Tag Archives: Eileen Myles

WE WERE THERE: Readings and performances in response to Zoe Leonard’s I want a president

I want a president

“I want a president” on display at the High Line

Readings and performances in response to Zoe Leonard’s “I want a president,” featuring: Eileen Myles, Justin Vivian Bond, Sharon Hayes, Pamela Sneed, Wu Tsang, Fred Moten, Morgan Bassichis, Mel Elberg, Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade, and Layli Long Solider

Sunday, November 6th, 2016

Chelsea Market Passage, on the High Line at West 16th Street, NY, NY

 

To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions on the reinvented world.
David Wojnarowicz

Spotted at Interference Archive

Spotted at Interference Archive

The night before I went to see readings and performances at the High Line in response to Zoe Leonard’s work I want a president, I found myself in front of a poster that said “Defeat Reagan in 1984.” I couldn’t believe how much it felt like I was staring into the present when I looked at it. It was probably the most simultaneously punk rock and haunting image I’ve seen this year.

I got to the High Line the next afternoon with a few minutes to spare. Then I remembered how long the High Line is (1.45 miles) and how I hadn’t looked up where this event actually was. As I walked along, annoyed at tourists who simply walked the pace I would walk if I was on vacation—I thought about the first time I ever went to the High Line. I was on what I thought was a date or didn’t think was a date until we were there. That’s the feeling the High Line gives me. By the time my maybe-date and I finished dinner and got up there it was sunset. It was beautiful. I thought we should kiss. And when we didn’t, I still thought it was beautiful, just disappointing. We never went out again. But that’s what I think of when I think of the High Line—somewhere that bourgie people go to kiss because of the view. I say this all to explain why it feels so completely radical to have Zoe Leonard’s I want a president installed there.

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes about why transgender troops should be an oxymoron: “What, then, would an end to the ban on trans people serving openly in the US military serve to facilitate? More of the same: endless war, plundering of Indigenous resources, both in the US and abroad, and a militaristic orientation that sees oppressed people as cannon fodder for US imperialism.”

Alice Bag discusses her new solo album with the L.A. Times: “I remember growing up and having people say that there are certain things you don’t talk about at the dinner table…You don’t talk about religion or sex or politics. Well, then I’m going to go eat on the TV tray. Those are the only things I want to talk about.”

Novelist Gabby Rivera discusses her YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath with Remezcla: “I had to do some serious soul searching and evolving in my personhood and politics. As I asked myself those questions, Juliet really came alive and the purpose of it, connecting with queer youth of color, became clearer to me.”

Fanta Sylla has created (and continues to edit) the Black Film Critics Syllabus, feat. subheadings such as “Black music video is Black cinema,” “Black women looking/looked at,” and many more.

Kathleen Hanna is featured in the new installment of Pitchfork’s Over/Under series.

Dev Hynes released his new Blood Orange record, Freetown Sound, a few days early, and you can watch the new video for “Thank You/Augustine” at his website.

Read a transcript of Jesse Williams’ recent BET Awards speech at Colorlines: “Now, this is also in particular for the [B]lack women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.”

Eileen Myles on guns and gays: “When we talk about gun control I think we need to put the focus explicitly on protecting us from us and not from ISIS. We have guns, we live here, we find it so easy to kill. Something is so very wrong with America when the right to bear arms is not freedom but a curse.”

The 20th anniversary edition of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is now available in multiple formats, including free PDF.

At Buzzfeed, Doree Shafrir writes about how the media (specifically People) covers domestic violence: “And today, the language around domestic abuse remains euphemistic. Marriages or relationships that seem haunted by the specter of physical and/or emotional abuse are often labeled ‘turbulent’ or ‘volatile’ — certainly a legal hedge, but one that also allows the severity of domestic violence to be downplayed and, in a way, normalized.”

 

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“Even when the work is about the Self, we want and expect that others will weigh in on it, critically, as art. But many poets—especially, I wager, queer, feminist, marginalized, and young poets—read a Myles poem and see, beyond the work as literature, a vision of the self we would like to enact in the world: brash, confident, living large.”–Arielle Greenberg on Eileen Myles

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Molly McArdle spoke to fifty people across the industry about diversity in publishing, and the results are in Brooklyn magazine. From Tony Tulathimutte: “You will be tokenized. Even when you get to write about your own experience of being a minority in America—you know, even that can be turned against you. Are you going to be used later on as leverage against an accusation of racism? Will you then be seen as a collaborator? In most cases the answer is yes.”

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“…I’ll admit that many times over the last year when I was feeling too burnt-out from work to produce a really high-quality joke about second-wave feminist ghosts or something, I’d give in to social media’s seductive promise of instant validation, and I’d go for the easy joke about being a sad single lady who likes chocolate and wants a man because: ACK! I told myself I was making these jokes ironically, but the reality was, I was often writing them when I was feeling scared or guilty or angry about things that had nothing to do with being single, but I filtered my emotions through the relationship lens because it was easy. Rather than use those ‘negative’ emotional periods to create raw rough drafts that I would refine when I was feeling more balanced, I acted out in the hopes of getting some sign that my voice mattered.”–Sarah Rainone on what she’s “learned about love after a year alone (and a lot of bad jokes)”

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Chronology Doesn’t Always Feel Good: An Interview with Eileen Myles

Photo by: Annabel Graham

Photo by: Annabel Graham

On November 10, 2013, I interviewed Eileen Myles over the phone. Our discussion was focused on her two-books-published-as-one, Snowflake and different streets. Now that Eileen has recently released two books on the same date—it seemed fitting to finally release this interview into the world. Here is Part 1 of 2 of my interview with Eileen Myles.

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Cathy de la Cruz: These questions are all about Snowflake and different streets.

Eileen Myles: I love this new twist in our relationship.

CD: I know… it’s so weird, but it’s kind of hilarious. In my mind, you are this book right now and you’re not my friend, Eileen. I mean that in the best way possible.

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Sarah Clements, the daughter of a Sandy Hook survivor, wrote an open letter to Amy Schumer saying, “as a woman, a daughter and sister, a national figure, and a role model, you have a real stake in gun violence happening all around you.” Clements went on, “the experience of women in a country overshadowed by rampant, targeted gun violence and fear and hatred of women by people who are armed. This is not freedom — at least not for women.”

Amy

A writer at Paste Magazine responded to this call for Schumer to take arms by saying, “I can think of one reason why this unrealistic expectation of Schumer is so difficult for me to resist: She and I are both women and we all (other women included) expect women to be self-sacrificing for the sake of the social good.” What do you think, Weird Sister readers?

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Click here to read thoughts from 18 young feminists from Latin America and the Caribbean regarding “what it means to be a young feminist in a machista society.” lima-decidimos

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Activism & Herstory

“We really felt like there needed to be a space that people could relate to that didn’t blame black people for conditions we didn’t create,” explains Garza in “Meet the Woman Behind #BlackLivesMatter”

Yes! Magazine

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Finally, a Google Chrome app that “changes the word ‘man’ to something more appropriate”! And it’s called, you guessed it, Not All Men.

As you probably heard, since for some reason this news story turned everyone on social media into a total snark, Harper Lee will be publishing a second novel. Go Set a Watchman is a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although Lee wrote Watchman first. And okay, okay, some of those posts were pretty funny, like this one that riffs on that Kanye-and-Paul-McCartney joke from a few weeks ago:

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