D. T. Suzuki Museum, Kanazawa

Interview with Carolee Schneemann and Alexandra Juhasz

Also discovered in Clara Schulmann's book Chicanes, which I feel lukewarm about as despite some really interesting references and reflections (which bring back my undergrad classes in art history, cultural theory, and film studies at McGill) there seem to be a number of errors or omissions and each chapter, translated by a different translator, varies in quality. Instead of adding interesting texture and variation, the effect of the inconsistent translation stifles the text by causing unwelcome faltering. But anyway (bold added by me):

ALEXANDRA JUHASZ: I would like to talk to you about the legacy of your work I want to know what we owe you.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: You owe me the vulva. You owe me beastiality. You owe me the love of the presence of the cat as a powerful companionate energy. You owe me heterosexual pleasure and the depiction of that pleasure. And you owe me thirty years of lost work that’s never been seen. That’s what you all owe me. I guess what I’m also owed is a living, an income. I am owed the chance to produce the work that I have envisioned, that I have never been able to do. I am owed the chance to preserve the work that already exists. I am glad that you asked. No one has ever asked me. And you can see, I’m fuming underneath.

Juhasz, Alexandra, ed. “Kate Horsfield.” In Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, NED-New edition., 9:95–107. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 

Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506)

Andrew Cranston (1969-)

Gertrude Stein, Water Pipe (snippet)

In her book of assembled musings and quotations of women's voices, Chicanes, Clara Schulmann quotes a portion of Gertrude Stein's poem "Water Pipe" from 1916. There are near no references to this book online other than the reference Schulmann provides herself, which is a short paragraph on the poem published in the French journal Les cahiers du GRIF in 1978. 

I'm not able to find the full poem online, which seems to be published in Reflection on the Atomic Bomb (The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein) (1973), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas. I picture here the snippet in Schumann's text, which moved me:

Denise Riley, Say Something Back (2016)

I bought this book when I saw Denise Riley speak for the Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading in April at the Wills Memorial Building. She was quite formidable and her voice, so idiosyncratic commanded the hall, letting her words wash over you. 

Here are two of my favourites from this collection: 

And a snippet from a poem called "The patient who has no insides", which made me chuckle, because since my gall bladder surgery four years ago, I've been calling that negative space inside me my "ghost bladder':

House (1977)

Loved watching the Japanese comedy horror film House directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi at The Cube Microplex on Friday - a viewing experience that genuinely makes you cackle out loud while also feeling rather sad and a bit disturbed. 

Some stills and movie posters: