The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

Last May, when I wrote MAINTENANCE #1, I quoted the interview Bartholomew Ryan did with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, for Art In America in 2009. Maintenance, she told him, “is trying to listen to the hum of living. A feeling of being alive, breath to breath.” That’s still my lodestar for this column.

I write fiction most of the time, at Bookslut I write a reading diary on different themes, and here I write about specific solo publications – the reading I do, and bump into doing, here in Chicago. I write about “the people [the writers, the editors, the publishers] who are taking care and keeping the wheels of society moving.” I try to pay attention. Here where Our Scene is so rad and vibrant but also so segregated by neighborhood, schools, tone, etc., this is something we can always fail better at.

from THE CANTILEVER RAINBOW by Ruth Krauss (Pantheon, 1964), a terrific book I read this month but did not write about below. (This copy is available to the public on the J. shelves in the Poetry Foundation Library.)

To start, then, a list of new work by Chicago writers and publishers – I haven’t read any of these yet, but I want to: Ark, a new edition of Ronald Johnson’s epic poem about (for example) William Blake and The Wizard of Oz; David Stuart MacLean’s The Answer to the Riddle Is Me; Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge, published by Kenning Editions; and Rave #1, a comic by SAIC painter Jessica Campbell.

Next, some work I read this month. (An asterisk means it was published less than 365 days ago.) 

+ Afrosonics, a blog by Harmony Holiday*
+ Guy Davenport!
+ Manifesto Items 2 by David Lasky (self-published, 2013)*
+ Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson (University of Iowa Press, 2007)
+ Like Someone In Love: An Addendum to Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013)*
+ The Crisis of Infinite Worlds by Dana Ward (Futurepoem Books, 2013)*

Afrosonics by Harmony Holiday
Afrosonics is poet Harmony Holiday’s archive of poetry, music, and antiquefuturisms. “Afrosonics,” she writes, is “a form unto itself; an omni-poetics that exists in the interstices between genres, goes beyond the commonly perceived scope of oral tradition, and is an enactment of the Black Aesthetic and often the Black Avant Garde and Black Radical Tradition.” I love how she uses “enactment” – this is a living archive. All the clips and quotes here are fairly brief, meaning Afrosonics is more a map than a library – an introduction – and most everything is musical somehow. Some pieces are glitched or otherwise edited by Holiday.

I come here to look and to listen, and to take notes. I a lot of these names – Alice Coltrane, Haki Madhubuti, Joseph Campbell – but not all of them, and the ones I don’t make my brain and heart stronger. Here’s where I first heard Fred Moten’s name, and since then I’ve read every book of his I can find. Currently it looks like access to the clips is restricted and the archive is moving to a permanent, offline home at Columbia University. But I’m writing it up here anyway as a website because there are still some resources there, and maybe you need to get started too.

Guy Davenport!
Guy Davenport was a writer, translator, critic, veteran, teacher, and painter who lived – mostly – in Kentucky, where his lawn, said Ronald Johnson, was “a Klimt of violets.” Straight up, I should have read Davenport long ago and every year since, but I didn’t because his name didn’t sound like someone I would be able to hear very well. He sounded very white, very male, very rich. A couple years ago I grew up and gave him a proper chance, and it felt like someone knocked a skylight inside my head. Now I read him regularly and when I do, I absolutely always learn a new way to see this work. Plus, I enjoy his tone – it’s polite but fixed, and occasionally stubborn. No airs. He is white, but he’s not that male and rich, and he draws on an international archive then makes it new.

This month I re-read Davenport’s Art of Fiction interview, where he talks about (for example) logbooks, and being a soldier, and literature in schools (with a capital-L and without). My favorite section, this read-around, is where Davenport remembers one of his teachers, Harry Levin, who taught him “how to read images in a text – that literature is as pictorial as painting or sculpture. He saw that what we needed alongside the old-fashioned stylistic and ideological criticism was a criticism of content. In his seminar on Melville, he paid great attention to the Pequod, for instance.” How cool is that? Close reading as structural, as sculptural, not dogmatic. The other example I know of this kind of reading is Ramona Quimby, asking how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom. “[Levin] never once mentioned Calvinism or any of these other things that critics rave on about. But the space of the ship, its sociology, he could get into that.” Me too.

MANIFESTO ITEMS 2 by David Lasky (self-published, 2013)

Manifesto Items 2 by David Lasky
David Lasky, a Seattle-based artist who won an Eisner for his book about the Carter Family, is my friend and collaborator and so, good thing this isn’t a traditional review column. Manifesto Items 2 is a zine, staple-bound and covered in blue paper, and also a portfolio of recent work. Each page has an isolated image and none have accompanying text, so what makes a whole are David’s bold, confidently-inked lines and forward movement. On most pages, the gun is still smoking, or the character is looking out-of-frame. There are also women in capes and comfortable underwear, Jane Birkin waiting for a movie ticket, bare feet, sucker punches, Bigfoot combing his chest fur, and spot illustrations Lasky did for The Stranger. I really enjoy how David tells stories, even though keyholes like he has to do here, and I like this zine in particular, as a snapshot of his work before and just after the Eisner. If you write him he might send you one too.

Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson
Last winter, a lot of us read Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and so last spring some of us tried writing novels or poems in fragmented paragraphs, like how those two do. By “us” I mean I sure did. Then I read Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and Jane, which is about the murder of Nelson’s aunt. And then I thought, how did Nelson talk about what she wanted to write, before she started writing it? Where was she standing, when she wrote these books? Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions starts to answer these questions. It is a textual history not only about the New York School but about the forces that want to call it A School, and about the women who were in the room if not always in the books. The first chapter, which is my favorite and which quotes some of the same material Bluets does, is about Joan Mitchell and how she used color. There is also an entire chapter about Bernadette Mayer, which is never a bad choice. I learned so much here – facts and frames – and I love Nelson all the more for writing a dissertation about women she knows, women who are still working.

Like Someone In Love: An Addendum to Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn
As I wrote last summer in The New Inquiry, Love Dog is an archive of Masha Tupitsyn’s Tumblr by the same name, which references Argos, the patient, sweet dog who waited (and waited) for Odysseus to come home from the war. Now published by Penny Ante Editions – and beautifully so, with an accompanying multimedia mixtape - Love Dog is a book about love in the digital age, feminist love, and mourning. It is also the second volume in Tupitsyn’s digital trilogy. (The first was her book Laconia, which started as a Twitter account, and the last will be a sound and video piece, placing the whole definitively in the performance art world.) Like Someone In Love is a free, 65pp PDF – an internet essay culled from the same media and emotional space as Love Dog but written last summer, when Masha was on residency in France. The awareness of it, its careful attention, and its precise desires remind me of both Sarah Schulman (who Masha quotes in her introduction) and Chris Kraus, especially in I Love Dick. I read Love Dog as a performance and a feminist archive, and I enjoyed and felt passionate about it even though my life is far from a residency in France. I am excited for the third volume of the trilogy, and then to wait a few years before taking it all back in again. These pieces will continue to claim space – media-wise and intellectually – and to matter.

