ESSAY Sometimes Anger Is the Necessary Response: Reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick by L. Timmel Duchamp POEMS Una O’Connor unleashes her scream by Gwynne Garfinkle A Death of Hippolytos by Sonya Taaffe IN THIS ISSUE Traveler The Other Lives by Sonya Taaffe GRANDMOTHER MAGMA X The Girl We Forgot (and Really Shouldn’t Have) Madeline Galbraith Sarah Zettel on Speak of the Devil and Other Works by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding BOOK REVIEWS The Apothecary’s Curse by Barbara Barnett Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway Sleeping Under the Tree of Life “If your takeaway…is that The Cascadia Subduction Zone sounds really by Sheree Renée Thomas interesting, you’re not wrong—it’s a wonderful journal filled with thoughtful and insightful criticism.” FEATURED ARTIST h Niall Harrison, The Guardian, May 12, 2016 Madeline Galbraith $5.00 Managing Editor Arrate Hidalgo Reviews Editor Nisi Shawl VOL. 6 NO. 4 — OCTObeR 2016 Features Editor L. Timmel Duchamp ESSAY Arts Editor Sometimes Anger Is the Necessary Response: Reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick h Kath Wilham by L. Timmel Duchamp 1 POEMS Una O’Connor unleashes her scream by Gwynne Garfinkle h 5 A Death of Hippolytos by Sonya Taaffe h 9 The Other Lives by Sonya Taaffe h 9 GRANDMOTHER MAGMA The Girl We Forgot (and Really Shouldn’t Have) Sarah Zettel on Speak of the Devil and Other Works by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding h 6 BOOK REVIEWS The Apothecary’s Curse by Barbara Barnett reviewed by J.M. Sidorova h 10 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway reviewed by Nancy Jane Moore h 12 Sleeping Under the Tree of Life by Sheree R. Thomas reviewed by David Findlay h 14 FEATURED ARTIST Madeline Galbraith h 16 Subscriptions and single issues online at: To order by check, payable to: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $16/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $5 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (PDF format): [Washington State Residents $10 per year add 9.5% sales tax.] Electronic single issue: $3 Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Liden Bode Sometimes Anger Is the Necessary Response: Reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick y by L. Timmel Duchamp [W]ho gets to speak, who gets to readers have assumed. First published in speak about what, and why are the 1998, reissued by Semiotext(e) in 2006, only questions. it was recently released in the UK and — Joan Hawkins, “Afterword” to is momentarily enjoying more favorable Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick attention (including, weirdly enough, a television series based on the book, The genres of science fiction/fantasy titled, I Love Dick) than it received at and literary fiction both are currently first publication. As Joan Hawkins notes revisiting issues raised by feminists de- in her afterword to the work, its first cades ago. The Vida Project, for literary We all know of numerous reviewers insisted on reading the book fiction, and Niall Harrison’s annual SF cases in which literary as naïve, raw, unprocessed memoir and Count, for science fiction and fantasy, or theoretical innovation simply ignored everything in it that did have brought glaring visibility to ineq- undertaken by a woman not fit such a reading. The book’scri de is ignored or dismissed as uities in professional reviewing, which coeur is not, as those reviewers had it, personal idiosyncrasy and persists in favoring books written by “Love me, Dick!” but, rather, “Why is no technical naïveté…. men over those written by women and one hearing a word I and all these other the nongendered, and novels featuring women are saying?” A signature moment male protagonists over those featuring of I Love Dick occurs in the epistolary es- female protagonists. A related problem, say that appears late in the book, “Add but one that gets little attention, perhaps It Up”: because it can’t be quantified, is the near- impossibility for women writers, poets, I was at a dinner at Félix [Guattar i]’s film-makers, composers, and artists to loft with Sylvère. The Berlin Wall be credited with innovation in creative had just come down. He, Félix and i fields in which both men and women Tony Negri and François, a younger work. We all know of numerous cases in follower of Félix’s in French broad- 1 which literary or theoretical innovation casting, were planning a TV panel undertaken by a woman is ignored or show about the “future of the left.” dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy and Sylvère would moderate a live discus- technical naïveté (presumably because sion between Félix and Tony and the a woman who breaks long-established German playwright Heiner Müller. rules must be assumed to not know what They needed one more speaker. It she is doing), or even due to insanity, seemed strange that people would only to be hailed for its brilliance (usu- be interested in any conversation ally a short while later) when a man is so between such a homogenous crew: bold (rather than naïve) as to employ it.1 four straight white European men in The difficulty innovative women cre- their 50s, all divorced and now with ators have being taken seriously lies at childless younger women in their The difficulty innovative the heart of Chris Kraus’s endlessly early 30s. Sometimes coincidence women creators have ironic book, I Love Dick, a work that is depressingly inevitable. No mat- being taken seriously lies at the heart of Chris defies formal identification. Is it fic- ter what these four men say, it’s like Kraus’s endlessly ironic tion? Or cultural theory? Certainly it’s they’ve already said it. In Félix’s book book, I Love Dick…. not memoir or autobiography, as many Chaosophy, there’s a great discussion on schizophrenia between him, De- 1 These cases are so numerous that I’d leuze, and eight of France’s leading like readers to make an effort to call to intellectuals. All of them are men. If mind instances they have encountered and then forgotten, since such recollec- we want reality to change then why tion will mean more to them than read- not change it? Oh Dick, deep down ing the handful in my mind as I write I feel that you’re utopian too. this and then soon forgetting them, as one does. Cont. on p. 2 n Sometimes Anger Is the “What about Christa Woolf?” I receded, and I could again dampen my Necessary Response asked. (At that moment she was sense of shame with defiance, for many (cont. from p. 1) founding a neo-socialist party in people shared my anger, and the few Germany.) And all Félix’s guests — critical remarks I fielded from people the culturally important jowelly men, who still saw feminism as purely a mat- their Parisianlly-groomed, mute ter of women taking total responsibility younger wives just sat and stared. for every difficulty they fail to overcome Finally the communist philosopher bounced off me.2 Negri graciously replied, “Christa I read I Love Dick in 2016, not in the Woolf is not an intellectual.” late 1990s when it was first published. (I Love Dick, 226-227) And yet it took me months to finish. I felt as if I had been plunged into a spec- Kraus composed her book in the mid- tacle of abjection and for about the first 1990s, which in the US (where she was half of the book wrestled with that feel- mostly living at the time) saw the peak Kraus composed her ing, a feeling that drove me to resist sym- of a backlash to feminism that began pathizing (much less empathizing) with book in the mid-1990s, in the early 1980s and by the mid-90s which in the US (where the narrator. In her resonant foreword, had taught most feminists to either alter “What about Chris?,” Eileen Myles be- she was mostly living their language or shut up altogether — at the time) saw the gins by recalling her sense of despair on which quite a few, unwilling to bow to seeing François Truffaut’s The Story of peak of a backlash to the punishing pressure of the status quo, feminism…. Adele H. (1975). On reading Myles’ de- did. “Women’s liberation” got down- scription, I recalled my own reaction to graded to “feminism” (which sounded the film: I seethed with fury at Truffaut politer and less threatening and implied and, on leaving the theater, turned my that the drive for liberation had become fury into ridicule — not of the character an anachronism); words like “patriar- of Adele (as had the object of Adele H.’s H chy” and “oppression” were made un- attentions), but of Truffaut, for foisting speakable, and words like “agency” and bathos upon her and her story. In the 2 “choice” became paramount declara- film, Adele, Victor Hugo’s daughter, ob- tions that women chose subordination, sessed with a British officer, follows him implying they were therefore already to Halifax. He repudiates and derides liberated, and that anyone who sug- her. Adele descends into destitution and gested that such choices weren’t acts of is ultimately returned to Paris and in- “agency” were thus demeaning women. stitutionalized. Bit by excruciating bit, It was a painful time for me, personally. Truffaut strips her of her humanity (for I still recall the sick feeling I got when abjection is all about stripping its object I read I Love Dick in 2016, I told a new acquaintance who identi- of human dignity).