Unica Zurn - The Trumpets of Jericho

probably the most I have ever felt recognized by a book, have felt that the author thinks and writes like I do. To apprehend this as a book about pregnancy that drifts into abstraction is wrong, in the same way as saying Taubes' To America and Back in a Coffin is about divorce. Pregnancy is the trumpet of Jericho, the walls fall and everything comes pouring out and it's no longer about that exactly. Now it's about, ultimately, whether it's worth trying to live in a world that despises you for your strangeness, or if it's worth dying.

The wind reconfigures and merges with you. Let it.

(no subject)

every male surrealist: ah my woman the sweet animalistic purity and madness that is my muse!
every female surrealist: if another one of these guys tries to talk to me I'm going to kill myself

My Project I: Definitions

a series of intermitten reflections on my "project" as a writer

today

definitions

by project i mean the thing that i am doing (or more specifically the thing i want to do but am incapable of (forever incapable of) which is a mix of influences and desires and pain which is to say ah let's start again

i don't like the word project (but i do like it because it is painfully unromantic) but i think it is the best choice for that thing all artists have (that is to say, you don't have to lay out a manifesto to have a project (i just mean what you are trying to do with your art (and how you are trying to do it)) therefore ah let's start again

constellation points:
- surrealism (to destabilize, to bring something out from below, to push into something else)
- modernism (to explode into new logics)
- postmodernism (to recognize that the only logic that exists must be exploded)
- marginalized literature (to be small to be anti-hegemonic to be anarchist to find value in anything else but this)
- fear and rage (to scream to scream to scream)
- radical transfeminism (to explode my own body into liberation to push back to try not to die to recognize the world wants to kill me)
- mad pride (to write through and for my brain and nothing else)

thus, writing (such as it is (is it funny or awkward or embarrassing to write this while i'm still working on a collection that expresses these things) and such as it will be)


)

Leonora Carrington is such a pleasurable writer

i get a lot of out, especially in The Hearing Trumpet and some of her shorts, how colorful and optimistic she ends up being. A lot of surrealist novels by women dive heavily into this kind of suffocating abuse - which, don't get me wrong, is something i tend to find really relatable and powerful - but Carrington feels like she has such a connection to the lines of escape, as it were. like The Hearing Trumpet proposes, freedom is possible through the power of female friendship across time and space. also with the power of being old and weird which, again, is really refreshing in a milieu that tends to heavily value the young, fragile girl as either muse or marginalized subject.

that is to say, there's a warmth to Carrington that makes me want to cry.