THE CRISIS OF INFINITE WORLDS by Dana Ward (Futurepoem Books, 2013)

The Crisis of Infinite Worlds by Dana Ward
I picked up The Crisis of Infinite Worlds because poet Anselm Berrigan blurbed it and its cover was a rainbow. I went straight to Skylark and read the entire thing in one night. I spend a lot of time learning how people think about poetry, and figuring out how to teach it, so it was such a pleasure – a relief, even – to get completely lost in a book of poems. Seriously people: I went so far inside. I loved it. Lost in a Chicago bar, reading a book of poems, would be a great way to go.

The Crisis of Infinite Worlds is committed to both optimism and survival. It is fierce and tender. It is written by a poet, a husband, and a dad, who is also a New Yorker and doesn’t try to minimize any of these things or worse, make them dishonestly graceful. It is sometimes a letter, sometimes an encyclopedia, sometimes traditional poems. My favorite today is “untitled birth narrative” which has a Joe Brainard cameo and is also a totally heartbreaking piece about being the dad in the delivery room, i.e. the kind of poem I always thought would be either selfish or saccharine by default. This one is neither. I read it twice in a row. I do not want to write any more about this book because I want you to read it for yourself.

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

Here are five books I read this month, and pictures of three more. An asterisk means the book (or zine) came out less than 365 days ago. (The green polish is Selena Gomez Nicole by Opi. I don’t own the bottle but I did bonk my thumb running for the #18, and a nice lady at the library let me do a touch-up. The silver is Wet n Wild.)

+ Library Mixtape (exhibition catalogue) (John M. Flaxman Library at SAIC, 2013)*
+ Radon by Travis Fristoe and Aaron Cometbus (Salad Master, 2013)*
+ The Wayside by Julie Morstad (Drawn and Quarterly, 2012)
+ The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead, 2011)
+ You’re So Sexy: When You Aren’t Transmitting STDs by Isabella Rotman (self-published, 2013)*

ANOTHER GOVERNESS/THE LEAST BLACKSMITH by Joanna Ruocco (University of Alabama, 2012)

Library Mixtape (exhibition catalogue)

Last summer, the libraries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Flaxman and Flasch) put out a call to faculty, staff, and students who wanted to make their own “mixtape” of favorite holdings in the two spaces. Their picks would then be displayed together on a shelf, for browsing, and highlighted in a takeaway catalogue. Okay, so three issues here: one, technically these are not mixtapes; this “exhibition catalogue” (my phrase) is eleven color-copy pages with a staple in the top left corner; and three, these libraries are in a private institution, so why am I writing about this project here, in a column about (for example) accessibility and openness? Because I love this idea. Even the title cards are cool – designed to look like Side A of a CS90 tape, each features a photo of the mixer, her name, the date, how to find these holdings in which library, actual handwriting, and in Claire Ashley’s piece, a terrific Harlequin-colored doodle. The format makes these holdings fun, available, and visible, which is an awesome move for an academic library to make. (Props too to Terry R. Meyer’s tongue-in-cheek quote from the Pet Shop Boys song “Love, Etc.”: “You need more than / the Gerhard Richter hanging on your wall.”) It is cool too, seeing everyone on one page: faculty with pictures of their kids, recommending titles that have nothing to do, immediately at least, with their current classes; students with rigorous, focused lists about music concrete or the artistic process. Sure, this introduced me to new library holdings but equally importantly, it helped me jumpstart non-weather-related conversations when I bumped into these smart folks on the elevators. I would love to see versions of this catalogue adapted in other public and private spaces – if SAIC is not a daily part of your life and you would like to read my catalogue, email me your mailing address.

Radon by Travis Fristoe and Aaron Cometbus

Radon is a sincere spoof of Bloomsbury’s popular 33.3 series, written by Aaron Cometbus (of BookThugNation, and Crimpshine, and Cometbus; his fans will notice overlap between this book and Cometbus 55, but whatever) and Travis Fristoe (of the Gainsville Public Library, and reactionary 4, and america?). It’s the same size and design as that series (which I love and support), however instead of looking at one album in full this one covers a 45, the self-titled and only LP out from Radon, a 90s punk band from Florida. “Probably they weren’t any more schizophrenic or suicidal than their peers,” writes Cometbus, “but they were more artful at expressing it.” Radon doesn’t really try to describe how the band’s music sounds, which was annoying at first because, why hack the 33.3 look if you’re not trying to one-up or critique it? Instead Radon is a split meditation on what punk music is, and why, and why it’s important to write songs about where you’re from. That’s a pretty nebulous book to be, but somehow dudes got away with it without going all bro-nostalgiafest on us, or talking down. This is a book about loving a band. “Music history is useful,” writes Fristoe, “so are facts, but each lonely person in their bedroom listening to records is an equal, valid force.” My favorite descriptions are when Cometbus writes drummer Bill Clower as a short order cook (“The steady sizzle of his hi-hat is comforting, making me feel like I’m in a greasy diner and breakfast is on its way.”), and Fristoe compares Radon’s lyrics to a passage from Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever? – a book he read this summer, a decade later, that reminded him of the band. As usual with a Cometbus joint, the times I’m frustrated by Aaron’s uncompromisingly purist aesthetic are soon rendered moot by a cool metaphor he uses or the empathetic, even tender way he’ll describe a crowd. This is a book that sets its own rules and follows them well.

The Wayside by Julie Morstad

The Wayside is a gorgeous collection of ink-and-watercolor illustrations by Julie Morstad, a Vancouver BC artist whose foxes and bodiless heads you might recognize from Neko Case’s 2006 album. For the most part Morstad’s drawings connect tonally (women with hair like windy tentacles, deep burns of color, flowers with eyes) not sequentially, though there is a short story at the beginning of the book, about a girl who meets a person whose body is totally covered in a veil – like the Ghost of Christmas Future only without a graveyard. This is why I love Morstad: she looks like she might be Too Cute but she’s not; there are no birds on anything. Her veils are curtains not gauze, the bodies under them oracles not dead brides. Sure her characters are gendered, with breasts and dresses, but their eyes are not doe-y and childlike and their mouths are focused, curious. These ladies are often shown using sticks as divining rods or clubs or canes, or something to whittle in a corner. Time for Morstad is either trapped in amber – I love how she draws crowds, suspended – or whirligigging. In one panel a skylight opens like a mouth, a cast turns into a leg into a tree stump. The next page is a new story. The best surprise of all is that this is not a book since relegated to the “look at the cool independent graphic art books I own” shelf; I’ve kept reading it and the light catches something else every time I do.

