Suicide Blonde

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Just before I lost consciousness last September, my young surgeon, Dr. Katsuura, came in to join his team in his gown, cap and mask. His eyes were the last thing I saw before I went under. My doctor’s mask, standard surgical wear, also seemed like part of the uniform of a metaphysical astronaut, one positioned between my body and its pain, even its mortality. Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and moved to the US in 1932, studying at universities in Oregon, California, New Mexico and New York. In the early 1950s she developed a biomorphic style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1958. From around 1960?61 she began to work with the grids of horizontal and vertical lines for which she has become renowned. In 1967 she moved from New York to New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004. DS: I do. Questions about my relationship to the universal force, or God, or how we’re supposed to be oriented to this life, or how we’re meant to live with the fragility of the human body—these questions are central to me. These are the questions that drive my work. I’ve found myself, through my writing, moving even farther away from doctrine and deeper into to the idea that the world itself is divine. People, animals, every plant—it’s all a manifestation of God. It’s just not very worthwhile to me to get bound up in confining ideas of God anymore.

Our first introduction to Sandy is through a sermon by Ginger’s father. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers.” To Ginger’s father, Sandy is Christ-like, and the community must accept its complicity in her abduction. Everyone must “come to terms with the evil that resides within us.” Needless to say, the customers in his church are not entertained. Last summer, when it was released, I read Flash Count Diary in a kind of ecstatic fury, and by the time I’d finished it, I wanted to hand-deliver a copy to every person I know. As I noted in my reflection on the book, reading it made me feel as if I’d spent the day “watching words explode like fireworks inside my own head.” Steinke’s intimate and honest interrogation of her own faith and spirituality, her relationship with her body and the larger world, and her creative drive and process tore me open in exactly the way the best art does. I couldn’t wait to speak with Steinke directly about the book’s foundations and creation. Levinas’s philosophy of the face began while he was a prisoner in a German camp during World War II. There his humanity was negated. “Our coming and going, our sorrow and laughter, illness and distraction, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, all that passed in parenthesis.” It was a face, the face of an animal, that finally restores the camp to ethical health. “We called him Bobby…he would appear at morning assembly and would wait for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight.” A dog’s face affirms Levinas’s human one. “For him there was no doubt that we were men.” During the 17th century doctors wore bird masks to protect themselves from the miasma which they thought carried the plague. What a brutal, beautiful book. I was tempted to lend my copy to my pastor because it so finely captures the part where the church decides that what they really need is to hire a band and stop all that depressing sin talk. Then I thought twice about giving this book to my pastor, as it is about horrible, unspeakable things. RADICAL BODIES: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955—1972 By Kaitlyn A. KramerPeople call this book pretentious, over-the-top and self-conscious. Well they can go do that, but I liked the book. I'm not going to describe the events in the book because the review above did so already..., but I'll tell you why I liked it. As far as how people should act sexually in life: I don’t know. Who am I to say? For my daughter let’s say, I do want her to feel free now in her early life. To be open. For myself, once committed I do believe in the one-to-one soul connection. But I am old enough now to have seen many people work it out in a wide variety of ways that were nontraditional but also safe and joyous. Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name). If you come to this novel after reading other of Steinke's work, as I have, it'll seem like pretty tame stuff. This is not a criticism, as this is a very fine novel, but Up Through the Water is a sea change from some of Steinke's other novels, such as Suicide Blonde and Jesus Saves, gut-wrenching works awash in suffering and salvation.

The diary of a death wish . . . Suicide Blonde doles out some bitter, valuable lessons."-- New Yorker Hallucinatory, dystopian . . . a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion.--- New York Times Evolutionary biology traces the emotive face from a time before language and links it to the growing complexity of our early social groups. The better early humans were at conveying feelings, the more successful they were at the co-operations that pushed civilization forward. Some scientists have suggested that homo-sapiens greater facility for facial expression is what allowed us to overtake the less facially dexterous Neanderthals. I’d also like to write something about my family history. As we’ve discussed, on my father’s side, I’m Lutheran; however, on my mother’s side I’m a direct descendent of William Miller, who was the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. My grandfather was actually born in the Miller church. That history is on my mind right now. I’d like to write about people who are world builders—artists, writers, the better theologians—versus people who are world destroyers. Those two forces are so dominant. We’re in a moment when it seems possible that so many people will be given more rights and more justice, and that’s exciting. But we also have this very destructive and dark killing force in the world happening at the same time. I’d like to write about that. It’s what I’m thinking about.

The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness.