Disclosure: I'm friends or friendly with about half of the contributors to this book, for which I also wrote a chapter. I think I'd have loved it even if that weren't the case, but then again it couldn't have not been the case because the world of feminist archivists isn't as big as you might imagine--or hope!
"The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection." So yeah, Jeanette Winterson had a rough childhood, but somehow managed to keep her optimism and sense of humor. Why Be Happy reminds me of Are You My Mother?, but without comics and run through a Joan Didion filter.
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior -- benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'The what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course -- as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of the unconsciousness.'
It's been a year and a half since my last love-letter to Katie's zine making. The poignant 17 Strangers came to me in a donation of 100+ zines, but would have stood out, even among 1,000. The seventeen anecdotes read like flash fiction, those short short stories that take your breath away with a jab or a caress.
I've been meaning to write a review of Ker-bloom! zine by artnoose since about December, when I finished cataloging about 75 issues of the unusually reliable and long-running quarterly letterpress zine artnoose has been lovingly producing since 1996.
photo from Parcell Press
I've long been a List fan, but I don't think I've ever gotten around to reviewing it before. Ramsey's perzine is in the form of lists: her own, found, and contributed. In #13, subtitled "Moving On," she applies her oblique storytelling to her break-up with her long-term boyfriend. The lists reveal her vulnerability, and that she is lonely but not beaten, also committed to veganism and straightedge, but not preachy about it. The lists aren't the full story, with a talented artist like Ramsey. There are lots of full-page drawings to illustrate the various lists.
The first time I read an issue of Low Hug, I was relatively new to zines and didn't fully appreciate it. Now that I am old to zines, I have gained the proper appreciation for A.j. Michel and friends' well-written essays on popular culture, alternative music and as A.j. puts it in #9, castoff items or "cultural detritus." These folks are deeply nerdy, in the best possible way, as demonstrated by this statement about moving, also in #9, "This is one of the ultimate signs I'm a lifer when it comes to zines: I'm not worried about employment or having a regular place to stay, but how to get mail."
Celia and I made 24-hour zines together, but we only spent 12 hours on them. Hers is an adoring and adorable mini Sherman Alexie fanzine, because she is an adoring and adorable fan of the American Indian fiction writer.
I'm not going to tell you what this novel is about because if I'd known before I read it, I wouldn't have done so. I grabbed the bookjacketless novel off the shelf at Barnard because I loved the author's previous novel.
If that crappy writer had been in American Lit, then Ms. Doman would have written in the margin, "Don't use the passive voice unless there's a compelling reason." I mean, "being pursued"? By whom? I had assumed that such charges would have been pursued by me, and that they still could be. But the paper was acting like I'm not even real, just grammatically implied.
I knew Alison Bechdel was brilliant, but I didn't realize she was so smart. Her memoir about her relationship with her mother is multilayered, in that it's about psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy; literature, feminism, and aging & menopause (maybe I'm reading these last two into it a bit), as well about how Ma & Alison Bechdel did or didn't and do or don't get along.
As I write this, I'm halfway finished with the second book in the trilogy that begins with Delirium. My sister was right that Delirium is way better than Oliver's first book, Before I Fall.