RISE IN THE FALL by Ana Božičević (Birds, LLC; 2013)

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

I grew up Irish Catholic and I like the Cure, plus I’m Scorpio, so of course I’ve always been attracted to and scared of death. I’ve often picked up Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir – her mom died of cancer at fifty-five, leaving Meghan the only girl in the family – but I didn’t take it home until the beginning of last summer, when I started a project I thought was probably also about death and family. I hoped her book would be both medicine and a guide. It is, even the parts I don’t relate to, like summers in Vermont or life without public ritual. O’Rourke writes honestly, even beautifully, about trying to understand why her mother isn’t here anymore, and how she could be in so much pain, her and her mom both, and how to go on. O’Rourke writes as a person with a body and as a daughter but never selfishly, just trying describe the experience as immediately and specifically as possible. “There is our mother, and then, suddenly, there is our cancer.” O’Rourke quotes from research too, novels and poems—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, C.S. Lewis, Don DeLillo—first objectively, then personally. (Is this how I am supposed to feel? Is this how I do feel? Is that what’s next?) I left The Long Goodbye behind when I left town this summer (I was traveling light), and picked it back up a few weeks ago when a family member began actively dying. To my relief, it made me feel less alone in my grief, less crazy too, and the heartbreaker final graf helped me support my family as a daughter as well.

You’re So Sexy: When You Aren’t Transmitting STDs by Isabella Rotman

I saw this comic – with its glossy, pea-green cover, staple-bound and barcoded – on a newspaper stand and picked it up because there was a condom glued to the back and it said SEXY in bubble letters on the front, and it was free. Dedicated to “anyone who is having sex, has had sex, or plans on having sex ever,” this fifty-six-page text expands on three key points: communication is key, getting tested regularly is important, and most STDs are transmitted through bodily fluids so reducing contact with them reduces risk of infection. This is a solid tripod, and Rothman’s pitch is too. She’s in full-on smart older sister mode but firmly, with zilch emotional projection or squeamishness. Each page has a differently dynamic layout, however images and text do not really directly interact (as they do in Ellen Forney’s comics about sex, for example), but that’s cool because it makes the reader feel like part of the dialogue instead of an observer. Cisgender is defined on the first page, consent on page ten and at length. Options and STDs are presented clearly, by characters with kind eyes and different kinds of bodies, and there is a bibliography in the back. My only disappointment was that Rotman’s main narrator, Captain Buzzkill, is named weirdly (because knowledge is a turn-on! as Rotman says herself) and drawn a little weirdly too, with a muscled body and heart-print boots, like a frat boy on Halloween – then again, Buzzkill is a sharp, reliable guide so who am I to judge, especially when a spectrum of other characters are represented here too? I especially loved Rotman’s bent mermaid on the last page, with a long long tail knotted into infinity, and how she drew the woman on page twenty-four, looking at herself in a handheld mirror. The woman’s right big toe is out at an angle, helping her balance while she looks. I would give this book to my own little sister, and I took some tips from it myself.

THE LOVE AND ROCKETS COMPANION, edited by Marc Sobel and Kristy Valenti (Fantagraphics, 2013)

 

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

This month is different because I left Chicago—it’s the first time in six years I wasn’t in Pilsen for the Fourth—to study for a month in the Naropa Summer Writing Program. The point isn’t that I’m fancy (I’m not; I saved up!), it’s that this place is wonderful so I want to be your Mina Harker. (Or for you to be her yourself. Here’s the archive.)

This column is different too. I’m still in Boulder. I decided to write you from here, even though I need to turn in my portfolio soon eek, because I like the idea of book-review-as-postcard. I am writing you now, before I get back and set this experience against Chicago’s meat and concrete and home. I didn’t want to write starry-eyed, and I didn’t want to write retrospectively. I just want to show you some books I read while I was here, because I found them, living in a city where the sky—not the neighborhood—is what centers.

My constraints were that I couldn’t write about anything I had to read for class, and I couldn’t write about anything I’d heard about before. To sort that out I started taking selfies—these snapshots below—on lunchbreaks in the Ginsberg Library. I thought I was taking these pictures for myself, but in class yesterday I realized I was taking them for this column. Fragments are a good way to show  reading for research and pleasure while on deadline (dovetailing with what Carl Wilson says about poetry here). Plus these are personal because each one represents something I copied into my notebook, or otherwise Felt Very Near and Dearly.

Next month will be same as before—your regularly scheduled MAINTENANCE. If there’s something you’d like me to read, or read about, let me know: mairead dot case at gmail dot com.

Publications discussed here:
+ Heavenly Breakfast: an Essay on the Winter of Love by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 1979)
+ Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices by Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1954)
+ Civil Disobediences, edited by Lisa Birman and Anne Waldman (Coffee House Press, 2004)
+ Margery Kempe by Robert Glück (Serpent’s Tail, 1994)
+ I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time by Kristin Prevallet (Essay Press, 2007)
+ What’s With Modern Art? by Frank O’Hara, edited by Bill Berkson (Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999)
+ “A poem for record players” by John Wieners (1958)

HEAVENLY BREAKFAST by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 1979)

My first night, I walked to Pearl Street to buy a sandwich and something to read. Missions help. I found Trident and bought this book, which is also an essay, because this introduction here made me feel like I’d  swallowed a rock and needed to cry. Heavenly Breakfast is the commune where Samuel Delany lived, on the Lower East Side in 1967-8, and also his band. Babies lived at Heavenly Breakfast too, one bathroom didn’t have a door, folks “balled” a lot, and the kitchen was for guests, meals, practice, and the bathtub. “If you’ve ever indulged the fantasy of being invisible,” Delany writes, “you’d probably like commune life.” Heavenly Breakfast is clean, quick, and gripping, not so much a book about rock bands and sex as it is holding space, and living together in the in-between.

UNDER MILK WOOD: A PLAY FOR VOICES by Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1954)

Under Milk Wood is a radio play about the dreams people have in a small Welsh fishing village. It starts and ends at night, with some day in the middle. Characters include Mae Rose Cottage, a teenager who draws circles on herself in lipstick, a constable who pisses in his helmet, and Organ Morgan, who has nightmares about orchestras. The book is unified by time and music—reading it aloud at random, and again, is a great way to practice deep listening. (Or to make a bone-white student apartment seem less vast.) The people at Innisfree stocked two whole copies of this book and so I wanted to kiss everyone working that night.

“Symbiosis” by Peter Warshall, from CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES (Coffee House Press, 2004)

“Symbiosis” is anthologized in Anne Waldman and Lisa Berman’s Civil Disobediences, a “talking book” of smart beautiful people writing about how poetics can engage with politics. (Lady Liberty is on the cover, blurred like she’s making a fist not holding a torch.) Peter Warshall, the Whole Earth catalog guy, he wrote this essay (available here on Google Books)—his “her” is Beatrix Potter, the writer and also, the first person to prove that lichen is the product of fungus and algae. That freaked out Scientific Society, because it was queer coupling and also, a woman proved it. Warshall tells Potter’s story like the cool uncle at holiday dinner, conversationally, and braiding in biologist Lynn Margulis, Gaia, Gay Liberation, and billions of years. The essay rambles but it holds, and it gives Peter Rabbit a hero’s welcome home. I am excited to read the other essays here—Civil Disobediences is about half a phone book but I’m lugging it home anyway, to keep on my bedside table where I can love and argue with it over the years.

