you both?
Mallory Ortberg: I definitely have almost always gone with writer. I don’t understand what people mean when they say humorist. They’re clearly trying to do something fancy with the word, and I do not know what it is.
Rumpus: I feel that humorist is meant to describe people like P.J. O’Rourke.
Ortberg: I don’t know who that is.
Rumpus: He is the least funny person in the world. Did you study to write?
Ortberg: I went to an evangelical Christian college in suburban Los Angeles, which was not a great choice for me. They were very wonderful people, but I thought—it’s somebody else’s fault that I decided to go here, and am taking no steps to change my situation. I’m going to be kind of shitty, and hope that somebody eventually figures out that this is not my problem to solve. Which did not result in robust self-acceptance or a sense that I got the most out of my college career.
Rumpus: Part of the territory you’ve claimed as a writer is things that are rarified, like art history or literature. Are you self-taught?
Ortberg: I have read a lot. Both my folks are pastors and they’re big readers, and I think if you have a more religious upbringing, there’s still that slightly old school Western education that’s prioritized. I grew up reading Bulfinch’s Mythology and the Bible and Chaucer—which lots of people do; it’s not unique to Midwestern pastors’ kids, but it was a huge part of conversation with my parents. “Oh, that wacky Bulfinch, at it again with his things about Apollo and Daphne.”
Rumpus: When you talked about art history on The Toast, for example, part of what was funny was that it was very astute.
Ortberg: W. Somerset Maugham used to call himself the first of the second raters. It’s such a great way to duck out of getting critiqued, which I am so here for.
Rumpus: I think underneath the project is a respect for the material.
Ortberg: There’s a difference between humor that comes from a place of contempt and humor that comes from a place of familiarity and affection. I don’t think they’re total opposites, in the sense that you can be familiar and affectionate towards something that you do have some contempt for. Not that all humor has to be totally defanged and mutually supportive and loving, but you know—you’ve got to save your contempt for something that has really earned it.
Rumpus: Are you conscious of thinking about the craft of your writing?
Ortberg: I think I’ve learned the most about writing through the times that I had to write the most. There was a short stint I did at Gawker, and then at The Toast, in addition to all the reading I did. Just doing it over and over and over again, and figuring out what worked and what didn’t, that was absolutely the most helpful thing.
Rumpus: You can develop expertise by going to school. Then, there’s the approach you’re describing, which is more like practice makes perfect. They’re not quite at odds, but they are different philosophies about how you do something.
Ortberg: I’m just not an expert. I’ve never gotten an MFA, I’ve never done that sort of work, I don’t know.
Rumpus: So is The Merry Spinster a book of humor, or is it a book of short stories?
Ortberg: It’s a book of short stories. I think there are lots of funny moments in it, but it’s not a funny book, exactly. I would say it’s my knee-jerk response to the stories that I grew up with, and the ways that I feel about my life now, which is not to say that I’m in it at all. There’s a lot: What does abuse look like outside of a romantic context, and how hard can it be to recognize? What does it mean when someone tells you something is love, and yet it is not love? What does it mean when you inherit something violent? What does it mean when you perpetuate that violence, and you don’t want to acknowledge that to yourself? What does it mean when you’re not honest about what you’re doing?
Rumpus: It’s interesting to hear you talk about it thematically, because the text presents itself as a postmodern remix project—
Ortberg: I just want to stress right now, I don’t know what the word “postmodern” means, so we’re super clear.
Rumpus: I’m using a lazy word to describe a strategy that feels playful. Especially because you have a page of source materials—that seems to be saying, Yes, this is still the Mallory you remember having fun with the canon of Western art, and here they are talking about texts.
Ortberg: I was terrified that somebody would think I was plagiarizing Thomas Aquinas. If I’m directly quoting a Bible verse and putting quotes around it, the reader will get that this is not a thought original to me. If a character has a monologue where they’re interpreting Thomas Aquinas’s thoughts—what if someone thinks, “Is Mallory trying to fucking pass off Thomas Aquinas’s thoughts as original? Because if so, that’s fucked up.” I want to make sure no one yells at me, which is all I ever want, to never be yelled at.
