I was thinking about the aesthetic Marisa and I invented, the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic, and I guess it’s in the same family as the Lisa Frank Sticker, Hello Kitty Lunchbox, Which Baby-Sitters-Club Character Are You aesthetic (which are part, but not all, of the Gurlesque aesthetic), but in lots of ways it’s the opposite. Because it’s fun to put stickers and songs in your poems—there’s a pleasure in the nostalgia and in the flipping-off of those who want to police the pop out of poetry (say it like “police the fuck out of poetry”), but the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic has to be slightly embarrassing. Like that feeling you get when you see a giant cell phone or a boxy computer monitor on an old TV show. Like, you’re trying to pay attention to the story but you can’t, because god that thing is so big, uhhhhhhh…. It is pure spectacle, that thing that freezes narrative. But it wasn’t distracting at the time: that was just how life looked then. For most of human history we don’t have tons and tons of examples of how life looked so now that they’ve started to pile up and life has started to look so different so fast it’s kind of mortifying. Like your mom did something humiliating but “culture” = your mom. “Your mama’s cell phone is so big….” To get this kind of feeling into your poetry you’re going to have to dig out not just the memorable kitsch but the toys you never told anyone you played with. Your secret collections. Maybe that bag of troll dolls with their hair cut off you found in a closet at your mom’s could count, but that might be too cool. To achieve the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic you can’t be a complicit consumer in a winky way, it has to be something you’d prefer to never tell. Is this just Confession all over again, but with more stuff? (And what would it mean to want it more than wanting to stand in line outside the store to get the six, seven, eight, nine, ten…?) What it offers for nostalgists like you and me is the reminder that the past isn’t always cute, but also full of space junk. And we play Kick the Can in the landfill of our own obsolescence.
Category Archives: Everything Else
The Zack Morris Cell Phone Aesthetic
Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else
Come Find Us at #AWP15!
The WEIRD SISTER crew is taking a few days off to attend AWP in Minneapolis. If you’re at the conference, come say hi to us at the Monk Books/Groundwater Press book fair table (#1429), or at these rad feminist offsite events!
ON THURSDAY 4/9: Weird Atlas/Gazing Switchback
ON FRIDAY, 4/10: GIRL FRIDAY: An AWP Offsite Event Hosted by Our Flow Is Hard, WEIRD SISTER, & Dancing Girl
Can’t wait to see you! <3
Filed under Events, Everything Else
WEIRD SISTER at AWP!
Come hang out with WEIRD SISTER at #AWP15, next week in Minneapolis!
We’ll be at the Monk Books table (#1429) at the Book Fair on Friday and Saturday. We’re also part of two extremely rad off-site events:
ON THURSDAY 4/9: Weird Atlas/Gazing Switchback
& ON FRIDAY, 4/10: GIRL FRIDAY: An AWP Offsite Event Hosted by Our Flow Is Hard, WEIRD SISTER, & Dancing Girl
Come say hi! <3
Filed under Events, Everything Else
We’re Obsessed With: Lizzie and Ali
When I was in college, I was friends with this group of girls who had the driest, most deadpan sense of humor imaginable. (Just to be clear, since I have a moist sense of humor at best: I wasn’t in this particular group, I was just friends with them.) They were the kind of girls who would just flat-out lie to you about something, anything, for like fifteen minutes, or however long it took you to figure out that they were lying, but I’m pretty sure they assumed you were in on it and knew they were lying, because they were nice and generous enough to maybe think you were as smart as they were, or almost as smart. Also they had a wonderful, violent kitten named Cupcake.
They all grew up to be dry and deadpan and smart and generous in various careers, and one of them, Lizzie Prestel, grew up to make this webseries, Lizzie and Ali: A Mostly True Story, in which she plays a mostly-true version of Lizzie: one who is just as dry and deadpan as Real Lizzie, but a lot less smart and way less generous.That’s especially true in Lizzie and Ali‘s latest episode, which just went live on Funny or Die. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
Bad or Boring: Doing Without Ethics in Poetry
Hi guys. I’ve noticed something about the word boring.
I noticed it most recently in discussions about Kenneth Goldsmith’s performance of his version of the St. Louis County autopsy report for Michael Brown. Many people responded with outrage to Goldsmith’s appropriation and objectification of Brown’s body (see the above link to Rin Johnson’s piece and Amy King’s piece asking “Is Colonialist Poetry Easy?”, among others); many of them saw his performance as symptomatic not only of an individual poet’s bad taste or careless sense of entitlement, but of the inherently white supremacist values of avant-garde poetry specifically and the American literary world in general (values that Cathy Park Hong brilliantly exposes in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” and that the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo continues to critique and rage against and lampoon). Goldsmith’s performance, many of these critiques point out, is a logical extension of a position he outlined in a 2009 inteview in Jacket:
I really have trouble with poethics. In fact, I think one of the most beautiful, free and expansive ideas about art is that it — unlike just about everything else in our culture — doesn’t have to partake in an ethical discourse. As a matter of fact, if it wants to, it can take an unethical stance and test what it means to be that without having to endure the consequences of real world investigations. I find this to be enormously powerful and liberating and worth fighting for. Where else can this exist in our culture?
The word, or the concept, of boring seems to come in when people want to preserve this anti-ethical practice but disavow the specific performance Goldsmith gave. I think that’s happening in this response from the publishers of SPORK Press, which celebrates Goldsmith’s “right to fail” as an artist, but notes that “personally I find the autopsy piece (offensive,) facile, and more specifically, boring.”
Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else
FUNNY FEMINISM #4: Missed Connections – An Interview with Aparna Nancherla
A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.