MARGERY KEMPE by Robert Glück (Serpent’s Tail, 1994)

Okay, here I’m cheating because I’ve read this book before. It’s one of my forever favorites though, it’s about waiting and romantic obsession in two knitted-up stories, one belonging to Margery Kempe, a failed fifteenth century saint who loved Jesus physically and passionately and is credited with writing the first autobiography. The other belongs to Glück, who wanted to write Margery’s story for decades but couldn’t until he fell in love himself, with a younger man named L. The book is hot and funny and sweet and taboo. “I’m Margery,” writes Glück, “following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.” “Mine the attempt to talk herself into existence,” what a killer gymnastic. Above is another paragraph I loop to myself aloud.

I, AFTERLIFE by Kristin Prevallet (Essay Press, 2007)

The front table at the library had two books, that I saw, that people wrote about their fathers’ deaths. One was Eleni Sikelianos’s heartstopping The Book of Jon, and the other is here, I, Afterlife by poet and hypnotherapist Kristin Prevallet, who writes about when her father killed himself in the car. It’s a powerful tug-of-war won by Prevallet, the survivor. One tension is her nimble poetry against the sudden vortex, another the way she braids clinical report language with elegy. I, Afterlife is brave and current, happening now. I read it twice in a row and went to class red-eyed. Another moment: “Never fall in love with a text that attempts to convince you that you are already dead. / Or that you are a vampire.”

WHAT’S WITH MODERN ART? by Frank O’Hara (Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999)

This is a pamphlet of Frank O’Hara’s short reviews and “other art writings” from the 1950s, edited by Bill Berkson (who told us to look up George Schneeman too: here). Just like his poems, O’Hara’s reviews are vibrant and sincere—and capsule-sized, which means Robert DeNiro, Joseph Cornell, and Joan Mitchell can hang out together on one page. He uses words like “beautiful,” “brave,” and “passion” but his feet stay on the ground, in fact I copied a few reviews out longhand into my notebook to muscle up. Berkson includes a piece framing Jackson Pollock’s black and white paintings, a charming critique of David Smith’s sculpture (“circle them as you may, they are never napping”), and his own breezy, meaty afterword. The excerpt above is from Ingenue magazine 1964, from a feature where teenagers were encouraged to write in and ask a poet “What’s with modern art?” I love how seriously O’Hara replies. I love poets as critics, and teenagers asking important questions about art.

from “A poem for record players” by John Wieners

Okay, I’m cheating again because Eric Baus made me read this one, it was assigned for his Week Four Lecture (which was great; you can read the whole thing here). Poet Wieners studied at Black Mountain College with Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (whose bumper sticker was apparently “I saw delight”), and later on he worked at SUNY Buffalo. His poems are jazzy and sexy. I love how this one begins in the whirlpool—”The scene changes” is the first line, the second “Five hours later,” and then there’s pigeons, coughing, wings, squeaks. “I am engaged in taking away / from God his sound,” writes the speaker as he hides from a clock, echoing Krapp. What I really, really loved here was how nobody doubts the speaker’s eye, he just keeps zooming around the seacoast city, doing his best to be clear even though the reader will probably misunderstand, as readers do. (I read this poem on the bus on my way to Counterpath Books in Denver, to hear the amazing Julie Doxsee (an SAIC grad!), which is why the annotation’s a little wobbly.)

found in the back room of the coffeehouse

Because sometimes on lunchbreaks you don’t read, instead you walk downtown for coffee and sun and you bump into some guys playing D&D.

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

Before we talk books, a call: submit your work to two local publications, AREA Chicago and Chicago Literati. AREA Chicago—the acronym is for Art, Research, Education, Activism—was founded by Daniel Tucker in 2005. Not only has AREA transitioned into a collectively-edited, distributed, and programmed publication and event series (no small feat!), but it’s consistently stood by its mission statement, which is to “create relationships across the boundaries that segregate our city and our minds”. That’s a tall order for a city like ours—practically, it’s impossible because there isn’t one language that everyone uses. (I’m not being precious: you don’t talk in Pilsen like you do in Bronzeville, or Rogers Park. I hear juke out the window at home sometimes, but never at work.)

Still, AREA gets close to filling that order, publishing work by people of all stripes, from all walks and all neighborhoods. (I’ve ridden all the CTA lines to get to AREA events. No other publication in our city asks that.) This is good and bad, sometimes of course the magazine will dovetail into generalizing language or get a little wide-eyed, but even at worst those moments are fail-betters, and most often AREA reps Chicago well.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that they have a new call for work out—the next issue is themed KIDS. Send something if you have a kid, are a kid, work with them, or know one. Writing for AREA is one of the best ways to be a part of Chicago art and activism, whether you’re trying to find your place or ready to write its history.

Number two, Chicago Literati: an online literary and lit-focused publication—part of the Tribune’s blogroll—edited by recent Columbia College graduate Abby Sheaffer, who’s taking the baton from earlier catch-all local lit sites like Literago. Chicago Literati publishes features and interviews, as well as original work and heads-ups about cool series or events.

Abby is elegantly tireless, and I’m excited to see where she takes the publication. It’s an incredible amount of work and a noble goal, editing a project that covers all parts of our squid-like lit scene—plus Abby writes fiction in her own right. So let her know about your events, and your friends’ events, and hey: answer her call for original, summer-themed work.

Publications discussed here (an asterisk means it came out less than 365 days ago):
+ Triumph of the Ape: Stories by Todd Dills (THE2NDHAND, print edition 2013)*
+ nods by Carrie Lorig (Magic Helicopter Press, 2013)*
+ Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle (WAVE Books, 2012)
+ Tracy’s Tiger by William Saroyan (Doubleday, 1951; out of print)
+ The Mere Future by Sarah Schulman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009)
+ Violence by Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch (Guillotine Press, 2012)*

Triumph of the Ape: Stories by Todd Dills

Todd Dills graduated from Columbia College’s MFA program, worked door at Skylark for years, and—even after moving to Nashville with his family—still publishes THE2NDHAND, a two-sided broadsheet featuring work by the likes of Lauren Pretnar, Scott Stealey, Rob Funderburk, and Kate Duva. It’s great, and it’s just long enough to enjoy during solo happy hour.

Triumph of the Ape, a short story collection, is Dills’s second book, not counting the two 2NDHAND anthologies he’s edited. I love it for its consistency—it is Of Dills in both style (he writes itineraries, romances, long musical Faulkner-y sentences), stakes (romance again, and death and making a living, and what to believe), and geography (Chicago and the South). It is a testament to his community too, how he’s published it while publishing everyone else at THE2NDHAND in the meanwhile. Dude isn’t messing around.

One of my favorite things about the writing here is that Dills is not a namedropper, in other words the guys with Morrissey haircuts actually want to be Morrissey, or at least wistfully sensitive and sexy and queering like Morrissey. They are not lazy shadows; these characters talk about race and God and money in their own voices, not as cyphers. Admittedly Ape is a pretty masculine book—I went on an Adrienne Rich binge after finishing it—but that’s just to say I identified with the characters as brothers or sons or lovers, not selves, and sometimes I wanted to slap them or hug them. Nothing wrong with that, though—it’s a fine book that makes you want to do that.