Rumpus: I think it gives context for understanding those individual stories. Because ironically, however much you like to talk about yourself as not being smart, you have a deeper foundational education in the canon than a lot of readers.
Ortberg: Well, let’s be clear I genuinely mean that, and part of it is not just self-protection, but its own form of brag. When Maugham said he was the first of the second raters, essentially he was saying, I am amazing, and don’t critique me.
Rumpus: You talk about yourself as a person with some security in the world, but the worlds depicted in this book do not feel that way. Why was the fairy tale was of interest to you personally?
Ortberg: I’m safe and I’m secure and I’m doing well, but I’m also a human person who’s lived in the world. It’s not like every day I wake up on a bed of money, and then go enjoy my security for a couple of hours. There’s a grand tradition of rewriting fairy tales. G.K. Chesterton wrote this fabulous book called Orthodoxy. He has this whole chapter about the morality of fairyland, and there are very specific rules there that are never tapped into any sort of predictability. You never understand why it is that way, you just know if you open this door, you’re going to lose your husband, or if you eat from this table, you’re never going to be able to leave. It’s a very unstable, unsafe, emotionally fraught world—
Rumpus: I’m also curious about the fairy tale as a subject is a gendered subject—
Ortberg: Fairy tales are labeled by the nature of the protagonist. There will be entire subsets of fairy tales that are about the seventh son, or the third daughter, or whatever. There’s so many ways in which not just your gender but your relationship to your family, like whether you’re a daughter, whether you’re a son, whether you’re the oldest, whether you’re the third, whether you’re the seventh, some other significant number, shapes you. It shapes your role in a story, and it’s almost a job. The ways in which being a father in a fairy tale sets you up for one of several paths that you can be in, or being a stepmother, or being a mother, or being an older, envious sister.
Gender feels like a job that you can sort of apply for, and you could just as easily not get that job. It didn’t interest me to write about a world where gender was better, so much as —what if it was not tethered to the same things that we tether it to, what would be ways in which it would still be a trap and a fiction and a prison? Which is not to say that that is the only thing that gender is, but in the terms of things you can explore in a short story, that’s some serious grist for the mill. I was just trying to think of an imaginative way somebody else might be trapped by gender, in a world where they were not trapped in the same way that we are?
Rumpus: It’s a mistake to read too much into the fiction, but are you conscious of yourself on these pages?
Ortberg: I think there is rightly a sense that authors get asked too often, How does this track to your autobiography? The pushback against that can sometimes sort of make it sound like, “Look, I just work here at this factory…” As I was writing the book, I ended up having lots of thoughts and feelings about my own gender identity. Again, it’s not that you need to know this autobiographical information in order to appreciate the book, but that absolutely came up while I was writing it. I feel like I woke up one morning and I lost some of the ability to have gender that I always had had before. That was unsettling and destabilizing and frightening. It was exciting, but yeah.
Rumpus: Many people feel so comfortable inside their understanding of themselves that to hear someone articulate frustration with that, with their own understanding of themselves, is truly destabilizing.
Ortberg: I think just about everybody, regardless of their gender identity, has moments throughout their life where they bristle against gender roles or the expectations placed on them, or the assumptions made about them based on how their body is read.
Rumpus: Are you still a religious person, personally?
Ortberg: Not still in the sense that it has been lifelong or consistent or legible or that it makes a lot of sense, but yeah, religious is the word. Not spiritual, religious, in the sense that I like saying words that were already written down, but not religious in the sense that I’m good at it, or have a really strong sense of what reality is, or that everybody else ought to be interested in the same things that I’m interested in. It feels more to me like this is my inheritance, and I can have any relationship to it that I want, including total rejection.
Rumpus: There’s a trickster spirit inherent in the fairy tale. That particular register does not have as much to do with a contemporary or conventional understanding of morality.
Ortberg: If you look at the Christian Bible—again, that’s the story that I come from—you look at the Book of Job, and there’s this fascinating, open-ended question of what is the Satan? Because that’s literally the name of the character in the book. It’s called the Satan, not like the devil or Lucifer, Satan, like that’s his name. It’s just the Satan, and it means that he has a job. It’s your job. You bring evidence against humanity, and you are in God’s employ, and obviously we lost some of that over time. You remember the cartoons of the sheepdog and the wolf who would fight all day, and then they would end by swiping their punch cards? That’s been lost, and there’s just the sense of—it is this actual demonic, supernatural entity that lives somewhere in the ether and is out to get me. I think if you look at those stories, they are incredibly destabilized and all over the place, and that’s fantastic.
Rumpus: In these fairy tales is a universe that is random and tricky. You write with a real confidence, yet a lot of what you’re getting at in this book is the ways in which no one knows anything.
Ortberg: The confidence is in saying, This work is worth doing, not, I know what the work is, or Here’s how we all get it done.
Rumpus: How do you feel going into publication for this book?
Ortberg: I have been incredibly excited for a long time, and I would say really anxious. This is the first time I’ve done a lot of public appearances since I started really questioning my gender, or considering or starting hormone therapy. I’m just very self-conscious about my appearance. I’m anxious at the thought of being seen. I’m anxious with the thought of people saying, “You look different.” I’m anxious at the thought of people saying nothing. I feel both afraid to go on and afraid to go back, and I think it’s going to be fascinating and amazing to talk about all this, and have to leave my house and show up and put my name and my face to all this stuff. That’s because of the work that I’ve chosen to do. I’m not J.D. Salinger. I can’t write a book and hang out in Maine or wherever the fuck he lived.
Rumpus: The book feels very different to me than what people think of from you.
Ortberg: I’m not anxious in the sense that I’m worried that people will speak wrongly of me. That’s not it at all. I feel comfortable at this point saying, like, “This last year, I’ve been in gender therapy. I go to a transgender support group, and I have done a test drive of hormone therapy.” It’s certainly not a transgender experience, but beyond that, I don’t have requests to make of people. That’s real, that’s genuine, and it’s not because I want people to be confused and bewildered. It’s because I genuinely don’t have any requests to make yet. I think the anxiety is just the problem of being known. It’s not that I’m anxious people are going to say something wrong or hurtful. I believe I will be met by my peers and readers with the same love and affection and respect that I’m trying to show them.
Rumpus: The work kind of shows that you exist with some comfort in a state of uncertainty, or you’re comfortable articulating that we all kind of live in that state.
Ortberg: It took a while. It took a pretty rough year to get to this point. I could not have done this three months ago, or six months ago, but I think I’m here now and I’m really grateful.
Rumpus: The human brain is a crazy fucking thing, right?
Ortberg: Yeah, it’s wonderful.
Before she became her own character in I Love Dick, the 1997 cult novel cum sleeper hit cum TV show, Chris Kraus was a writer. With her latest book, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, she reclaims that persona.
Acker, an avant-garde writer of the 1970s and 80s post-punk scene, takes center stage here while Chris Kraus the character remains largely absent from her version of Acker’s life. As she says, “I had just arrived in New York, I wasn’t doing anything.” Still, she brings her unmistakable dirty literati approach to the book, where analysis of Acker’s spending habits and sexual practices are as significant as close readings of her published oeuvre and archive.
I sat down with Kraus in her hotel room in New York in the fall to discuss the book, writing about art under patriarchy, politics, and “the truth.”
***
The Rumpus: So, why Kathy Acker?
Chris Kraus: I had thought I was going to write the book after she died in ‘97, so it’s always better to start with something rather than with nothing. I had these interviews that had been transcribed a million years ago but I hadn’t looked at, so when I started to think about it, the first thing I did was take out this backlog of material. It seemed timely because of the overexposure of the period in such an incredibly mythologized way, in ways that don’t really serve an understanding of culture, or of art.
