Monthly Archives: May 2012

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This got lost in the shuffle of the book coming out and my subsequent trips to Alsace, Berlin, and London– I reviewed John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (FSG) for Writing in Public, a book which took me slightly outside of my comfort zone as a reader but which was well worth it. An excerpt:

Sullivan is a study in contrasts: a one-time born-again Christian and a liberal-minded critic, a Southerner and a darling of the New York literati, a goofy dude and a sober social conscience. He is, therefore, in an ideal position to explore the shady byways of American identity. His essay on the Tea Party, “American Grotesque,” features just this kind of intellectual magnanimity, even if he does (as he must) eventually come down on “our side” of the fence. “Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching,” he writes. We begin to meet the other marchers: “I want my America back,” reads one of their placards. It isn’t clear for certain whose America the sign refers to until we see another sign of Nancy Pelosi’s enlarged face, into whose open mouth the crowd is tossing Lipton tea bags. “It’s only fair,” Sullivan comments. “Liberals made fun of us because, at first, we didn’t know what ‘tea-bagging’ meant (…) Now we’re turning the joke back on them.” In the very next paragraph, we see a person standing on a garbage can wearing an Obama mask and a little gold crown, sporting “a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skim trim.”

 

Throughout this first part of the essay, Sullivan casts himself as a reasonably-minded member of an unspecified political rally. As he begins to mention its heroes— “[Glenn] Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top” — we know we’re at a Tea Party gathering, and we’re confused about what we’re doing there. It’s not until after the rally, back at the hotel, that it becomes clear why Sullivan has included himself in the “we” of the lunatic fringes of the Republican Party: he is there with his first cousin, an insurance executive from Kentucky whose politics are radically different from Sullivan’s. He gets into it with his cousin: “Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and ‘former CEOs’ and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear ‘socialized medicine‘ so intensely?” By the end of the essay, Sullivan is wishing his cousin luck and hoping for him to fail.

How to make a Metro poem

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Invented by Jacques Jouet

A métro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.

The first verse is composed in your head between the two first stations of your trip (counting the station from which you departed).

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the second station.

The second verse is composed in your head between the second and third stations of your trip.

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the third station. And so forth.

One must not transcribe when the train is in motion.

One must not compose when the train is stopped.

The last verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last station.

If your trip involves one or more changes of subway lines, the poem will have two or more stanzas.

Notes toward an Ouvroir de la Ville Potentielle (OuViPo)

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Today I’m flying to Berlin, where Joanna Walsh and I will give a talk about the figure of the flâneuse in the modern city on Thursday. Please join us if you’re in town! Full details:

17 May, 2012
19:30
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Kreuzberg, Berlin, 10967 Germany

 I write, I inhabit a sheet of paper – I invest in it, I travel across it. I incite blanks, spaces… This is how space begins: with words only, signs traced on the blank page. (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)

Join Dialogue Books as we explore the hidden boundaries and outer limits of urban exploration and the role of the flâneuse in the modern city with artist/writer Joanna Walsh and novelist/critic Lauren Elkin.

Joanna Walsh and Lauren Elkin have been exchanging ideas for a number of years. Working in different practices, they are both concerned with the city as a grid for explorations of politics and identity.

Joanna Walsh is visiting Berlin at the end of a period mapping European cities, researching her next book, which deals with love in space and cyberspace.

“I began to record my journey in photographs at theskyovereuropa.tumblr.com. What started as a side-project has now become an important part of my work. Inspired by the practices Georges Perec used in his attempts to wrestle place onto the page, I imposed the Oulipo-style constraint of showing no less than 75% sky in any photo. Drawn, like Perec, to undefined, overlooked, and in-between spaces, I explore a passenger’s aesthetic of travel in which the city, not the observer, appears to move, as from a train, a bus or a taxi. Chasing the borderlands of places and relationships, subjectivity and objectivity, I ask, does the sky over Europe have frontiers?”

Lauren Elkin is at work on a book about women and cities called Flâneuse, which challenges the widely-held idea that the flâneuse has never existed because women have not had the same access to the city as men. Part critical meander, part memoir, Flâneuse charts a path through literature and art revealing women’s sometimes liberating, sometimes fraught relationship to the metropolis.

“Cities have invisible boundaries, invisible customs gates that demarcate who goes where: certain neighborhoods, certain bars and restaurants, certain parks, are reserved for different kinds of people; a place that’s native and comfortable to one person may seem exclusionary to another. We become so accustomed to this that we hardly notice the values underlying the structure of the city. This is what Perec’s Oulipo and Debord’s Situationism attempt to disrupt: ordered, reified, normative, and oppressive city structures. But for a woman, who does not inhabit public space the way a man does, what does this disruption entail? How can women take possession of the literature and the city on their own terms? What links can we find between women’s radical movements through the city and feminism’s response to literary tradition?“

ABOUT

Joanna Walsh (Badaude) writes and draws graphic fiction and non-fiction. She is published by Tate, and has drawn and written for The Guardian, The Times, The Idler, FiveDials and The White Review amongst others. She has created large-scale artworks for the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Institute. Her website was a Webby Honoree in 2008. She is an associate member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics. This year she will be talking at the Port Eliot Festival, The Wellcome Institute and the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Lauren Elkin is the author of the novel Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson) and co-author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Literary Movement (forthcoming from TQC Long Essays and Zero Books). Her essays on books and culture have appeared in The Guardian, Bookforum, The Daily Beast, The White Review, and Five Dials, and are forthcoming in n+1 and the TLS.  She lives in Paris and London.

RSVP via events@dialoguebooks.org

Entry €5 including wine