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Last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite comics, Aparna Nancherla on what happened to be the coldest day in New York history since 1950. We were mistaken for NYU students “doing their homework on a Friday night” while carrying out the below interview at Oro Bakery. The included quotes are taken from Aparna’s Twitter account.
Photo by Doug Ault
“There needs to be an affirmative action program to get more white men in jail.”
ON COMEDIC BEGINNINGS
Cathy de la Cruz: I know you’ve mentioned this in your stand-up, the “I know you’re surprised I’m here, I’m surprised too.”
Aparna Nancherla: I started performing stand-up regularly 9-years ago. I got to stand-up a little bit in a more random way than a lot of other comics in that my friend was like, “Oh there’s this open mic near where we live that we should go check out,” just as like a free entertainment thing, not even to perform, but just to watch. We went one night during the summer and people were funny, but then there were people who weren’t as good, so we were like “This is something we could try” because we were both interested in humor. And I think that was my first access point to stand-up comedy. I didn’t grow up watching a lot of stand-up. I had seen it maybe once or twice on TV and I definitely didn’t think it was something that anyone could do. I came to stand-up from a direction of not knowing a lot about that world.
Filed under Everything Else, Funny Feminism
Uncertainty & Our Anxiety Culture
I’ve been diagnosed, at various times in my life, with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Sometimes, and with some people, it’s nothing to wear these labels. Many other women I love have a similar diagnosis, as do some guy friends. Women are twice as likely to have (or rather, to be diagnosed with) an anxiety disorder than men. As Americans, we live in an anxiety culture. Work is demanding, home is demanding, looks are demanding, social life is demanding. As women, we live in an anxiety culture within an anxiety culture. We are simultaneously marginalized and the targets of insanely high expectations.
Photo by NicoleHeffron.com
At age 13 I made a general life rule to stay away from trashy girl magazines, and instead subscribed to Ms. during my school’s annual magazine drive. As a result, I feel lucky to be relatively non-anxious about fat or wrinkles. My general lack of TV-watching also helps me to be less afraid of germs and terrorists than others. I admit Jaws ruined swimming for me, and after Psycho I showered in fear for a decade. I also admit that TV, movies, and other media born of our white supremacist patriarchal culture affects the ways I think about race and gender. I’m not immune. TV, even in small doses, does work its magic on me. I once saw a reality disaster show that involved a teenager getting buried alive in a school bathroom after an earthquake, or maybe it was a tornado. No, it was a tornado. Definitely. The image of him in child’s pose for thirteen hours under thirty feet of rubble is seared into my PTSD-addled brain. I am terrified of being so stuck, of no escape. I’ve been there before. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
It’s a Girl! Or, Am I Finally Ready for Jumpsuit Feminism?
I’m the kind of feminist who values stuff that has been traditionally associated with The Feminine. If I have to choose between “difference feminism” and “equality feminism,” I’ll choose difference: no unisex jumpsuits for me, Charlotte Perkins Gilman! You might expect that I wouldn’t want to dress my children in jumpsuits, either.
This family ruined everything by forgetting the styling rules for unisex hair.
I don’t actually believe that there’s anything in the world that’s fundamentally “feminine” or “female.” I just tend to like objects and activities and aesthetics that people consider “girly”—or, at least, that Americans have considered “girly” during my lifetime, even though some of those things (poetry, the color pink) were once the domains of boys, while others (talking loudly, talking a lot) get gendered differently depending on the context. Because I’ve more or less colored within the lines of what girls like me (white, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, highly educated, apparently straight) were expected to do, I’ve experienced sexism and misogyny differently from the women I know who have had to struggle to gain a foothold in male-dominated fields, or who were shamed for not looking or dressing the way women are “supposed” to look or dress, or whose lives don’t conform to heteronormative models of marriage and child-rearing, or who have had to bear the burden of convincing people that they were women at all. Instead, for most of my life I’ve been most affected by the brand of sexism that dismisses my interests and practices as trivial and marginal. And, as many of my posts here and most of my academic writing makes clear, I have a very strong knee-jerk reaction to that kind of sexism—not because it’s The Worst Kind of Sexism in the World, but because so few people even seem to recognize it as sexism. Making people recognize that kind of sexism feels like important work to me, and like work I might be able to do.
Filed under Everything Else
The Feminist Bachelor Recap: Season Finale + After the Final Rose
This fuckin’ guy.
Oh Bachelor Nation, I do not even know what to say to you. For this week, we may have witnessed the biggest blow to feminism In. Bachelor. History. Like you, I am speechless. I don’t know where to begin, so let’s start at the beginning. We’re back in Arlington, Iowa, with Farmer Chris and his Final Two, Fertility Nurse Whitney (whose name henceforth is synonymous with Patriarchy), and Virgin Who Can’t Drive Becca (who will heretofore represent Feminism). Farmer Chris brings both stellar babes to meet his family this week, and then he must make the Most Difficult Decision of His Life. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else, Movies + TV
We Have Finally Reached Consensus on “Ladies”
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN GENTLES ALL:
Did you know that some people do not like to be called ladies?
I know, I know. You thought it was just a polite way to address women. You heard women don’t like to be called females or girls!
You’re right. For some women, “ladies” is a charming, even an empowering, term. For others, it’s condescending and limiting, enforcing stereotypes about women’s weakness and social codes prescribing ladylike behavior; plus, its use very often involves making assumptions about a person’s gender, assumptions that may be incorrect. Not even feminists can agree if it’s a word we want to use!
I asked some pals (I did a pal-poll) how they felt about this important topic. I also interviewed myself. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