So chasing one person’s trajectory seemed like an ideal way to write a history. I certainly wasn’t going to write a memoir of those years. I had just arrived in New York, I wasn’t doing anything, there was nothing to remember. So writing a story of someone else’s life seemed ideal.
Obviously Kathy was a big influence on me; as I Love Dick has kind of began to come out and sort of circulate again, it amazes me that people treat it like some kind of urtext of autofiction. It seemed like a good time, since there’s so much interest in female—I don’t even want to say first-person writing, but I guess that cuts into it. Kathy obviously needs to come forward into the conversation—a close reading of her work and coming to understand how she created herself as a writer.
Rumpus: You note at the end of the book that those of us working in discursive first-person fiction owe a great debt to Acker. What do you see as your own writing’s debt to her, specifically, and are there other under-recognized antecedents?
Kraus: Well, it’s about direct address. It’s not about sex or sexuality or the body, I mean, my work has never really been about those things. My work is more satirical, really. It’s social comedy. But what I got from Kathy, and I think what’s most singular about Kathy’s work, you know, what she did that no one else was doing at the time, is the way she address the reader so directly and in the moment. She does that New York School thing, of naming the names of people around her so that you really feel that you’re not just in her head, but you’re located within that time and place in that community. I totally did that in I Love Dick, there’s no question that that’s an affinity.
Also, the high-low thing. Kathy’s not the only one to have done that, but she did it in a very special and incredibly realized way. I think maybe we could say that even Semiotexte took a bit of that from Kathy. Or maybe we could say that that was in the air, at that time and place, among a number of people.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about truth and lies, in relation to Acker’s life and work, and your treatment of it. You write that Acker lied all the time, and then you follow up with “the lies weren’t literal lies, more a system of magical thought.” How do you account for that in her writing a supposedly nonfiction biography?
Kraus: Yes, okay, she exaggerated, she mythologized herself. I’m sure she’s not the first or last artist or writer to have done that. If you’re vetting a biography you have to establish certain facts. The first thing I think anybody does is they make a timeline. And one question that was important for me to answer was how was she living all those years? That’s always such a dirty secret of the art world—what people’s means of support were, and she was also extremely circumspect and evasive about that question. I wanted to establish those facts: When did she get the inheritance? How much was it? I actually hired a private investigator because it wasn’t easy information to get.
Flaubert had these epileptic fits that saved him from having to be a lawyer. Then he went and lived off his mother, basically, for the rest of his life. So at the distance of a hundred and fifty years people can talk about it, but among their immediate contemporaries, no! People don’t talk about it.
Rumpus: It’s almost more shameful than talking about the sex. For the most part, you keep a relatively low profile as a narrator or character within the book. We don’t know about the particularities of your relationships to the people who had relationships to Acker, or your role in the scenes in which you may have circulated. Why?
Kraus: I’m a fiction writer! And I approached it as a fiction writer. That was the first choice that I had to make. It seemed to me a lot more respectful of Kathy and her work and legacy not to let the Chris of I Love Dick—my character is irremediably linked at this point to the Chris Kraus of I Love Dick. Right? We really don’t need to hear from that Chris Kraus. We don’t care if she slept with the same person ten years later at a party. We don’t care if she happened to sort of meet one of the people.
A book is finite and you have to make your choices of what you’re going to deal with, and I thought to bring myself into the story in any way would be so distracting. And yet I’m a writer, of course, and I wanna say things out the side of my mouth. I never wanted to be a cradle-to-grave conventional schlock biographer. My presence in the book is as a reader, her best possible reader.
Rumpus: The tone of the book has been called gossipy, in a positive way. I’m curious how you arrived at that unique voice.
