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.

can i lay in bed all day listening to doug sahm don’t turn around, something’s gaining? the cat curled between my legs. i have closed all the windows though it is nearly eighty degrees. to sweat myself out. the unbelievable heat of two pm. on the sidewalk, a man with a long pointed beard, dressed in all blue, picks through the trash for beer bottles and pickle jars to recycle; ten cents a piece. the downstairs neighbor wails into a receiver well, i wasn’t asking the whole world, why did you let me leave? or so it seemed she was speaking into a phone as no one answered her. tell me: what are the purple blooms that grow only in california? pushing up against the window screens, turning the whole room, not like a bruise, but the same strange yellow-purple?

September 18, 1996

"I don’t think Wendy’s coffee has such a good taste. This is not to say I don’t like it. I like it very much. Its poor taste keeps my intentions clear; I drink coffee for the enthusiasm-prod, not for the taste. The taste, then, when it is too pleasant, can distract one from what matters most — the deep writhing jolt. Of course, some taste is necessary so that the jolt seems, at bottom, inadvertent."

from Letters to Wendy's, Joe Wenderoth

you keep telling me where you’ve been
you say that man, he’s just a friend
aww baby, o baby, it just don’t matter

princess marie: notes

In the dead of winter 1916, after a two year courtship, Princess Marie Bonaparte wrote a letter to Aristide Briand, “I have decided to surrender myself in your arms.” The first night they stayed together, he asked her to remove her clothes. She slipped out her dress limb by limb, committed herself to an affair. An affair! But Aristide simply held her naked body in his arms. Marie wrote in her journal, “...and above all I wanted to leave!” Their relationship blossomed, aside. Not until 1922 did Aristide meet his rival in X, “the friend.” Autumn in full-swing. Marie and X walked through the damp woods, sun slipping below the horizon. “Our eyes kissed,” Marie said. Although she developed an intense intimacy with X, he, like all her lovers, failed to satisfy her sexually.

Failed to satisfy: frigid? No, Marie knew how to come. Understood the anatomy of the female orgasm better than most early 20^th century sexologists: the clitoris. But orgasm, and orgasm alone, was not It. Marie wanted to come during penetration, from penetration, for whatever reason. With her lover inside her.

More important, still: she had the courage to admit I don't. How little sympathy exists for women who Can’t. Not only "cold" but also somehow stupid: Why the preoccupation with penetration? Why did she not assert herself with her lovers? Why did she not show them how? As if desire were an activity and one could identify a Why.

Marie tried. The attempt to know a thing, understand it’s every element, is to kill it. Well, precisely the point. By the time Marie began her analysis with Freud, she had already conducted her radical clitoral research and developed her own theory of female frigidity, emphasizing a biological root. Although not formally trained as a physician, her knowledge of the body, and impeccable research skills, surpassed many professionals. Resisting Freud’s accepted ‘myth of the vaginal orgasm,’ Marie focused instead on the connection between the clitoris and the vagina, their proximity, intricate kinesis.

After measuring the distance between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women during routine gynecology examinations, Marie published her results under pseudonym. In Considerations on the Anatomical Causes of Frigidity in Women (1924), she concluded that women with short distances (the “paraclitoridiennes’) achieved orgasm easily during intercourse while women with a distance of more than 2½ centimeters (the "téleclitoridiennes") did not. Marie considered herself téleclitoridiennes. She wrote, “Even if [an] attentive lover is found and his caresses ‘before and after, or even during’ lead to orgasm, these women will never be fully satisfied. Because it isn’t these ‘eratz’ of voluptas that Nature demands of love. And though these women may well sometimes want to convince themselves of their perfect happiness, perfect it isn’t: they remain, despite all the caresses, all the tenderness of love, eternally unsated in their bodies.”

Two years later she agreed to undergo a procedure performed by Dr. Josef Halban to move her clitoris closer to her vagina. Like many pioneers of sex research, Marie experimented on herself first. The procedure was unsuccessful. Halban performed another. And another. Each surgery proved as ineffective as the last yet Marie continued to champion the procedure among colleges and friends as well as in published reports.