NODS by Carrie Lorig, in the fine light of a North Loop Kinko’s.

nods by Carrie Lorig

Carrie Lorig read at the last Dollhouse, a poetry reading series co-organized by Dolly Lemke, Holly Amos, and Ryan Spooner. (I worked with Dolly at Switchback Books and I work with Holly now, but I’d love their series anyway.) The Dollhouse Reading Series is free, salon-style BYOB, and super-comfy—the last time I came a little late, so tuned into the first reader while perched on Dolly’s porch, looking up at the sky and feeling at home.

Lorig read last that night, she said it was her biggest crowd ever and giggled a bit. She stood like a bass player—feet square to the crowd and squinting, like there was mist hanging over our heads. (Kate Greenstreet does this too.) Lorig’s work is first-chapbook-energetic, bright and sensory, half letter-to-the-poet’s-lover, half kid-explaining-a-nightmare-to-her-mom. There are cattle and rodeos and lust, twinning a bit with the cattle and farms and births of Kristen Stone’s Domestication Handbook.

After I bought the book I was surprised to see how its poems look on the page: not light but dense, low-caps and all caps, with drone repetition and Gertrude Stein valentines. Lines come up like music—“To my Aunt Zero Bones”, “PURPLE CURBS”, “oofprints in the face”—making this a book to dive into, not excerpt from. I’m excited for her next one too.

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle 

I recommend Madness, Rack, and Honey, a book of lectures by poet, critic, and teacher Mary Ruefle, because I am still reading it. I read it like practicing free throws or covering songs. Ruefle begins with a quote from Gaston Bachelard (“We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment”), and continues with essay after wise essay about oh, secrets, thoughts, facts, time, and writing (the daily work of it—the endurance not the romance). I admire her excitement (she uses exclamation points!), her respect for youth (even as she draws on her experience), her taste, how she reads as she writes, and also her respect for form. These are essays written to writers, with established theses and language, not perzines in masquerade. Ruefle even convinced me that Richard Hugo was wrong, and I should start using semicolons. (Tip: listen to this song while reading “On Sentimentality”.)

TRACY’S TIGER by William Saroyan, in the fine light of a Red Line car.

Tracy’s Tiger by William Saroyan

Tracy’s Tiger was a gift—a loan—from a friend who is moving to Oregon to be an architect. We went to her apartment and there were colored balloons everywhere, and beer and dancing, and she said have you read this? And I said no, and she said here. You should. She opened it to show me Henry Koerner’s beautiful line drawings, fine enough to see heartbeats. My favorite I think is one of Tracy getting photobombed by pigeons and of course you can’t really have photobombs in a line drawing, but that’s how good these are.

Anyway then one day I grabbed Tracy’s Tiger for the bus. It’s a slim, clean book; I read it all on my way in to the Loop. I’ve read Saroyan before, West Coast high school teachers love The Human Comedy a lot, and also because I want to write strong, short episodic books like Saroyan does. I love how he writes about poverty and children without belittling or straw-manning anyone.

Still I was wary of Tracy’s Tiger, which is about a boy, Thomas Tracy, and how he grows up. Tracy has a tiger; it has white teeth and is actually a black panther. It follows him around like a shadow and is late for church sometimes, and sometimes it says “Eyeeej.” Boy and tiger met at the zoo in New York, and early on it is not clear whether the tiger is imaginary-but-not (a pooka like Harvey), or maybe a precious-er version of Cortazar’s axolotl, an easy mirror of Blake’s poem.

But then of course Saroyan quits my whining—Tracy starts to want things (jobs, kisses) and sometimes he gets them and sometimes he doesn’t. He messes up and he doesn’t always know why. He falls in love and he trusts it, and he even lands in Bellevue. (“He found the people there quite mad,” Saroyan says with a wink.) Towards the end there is a scene that made me cry like when Jason goes to the ocean in Miranda July’s The Future. Greatest of all, also towards the end Saryoan just takes the wheel and tells us what and how the tiger means. Sometimes that’s OK.

The Mere Future by Sarah Schulman

When I’m deciding whether I should read something, I usually look at the acknowledgements not the blurbs. Some names are lucky pennies, so if I see those people thanked I know I’ll probably love the book, that it will probably change my brain. Sarah Schulman—playwright, novelist, activist, professor—is one of those people. (Her book The Gentrification of the Mind is on my shelf for life.)

The Mere Future, her most recent novel, is a romantic satire about two lesbians living together in a future Manhattan. The first chapters are hilarious and dreamy (the political parties the couple can vote for include the Catholic Resumption Party, the Celebutante with Education Party, and the Seniors for Seniority Party), all eerily narrated in past tense. (After earning her postdoctrate in Placemats of the Moyen Age, the narrator works at a place called “THE MEDIA HUB”. “We were blinded by the fun of all having the same boss,” she explains, “while our units provided Identity.”) There is no hunger or homelessness; wealth, attention, and fame are redistributed; and everyday folks can meet up with their politicians to chat over rugelach. Anyone can live in a Bushwick brownstone with six bedrooms for $140 a month, though priority is given to people born in neighborhood.

As engaging as that beginning is, The Mere Future works not because it offers a fairy tale, but because it challenges this world after establishing it. With her usual fierce empathy, Schulman asks what if—what if we’re trapped where we want to be? “Hey you,” says the narrator. “Still here? Yoo-hoo.” How does death work now?

Violence by Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch

A while ago I wrote an essay because I kept rewriting a chapter instead of just cutting it, and Sarah McCarry read that essay and wrote to me. We both grew up around Seattle, and we both read, write, and wrote zines.

Today she publishes chapbooks too (and soon, a YA novel!). Guillotine offers “revolutionary nonfiction”, gorgeously letterpressed by McCarry herself.  (Readers can buy the chapbooks solo or the Special Editions, which include limited-edition broadsides. My favorite so far is a tie between “Punk Is a Moving Target” and “No More Wire Hangers.”) I appreciate Guillotine’s chapbooks for their sincere diversity—in topic (book banning in occupied territory, writing and rage and madness, the politics of methodology; kerpow) and also in length. Each one could be 300 pages instead of 30 but McCarry keeps them short and sweet, so they spark discussion between readers instead of pointing fingers. The chapbooks are also honest and engaging—no posturing and no academic fog, but no weight sacrificed either.

Violence is the first in the series, it came out in October 2012 and is the transcript of a conversation between writers Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch. They talk about how female experience is restricted in art—how women can really (no, really) only be violent if it’s moral, or vengeful if it’s redemptive. “All conversations are preceded by violence,” writes Veselka in the introduction. “Without our consent, we are marked by the world.” (Consent! On the first page of a book about violence. I did a little fist-pump.) They talk about tears, dick, and desire versus hope—not just what to write but how to tell it.

This is a powerful chapbook that shone new light on Veselka and Yuknavitch’s work as well, and even at the end of some of my own tunnels. By the last page I felt like I’d drank a pot of coffee after a nap, and I was ready to get back out and work.

