‘Sick Sick Sick’ : The Books of Ornery Women

THE FIRST WOMAN HAS FALLEN FROM THE SHELF

READING GROUP | ONE | 6:30PM, CCA CLUBROOM, THU 19 DEC, 2013
Book: Kate Zambreno, Heroines, published by Semiotext(e) Active Agents, 2012

READING GROUP | TWO | 6:30PM, CCA CINEMA, WED 5 FEB, 2014
Book: Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, published by Semiotext(e) Native Agents, 1997
Film Screening: Chris Kraus, Gravity & Grace, 1996 (film courtesy of the artist)

Thank you for joining us at the November introductory meeting. We look forward to welcoming you to the first reading group session where festive food, drink and cheer will be served. A selected passage read by Kate Zambreno and further information about the project is available on MAP, www.mapmagazine.co.uk and the project tumblr, www.sick-readers.tumblr.com

Please RSVP to readers@mapmagazine.co.uk

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Readers,

She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around in the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree […] When she comes near to making a clearing, it looks too much to her like all the other clearings she’s ever seen, so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed to even speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organised from without, she is a very useful individual—but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility, which is like gold without metal, spring without water, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy, yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work—whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between ‘work’ and mere sweat—less in the last few years since she has had arbitrarily to be led or driven.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896—1940)
Early notebook on ‘Karacters’, cited in The Crack-up, edited by Edmund Wilson, 1993