Marie first consulted Freud in 1925. He was sixty-nine, referred to her always as Princess. In a matter of weeks, they began meeting every day. Eleven am to one pm. All formalities dissolved. Marie confided in Freud, Freud confided in Marie. After three weeks, he confessed, “Look...I’m telling you more than to other people after two years...I must also add that I am not a connoisseur of human beings.” Marie described her deepening involvement in analysis as “...the most gripping thing I have ever done. Ich bin, as the say in German, gepackt! aber vollstandig!”

Although Freud knew of Marie’s surgeries, he disapproved, instructed her to “turn her focus inward.” Following Freud’s advice, Marie scoured her childhood for a clue, any clue. Born in 1882, Marie’s childhood was cut-off, spent (minute by minute) holed-up in a stone mansion with her widowed grandmother and father, Prince Roland. Aside from seaside “holidays”—as isolated as her own home—Marie attended no social gatherings of any sort until her early twenties. Excluding governesses, had no companions. How does one overcome the death of a mother? Marie's mother died of consumption, cradled in her husband’s arms, a month after giving birth. The housemaid's whispered poison! Even the stable boys were suspicious: just days before a new will had been drafted in Prince Roland's favor. The rumors persisted.

Brief moments of bliss: in a room with a shut door, Marie filled five copybooks between the ages of seven and ten with stories of flowers bent in the breeze, white-tailed dogs, a woman who swallowed five houses whole. Also, poems: if I am so sad / I am sad / I want to say it. Stealing herself away, Marie learned German and English, skipped ahead to mathematics, anthropology. When Prince Roland gave her a book by the French astronomer Flammarion, she read it cover to cover, spent night after night face turned towards the sky, recording her observations in sprawling script. To get away, out: she devoured the Greek myths, studied Latin, sat back-straight on a bench two hours a day learning to play the piano with grace. Her constant comfort: to investigate, uncover, get to the root. When Marie is sixteen, she meets a man with black hair, blue eyes, and a pointed beard. Almost twice her age, he coquettes with finesse—walks through the dim-lit garden, kisses behind the curtains, gushy letters that, upon his urgent request, are ‘to be burned’ after reading. One afternoon he is so bold as to ask Marie for a lock of her hair; dutifully, she hands him a swath of brown curls. Proof in hand—he blackmailed her for 200,000.

Marie’s childhood—and marriage—the hope (however short-lived) that there will be a way out.

Her husband, Prince George of Greece, was a ‘handsome giant.’ Certain implications, however, were clear to almost everyone but her: George was only happy if Uncle Waldemar was near. In her diaries, Marie described the loss of her virginity: “You took me that night in a short, brutal gesture, as if forcing yourself and apologized, “I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.”

Throughout her life’s work, Marie echoed Freud in that she believed that vaginal sexuality was somehow superior to the clitoral. But a ‘product of her time’ she was not. Marie remained restless: "The analysis has brought me peace of mind, of heart, and the possibility of working, but from a physiological point of view nothing...Must I give up sex? Work, write, analyze? But absolute chastity frightens me." Marie’s lifelong search for the vaginal orgasm is in a sense not at all related to the orgasm itself, but rather the desire to feel it, in the same instant, with another. That’s the terror: when you don’t.

interview with birkensnake

read my interview with the masterminds behind birkensnake, one of the swankiest lit journals out there, on the black clock blog.

p.s. birkensnake is currently reading submissions for issue 3. submit!

heartstuff

my sister got married! awww! more photos here!

interview with urs allemann

i recently interviewed urs allemann. you can read the interview on the tarpaulin sky blog.

letters and sodas

the rabbit makes it to los angeles

Join us for a night of glamor, destruction, coquetry, activism, the autobiographical impulse, sinkholes, and all things lovely and gross.

Performances by:
Elizabeth Hall
Emily Kierian
Katie Manderfield
Amanda Montei
Allie Rowbottom
Jessalyn Wakefield

May 23, 7:00 pm at Book Soup in West Hollywood.

THE EARLY SEX LIFE OF KLAUS KINSKI

her panties smelled so intoxicatingly     placed her on a pedestal, spread her legs, and sniffed      without a rubber      ate her      examined my hard-on, stared up at the ceiling     she comes back the next      tits graze my face       (like a puppy)        every conceivable VD     in the hospital, nun takes my temperature       her pussy: thick       first time i kissed a twat, i was seven       (awfully alone)       girl acted as if nothing had happened      later, touched my mouth       nuts heavy       feel my own painful orgasms all the way      slacked