Kraus: Well, it’s not my voice that’s telling the gossip. It’s a gossipy part of Kathy’s voice. That was the technique that I kind of figured out early on, that I was going to bring Kathy’s voice in as much as possible. We have Kathy talking shit in her letters about this that and the other person. Then you counterpose it with other people’s recollections or other people’s letters. It immediately becomes this kind of deep dish, right? I mean, there’s that archival thrill I think that everybody has when they go and dig up stuff, especially of your contemporaries. Did he say that? Did he say that about A? Because he’s supposed to be such a good friend of A’s, right? To hear all the kind of trash talk that goes on behind the scenes is a great historiographic thrill.
Rumpus: Were people excited to respond to you?
Kraus: Well, in ‘98 it was different, because, you know. I Love Dick was published but it wasn’t that widely read, so these people weren’t even certain that the Acker book would really be a book. So they were humoring me. These interviews were like two or three hours long and they were very candid. They didn’t censor anything.
Rumpus: And then twenty years later you have a bigger platform.
Kraus: Right, coming back to it in 2014 or ‘15, and I’m a more published writer. There’s a kind of gravitas to the interview that didn’t exist in ‘98, where people really feel like they’re speaking for the record.
Rumpus: So were there people that were upset? You know, that they felt that they had been taken out of context for having been published so much time after the initial interview?
Kraus: No, I haven’t encountered that problem yet. As I was working on it, people heard that I was working on it, and Jonathan Myles in London, he and I had a student in common, Rebecca Carson, and she facilitated him giving me all these letters that he kept that weren’t in any archive. They were so useful because I was trying to reconstruct ‘82, ‘83. And he and Kathy had an affair over three months with a lot of correspondence in ‘82. And, you know, the letters of the affair are useful, not so much for the affair, usually, as to pin down other things that get said to a lover that wouldn’t be said in a more official context.
Rumpus: When I mentioned to a couple of friends that I was going to interview you, I did a little bit of crowdsourcing. A friend of mine, when she was reading Aliens and Anorexia, felt you expressed a sentiment along the lines of “we told each other everything because we were both women.” And this presumed commonality due to womanhood has, for me, always been a great source of anxiety and ambivalence and joy.
Kraus: Exactly. [Laughter]
Rumpus: Another friend asked: Considering how art history might be called “New Advances in the Field of Female Objectification,” how do you write about art and not just get mad or even?
Kraus: Well, there are so many other things to get mad and to get even about now, gender isn’t the only one. In fact, gender in the art world that’s much less of an issue now, I think. I mean, there’s a tremendous problem of women in the art world. That’s not a problem. In I Love Dick, I think the book says something about, like, what happens between women as the most interesting thing because it’s least described—not true anymore! But, you know, that’s a certain kind of writing that writes criticism just to get mad and to get even and I can really appreciate that, that kind of polemical writing. But that’s not exactly what I do. I don’t write about somebody’s work unless I really like it. You know, I don’t care enough about the art world to kind of put myself out there. You really expose yourself if you attack somebody, so you have to pick your battles, and the art world isn’t that meaningful to me that I would go out of my way to create enemies in it. The literary world, maybe.
Rumpus: If you had to write a book about somebody’s writing that you hate, who would it be?
Kraus: Somebody’s writing that I hate? Oh no, I can’t. I’m afraid.
Rumpus: What about in the art world?
Kraus: Oh, there are so many easy targets. I mean, Jeff Koons, but what does it mean, it’s such an easy target. Every season there’s a new crop of over-privileged and over-praised and probably-won’t-be-around-five-years-from-now artists, and you watch it and it plays out. Interesting work tends to somehow persist. But yeah, every season there’s a bunch of stupid stuff that we don’t like very much, but why get upset?
Rumpus: The figure of the cowboy looms large in your work. I think of Dick as kind of an academic cowboy and certainly in the film adaptation that gets played up in a certain context, right, with the relocation to Marfa and all of that. And I think Kathy Acker is kind of a cowboy in her own way, like a motorcycle cowboy. How do you define that myth of the cowboy?
