A Reading about Psoriasis

-
For class last night, we went to the Kelly Writer's House and heard from three readers--two guys reading queer work and the third, a woman name Erin Markey (have to look her up) and all of them were like just 30 years old and super hipster and visiting from Brooklyn. I can't say I was in love with the one guy's project, though some of it might be jealousy--he has a book called Thirtynothing, and it's about his thirtieth birthday falling on the same anniversary as the birth of AIDs, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure that there is a birthday designated to AIDS, but you get the gist.

The second guy read what he characterized as sci fi post industrial punk rock pornography, and it was this noir-ish piece about a guy going undercover to seduce another man and possibly kill him (unclear), but then, when he's in the middle of having sex with the man, the guy tells him that he was the one who actually hired him, not the other guy. It was a somewhat funny piece, at least other people were laughing and I was making mental check notes like, Mildly amusing, but I didn't think it was LOL funny.

I liked the third reader, Erin Markey,  best--she has her own cabaret show in Brooklyn and sings and reads her work. She came up to the podium wearing a super high, super messy bun, and read in this sardonic, dead pan funny way about when she was fourteen and moved from one Southern state to Georgia, and how she decided to take that opportunity to transform herself, having recently gotten contacts, by going to the mal land trying to convince her mom to purchase an entirely new wardrobe. She only succeeded in getting two pair of short shorts, which she then alternated daily. She described going to the new school and realizing there wasn't a whole lot of opportunities to join things. First, she tried out for the girls' basketball team, but got hung up on the try out (she called it an audition) where they had to run backwards, which she described as feeling as unnatural to her as purposefully peeing one's pants when there was a perfectly good bathroom within eyesight. Next, she joined a Christian, holy roller church and then admonished her Catholic parents for not praying more in front of the children. Next, she had a friend come up to the front and play guitar while she sang a song about psoriasis, which had lines like, "I have my father's cankles/And my mother's Hershey kiss tits/But I'm the only one in my family/To have psoriasis."

Her reading was thoroughly entertaining and vivid and funny and now I see that I have to come up with something like that for my final project; some way to talk about being female and different without making it too much about the unrequited crushes I had on boys most of my life. Some famous writer (Eudora Welty? Carson McCullers?  Can't recall) once said something about how if you survived childhood, you had enough material just from that experience to write about it for the rest of your life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more