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

Hi! Here are some books I read this month (an asterisk means it came out less than 365 days ago):

+ Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories Press, 1996)

+ Kite by Dominique Eddé, trans. Ros Schwartz (Seagull Books, 2012)*

+ Dying Birds by Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard (Haasla Books, 2010)

+ Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun (Riverhead Books, 2009)

+ STIR Vol. 1 (www.stirtoaction.com, 2012)*

+ Man vs. Sky by Corey Zeller (YesYes Books, 2013)*

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler 

I picked up Bloodchild again for the class I took last spring with Oli Rodriguez and Catherine Opie (mentioned if you haven’t already checked out their work, which is great). Each time I read the title story I think about the song where Le Tigre samples Naomi Weisstein—she liked riding this one train in New York, you could go all the way up, thinking, and nobody would bother you. “Bloodchild” is my train, it’s the story I always wish I was reading late night at the bar, those times somebody comes up and says “Hey, what’s that book about?”

The first story’s about Gan, a young male alien who eventually agrees to be impregnated by T’Gatoi, an older female from a more powerful species. T’Gatoi has two rows of limbs, gets folks stoned on eggs, and is pals with Gan’s mom. The story has both one of the grossest scenes I’ve ever read in science fiction—a bloody grub-by birth one—and one of the loveliest: when T’Gatoi leads Gan into a room, and because of her limbs she’s described not as in front of him, but as flowing around him. (It reminds me a little bit of “She’s A Rainbow.”)

I would like to talk to Straw Man Dude at the bar about this book, not because I’d be identifying with T’Gatoi but because the story’s just so radical and weird. Totally not what I’d expect to find behind a cover checkerboarded the color of Reese’s Pieces. He’d either really want to talk about it, which’d be cool, or I guess he’d go away and let me keep reading.

In case lady squid and pregnant men aren’t immediately your jams, pick up Bloodchild because of Butler’s power. She was raised by a single mom (her dad, a shoeshine man, died when Butler was very young) and mentored by Harlan Ellison. In her salad days, Butler woke herself up at two o’clock in the morning to write, and when the sun came up she made a scrappy rent washing dishes and inspecting potato chips.

Butler was a black woman writing in a predominantly—even still, obviously—white male genre, and she wrote regularly and directly about sex, class, and race. Bloodchild is a crucial text for likeminded writers to study too, it’s nimble K.O. after K.O. of short, clean stories about utopia, torture, depression and love, capped off with two essays. Her stories don’t preach, rather they are rooms for sitting and thinking. Each piece is succeeded by a brief afterword, in which Butler says how she made the sausage and, poignantly sometimes very anxiously, what she hopes the reader’ll take from it.

Kite by Dominique Eddé, trans. Ros Schwartz

Seagull Books was founded in Kolkata, 1982, to meet the need for an Indian publishing house for theatre, cinema, and film theory. Today, it has offices in London and New York too, and publishes several series including French and German books in English translation.

Kite, which first came out from France’s Éditions Gallimard in 2003, was recommended to me by my friend Jeff at 57^th Street Books (and University of Chicago Press, who distributes Seagull). The author, Dominique Eddé, is a Lebanese writer who’s published novels, an essay on Jean Genet, and interviews with psychoanalyst André Green. Here she writes about two lovers: Mali, who is struggling to write, and Farid, who is going blind. Eddé writes about two dear but different girlfriends, Mali and Lulwa. She wrote a proper epic, sweeping through Beirut, Lebanon, Cairo, Paris, and London from 1960-1980, ish, as Egyptian-Lebanese society cracks and changes.

This book prisms, letting different characters speak their pieces one at a time, and nearly always keeping Mali, who speaks in italics, at the center. That works in two ways, it shows and tells the war, and also, it lets us see the love story within and without Mali’s paradigm. It lets us see what she forgets because of trauma, or how she colors in extra, being sweet on Farid. Kite is bloody and intimate and wise, equally deft at tiny scenes about love notes on cigarette packets (“You are mine”) as it is bigger ones, when bombs go off at dinnertime. Mali and Farid are mismatched lovers, but they are not cyphers for the war. Instead, the precise way Eddé writes about their love only highlights how serious the fighting was, and is, and how much changed.

Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard, from DYING BIRDS (2010)

Dying Birds by Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard 

Dying Birds doesn’t blink. Printed in gray on creamy, heavyweight paper, it’s a softcover, saddle-stitched book of photos by Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard, who joined a hunt and took pictures of birds just after they were shot, or right when a shot was fired into the flock. All the birds are still in the air, their wings frozen or blurred. There are less than thirty-five pages, and very little text.

For better or worse, I’m the guy who needs to know where these birds died, who fired the guns, and why, but that’s not told. Plus, then too it’s not always clear what species it was or where it was going, so these guys are shot twice: once by the gun, once in the frame. And yet the pictures are gorgeous. They’re like dancing. I read Dying Birds like how I read my dad’s old monster movie books when I was a kid—in pieces, attracted but scared that if I read too long, the Creature from the Black Lagoon might actually put his claw on my shoulder. I shelved Dying Birds next to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.

Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun

Once at Columbia two undergrads came by my desk, separately, and both said they were in Nami Mun’s class. She’s the coolest they said, had I read her novel yet? I hadn’t, but when students tell the secretary they love the prof, that’s real talk praise. So I put Mun’s book on my list.

Miles from Nowhere is a novel in stories told by Joon, a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx in the 1980s. When Joon’s father leaves and her mother’s brain goes sponge with grief, eventually the thirteen-year-old decides she needs to leave home too. The decision is rendered necessary, unromantically, practically, like how Denis Johnson’s Fuckhead preps his drugs (or how Beth Nugent’s Catherine staffs the porn theatre). Miles from Nowhere is kin to Jesus’ Son in that neither is a soap opera.

Like Fuckhead, Joon is a beautiful, terrible, hopeful character who truly shapes and is shaped by her world (in one story, she’s pregnant, homeless, and selling Avon). She’s neither holding a camera nor standing in front of one. Her constants are energy and bed and love and money or their lack, not Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday. At one point, for example, Joon walks up to an abortion clinic and a little girl outside hands her a hardboiled egg. There’s a whole huge wastebasket full of them. Joon wonders if it’s Easter, she wonders why the girl is giving her an egg but not the hungry people down the street. She’s focused but foggy. Everything zooms in on that girl with the egg.

To live Joon hustles newspapers, she escorts, she loves bad boys and bad drugs. She takes care of her girls, gets beat up pretty badly. Joon is clueless then not, then she’s clueless again. She has powerful, testy relationships with a nun, a warden, and an employment officer, ones that ring true on both sides of those walls and desks. I finished the book at the laundromat and it made me cry times three: because of what happens, because it was over, and because Mun’s so hardcore she brings in a character we’ve never met before, fourteen pages from curtain, and it works. I wiped my eyes, and the man loading hot Cheetos into the vending machine by the dryers asked if I was OK.