Kraus: Yeah, cowboy would be one way to say it. You know, there’s this late twentieth century idea of “that’s just what an artist does.” You know, they say what they see, they live how they want, you know. So was Kathy a cowboy? Yes. I mean, with the motorcycle and the tattoos and the image stuff, yes, she cultivated a certain image. But in the choices that she made in her career, they were cowboy choices but in a much more admirable and sincere way. She didn’t always make the choices that would be most immediately rewarded. She was at odds with people in London, certainly, and she didn’t change her work, and she didn’t change her presentation or point of view in ways that would have made it easier for her. She was very courageous in her persistence, how she wanted to pursue her work and present herself. And it’s just it’s more vernacular, right? People confuse the vernacular with the abrasive. It’s almost like a library voice that we’re supposed to use within the cultural world. That didn’t exist so much in that period in the late twentieth century, you know, it was about people speaking in other voices. All of that kind of pulp fiction bleeding into high fiction.
Rumpus: And you think we’ve moved away from that? Why?
Kraus: I mean, all of the usual suspects: the MFA programs, the hegemony of the publishing industry, the sort of mafia of the literary world, all of these things. It’s all true—I mean, it’s boring to talk about, but it’s not not true.
Rumpus: I think that often people assume some kind of truth to a letter, and you’ve often worked to expose the artifice of certain kinds of forms. So how do you work with the truth when you write?
Kraus: Well, which truth?
Rumpus: What would you describe as the varieties of truth?
Kraus: I mean, every book is its own truth, right? And that truth was arrived at through a synthesis of all the dissonances, right? The cumulative experiences that you have kind of moved through the dissonances within the book, and that’s the truth of the book. That’s as true as any truth is gonna get.
Rumpus: There are facts, there is emotion, there is narrative, there are real words people have said which could be found text or could be, you know, plagiarized.
Kraus: Truth as a verifiable fact or as an immersive belief.
Rumpus: Is the idea of immersive belief something that is an engine in your work?
Kraus: Well, of course. I mean, if you write a book you’re trying to create an immersive belief, to get it out of you and into the body of the reader. A novel is a big thing. And it can contain all of these worlds.
***
Author photograph © Carissa Gallo.
You can keep your Jesus bracelets with their WWJD reminders. I’m getting a bracelet that asks WWHGD: What Would Hannah Gadsby Do?
Ever since I watched Nanette, her one-hour comedy show that everyone you know is probably telling you to watch (they’re right; you should), I haven’t been able to get Hannah out of my mind. It’s sort of like what happened after I watched Hamilton, and for the same reason: Hamilton is a musical the way Nanette is a stand-up routine. They both transcend their genre to the point that they’ve transformed their genre.
Nanette makes us laugh, absolutely, and with the kind of insight that resonates well after the chuckles have subsided. You’ll never hear a teacup clink into its saucer the same way again. But Gadsby’s show also calls out the world for its deference to the sacrosanct image of the male genius, whose suffering, we’re told, produces great art. She reminds us that often, if not always, it’s the women and children around these artists who also suffer. They are the collateral damage in the male artist’s struggle to achieve mastery over his medium.
Never before have I seen an art history degree put to such good use as when she talks about how Picasso’s treatment of women is excused because his work transformed the art world: “Cubism,” Gadsby drawls, with a Tasmanian accent and a dollop of disdain, “changed everything,” and so it shouldn’t matter that Picasso claimed—at age forty-two—that his affair with a seventeen-year-old girl was perfect, because they were both in their prime.
“No woman is at her prime at seventeen,” Gadsby rages, and we laugh when she says it because it’s true and because we’ve all grown up with versions of these stories, which justify the appetites of powerful men. Picasso, Gadsby says, had a mental illness: a mental illness called misogyny.
The Picasso story comes towards the end of the show, but it beautifully links with all that comes before it. Nanette is, among other things, brilliantly written; it is a monologue that I would like to read in order to better appreciate its writerly moves. You start Nanette thinking that it’s a standard stand-up, with anecdotes that build to punchlines, then move to the next “bit.” But along the way, you start to realize that these “bits” have become a much bigger story; the monologue has a beginning, middle, and end.
