‘Sick Sick Sick’ : The Books of Ornery Women
A reading project examining a radical or ‘bludgeoned’ subjectivity of female writers
SESSION TWO | 6:30pm, CCA CINEMA, WED 5 FEB, 2014
Book: Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, published by Semiotext(e) Native Agents, 1997
Film: Gravity & Grace, written and directed by Chris Kraus, 1996 (Screening at 8pm, open to all)
SESSION THREE | 6:30pm, CCA CLUBROOM, THU 27 MAR 2014
Book: Katherine Angel, Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell ,
published by Penguin Group, 2012
Essay: Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound, 1992
SESSION FOUR | 6:30pm, CCA CLUBROOM, THU 24 APR, 2014
Book: Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie, published by The Feminist Press, 2013
SESSION FIVE | 6:30pm, CCA CLUBROOM, THU 29 MAY, 2014
Reading to be announced
In November we began by reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines , 2012, alongside a screening of Věra Chytilová‘s New Wave film Daisies, 1966. In February we continue our reading with Chris Kraus’ confessional reportage I Love Dick, 1997, a novel which exposes Kraus’ desire-written and desire-unrequited pursuit of cultural theorist Dick Hebdige with her husband, Sylvère Lotringer, as an accomplice. Chris Kraus’ Gravity & Grace, 1996, produced just one year earlier and the valediction of her career as an experimental filmmaker, is closely aligned to her early writing, always present but labelled as a failed endeavour. In I Love Dick Kraus describes the humiliating advocacy of the feature and in Gravity & Grace she cameos as a New Museum curator berating the artist-protagonist’s ‘good try’; ‘the sublime has always been on the side of shit [but] frankly, your work just isn’t shitty enough, it’s illustrative of the peripheral conditions of shit’. The film will be screened in the CCA cinema and is free to both reading group members and non-members.
In March, for the third session, we continue to consider the semantics of the female subjective voice and read Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, 2012, and Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound, 1992. The fourth session in April will lead us to Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie, 2013. May reading TBC.
Contact readers@mapmagazine.co.uk for further information, to make comment, or to submit proposals.
Initiated by Emma Balkind and Laura Edbrook in association with MAP
With thanks to Chris Kraus, The MIT Press, The Feminist Press and CCA, Glasgow for their support