STIR Vol. 1

STIR is the first volume in a series, made by Johnny Gordon-Farleigh, Abby McFlynn, Kieran McCann, and 157 additional collaborators who crowdfunded, authored, edited, illustrated, designed, and phew. (Full disclosure: I donated a small amount too, just enough to get a copy of this first book once it came out. STIR’s funding campaign was compact and sincere, a real deal example of peer production and sharing economies.)

STIR (“Anger. Analysis. Action.”) aims to promote community-oriented and cooperative alternatives to the financial crisis, climate change, and other scary contemporary challenges, and here it succeeds—clearly and calmly, offering platforms to different voices without turning the whole weak and gray. Some pieces come from angry, sparky places, sure, but then that passion’s put towards disciplined analysis and sustained action, or at least proposals for it. Coolest of all, STIR is written by old pros and true tenderhearts. Everything I usually get my color up over—distancing jargon, white people problems, accessibility, etc.—is minimal or nonexistent here, meaning more readers can just dive in.

The softcover book is nearly ninety pages, with a warm yellow-orange cover designed by Josh MacPhee and Bec Young of Just Seeds. There are articles on, for example, copyright and the internet, Occupy, city riots, food, currency, and interviews with Simon Critchley and Raj Patel. My favorite piece was by J Cookson and James John Bell of Smartmeme Studios, who advise following up the alarm stories we tell our friends with solution stories, to tell the world and act on. I didn’t read STIR all at once, instead I kept my copy on the breakfast table, where I read a bit each morning before launching the day. (Alternatively, download a free e-version from STIR‘s website, where you learn about their new quarterly magazine, too.)

Man vs. Sky by Corey Zeller 

Man vs. Sky, a book of poems by Corey Zeller, came to me from Alban Fischer, who designed the cover and had some extra copies so asked the internet if anyone would like to read one. Alban is a champ who has designed for tons of small presses, including Curbside Splendor, H_NGM_N BKS, Mud Luscious Press, PANK, and Tiny Hardcore Press.

Zeller wrote Man vs. Sky in the voice of his friend Jeremy Quezada, after Quezada killed himself in January 2012. There are just over seventy poems here, each one fist-sized paragraph long. The work is steady rolling, broken up by colons and surreal images: jets of blue-green blood, a microwave out of nowhere, kids with animal heads.

Since Zeller chose to write this in his friend’s voice, through his friend’s eyes, this book about transformation first, not mourning. It’s focused on how Quezada thinks and sees after he dies, not where he is or the people left behind. The kickoff poem is called “I am going to do a few things can’t nobody follow”, which I loved for its Ringolevio-y tone. (Emmett Grogan: “Can’t nobody catch me!”) Zeller’s Quezada writes to “you”, who might be Zeller but also, might not be. Quezada talks about being caught in a light with you, about your mother and gin rummy and a bathrobe, about his legs dangling down and birds looking up at him.  As much as I wanted to know more about what Quezada was like here, and his relationship with Zeller, and how Zeller is coping, that’s not the story this book wants to tell. Instead it’s the story of two friends’ love for each other, and how that outlived death.

A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing, dynamic, change.

The Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

Publications discussed here (an asterisk means it came out less than 365 days ago):

• Let It Sink by Jim Joyce (victimsofmathematics at gmail, 2013)*
• Filmme Fatales Issue 1, ed. Brodie Lancaster (filmmefatales.com, 2013)*
• Cha-Ching! by Ali Liebegott (City Lights/Sister Spit, 2013)*
• Collisions by Brendan Monroe (brendanmonroe.com, ??)
• Life Form by Amélie Nothomb, trans. Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2013)*
• Rumspringa by Tom Schachtman (North Point, 2006)

Right now I’m taking a class with some painters—mostly we read, and talk—and the other day, we were talking about endings. For painters, I’m learning endings mean say, photography, and intubated paint, and Rodchenko. I’m a writer so I started thinking about Samuel Beckett, the Independent Press Association, Kathy Acker’s parrots and pirates, her red/read. But more generally, meditating to “This body will be a corpse,” and to be fair that really just used to crack me up. It is very hard for ex-Sad Teenage Girls like myself to meditate to that, because for so long we were like “Yes I know, hurry up already.”

Endings can be cliffs or phoenixes or Frankensteins and anyway, like Sarah Kane says, “the only response is to live with as much humanity, humor, and freedom as you can.” Because you know, my friends aren’t going to stop painting. I’m not going to stop writing. (I don’t mean this in a straightedge sense, I mean it like writing’s what I do. It’s how I work.)

So then my class talked about what happens around the endings, or despite them. We looked at Sanfranchrisko’s pictures of the dust under the Brancusis at MoMA—the dust that’s just collected, the fly eyes and the pieces of skin—and after that, my teachers showed us some pictures of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In one, she’s just lying in the street, hugging the curb like a parenthesis, and in another she’s shaking hands with one of 8,500 city sanitation workers.

Ukeles is 73, and for over forty years now she’s been Artist in Residence for New York City’s Sanitation Department. She practices “Maintenance Art”, and sure, at first I wondered if that was actually a gross kind of slumming—or a bleeding heart kinda situation, which is sometimes worse. Next, as I’ve cleaned my share of homes and public spaces for money, I wondered if graduate school was somehow morphing my brain. Who am I kidding, reading about maintenance in a textbook? But then I got over myself, because people: Ukeles is rad.

In 2009, Bartholomew Ryan interviewed her for Art In America, and she talked about 1968, when she had her first baby. “And when people would meet me pushing my baby carriage,” Ukeles said, “they didn’t have any questions to ask me. They didn’t say, ‘How is it, to create life? How can you describe this amazing thing?’ These weren’t really questions. It was like I was mute, there was no language.’

“The trajectory was: make something new, always move forward. Capitalism is like that. The people who were taking care and keeping the wheels of society turning were mute, and I didn’t like it!” So Ukeles wrote a manifesto for Maintenance Art, which she’s still practicing. Her projects focus on involving everyone—“everyone!”—in community dialogue, long-term projects, and ecological sustainability. Maintenance, Ukeles told Ryan, “is trying to listen to the hum of living. A feeling of being alive, breath to breath.”

Not to be woo-woo, but that’s what I want this column to be about—the hum. I mean, yes of course I am going to review books, and art books. (If you would like me to review yours, or someone else’s, please let me know: mairead dot case at gmail.com). But I am going to review them as objects in time—for example, Collisions, which I write about below, was sent by a friend who found it on tour, and Rumspringa came out in 2006 but I just read it—I am going to write about these books as objects in time, and I am going to write about them as a writer, editor, student, and teacher who wants to get better at these jobs, and be in this community her whole life.

I want this column to be about maintenance, because endings get so much press right now—education is increasingly privatized and teachers are undervalued, slow media is undervalued, pedagogy and art practice and criticism are going weirdo Cerebrus on us—and instead of getting ever-crabbier or just throwing in the towel, I want to talk about how we’re living. How we’re taking care, how we’re keeping the wheels turning. How we’re supporting ourselves long-haul. (Why books? I spend most of my time in libraries and classrooms, and reading, so books seem like a good place to start.)