You’ll hear people talk about how Nanette is a show about comedy that dismantles comedy, that it’s the show in which Gadsby announces her decision to leave comedy. It is, indeed, quite a “meta” performance. It is a show about itself, about the power of storytelling and about the realities behind the stories Gadsby tells. She points out that the punchlines of jokes stop the story in the middle because that’s where the humor is, usually. As the show goes on, however, she gives us the real endings of the stories she tells rather than crafted punchlines.
Towards the end of the monologue, she completes the story behind an earlier punchline, and then mentions several other real-life incidents, all of them violent: childhood abuse, a beating by a man enraged that she’s a “lady faggot,” a rape by two men. She doesn’t go into detail about any of these events—a starkness that renders them more powerful—and I wondered, as I listened to her list of assaults, if the women in the audience were thinking the same thing I was: that almost every woman I know has a version of that list.
It is a list made more terrifying for its ordinariness, so much so, in fact, I am sometimes amazed there aren’t more dead men in the world. It must be the case that women are less violent than men, because if men suffered at the hands of women as much as women have suffered at the hands of men, there would be blood in the streets and heads on pikes.
Women live with so much insult—from the small insult of a man who talks over you during a meeting to the violent insult of rape or assault—that we become inured to it. Nanette asks us to rip off that shell, that protective carapace women develop in order simply to get through the day. It is a necessary shell, perhaps, but it often prevents us from knowing that we are not alone.
It’s like when you have a miscarriage. You find out, afterwards, that almost everyone you know who has tried to have a baby has had a miscarriage, and that women everywhere carry that grief with them—the grief not only for the loss of the wanted child but also for the failure of our own bodies. The medical world contributes to that sense of failure in yet another insult: a woman I know who miscarried was told, as her official diagnosis, that she had an “incompetent cervix.”
What a great phrase. Because just in case she wasn’t feeling shitty enough when all she’d wanted was the banal mammalian miracle of a baby, she’s being told that her body needs some kind of remedial work, a cervix tutor.
When I was pregnant for the first time and for some reason the baby stopped growing inside me, the doctor who performed the ultrasound said, “Well, basically, you have a crappy uterus.” I lay there in the dim light, blue goo smeared across my crappy belly and cried, tears pooling into my ears. Would I find that diagnosis under “uterus, see also crappy,” or should I just search for “crappy uterus”?
Despite the crappy uterus, my baby managed to be born—weighing less than two pounds—but the doubt about my innards came rushing back when, two years later, I had a miscarriage at ten weeks, and needed to have a D&C, which meant running the gauntlet of anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic, who screamed “baby killer” at me as I walked up the sidewalk.
Those protesters yelling at my adult self sounded just like the protesters outside the clinics I went to in college, many years ago, when friends needed abortions. Optimistic in our youth, we’d thought that our marches and protests and screaming would somehow reclaim our bodies, except—as Gadsby reminds us—the world has never really thought that women’s bodies belonged to women. Perhaps we should think of #metoo not as a reclaiming but a claiming.
Who among us doesn’t have a story? I think about my women friends and think about their stories—rape, abuse, exploitation, shaming, self-abuse—partners who cheat, uncles who touched in funny places, boyfriends who knew she wanted it. it. I think about my own introduction to sex: a drunken, unwanted and unpunished violent coupling that resulted in me being called “slut” the next week in school, where the boy sat next to me in class, his varsity letter jacket slung around his shoulders. He smiled at me and I fled from class to puke in the bathroom.
Hannah Gadsby reminds us that our stories matter. In its highest form, comedy tells the truth to power, which is what Nanette does, but Gadsby takes it one step further. The truths she tells come from the anger of a woman who has, as she says, been broken and then put herself back together.
That’s why I want a What Would Hannah Gadsby Do bracelet. Not because she’s Jesus, but because she reminds us to shed our shame and let our stories put ourselves back together.
***
Rumpus original art by Richelle the King.
