Monday, March 19, 2012
Talking with Edith Zimmerman over at The Hairpin
Weird+fun: After Edith Zimmerman judged The Marriage Plot and Green Girl over at The Tournament of Books on Friday (and found herself not liking either) I contacted her just to say: hey: and we decided to have a dialogue about Green Girl and books over at The Hairpin, up now. I think we had a delightful conversation. I'll be lurking over there for a bit to answer any questions for the lovely Hairpin commentariat.
rituals
I didn't do much, purposefully, thinking about The Anniversary this weekend. Friday, the actual day, was already tense, strained, difficult. Yet all weekend John and I sketched out plans for the installation we're doing through our collective La Genet for the Violence and Community symposium at Naropa—a triptych of garguntuan silk-wrapped fetal-pupas, bound in butcher string, riffing on Hans Bellmer's poupees, esp. on his photograph of a bound Unica Zurn, her flesh contorted, sculptural, on the life cycle of the silk worm, on the disciplining of a woman's body. We're calling it NO MORE WIRE HANGERS. The effect will be hopefully both gorgeous and grotesque. They will hang most likely in Bhanu Kapil's office. (By the way if anyone has an used duvet insert, queen, that you'd be willing to give away, I will pay for your shipping, message me. Turns out thrift stores here don't usually sell duvets for health reasons. Another symbolic mothering: my paternal grandmother who worked for decades in Linens at Marshall Field's).
Anyway, for the installation, we decided to learn how to sew, and when we were in Chicago for AWP shipped back my mother's old pink sewing machine that was buried away in the closet. Fitting for the central imagery behind NO MORE WIRE HANGERS - riffing on Joan Crawford - comes from my anti-memoir of maternal trauma, The Book of Mutter. We are hoping to counterpoint an additional image, dealing with the violation of a woman's body, being disciplined, legislated, a doubling history of violence. Using the machine she bought at the Goodwill in the 70s - when she was a struggling single mother—the machine itself, all massive and metal, is probably from the 50s. So surmised the good women at the local quilting shop who fixed it for us. We have visited the silk shop down the street, are playing with colors—hot pink, purple, red, like a girl's bedspread, like a prom dress—are taking a tutorial to learn the machine. But this weekend, dragging the machine out, going through my mother's notion kit, the smell of it, how nostalgic, all of it—felt ritualistic, anyway.
Anyway, for the installation, we decided to learn how to sew, and when we were in Chicago for AWP shipped back my mother's old pink sewing machine that was buried away in the closet. Fitting for the central imagery behind NO MORE WIRE HANGERS - riffing on Joan Crawford - comes from my anti-memoir of maternal trauma, The Book of Mutter. We are hoping to counterpoint an additional image, dealing with the violation of a woman's body, being disciplined, legislated, a doubling history of violence. Using the machine she bought at the Goodwill in the 70s - when she was a struggling single mother—the machine itself, all massive and metal, is probably from the 50s. So surmised the good women at the local quilting shop who fixed it for us. We have visited the silk shop down the street, are playing with colors—hot pink, purple, red, like a girl's bedspread, like a prom dress—are taking a tutorial to learn the machine. But this weekend, dragging the machine out, going through my mother's notion kit, the smell of it, how nostalgic, all of it—felt ritualistic, anyway.
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