MAINTENANCE will focus on reviewing new publications, but there’ll always be older ones in the mix. Again, if there’s something you’d like me to cover, please be in touch: mairead dot case at gmail.com. Hi!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, MAINTAIN YOUR DESTINY (1974)

Let It Sink by Jim Joyce

Let It Sink is a zine by Jim Joyce, who grew up here in Chicago and now teaches high school English. I read the sample edition. It’s a four-story short with Sam the Sham lyrics on the back, made for “giving to riff-raff on the bus or in bars or libraries.” (Jim gave this to me after his class visited the library where I work, and also he used to live above the hot dog stand on my street.)

Let It Sink is clearly made by someone who reads zines as well as writes them, which is totally the way to go. It has a co-opted Art Shay photo of a person jumping in a trainyard, irregularly-cut pages, and a sweet, complicated border running around all the text. Jim’s voice is loud and sure, and there are run-ons and typos but who cares. I admire him for finishing something else while teaching high school classes, which Lord knows makes me so tired some nights I can barely make eggs for dinner, let alone write.

In my favorite story, Jim talks about other Joyces he knows, including James the novelist but also “John, James, Ed, Tom, Ed, Tom, James, Tom; all our Chicago names jingling around from 22nd Street to 127th.” I read Let It Sink front to back on my commute one morning, happily, and if you’d like to do the same, email me your mailing address. First dibs gets it!

Filmme Fatales Issue 1, ed. Brodie Lancaster

Filmme Fatales is a magazine (no barcode, but a logo, a gorgeous heavyweight color cover, and a glossy center spread) about film and feminism, edited by Brodie Lancaster of Melbourne, Australia. The introduction shouts out to characters in their “post-college, pre-career funk,” women who love Lena Dunham but know she can’t speak for everyone. Lancaster founded Filmme Fatales in response to that, and while there’s a lot to love here I was also frustrated by how “everyone” seems to mean cisgendered, straight-but-queer-friendly white women (with the exception of Jonah D. Ansell, whose She-Ra essay is printed in the very back).

But then I paused, as while of course it’s OK to wish, it’s not always OK to impose. The contributors to Filmme Fatales do a brave, beautiful job looking at where it seems they’re from (the centerfold is Kiki Dunst, dreamy beween diamonds and cake: “We get it. Weddings suck”; so good!), and props to Lancaster for publishing her own writing too, both a thinkpiece about watching sexual violence in film and a charming valentine to one of her heroines, the actress Mae Whitman. Her heart here is clear. My favorite piece was Lauren Vadnjal’s essay about Kristen Stewart’s Marylou, in the upcoming On The Road movie. While I don’t agree with all Vadnjal’s romanticisms, her focus and passion helped my gut get past the lack of female pronouns in that book and consider the story for real, for probably the first time in fifteen years.

Cha-Ching! by Ali Liebegott

Cha-Ching! is Ali Liebegott’s third book, and one of the first from Sister Spit’s City Lights imprint. It’s a love story about a girl—say the press releases; also, Liebegott’s character is named Theo and identifies as a sirma’amsir—in her twenties in 90s Brooklyn. As the book starts, Theo drives suddenly but directly from San Francisco to New York, with a rescue dog named Carey Grant, a renewed commitment to sobriety, money won gambling, and a chest tattoo that was supposed to be a dagger but looks more like a penis. Theo is so hungry, and hungry, and makes some really truly terrible decisions, all while winning the reader’s love and support for real. I loved Theo like I loved Craig Finn’s Holly and Charlemagne, and two-thirds of the way through, when Liebegott flips from Theo’s thoughts to the thoughts of Marisol, a girl Theo’s dating, the book got bigger than its protagonist and I teared up on the bus. I really admire how clearly Liebegott writes about sex, money, and need, and how her characters have their hearts on their sleeves even still.

Collisions by Brendan Monroe 

My friend Mattilda is on a tour for her book, The End of San Francisco, and she found this zine in Los Angeles and sent it to me. It’s all black, white, and gray, with no words except for Brendan’s contact info on the back in silver script. There’s a tension between the bleak contrasts of that look and the looping, multiplying graphics—an explosion on each page. Some look like Spirographs or math problems, others like dandelion seeds blowing away. When I looked at Monroe’s website I realized these were drawings of particles colliding at light speed, after data from the Large Hadron Collider at SERN, in Switzerland, which made me love them twice. This zine is gorgeous, and I want to keep it on my bookshelf for a very long time.

Life Form by Amélie Nothomb, trans. Alison Anderson

Two of my favorite women writing in French today are Annie Ernaux (whose book The Possession is my ur-breakup diary) and Amélie Nothomb. Nothomb, the daughter of Belgian diplomats, lived the first five years of her life in Japan and loved it dearly, so much so that she wrote The Character of Rain—an autobiographical novel about a three-year-old Belgian girl in Japan, who sees her life in water and tubes. Her books are hilarious, powerful, and full-hearted. They almost always have her face on them too—big eyes, dark and stormy hair—so whenever I see a new one at the bookstore it feels like bumping into a friend.

Nothomb’s latest, Life Form, which is also her nineteenth, really starts when she opens a letter from Melvin Mapple, a fan and American soldier fighting in Iraq. Mapple loves Nothomb’s weird writing so thinks she’d get him, and eventually he tells her he has a serious problem with food. He has eaten so much he can barely fit into his XXXXL uniform anymore. To cope, Mapple names his fat Scheherazade, and at night he’s not lonely because he imagines she’s hugging him. Nothomb is both touched and grossed out, and she writes him back, and they start corresponding regularly. I read this book in a night at the bar, over a hamburger, and admired it as a novel within Nothomb’s oeuvre, a novel in letters, and a look at this war through someone else’s eyes.

Rumspringa by Tom Schachtman 

A couple weeks ago, after a day of writing I baggied a sandwich, ate dinner waiting for the bus, and rode into the Loop to see Spring Breakers. I hustled to the early show because it meant I could wander into After-Words Books afterwards, let myself buy one before the store closed. I picked Rumspringa, Schachtman’s book about sixteen-year-old Amish teenagers, and the period of time when they’re allowed to experiment with drugs, sex, cars, and school as a way of discerning whether or not they’re truly meant for the Amish life, permanently. It seemed a good compliment to the movie. The lady who sold it to me said she’d read two chapters in advance, back before it came out, and liked them.

The scope of the book is really stunning—case study after case study, in context but without English judgment so—it seems to me—you could read the book if you knew nothing about rumspringa, or if you knew everything but wanted to talk about it. (Schachtman directed a documentary about rumspringa, too.) We meet Johnny, who falls in hard fast love with major league baseball, Faron Y., who was frightened by falling stars at eleven and ran away from home when he was fourteen; we meet eldest daughters, an “Amish drug ring”, and Amish parents trying to support their children’s discernment as faithfully as they possibly can. I stayed up reading The New Inquiry’s Spring Breakers insert and this book’s first several chapters, then had strange dreams about hot green bikinis and electricity-free farms.