Madness and Sewing in the Village...

Beautiful sentences from Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Village," sent to me by new media writer J.R. Carpenter.

"The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass." Bishop, Elizabeth, "In the Village," The Collected Prose, NY: FSG, 1984, p. 252.

"Her house is littered with scraps of cloth and tissue-paper patterns, yellow, pinked, with holes in the shapes of A, B, C, and D in them, and numbers; and threads everywhere like a fine vegetation. She has a bosom full of needles with threads ready to pull out and make nests with. She sleeps in her thimble." Bishop, Elizabeth, "In the Village," The Collected Prose, NY: FSG, 1984, p. 258.

Reminds me of a talk I heard by the marvelous poet/singer/activist Julie Ezelle Patton in November at Pratt Institute (thanks to Rachel Levitzky and Ira Livingston) in which she spoke of her engagement with poetry rising from her love of paper; her mother, an artist, taught her to sew her own clothes at an early age, and she would indeed be crawling around on the floor surrounded by the thin, filmy paper of patternmaking. "Pinked" in "In the Village" means not the color pink but zigzag-edged, as in "pinking shears."

Need I even mention the "holes in the shapes of A,B,C and D"? Stencils, like lace, or like photography, and art-form of negativity, just as women are considered "negative space." Holes in the shape of letters...to be filled by the spirit of letters. Reminding me that I must post Adeena Karasick's commentary framing her video "Lingual Ladies."

The connection to madness and the animal abjection of crawling around eating grass, pins, etc. is a haunting one related to the madness of Bishop's mother, who was permanently institutionalized when EB was very young. Indeed, as I recall, that is the (muted) theme of "In the Village." I think also of the bestiality of descriptions of the "madwoman" in Jane Eyre, who is compared to an animal in the only scene in which she is fully revealed...

Something about "looking ridiculous" (a phrase that arises in pornography and Harlequin romances: "O knew she must look ridiculous...etc.") in the process of losing oneself in the creative act, be it sewing, writing, dancing, or sex. But cross-stitchers and knitters don't look ridiculous; it's such a contained, serene "habit." Maybe that's why we do it in public.

Thank you, JR, for these haunting, violent images.

Lingual Ladies, Text and Gender

Dear All:
Here's Adeena Karasick's video, Lingual Ladies, a repurposing, scrappy and pieced-together parody of Beyoncé's smash hit Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) that is also a celebration of innovative women writers and a call to pens. Enjoy!
Adeena's website is listed to the right, in the URL-roll.
And here's the intro she delivered when she presented it yesterday:


LINGUAL LADIES
Adeena Karasick

For Banff Presentation In(ter)ventions : Writing at the Edge 2011
For the past 20 years, my work has been focused on aspects of intralingual post literary construction – whether its videopoems (I Got A Crush on Osama, or This IS Your Final Nitrous) slide projections, homolinguistic, pataphysical translations, or the repurposing of the 50’s style dating etiquette handbo, “The Rules”, its incorporating a post-literate, hyper-generative aesthetics highlighting recycled language, sampling, borrowing, cutting, pasting, mash-up, engaged in an inter-ventive poetics marked by neo-formalized post-consumerist media-enfused transgressive linguistic practices.
During my two weeks here at Banff as part of the In(ter)ventions Residency, I made a video called “Lingual Ladies” [a parody or repurposing of Beyoncé’s pop hit “Single Ladies” and kinda acts as an example of and commentary on Conceptual Poetry.

The video foregrounds the process of hunting and gathering, of assemblage, bricolage, grabbing and cutting and pasting; becomes a kind of cultural translation, a socio-cultural ideological religious mash-up. It draws from the materiality, miasma of cultural/intellectual archive -- and aims to de-hierarchize or problematize, interrogate that distinction between a kind of philosophical / high art discourse and the “lowbrow” seeming banality of pop culture.

Along with Beyoncé, it features cameos from the texts or likeness of Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, the Italian and Russian Futurists, Marx, Derrida, Levinas, Benjamin, bp Nichol, Spinoza, Helene Cixous, Hannah Arendt, all floating through the boppy mistranslation of a pop song.

Basically this is my rallying cry for the women of Conceptual Poetry to "put their pens up", TO WRITE and be engaged / participate in a vital act of cultural translation, a memetic translation. And if a meme, a unit of cultural info virally replicating itself through language, “make a text of radical memes”.
The fact that there are three dancers was kinda crucial and significant. As Maria mentioned in her brilliant talk regarding her illuminated cross-stitch, 3 is synechdoche or metonymic of the Three Fates, Macbeth’s 3 witches, of course the Kabbalistic notion of the three mothers (ALEF, MEM SHIN), letters or vessels of fiery potential (and by the way not only reference the beginning of the word “shmata” but means “Hear This” (Listen Up)…AND very significantly, Irigaray’s notion of “The Law of the Excluded middle” – (her retranslation of Plato), which interrogates a highly problematic reductive binaric structure embedded with boo hiss hierarchization. So, of course this tripartite structure opens up any limitive dynamic of either /or.

I wanted the video to be highly parodic in nature, satirical and ironic. And, if you really think about it, parody is not merely a “send-up” or spoof, generated to mock but rather as a jumping off point, to comment on cultural practice, female representation intellectualism, meaning-making. Its satirical in the way that its social commentary, incorporating strategies of exaggeration, juxtaposition, fractured comparison, analogy, and highlights certain discordant features of “reality,” art, ideology, the concept of framing ---

And it made me really think about the whole notion of framing / of how a frame is a bracket / a cutting off and into – is NOT a static enclosure but a kind of calling into, a caress (like how Fred was writing about Isadore, a door; the frame is a passage into and out from --- a contingent holding pattern from which one can intensely investigate luxuriate or bask in and then let go of…a flux of frames reframed in infinite aims

Through the making of this it made me really question WHY is it so important or interesting to engage in a process of repurposing or stealing, borrowing shoplifting information – and it just made me really think about how everything is a parasc/tical process, all intertextual and archival; a rewriting, a retranslation of a retranslation; how the page a pageantry of the giddy googler gone rogue mad gatherer. & madly gathering, i’m not just a RAG picker but a FRAG picker / plucker of fragments of parsed pulse plais plays laced socio-political-lingual culturul shards fractures highlighting how nothing is pure, but contaminated with palimpsested resonance --

So Lingual Ladies – a work of excess and exuberance; writing against resistance enclosure, risk, fear, but with festive frivolity…And like in the project with Maria --

weaving words through all that is dirty and degraded;
making meaning out of the syntactic rags, tags, remnants, moments, the
found data, shattered matter,
shredded fragments garments of the other

and anti-absorbedly sops up
all that surrounds
caressing what is dirty and contaminated, expropriating,
re-appropriating the proper, improper,
impropriotous, riotous
celebratrating (syllaborating) all that’s filthy and wrinkled and inside out.
all that’s unfolded, soiled, sullied and un-rinsed
all the philosophers and poets and semioticians all the feminist writers / warriors and
semerotic infidels

and i want to plunge into your spongy thickness / your infected inflection,
yr intertextatic syntacticism


BRING ON THE LINGUAL LADIES!