Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Lee Edelman's Birds, Sweden, Girls, the webzine Lacker

So I wrote that post below about Lee Edelman's analysis of the birds and Aase Berg and a possible female spin on that interpretation. Turns out there's a much better piece of writing about femininity and The Birds and Edelman in the briliant Swedish ultra-gurlesque, Acker-y literary journal Lacker (and also a very pun-heavy journal).

There's a great piece called "I have nothing to do with birds" by Aylin Bloch Boynukisa, which, if I with my mental disorders is reading it correctly, is in fact a kind of story about Lee Edelman's interpretation of The Birds!

There is all this cut-up stuff from The Birds and Edelman's interpretation of the movie and then there are italic sections between these section where a character named "Lee" publishes a book about birds and children. Here's one section:

[roughly translated:]
"Lee works on his book. It's going to be a great success. It's possible to imagine that he already knows that, even though he's also a little sad. It's easy to get a little sad deep in one's heart and write Fuck the Pope Fuck the Child Fuck the Future so that someone will be guaranteed to fall down pladask. On the book's cover Lee is going to press the children's pig-pale chopped-up faces and the book's title agianst white and green-cool background. One gets nauseous so easily."

I haven't really processed the piece but it seems to be a critique of Edelman, accusing him of dreaming of a "future-free" utopia and engaging in sensationalism and the birds become female(like in my guinea pig analysis) and the girl-child from Bodega Bay is transformed from Cathy into Kathy (Acker?). I love this story. I'll have to translate the entire piece for Action, Yes.

If you can read Swedish, definitely go to the web site and read it. Also, the second issue has a rewrite of Alice in Wonderland by Sara Tuss Efrik, whose work I've clammored about here on this blog before. She's the one who sent me the link to the journal.

All I want to do is read this journal.

"It's about this thing of being a girl. It's about this thing of being a bird. To sex-lessly rush straight up towards the sky and disappear into the scream. To turn around but not to return."

Brillian t.

2 Comments:

Blogger Boyd Nielson said...

This is interesting. I would be interested in seeing the translation, Johannes.

11:11 PM  
Blogger Johannes said...

Boyd, you'll be the first to receive a copy.

Apparently she has also written a thesis called "We kept picking up handfuls, loving it" : om queera känslor och läsupplevelse utifrån Sylvia Plaths författarskap" - "on the queer feelings and reading experience in Sylvia Plath's Authorship," which seems to fit in very well with discussions about the gurlesque.

Also, the editor of Läcker has written a dissertation called "Äckliga flickor och brutala blommor - feministisk skönlitteratur i det sena 1900-talets" - "Repulsive girls and brutal flowers - feminist literature in the late 1900s." Which is pretty much my favorite title of a dissertation ever.

And which may fit in very well with the general disease with the "girl" in gurlesque.

Johannes

6:42 AM  

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