Attention Next Objectivists,

We have resumed our regular schedule & will meet THIS THURSDAY at our new location:

the Alternative Press Center
2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL, 60647
http://www.altpress.org/

Meeting will be at the usual time: 7-9:30.

We'll be turning to a new project that was introduced in our last workshop--ekphrastic poems responding to an archive of images related to the financial crisis--but also messing with older projects & open to other alternatives. More on this project will be announced on the blog soon.


Following is the strange essay we produced at our last workshop, working with the texts that surround us in our new space.

           I will be less afraid of being drowned by women. Maybe I should whiz past them, make believe they aren't there, as everybody else in Chile has probably done since they were born, run right by them, ignore their existence. My balking I think could hardly matter now, if women were not balking too. They say whatever causes the behavior, it's the behavior itself that becomes the problem. One way I could handle this fundamental difficulty it to sort out the conflicting ingredients into two kinds of love: tender and sensual. The union of course rejected both plans. For men's items should be oriented toward women, as I have suggested. Maybe he had intended the bathtub as an expression of his personality. It is necessary above all to be concrete when I speak of these things. Men, even good men, are commonly supposed to the slavery of the actual. In any event, whatever problems there were elsewhere, there had not been a single riot in Chicago itself. Of course a question will always occur as to the difficult analogic content of a passage such as this. She sat through the closing scene of the movie, beginning to be convinced that she was the victim of a complicated hallucination. “So I'm finally going mad,” she thought, “live everybody else. What a nuisance. Though I suppose it will be a change.” By now the city was being patrolled by at least ten thousand regular officers, “specials” and troops. A realistic self assessment—man, cut down to size. I was running along the sidewalk. After the first minute I was surprised to find my feet moving, wondering how they had begun, but I didn't stop. Which made it impossible for me to stop hating what I need and needing what I hate in the old man. Are the present times indeed so evil as to demand a literal reading of a text such as this? Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring catechism. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for a daily immersion. If our consciousnesses don't prick over vacant pie shells or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking. But we were not always like this.

           All of the above was either grossly untrue or greatly exaggerated, but it created a public climate so frenzied that the government could feel free to seek injunctions and send in troops.

Sentences taken, with minor changes to pronouns and tenses, from:

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman.

Berrigan, Daniel. No Bars to Manhood.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur.

Dorfman, Ariel. The Nanny and the Iceberg.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture.

Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American.

Lens, Sidney. The Labor Wars.

Hope to see you this Thursday, June 13, @ 7:00 pm!

Matthias