December 5, 2013 Quote Unquote Dream Weaver By Sadie Stein INTERVIEWER You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. JOAN DIDION It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. —Joan Didion, the Art of Fiction No. 71
December 5, 2013 On the Shelf Underthings, and Other News By Sadie Stein Busboys & Poets, the amazingly-named D.C. bookstore/cafe/performance space, is opening a sixth location! The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has named Samuel R. Delany the 2013 science fiction and fantasy Grand Master. (Which is a great honor.) “There’s never much mention of male underwear.” An ode to the great unmentionables of lit. Remember! The St. Mark’s Bookshop auction is happening now! Visit the site (or the store) to help them relocate!
December 4, 2013 At Work Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado By Ricky Tucker The student worker guarding the doors to Beatriz’s (B.’s) roundtable discussion at NYU meant business. I had been late leaving a class several blocks over at the less austere New School, and for that he was sorry, but I wouldn’t be able to fit in the room with B., José Muñoz, Avital Ronell, their cumulative brilliance, and about a hundred students who may or may have not been aware of the cultural master class that lay in store for them. “If someone leaves, you’re next in,” he assured me. I sat outside the lacquered double doors, deflated. Attending this discussion was my only chance to unpack, and from the horse’s mouth, this dense theoretical/narrative text I had been reading in a silo all summer. My interview with B. was scheduled for the next day. Last July, when I first picked up the manuscript for what, in its final iteration, would be Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, I was in the hills of Ecuador at a straight friend’s wedding, far from anything remotely related to queer theory, pharmacological engineering, Foucaultian lineage, or writing, for that matter. B. toggles between a personal account of using topical testosterone, Testogel, as a kind of performative homage to a fallen queer friend, and a cultural analysis that investigates how pharmaceutical companies politicize the body– down to the molecule. The idea is that Testo Junkie picks up where Foucault’s The History of Sexuality left off, a chronicle of sex in an ever increasingly consumerist and pornographically identified modernity. Its mix of personal narrative and theory softened my point of entry, but still, it was a lot to consider on my own. So, I waited outside of those doors at NYU hoping to get in, and if I did, I prayed that the complexity of the pharmacopornographic dilemma would magically break down into a series of alphabet blocks: pointing to big business as the culprit and queer individuals taking hormones as the politicized bodies. Of course it was not so simple; when the student going to class or dinner or whatever left the auditorium, making room for me, I found through a series of revelatory slides and discussions that this issue is wide-reaching but fundamentally inherent in everything we do—all of us. And that was just the panel discussion. When I sat down the next day with the calming but intellectually compelling B., B. laid out for me the universality of the pharmacopornographic regime, how all bodies have become biopolitical archives for the powers that be, but also how taking testosterone effects one’s cognitive experience, how we romanticize substances like opium and writing, and how the pill is just a blip on the blueprint that is you. What was the beginning of your academic research? I went to the New School, for philosophy. I had come from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, which was very different then. Continental philosophy was more of what I studied at the New School. But what was great for me was that in this context, I had the great chance of meeting Derrida, who became for me a mentor. He was my teacher in a seminar with Ágnes Heller, and I spoke French, so it was fantastic. He was the most generous professor I ever had. He invited me to teach a seminar. I then ended up living in Paris, and now I’ve been there for the last ten years. He was teaching a seminar on forgiveness and the gift, but at that time, he was studying Saint Augustine’s transformation in relationship to faith and becoming Catholic while at a point of personal transitioning. It was kind of like a story of transexuality. So, I went to France to speak about this. Read More
December 4, 2013 Bulletin The News You Have Been Waiting For By Sadie Stein Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is being adapted for the screen. No word on who will get the plum role of Jenny in “The Green Ribbon.”
December 4, 2013 On Food All We Had By Amy Butcher Photo: Luigi Anzivino. My boyfriend Keith does not like my dumplings. He thinks they’re plain-tasting. I stir the sticky dough. He says that even their color is unappetizing. Like paste, he tells me, like something thick from inside an engine. “Like papier-mâché, almost,” he says, and I look at him and blink. Keith and I have been standing in my cramped kitchen for over an hour now, scraping spoons against spoons, and it’s late. On the table behind us, there’s a bowl of French-cut green beans and a whole chicken, getting cold. I take a pinch of flour and release it over the bowl. “Like this,” I say, but still the consistency won’t come together in the way I know it can. I add another pinch, and then another, and then another. The recipe for the dish is my grandmother’s, and it is simple: whisk together flour and egg, whisk until the dough sticks to the spoon and then, at last, snaps back against the bowl. It’s all about consistency, something you can’t put your finger on, something you just have to know. That is why there is no written recipe for this dish, this congealed mess of white that gets boiled in bits and drenched in sour cream and salt and pepper. There is no written recipe because how do you put your finger on dumpling elasticity? “So you just know?” Keith asks. He dips his finger into the simmering stock beside us, pulling it to his lips. “I just know,” I say. Read More
December 4, 2013 Look F?!@#g Ohio By Sadie Stein Nice work, Buckeyes: you curse more than any state in the union. (Not to be confused with our Ohio-born associate editor’s odd penchant for exclaiming, “Jesus Christ and all his merry elves!”)