the swoon-worthy jessica hallock flew out to california for a week. lots of gin gimlets, kisses, blunts & gossip.

interview with christine wertheim

early this spring, i asked california writer and editor christine wertheim to answer a few questions via email about herself as a poet, feminist, and editor. read the entire interview on the lemon hound blog.

EH: Have you always considered yourself to be a “feminist?” If so, has your definition of ‘feminism’ shifted over the years?

CW: Yes, I have always been a feminist. My mother had 6 children and no help, and was a founding member of second wave feminism in the 60s/70s in Australia, so I have always been aware that there was a need for a more equitable distribution of access, along gender, race and class lines, to social resources, including discursive space, and validation for one's contributions to life. That has always been my main definition of feminism/s. In the 90's, through my encounters with psychoanalysis I added an extra clause, that access to what the Lacanian's call "symbolic" resources is also crucial, and that if our current symbolic resources by definition exclude certain kinds of articulations, i.e., the perspectives of any specified social group, then those symbolic resources need transforming. This is one of the tasks for feminists, as it is of all social justice movements.

les figues press: not content, pt.2

Painted Over/Under: Part 2

Not Content is a series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Not Content investigates the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous and transitory space between these real and imagined realms.

MORE PICTURES HERE

Eros
Robert Creeley

Also the headache of
to do right by feeling
it don't matter, etc.

But otherwise it was one, or even two
the space of, felt

and one night I said to her, do you
and she didn't.

I, 3. Lichtenberg says that very few people have ever seen pure white. So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use? – He constructed an ideal use from the ordinary one. And that is not to say a better one, but one that has been refined along certain lines and in the process something has been carried to extremes.

I, 26. We would say, perhaps, of a green pane: it colours the things behind it green, above all the white behind it.

I, 72. One thing was irrefutably clear to Goethe: no lightness can come out of darkness – just as more and more shadows do not produce light. – This could be expressed as follows: we may call lilac a reddish-whitish-blue or brown a blackish-reddish-yellow but we cannot call a white a yellowish-reddish-greenish-blue, or the like. And that is something that experiments with the spectrum can neither confirm nor refute. It would, however, also be wrong to say, “Just look at the colours in nature and you will see that it is so.” For looking does not teach us anything about the concepts of colours.

I, 81. Can one describe to a blind person what it’s like for someone to see? –Certainly. The blind learn a great deal about the difference between the blind and the sighted. But the question was badly put; as though seeing were an activity and there were a description of it.

III, 102. When we’re asked “What do ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ ‘black,’ ‘white,’ mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours—but that’s all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further.

from Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein

night so thick wade the moonlight. sweat stuck on the second step of the stoop. i do not want to go up, into the apartment with tea in its pantry, a clean litter box nor down to the streets. 4 am’s dry wind. only the garbage men. their trucks wheeze, weave between street sweepers, industrial green dumpsters perched on the edge of the sidewalk. sidewalk, a glut of smashed jacaranda blooms, rotted purple to white to brown. how the first flush of dawn appears as a white crust circling the sky, thinning out into the same weak grey light in which i learned to be alone.